Joseph S. Lucas and Donald A. Yerxa, Editors
Randall J. Stephens, Associate Editor
 
 
  Volume VIII, Number 1

--Benjamin Lieberman, "Ethnic Cleansing and the Remaking of Europe"
--Frank B. Tipton, "Nationalism and National Culture: Germany in a Cross-Disciplinary Perspective"

--HERBERT BUTTERFIELD AND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION: A FORUM
--Peter Harrison, "Reassessing the Butterfield Thesis"
--William R. Shea, "Response to Harrison"
--David C. Lindberg, "The Butterfield Thesis and the Scientific Revolution: Comments on Peter Harrison"
--Charles C. Gillispie, "Butterfield's Origins and the Scientific Revolution" 
--Peter Harrison, "Rejoinder to Gillispie, Lindberg, and Shea" 

--Barry Strauss, "Why Is Troy Still Burning?" 
--Christopher Tyerman, "Some Modern Myths about the Medieval Crusades"
--Mark Moyar, "Rewriting the Vietnam War" 
--Peter H. Wilson, "The Thirty Years War"
--Chris Beneke, "American Judaism: A Symposium on Jonathan Sarna's Award-Winning Book"
--Letters
 
 

Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

Ethnic Cleansing and the Remaking of Europe
Benjamin Lieberman
 In a recent class on European history and politics, I asked students to locate Danzig, the birthplace of Günter Grass, the 1999 Nobel Prize winner in literature and the most influential postwar German novelist. I next asked my students to locate Gdansk, the city where Lech Walesa, the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize winner, gained fame as the leader of the Solidarity trade union. Finally, I asked them to determine the distance between Danzig and Gdansk. This was of course a trick question because Danzig and Gdansk are one and the same place or, rather, more accurately, the predominantly German city where Grass once lived became the Polish city of Walesa’s work as a union leader.

This trick question introduced a key point about modern Europe’s map. My students at the start of the course did not know many of the details and major themes of Europe’s recent past, but they still basically accepted the notion that Europe’s economy and political systems had changed greatly. It did not surprise them to learn of rapid economic and political change. However, much of Europe has experienced further profound change—a fundamental rupture with the past. Across much of the continent, the residents of many towns and cities speak different languages or practice different religions than the people who once lived in the very same neighborhoods, on the same streets, and sometimes in the very same houses. Gdansk, therefore, is not unique in the radical shift in its population’s identity. The lands from Germany east across Central and Eastern Europe and into Western Asia make up a border region of many Gdansks.

With a few exceptions this history of violence and expulsion is often forgotten. The Holocaust, of course, has been the subject of growing scholarly and public interest for several decades. There is also a growing awareness of the Armenian Genocide, though historical inquiry on this tragedy remains oddly underdeveloped some ninety years after the crime, probably because so much of the public discourse has focused on whether there was genocide rather than on such key topics as the causes, motives, and execution of genocide. Ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia also gained attention during the 1990s. However, the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, and ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia are more than a sequence of atrocities. They are also part of a broader process of the remaking of much of Europe through ethnic cleansing and related violence.

This broader history of the violent redrawing of Europe’s ethnic and religious map has been overlooked until recently for several reasons. For a start, European history has traditionally focused on the history of individual nations, and historians have been far more likely to look at the past of Europe’s many nations, rather than at the groups driven out of modern national homelands. These experiences do not fit easily into prevailing historical themes or narratives. The flight, expulsion, and transfer of some 12 to 14 million or even more Germans at the end of the Second World War, for example, make up the largest case of involuntary migration in modern European history. Yet this case was until recently largely overlooked in American universities where courses focused on the causes of the Nazi rise to power and then more recently on the Holocaust. These topics unquestionably demand the utmost attention, but it is also true that the history of German suffering fits very uneasily within a narrative formed around German aggression. Finally, the Cold War further obscured Europe’s history of ethnic cleansing to the extent that experts and students in the West saw the East as a “block” and focused on bipolar relations rather than on ethnic and religious relations within the region east of West Germany.

A history of European ethnic cleansing must begin before nationalist movements achieved success in Central and Eastern Europe. Before the rise of nation-states, several large empires—the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and Austria Hungary—ruled most of the region from Central Europe through Western Asia. These empires had their own traditions of inequality, but they were extraordinarily diverse. In some imperial regions, particular groups dominated towns and cities while other groups lived in the surrounding countryside. At the same time, different religious and linguistic groups also lived side by side. It is difficult today to fully recapture the diversity of many of these old imperial towns and cities now that we live at a time when we think of each town or city as belonging to a particular nation-state. Today for example, the city of Lviv is a Ukrainian city, but as a city on the northeast reaches of Austria Hungary it was once a city of Germans, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and others, and was consequently known by many names, including Lemberg, Lvov, and Lviv.

Thessaloniki is today Greece’s largest city. A few generations ago it was not a Greek city, but a diverse community of many peoples. In the late 19th century, Salonica, as it was then known, was a city not only of Greeks, but also of Slavs, Muslims, and Jews. Salonica’s Jews spoke a dialect descended from Spanish and had made up the largest part of the city’s community for generations.

More than a century of ethnic cleansing and related violence swept out and in some cases exterminated many of the peoples who had long resided in old imperial lands.1 Ethnic cleansing is not a new phenomenon. The 20th century has been described as a “Century of Genocide,” but in parts of Europe the roots of violence went back into the 19th century. Reporters, writers, and diplomats who witnessed wars in the Ottoman Empire’s European possessions found massacres and refugees who had fled their towns and villages because they feared that their entire religious or ethnic group was no longer safe. These early forms of ethnic cleansing did not always fully conform to definitions derived from late 20th-century examples, but they still reduced ethnic and religious diversity. The Muslim share of the population, for example, dropped sharply in several Balkan regions and on the island of Crete. Ethnic cleansing reached a new intensity during the First World War, and on the Eastern Front ethnic wars and massive pogroms continued for several years after the war’s end. By this time Armenians had been erased from most of Anatolia, and most Greeks had been removed from Turkey and Turks from Greece under the terms of a population exchange. Smyrna, once a polyglot city of many peoples including Turks, Greeks, and Europeans, was now changed for good—it had become the Turkish Izmir.

