For now, I read Jan Długosz, excerpts from his Roczniki (“The Annals”), which I ordered from the university library in one heavy black flagstone of a book. The 15th –century cleric and royal functionary, Poland’s first “historian,” Father Jan wrote in Latin, but this translation is from the Polish, eleven parchment colored volumes which stood on a high shelf in the bookstore round the corner on Piłsudskiego in Kraków. Oh, I coveted them, covet them still, as well as the Polish necessary to read them as easily I do this English abridgement.
Długosz’s entries, year by year, present like extravagant lab notes to Steven Pinker’s theory on violence, or Davies’s terse thesis that “War was the natural condition of medieval society” (I, 80):
A.D. 970
Sviatoslav, the Ruthenian [Ukrainian] prince, apparently dissatisfied with the
lands he has inherited from his father, starts a war against his neighbours,
the Bulgarians….
[Two
years later]
Sviatoslav
finally returns from his incursion into Bulgaria in possession of considerable
booty. However, his homeward progress is barred by a large force of Petchenegs,
which easily defeats him, either because his army is overburdened by booty or
because the site in which he chooses to do battle is unfavourable. He, himself,
in trying to make his men stand firm and so prevent a shameful rout, falls into
the hands of his enemies, whose leader, Kura, has Sviatoslav’s head severed and
made into a goblet, ornamented with gold, from which he, Kura, drinks a daily
toast to his triumph. (3)
I’m partial
to both Długosz’s form—historical fact, meditation upon it, moralysis, though I
prefer a less explicitly Christian take—and his voice, sage and sardonic,
sometimes, perversely understated:
Bohemia
loses its king, Boleslav, he who had been blinded by order of the Polish king,
Bołeslaw [sic]. Another death is that of the King’s son, Oldřich, to whom
Polish Bolesław had restored his freedom. This leaves Jaromír, who has also
been blinded on the orders of his own brother, Oldřich, and is thus unable to rule.
Instead, he places on the throne his own nephew, Břetislav, Oldřich’s son by
Božena, whom he strictly enjoins to make sure that he exterminates the
treacherous family of Vršovci, at whose suggestion both he and his father had
been blinded. One member of this family, Kochan, incensed by the implied insult
and finding himself in a strategic position behind Jaromír as the latter is
attending to a call of Nature, runs him through with a sharp spear. Thus, in
one year, Boleslav, King of Bohemia, and his two sons are killed; while the
Queen of Poland and her young son are sent into exile. It is not a happy year
for the ruling houses of these two countries. (28)
The good old days. In these less sanguinary
times, I return from foreign adventures to the books.