Ethnic cleansing and related violence reached a new peak and remade the map of even more of Europe during the Second World War. The Holocaust was distinct in its goals and methods, but it was also part of a general war of ethnic cleansing on the Eastern Front. As early as 1939 Germany’s leaders began reshaping the ethnic map of the East by pushing unwanted populations, in particular Poles, out of regions of western Poland annexed by Germany and replacing them with German settlers relocated from the border regions of the expanding Soviet Union. Further German victories with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 initiated the mass murder of Jews and fueled dreams of an Aryan empire in the conquered lands. German racial experts hoped to remove tens of millions of Slavs. These plans, if completed, would have would have led to the largest instance of ethnic cleansing by numbers in world history. German conquests also unleashed wars within wars. In Yugoslavia, Croatian fascists embarked on a program of purifying Croatia through discrimination, expulsions, and murder; and they extended their killing campaign into Bosnia-Herzegovina. Soviet authorities deported inhabitants of the Caucasus and the Crimea accused unfairly of treason, and the Soviet advance west sparked massive German flight. When the war ended millions of Germans were expelled from regions they had long inhabited. Jews were now gone from most of Central and Eastern Europe, victims of genocide, and German communities were gone as well, removed by expulsion or transfer.

By the middle of the 20th century the idea of forcibly separating entire populations based on their ethnic and/or religious identity had gained broad support. This was not a consensus in favor of genocide or extermination, but increasingly Europeans and powers such as the United States involved in Europe came to see large-scale forced migration as necessary. Some regimes, such as Nazi Germany, embraced ethnic cleansing enthusiastically. Others, such as the victorious Allies in the Second World War, accepted population transfer as necessary. But the basic idea of forcibly separating the peoples who once lived alongside each other in old empires won support from political leaders of widely varying ideologies who otherwise shared little in common.

In the late 20th century, ethnic cleansing gained unprecedented attention when Serb paramilitaries supported by local allies began to drive Bosnian Muslims out of mixed communities in Bosnia Herzegovina in 1992. In 1995—the same year that Bosnian Serb forces carried out the massacre of Srebrenica—Croatians drove Serbs out of the disputed region of Krajina. At the same time as Yugoslavia broke apart, ethnic cleansing occurred elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. Ethnic and religious violence generated large flows of refugees in Armenia and Azerbaijan during the last years of the Soviet Union, and civil wars brought ethnic cleansing to disputed regions such as Abkhazia on the Black Sea coast and to Nagorno Karabakh once the USSR broke apart.

More than a century of ethnic cleansing and related violence created a new Europe. There are still pockets of diversity—and social scientists today are understandably fascinated by groups with hybrid or fluid national identities—but the overwhelming trend has been toward greater homogeneity. Where diverse ethnic and religious groups once lived near or alongside each other, one national group usually predominates today. Greeks and Turks, Turks and Armenians, Germans and Poles, Germans and Czechs, and Poles and Ukrainians are now largely separated, and in many countries virtually no one has lived alongside Jews for years.

George Seferis, the Greek diplomat, poet, and Nobel Laureate, returned to Turkey in 1950. Seferis found traces of a Greek past in western Anatolia, and he found Muslims who had once lived in Greece and still preserved Greek culture. But a visit to Izmir, where he had once lived, proved a shock: “My God, what am I doing here!” Only the landscape remained familiar. At Ephesus he lamented “the sudden extermination of a fully alive world.”2

For decades the fate of cities such as Izmir (the former Smyrna) was largely forgotten outside of directly affected communities and nations, but misconceptions about ethnic cleansing still abound despite growing interest in the topic. An understandable focus on powerful dictatorships such as Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union has obscured some of the key factors in ethnic cleansing. Nazi Germany carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide, and the Soviet Union deported officially suspect peoples; thus, we tend to equate ethnic cleansing with powerful undemocratic states, secret police, and bureaucracies of terror. However, ethnic cleansing has also frequently taken place when empires and powerful governments collapsed.

The case of Nazi Germany is especially instructive. To realize the goal of creating an Aryan East, Germany engaged in ethnic cleansing, resettlement, and genocide in a war of extermination in the East, but the collapse of the short-lived German empire brought further ethnic cleansing. The approach of German defeat served as the signal for bitter warfare between Polish and Ukrainian armed bands in which both sides tried to create “pure” regions for future nation-states. The broader war ended not with the creation of a new German empire in the East, but with the massive flight, expulsion, and transfer of Germans, especially from Poland and Czechoslovakia. In the winter months of 1945 some Germans so feared the advancing Soviet troops that they took the risk of crossing ice channels to reach ports on the Baltic Sea in hopes of getting to a westbound ship.  Once Soviet troops arrived, Czechs and Poles forced Germans out of their homes in spontaneous expulsions, and in August 1945 the Allies agreed on the transfer of remaining Germans out of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.

Other schemes of national expansion or empire building similarly ended in catastrophe. The pursuit of Megali or the “Great Idea” of uniting Greeks in a single state encouraged Greece to land troops in Turkey in 1919. This adventure ended in calamity. Greeks fled their long-time homes as the Greek army retreated in defeat in 1922, and most remaining Greeks in Turkey were forced to leave under the terms of a population transfer in 1923. Similarly, the effort to build a greater Serbia ended not with a larger Serbia uniting Serbs, but with streams of Serb refugees.

Ethnic cleansing has been a mass phenomenon. Many millions of people have been killed or driven from their homes. Ethnic cleansing is not simply something that bad states inflict on good people. Eyewitness accounts often tell of attacks carried out by acquaintances, colleagues, former classmates, and even friends. No people, including Germans, are especially inclined to take part in ethnic cleansing, but we are often less likely to accept evidence of grassroots support for or participation in ethnic cleansing when the perpetrators do not fit into our stereotypes of “aggressor peoples.”

Multiple motives produced modern European ethnic cleansing. Looting and theft often accompanied ethnic cleansing. Europeans also engaged in ethnic cleansing because they became accustomed to it. Massive flight increasingly became a norm across much of Central and Eastern Europe. Finally, Europeans took part in ethnic cleansing, not just because of economic benefits or past precedent, but because many saw it as good in itself.

One of the most extraordinary features of modern European ethnic cleansing is that in many cases previous patterns of contact between neighboring ethnic and religious groups have not prevented violence. To take only the most recent example, Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs often say that they used to enjoy good relations with each other. This is worth remembering when we hear that similar bonds between intermixed ethnic or religious groups make ethnic cleansing impossible elsewhere.

Benjamin Lieberman is professor of history at Fitchburg State University. His most recent book, from which this essay is drawn, is Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe (Ivan R. Dee, 2006). 
 

1 For more details, see Benjamin Lieberman, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe (Ivan R. Dee, 2006).

2 George Seferis, A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945-1951, trans. Athan Anagnostopoulos (Harvard University Press, 1974), 164, 177-78, 187.

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Nationalism and National Culture: Germany in a Cross-Disciplinary Perspective
Frank B. Tipton

Trained as a German historian, I grew up professionally with the arguments over the German Sonderweg and comparisons with the allegedly more normal course of development in Western Europe. More recently, I have migrated into the discipline of international business studies, where I have been introducing students to national differences in firm governance, the risks and opportunities arising from variations in national operating environments, and their impact on firm strategy. Two concepts shared by history and international business studies are culture and nationalism. However, their perspectives differ.  Fascinating in themselves, the differences suggest new ways of looking at the experience of nationalism . . . . 

Frank B. (Ben) Tipton holds a Personal Chair in the School of Business at the University of Sydney, where he is the director of the Master of International Business program. He is the author of A History of Modern Germany since 1815 (Continuum and University of California Press, 2003). 

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Herbert Butterfield and the Scientific Revolution: A Forum

Over fifty years ago, British historian Herbert Butterfield declared that the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries was a major formative influence on Western modernity. In his classic The Origins of Modern Science (1949) he wrote: “Since that revolution overturned the authority in science not only of the Middle Ages but of the ancient world—since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics—it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom.” In recent years, however, a number of historians have claimed that there was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution. Steven Shapin, for example, begins his revisionist account of 17th-century science with the memorable line: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” We asked one of the leading historians of the rise of science, Peter Harrison, to revisit Butterfield’s claim that science gives the modern West its distinctive character. Commenting on Harrison are three veteran historians of science, Charles Gillispie, David Lindberg, and William Shea. This forum was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

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Reassessing the Butterfield Thesis
Peter Harrison

Like so many familiar historical categories—the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment—the Scientific Revolution has undergone something of an identity crisis in recent years. For historians of science, both terms in the expression Scientific Revolution have come to be regarded as problematic.1 “Revolution” is said to be misleading because the relevant transitions took place over a rather more protracted time period than the term would normally warrant. A. Rupert Hall’s The Scientific Revolution: 1500-1800, to offer an instructive example, implies a “revolution” of some 300 years duration. While it is possible to contract the chronological scope of the putative revolution to the more manageable one hundred years or so between Galileo and Newton, this still leaves us with a rather less climactic event than such analogous political upheavals as the French or Russian Revolutions. Neither is it easy to identify specific events or occasions that might act as markers that signal the commencement or, for that matter, the completion of the Scientific Revolution. There is no equivalent, in other words, of the fall of Rome or the storming of the Bastille. Some have thought that the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus in 1543 might play such a role, and the coincidental appearance of the De humani corporis fabrica of Andreas Vesalius in the same year might seem to add weight to the status of this date as the logical terminus a quo for this particular revolution. Yet when we consider its immediate impact, the only thing revolutionary about Copernicus’s work was its title. De revolutionibus aroused little controversy at the time and for almost half a century attracted few converts. Robert Westman has convincingly argued that there were at most ten genuine Copernicans in Europe before the year 1600—considerably fewer, I suspect, than those currently living in the U.S. who are committed to the geocentric system.2 It took the combined efforts of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and others to establish the credentials of the heliocentric hypothesis, and even at the end of the 17th century there were many who remained unconvinced. In sum, we can legitimately ask whether the term “revolution” is the right word here and, beyond issues of semantics, question the idea of a radical discontinuity between medieval and modern approaches to the study of nature . . . .

Peter Harrison is professor of history and philosophy at Bond University. He is author of The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

1 For a summaries of the relevant issues see Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1-4; David C. Lindberg, “Conceptions of the Scientific Revolution from Bacon to Butterfield,” in David C. Lindberg and Robert Westman, eds., Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1-26; and A. Rupert Hall, “Retrospection on the Scientific Revolution,” in J. V. Field and Frank James, eds., Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 239-250.

2 Robert Westman, “Copernicus and the Churches,” in David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (University of California Press, 1986), 76-113. Cf. Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science [1949] (Free Press, 1997), 44.

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Response to Harrison
William R. Shea

The Scientific Revolution, meaning roughly the period that runs from Copernicus to Newton, is now so deeply entrenched in the literature that it is hard to believe that it was only given broad currency in Herbert Butterfield’s The Origins of Modern Science in 1949. Whereas 19th-century historians claimed that the great changes that catapulted Europe into the modern age were the Reformation and the Renaissance, Butterfield saws the major breakthrough in the twin advance of scientific conceptualization and factual discovery that began in the 16th century. I agree with Peter Harrison that Butterfield captured a major aspect of the historical shift that took place at this time, and I will stress in this response some of the reasons why his thesis still holds.

We need only reread the famous aphorisms at the beginning of Bacon’s Novum Organum to be reminded that our way of viewing the world changed in the 17th century:

I. Man, the minister and interpreter of nature, understands and does as much as he is able to observe of nature through reason or his senses. He neither knows nor is capable of more.

II. Neither the unassisted hand nor the understanding left to itself is worth much. Results are obtained with the help of instruments, which are required by the understanding as well as by the hand. And just as instruments provide the hand with motion or regulate it, so they stimulate or safeguard the action of the intellect. 

III. Science and human power are one and the same.

The shift is clear: knowledge has become power to be used not to contemplate nature, but to improve it. Such a change would have been impossible without tools that opened new vistas . . . . 

William R. Shea is Galileo Professor of History of Science at the University of Padua, Italy. He is a member of the Council of the Academia Europea, past president of both the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science and the International Academy of the History of Science, and past chair of the Standing Committee for the Humanities of the European Science Foundation. He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than twenty-five books, the most recent of which are Designing Experiments and Games of Chance: The Unconventional Science of Blaise Pascal (Science History Publications, 2003), Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius (Oxford University Press, 2003), and Galileo Observed: Science and the Politics of Belief (Science History Publications, 2006). 

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The Butterfield Thesis and the Scientific Revolution: Comments on Peter Harrison
David C.  Lindberg

I admire Peter Harrison’s willingness to march boldly into this particular jungle. The question of the “Scientific Revolution” (Was there such a thing? If so, when did it occur, and what were its defining characteristics?) has become a favorite pastime of historians of early modern science who thrive on frustration and conflict. Forty years ago we knew what the Scientific Revolution was and had a pretty good idea when it occurred and what its causes were. But unanimity is now a distant memory . . . . 

David C. Lindberg is Hilldale Professor Emeritus in the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a past president of the History of Science Society and author of The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context (University of Chicago Press, 1992) and co-editor with Ronald L. Numbers of God and Nature (University of California Press, 1986) and When Science and Christianity Meet (University of Chicago Press, 2003). He is also general editor with Numbers of the forthcoming, eight-volume Cambridge History of Science.

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Butterfield’s Origins and the Scientific Revolution
Charles C. Gillispie

For those of us attempting to inaugurate teaching of the history of science after the war, Herbert Butterfield’s Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 was literally a godsend. He began the cultivation of a largely untilled field like a deus ex machina bestriding, albeit unpretentiously, the discipline of history proper.  Not only did he set the example of how to write a narrative history of technical material, he also wrote a book we could give undergraduates to read. And this may have been even more valuable. The current generation can scarcely imagine the conceptual and stylistic poverty of what passed for the literature half a century ago. Apart from Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being (1936), E. A. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (rev. ed. 1932), the chapters on English, French, and German scientific styles in J. T. Merz’s A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1896-1914), and James B. Conant’s On Understanding Science, an Historical Approach (1947), none of which was properly historical, the pickings were thin and thorny. That said, it is ironic that Butterfield is best known to historians at large for his devastating and perhaps overdone critique, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), for there is no more classic an example of whiggishness in the historiography of science than his Origins. The notion of a delayed scientific revolution in chemistry is instance enough.

It is no reflection on Butterfield to say that he popularized, or better publicized, an analysis developed by Burtt and more deeply by Alexandre Koyré in Études galiléennes (1939) and From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957). Thanks to them—though not new with them—the very concept of a scientific revolution was of crucial importance to our thinking. It gave us a framework with which to contrast our accounts of ancient and medieval science—the word may be thought anachronistic, but scientia does mean knowledge—and within which to develop the story line leading to modernity . . . . 

Charles C. Gillispie, Balzan Laureate in History and Philosophy of Science and past president of the History of Science Society, founded the Program in History of Science at Princeton University and edited The Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 16 vols. (Scribner, 1970-1980). Among his other writings, besides those mentioned in this essay, are Genesis and Geology: A Study of the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790-1850 (Harvard University Press, 1951, 1996); Lazare Carnot, Savant (Princeton University Press, 1971); The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation, 1783-1784 (Princeton University Press, 1983); and Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749-1827: A Life in Exact Science (Princeton University Press, 1997). In press is a collection, Essays and Reviews in History and History of Science (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society).

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Rejoinder to Gillispie, Lindberg, and Shea
Peter Harrison

Let me first thank my respondents for their thought-provoking contributions. I am pleased to be in such illustrious company. I am also pleased that we seem to be in general agreement about the value of Butterfield’s contribution and the importance of retaining the category the “Scientific Revolution,” albeit with some caveats.

William Shea provides a useful reminder of the importance for this revolution of such things as scientific instruments and the printing press.  Indeed, Shea offers a gentle corrective to my somewhat intellectualized account of the changes that took place in the sciences of this period. Whereas I pointed largely to conceptual revolutions and the reasons for them, he has rightly shown that material factors played a pivotal role in the production of the new forms of knowledge. Shea also highlights the importance of a new emphasis on the mastery of nature, to which I shall return at the end of this rejoinder.

There are several other matters raised in the responses on which we might engage in profitable discussion. However, I shall restrict myself to two of the more important, raised in the main by David Lindberg and Charles Gillispie. These are, first, the issue of the putative separation of natural philosophy and mathematics in medieval science and, second, the question of whether concern with the early modern conception of “science” is largely a matter of semantics . . . .

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Why Is Troy Still Burning?
Barry Strauss

Who owns history? Few subjects raise this question as vividly as the Trojan War. So I was reminded recently while writing The Trojan War: A New History (Simon & Schuster, 2006), which looks at the war as an example of the state of the military art in the Late Bronze Age. For scholars, the Trojan War has generated centuries of philological, literary, archaeological, anthropological, and historical study. Troy ranks with Alexander, Cleopatra, Spartacus, and the fall of Rome as one of the rare topics in classical studies that grips the attention of the general public.

Is history the preserve of the specialists, or is it open to everyone? That is the underlying question that makes the Trojan War so controversial. We might date the debate from the late 19th century (although F. A. Wolff had already begun researching the so-called Homeric Question nearly a hundred years earlier, to say nothing of scholarly debates in antiquity). In 1871 the German (and sometime American) businessman-turned-amateur-archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, following the pioneering ideas of Calvert and McLaren, elbowed his way into digging at the hill of Hisarlik in northwestern Turkey. He uncovered what virtually all archaeologists now agree was the site of Troy.

For his pains, Schliemann was sneered at by German academia, which saw a vulgar, self-promoting, and error-prone amateur—and they had a point, since Schliemann’s vices matched his virtues. But then the Kaiser himself, Wilhelm II, championed Schliemann as a symbol of national prestige, and the professors relented. Fortunately, a series of professional archaeologists followed Schliemann and put the site of Troy on a firmly scientific footing.

More recently, a new storm over Troy hit Germany. In the 1980s the late Manfred Korfmann, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen, began excavating in and around Troy. He found a settlement and graves at the harbor, the first Bronze Age writing at Troy and, most important, the long sought-after lower city. This spectacular discovery converted Troy from a half-acre citadel to a seventy-five-acre city—much closer to the mighty city of Priam that Homer describes. But in 2002 critics denounced Korfmann. They called him a victim of wishful thinking, a self-promoter, a treasure-hunting “Indiana Jones,” and someone who misled non-specialists. The German public is fascinated by Troy and has a taste for academic duels, the bloodier the better. So as Korfmann and his defenders replied to their detractors, a battle took shape not just in the usual scholarly journals and conferences but also in the mass media.

Led by ancient historian Frank Kolb (also at the University of Tübingen), the critics questioned the evidence for the extent of the lower city and its defensive system, for the density of population at Troy, and for the existence of international trade between the Black Sea and the Aegean with Troy supposedly at its hub. They accused the excavators of misleading the nearly 1 million visitors to a traveling exhibition (in Germany) about Troy by presenting their hypothetical reconstruction of the lower town as a certainty. Korfmann and his advocates defended their scientific methodology, denied any intent to deceive the public, and accused Kolb and his side of misrepresentations of their own.1

The evidence for the extent of the lower town is good, if not ideal (in the absence of places to dig, it depends on surface and geophysical surveys and an assumption of soil erosion), as is the evidence for the existence of a defensive system in the lower city (it depends on limited excavation and magnetometric surveys). But the details of that defensive system are debatable, as is the size of the town’s population. Meanwhile, the evidence of trade via Troy as well as the feasibility of Bronze Age ships navigating the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus are both questions requiring further investigation.

These dry facts hardly reveal the invective, anger, and bad manners of the public debate over Troy in Germany. But there is more at stake than just a good show. For Germans, Troy is a symbolic city, redolent of past national pride, a Berlin of the imagination. A century ago, excavations at Troy, Pergamum, the Hittite capital of Hattusha, the Athenian Acropolis, and elsewhere demonstrated German scientific prowess and narrowed the “archaeology gap” with France and Britain. More recently, in the aftermath of reunification, national power might have made the most patriotic German reflective about the country and its future.

For Korfmann, Troy was something of a reformed sinner. Once hailed as a sign of Europe’s triumph over Asia, Troy could now serve as a bridge between East and West. By demonstrating the Anatolian character of the city, the excavator hoped to contribute to our appreciation of the Eastern roots of Western civilization. Meanwhile, it was clear to many that the publicity could hardly hurt Turkey’s quest for admission to the European Union. And some thought it might even improve relations between the European majority and the Turkish minority within Germany.2

But Germany has no monopoly on going over the top when it comes to Troy. Scan English-language scholarship on this subject over the last generation and you will find a certain amount of invective, ridicule, sarcasm, ex cathedra pronouncements, and unsubstantiated charges of corruption. To be sure, these are the exception; most scholarship on Troy is sound and sober. But rare is the subject in classical studies that excites such emotional behavior. Then again, great poets have a way of reaching across the centuries and hitting our pressure points.

Take the United States, where, in recent years, both prosecution and defense have called Homer as a witness in debates on the nation’s wars. In a powerful study called Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994), for example, psychiatrist Jonathan Shay argued that his work with Vietnam vets suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome helped explain the pressures faced by Achilles and Hector on the Homeric battlefield. Earlier, in 1985, Barbara Tuchman wrote The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, whose subtitle is self-explanatory. More recently, the stars of the Hollywood epic Troy (2004) took a stab at connecting the story to the war in Iraq. These are all a far cry from the heroic recollection of Tennyson’s Ulysses of the days when he had “drunk delight of battle with my peers, / Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.”

But others see things differently. Journalist Bing West, for example, entitled his 2005 account of the battle of Fallujah No True Glory. The reference is to a passage in the Iliad in which one soldier turns to another before battle and says, “Let us win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others.” West focuses on the battle experience of U.S. Marines on the grounds that, like Homer’s warriors, they deserve to be remembered as heroes. Scholar and columnist Victor Davis Hanson, a supporter of American policy in Iraq, co-authored several years earlier a book called Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom. Advocating a traditional classical curriculum, the authors praised Homer for teaching the hard truths about life and war while criticizing the softer, modern outlook. In other words, they took positions more likely to appeal to conservatives than liberals.

Adrienne Mayor offers yet another point of view. In Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs (2003) she documents the surprisingly common use of biochemical weapons in antiquity. For Mayor, the Trojan War is an example that Western warfare, like all warfare, was conceived in sin, providing

striking evidence of the two complex, parallel pictures of warfare in classical antiquity: the familiar, idealized Homeric version of clean, fair fighting, epitomized by heroes like Achilles in the Iliad, and other, more nefarious ways of overcoming foes, often attributed to barbarians, but admired in crafty Greek heroes like Odysseus.3

Consider, too, Greece and Turkey, where the Trojan War sometimes takes on nationalist overtones. But it would be hard for it not to, given the long history of conflicts between the east and west sides of the Aegean Sea, and given the tragic ups and downs of Greek and Turkish relations during the last century.

Internationally, the broadest meaning of Troy today may be as an ambivalent symbol of progress: a reminder that science gives with one hand while it takes with the other. When Schliemann used archaeology at Troy and Mycenae to prove that Homer was not simply myth, the public cheered. But was it equally thrilled with the new consensus of the 1950s that the real Troy in the era of Priam was an impoverished shadow of earlier greatness? Or that nothing discovered by archaeology proved the Trojan War more than a minor raid, if that? These were the conclusions respectively of archaeologist Carl Blegen and historian M.I. Finley. The bitter experience of the Second World War had rendered unfashionable all heroic narratives. So these diminished assessments of Troy no doubt struck a public chord.

But that was not the end of it. The public was still hungry for reasons to believe. Scholarly books such as T. B. L. Webster’s From Mycenae to Homer (1958; 2nd ed., 1964) were sanguine about the historicity of Homer. In 1975 Irving Stone published The Greek Treasure, a biographical novel of Schliemann, his wife Sophia, and the discovery of Troy. It was a best seller. In 1986 Michael Wood published In Search of the Trojan War (rev. ed., 1998) in tandem with a BBC/PBS documentary series on the same subject. It was another publishing hit, this time in the genre of popular nonfiction. Wood is a journalist, not a professional scholar, but he is no slouch: he is Oxford-educated and did graduate work in early medieval history. He argued that Hittite documents provide grounds for believing that Greeks and Hittites fought over control of what is today western Turkey. One of the bones of contention was the kingdom of Wilusa, which might plausibly be what classical Greeks called Ilion and their ancestors had called Wilion (the “w” later dropped out of the Greek language)—that is, Troy.

Wood’s arguments are cogent. They were not entirely new, having first been proposed in the 1920s, when they were rejected by the scholarly mainstream. But new Hittite evidence has been discovered since (some even after the publication of Wood’s book) that strengthens the case.

By now, nearly 150 years have passed since Schliemann began excavating in 1871. Those years have seen the discovery of Bronze Age Greek writing (Linear B); an entire lost civilization in what is today Turkey (the Hittites); the sites of Mycenae, Knossos, and Troy; archives of diplomatic correspondence, shipwrecks, a forgotten city buried by a volcano, and much more.

Now we know that although the Iliad was not written down until after 750 B.C., it is steeped in the details and mores of Bronze Age civilization that had disappeared by 1150 B.C. Although Greece was illiterate in the intervening centuries, Anatolia was not, and there is evidence that the Iliad took shape in the Greek colonies planted in Anatolia ca. 1000 B.C. The poem bears many signs of contact with non-Greek Anatolian societies. Besides, Greece’s oral culture allowed for the preservation of historical memory through bardic poetry. It has been demonstrated that Homer or his predecessors actually visited the site of Troy, so the Iliad’s is no imaginary landscape.

As for the Bronze Age, scholarship has accumulated a great deal of circumstantial evidence suggesting that Mycenaean Greeks engaged in armed conflict in western Anatolia; that they established some kind of settlement on the Aegean Coast at Miletus; that their soldiers were known to Egyptians and Hittites; and that their kings claimed control of the Aegean islands near Troy by right of dynastic marriage with Anatolian royalty. The latest excavations show that Troy was destroyed by fire with signs of violence (weapons, unburied corpses) around 1200 B.C. We do not know whether that destruction was caused by a long war or merely a raid nor whether a marriage gone bad was the occasion for violence at Troy (as it was for other Bronze Age conflicts).

None of this proves that there was a Trojan War. But we need to ask which is more probable: that the Iliad is based on some historical war or wars or that Homer made up an imaginary war and set it in a Bronze Age background which he carefully described in accurate detail? No wonder that Homerist Joachim Latacz concluded in his Troy and Homer: Towards a New Solution of an Old Mystery (English translation, 2005) that it is “likely” that the Trojan War really happened.

Still the skeptics scoff. Circumstantial evidence is not proof beyond the shadow of a doubt. But there is more at stake here than methodological rigor. After all, we do not have proof beyond the shadow of a doubt of what Socrates said in his defense, and we have no way of verifying much of what Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War or what Polybius wrote about Hannibal. Yet we tend to discuss the Apology as if it were an official transcript and not a Platonic semi-fiction. Moreover, we lose no sleep over the reality of Pericles’s Funeral Oration, and we trust the accuracy of Polybius’s research into the career of a Carthaginian who was already dead and discredited by the historian’s day.

Troy is the Great White Whale of scholarship. To many it is the test case to prove that history is a science. Any concessions to poetry run the risk of losing that coveted status. And so the ante has been upped. Since the search for the historical Troy has always had to defend itself from the charge of confirmation bias, the critics have armed themselves with what might be called an anti-confirmation bias. Since we want to believe in Homer, the argument seems to go, the standard of proof must be raised. So what some might call “the likeliest interpretation of imperfect evidence” becomes, to others, “unproven.” What is objectively an impressive Late Bronze Age citadel becomes, for some, a mere pirate’s nest. What is objectively a site destroyed by fire with signs of violence (weapons, unburied corpses) becomes for others maybe just an accidental blaze.

The deeper issue, again, is who owns history—and who benefits from it. Johannes Haubold has shrewdly pointed out that Germany’s recent storm over Troy took place in the climate of a major funding debate. While German professors are used to the status of civil servants, subsidized by public funding, the federal government is seeking to switch universities to “a market-oriented model of competitive excellence.”4 In other words, privatization. Korfmann more than met the government’s goal.

A visitor to the site of Troy might notice as much, as he drives up to the parking lot on a road lined with flags of the excavation’s corporate sponsors. On-site, a plaque with a sense of humor lists Troy’s benefactors from antiquity to the present (e.g., Xerxes, Augustus, the University of Cincinnati’s Taft-Semple Fund). The excavators have made public that their funding is about 1/3 public, 2/3 private, with long-term corporate support from Daimler Chrysler and Siemens Turkey. They announce this on their website.

Troy may be the first cyber excavation. The website for “Project Troia” (www.uni-tuebingen.de/troia/eng/neues.html) is extensive and thorough. It provides background, photos, maps, a summary of controversy and debate, news about the excavation, bibliography, links to scholarly articles, contact information for the media, as well as an overview of funding. A link takes the reader to Troia VR, a project whose self-described goal is “virtual-reality-based knowledge-management and knowledge marketing in archaeology.” In plain language, they aim to help archaeologists use new technology to manage and present their work.

Not that the excavators have neglected old technology. Since 1991 they have published an annual scholarly volume, Studia Troica, consisting of excavation reports and related articles. In a profession notorious for delayed publication, this is an impressive record. Yet the excavators’ public outreach and fundraising success touched raw nerves in German academia.  The storm over Troy is also a storm over turf and money. Archaeology is expensive and so are universities. The Trojan War is profitable, even if the 2004 film Troy was not Hollywood’s greatest box office success (the domestic box office gross was reportedly $133,000,000 but the film’s budget was $150,000,000—overseas it grossed an additional $365,000,000). In Britain, at least, the film boosted the sales of the Iliad and the Odyssey to the top of the poetry list.

Profit and Troy are old friends. In Hellenistic and Roman times, the citizens of Troy literally took possession of history. The city became the premier tourist attraction of the ancient world, with tours and relics offered to one and all, from ordinary sightseers to VIP tourists like Alexander the Great and the Emperor Augustus.

Public passion, private profit: the Trojan War is an easy target for those wishing to be shocked by the politics of historiography. But retreating to a standard of “absolute proof or nothing” is neither productive nor professional. Without a willingness to engage in informed speculation, clearly labeled as such, ancient historians risk being left with bloodless sets of data. Worse, they will fail at their job as historians if they cannot create and debate plausible scenarios that connect the dots represented by the few facts that happen to survive from ancient times. In any case, if professional scholars shy away from interpreting imperfect evidence, amateurs will surely rush in.

The ancient past was not preserved by scholars alone. It was saved from oblivion by poets like Homer. The price, though, was the interweaving of history with myth. It is understandable and pardonable if we forget that sometimes. But the public knows better. The real meaning of the Trojan War is that we all own history. 

Barry Strauss’s latest book is The Trojan War: A New History (Simon & Schuster, 2006). He teaches history and classics at Cornell University. His Web site is www.barrystrauss.com.

1 Internet links to a series of articles in English on both sides of the controversy are available at www.uni-tuebingen.de/troia/eng/fachliteratur.html. On the number of visitors to the exhibit, see Johannes Haubold, “Wars of Wissenschaft: the New Quest for Troy,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 8 (2002): 566. My discussion of contemporary Germany borrows much from Haubold.

2 Manfred Korfmann, “Troia—Traum und Wirklichkeit, Eine Einführung in das Thema,” in Manfred Korfmann et al., Traum und Wirklichkeit: Troia (Theiss Verlag, 2001), 23. 

3 Adrienne Mayor, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (Overlook Press, 2003), 49.

4 Haubold, “Wars of Wissenschaft,” 574.

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

Some Modern Myths about the Medieval Crusades
Christopher Tyerman

The 18th-century Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume remarked that the Crusades had been “the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.” Yet, he admitted, they “engrossed the attention of Europe and have ever since engrossed the curiosity of mankind.” Since 9/11, his words have taken on a new relevance. It has now become fashionable to seek esoteric historic parallels for a current conflict that challenges traditional assumptions about international relations and the causes of war. The post-Enlightenment vision of a world operating according to natural laws of economics, social exchange, political competition, and technological development cannot comprehend the phenomenon of political action and ideology based on faith. In consequence, analysts and observers have sought refuge in the language of inherent cultural contest, clashing value systems, and religious war. Muslim critics of liberal democratic norms, even Muslim legal systems, have been branded “medieval” by some seeking analogies from a pre-Enlightenment age, while others, including in one unguarded moment President Bush, have invoked that apparently most characteristic example of wars between beliefs, the Crusades.

Ironically, when he referred to the Crusades, President Bush was precisely, if maybe unwittingly, echoing the language of his nemesis, Osama bin Laden, who has consistently described the involvement of Western powers in the Islamic world as a continuation of the medieval Wars of the Cross in order to highlight what he and his sympathizers wish to portray as an age-old struggle between exploitative infidel imperialists and the victimized adherents to the pure doctrine of God. Such talk, by president or terrorist, masks the serious, modern issues at stake and demeans the reality of a distant past that has few if any direct messages for the present. There may be parallels in the medieval and modern conflicts involving Christians and Muslims, and in the geographic congruency of some of the regions in dispute. But the point of parallels is that they do not easily meet. Neither can the medieval Crusades be recruited to serve or explain modern crises . . . .

Christopher Tyerman teaches medieval history at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of Hertford College. His most recent books are Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2005) and God’s War: A New History of the Crusades, published in the U.S. by Harvard University Press this fall.

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

Rewriting the Vietnam War
Mark Moyar

My interest in the history of the Vietnam War began in the early 1990s when, as an undergraduate at Harvard, I took a core curriculum course on the war. I was struck by the extent to which Harvard faculty and students considered the Vietnam War closed to debate. In the course, historical works that did not conform to the mainstream interpretation of the Vietnam War received little attention and still less respect. The course term paper, however, afforded me the opportunity to find other books in the dimly lit corridors of Widener Library, and it was there that I first began to sense that something was seriously amiss.

That term paper led to a senior thesis and then to the publication of Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA’s Secret Campaign to Destroy the Vietcong (Naval Institute Press, 1997). Focused on counterinsurgency programs in South Vietnam during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the book challenged a great deal of conventional wisdom on the village war. Phoenix and the Birds of Prey touched at various points on the history of Vietnam before 1965. And after the book came out, I decided to look further into the early years of the war. I found unanswered questions and inconsistencies. Extremely skeptical of the existing scholarship, I resolved to check other historians’ primary sources for accuracy whenever possible and to seek out new primary sources to help fill the gaps in the existing literature. The result of that work is Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2006). 

While I wrote Triumph Forsaken several important revisionist books appeared. In a thousand-page tome on the two Indochina wars, Arthur Dommen offered much new information and analysis.1 C. Dale Walton reexamined America’s strategic options, while Michael Lind used secondary sources to produce a broad critique of the orthodox school.2 Several other historians reinterpreted the government of Ngo Dinh Diem and its demise.3 In addition, a number of excellent works on the latter part of the war emerged.4 Unfortunately, this collection of books did not receive the recognition it deserved from other scholars. David L. Anderson, the president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and a historian of the Vietnam War, exemplified the thinking of many scholars when he pronounced in his recent presidential address that Vietnam War revisionists merely argued on the basis of emotion, whereas orthodox scholars relied on rational analysis of the evidence.5 It is my hope that Triumph Forsaken will make clearer the preposterousness of such accusations . . . .

Mark Moyar is an associate professor at the U.S. Marine Corps University. Cambridge University Press has just published his second book, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965.

1 Arthur J. Dommen, The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (Indiana University Press, 2001).

2 C. Dale Walton, The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam (Frank Cass, 2002); Michael Lind, Vietnam, The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America’s Most Disastrous Military Conflict (Free Press, 1999).

3 Francis X. Winters, The Year of the Hare: America in Vietnam, January 25, 1963-February 15, 1964 (University of Georgia Press, 1997); Philip E. Catton, Diem’s Final Failure: Prelude to America’s War in Vietnam (University Press of Kansas, 2002).

4 For example, see Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999); John Norton Moore and Robert F. Turner eds., The Real Lessons of the Vietnam War: Reflections Twenty-Five Years After the Fall of Saigon (Carolina Academic Press, 2002); and Marshall L. Michel, The Eleven Days of Christmas: America’s Last Vietnam Battle (Encounter Books, 2002).

5 David L. Anderson, “One Vietnam War Should Be Enough and Other Reflections on Diplomatic History and the Making of Foreign Policy,” Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Annual Meeting, College Park, Maryland, June 24, 2005. The address was reprinted in Diplomatic History 30 (2006): 1–21.

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

The Thirty Years War
Peter H. Wilson

The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) retains a place in the historical consciousness of most Europeans at a time when school curricula and TV history channels truncate the past to the last hundred years. General knowledge and interest is naturally deepest in German-speaking Central Europe, the war’s epicenter, where works of popular history still regularly describe the level of destruction as exceeding that of World War II. Tour guides mention traces of the Swedish and imperial armies almost in the same breath as recounting the effects of Allied bombing. The same is true for the Czech Republic, especially Prague where the famous Defenestration took place in May 1618 when angry Protestant nobles threw three Catholic officials from the window of the Hradschin palace. The event and its aftermath are deeply etched on the national consciousness as the last attempt to free the Czechs from German-speaking Habsburg absolutism that persisted for another 300 years.

The conflict has long found a firm place among professional historians who generally view it as dividing the age of religious controversies and renewal in the 16th century from the subsequent, allegedly more secular “old regimes” after 1648. The Spanish hegemony of Charles V and Philip II is replaced by French preponderance, personified by Louis XIV whose reign began as the peace talks opened in the Westphalian cities of Münster and Osnabrück. International relations specialists and political scientists regularly cite the Peace of Westphalia as marking the birth of the modern state system, whereby fully independent and theoretically equal sovereign states replaced a single, hierarchically structured Christendom. Not only has this system become the basis of the global order, but the European conflict had a world dimension, with considerable fighting in Brazil, western Africa, Sri Lanka and Indonesia . . . .

Peter H. Wilson is professor of early modern history at the University of Sunderland, UK, and the author of From Reich to Revolution: German History 1558-1806 (Palgrave, 2004). He is currently completing a history of the Thirty Years War for Penguin Press.

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 Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

American Judaism: A Symposium on Jonathan Sarna’s 
Award-Winning Book*
Chris Beneke

There haven’t been many denominational histories like this one. That was the consensus reached by a distinguished panel of speakers assembled to discuss Jonathan D. Sarna’s monumental American Judaism: A History (Yale University Press, 2004), winner of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award. The symposium, held at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts, and co-sponsored by the Historical Society, featured comments by Nancy T. Ammerman of Boston University, Jon Butler of Yale University, and David B. Starr of Hebrew College. Professor Sarna of Brandeis University was also present to offer his thoughts on the book, which chronicles 350 years of Jewish history in the United States. Ranging across social, cultural, and religious history, American Judaism synthesizes a vast body of scholarship (much of it Sarna’s) on the subject. Butler maintained that the book represents the best denominational history that has ever been written about any religious group in American history. Ammerman and Starr were only slightly less effusive in their praise. Sarna, by contrast, focused on the limits of his achievement and the work that remains to be done . . . .

Chris Beneke, assistant professor of history at Bentley College, is the author of Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2006). 

* The symposium was co-sponsored by the Historical Society, Yale University Press, Gann Academy, the Center for the Arts and Sciences at Bentley College, the Bentley College Spiritual Life Center, and the Bentley College Department of History.

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