When it comes to southern African history, Montefiore relates the famous tales of the mercurial and cruel Shaka Zulu, who had thousands upon thousands killed during his reign, but also nudges Moshoeshoe, leader of the Sotho people, to front of stage. In a 50-year reign that ended in 1870, the “majestic, benevolent” Moshoeshoe, more humane than Shaka, defeated the British, Afrikaners, Zulus, and Ndebele. In the same chapter we read of the formidable Zambezi donas, women of Portuguese lineage who ruled over massive estates with slaves and private armies in what are now Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
Slavery looms large in this telling of history — not only the Atlantic slave trade but also the east African, Ottoman, and Arab trades, as well as those of Russia, Ukraine, and the Balkans. It seems, depressingly, that slavery is stamped into the very blueprint of humanity.
The World is by no means all about ancient civilisations. Montefiore is fascinating on the subject of, for instance, the Kennedys and their cohorts such as Frank Sinatra who, he points out, was much more than an entertainer. He was at the very nexus of politics, mass culture, and the mafia. John F Kennedy, he writes, routinely shared girls with Sinatra. “If I don’t have sex every day,” JFK famously said, “I get a headache.”
Given its immeasurable, fluctuating breadth, this is a book that should be read in small doses. It moves quickly but is minutely detailed and dense. It is also indescribably violent: not just wars, massacres, and suchlike, but also acts of such debauchery and ingenious cruelty as to make the reader queasy. The effete, obese “Fatso” — Ptolemy VIII of Egypt — married both his sister and his sister’s daughter, dismembered his young son and sent the body parts to the boy’s mother on her birthday.
A queen in Greece punished her son’s three killers thus: one was skinned alive, another forced to drink molten lead, and the third killed by scaphism, “in which the victim was enclosed between two boats while force-fed honey and milk until maggots, rats and flies infested their living faecal cocoon, eating them alive”.
Atrocities scatter across the chapters. Alexander the Great let his troops loose in Tyre, Lebanon, where they slaughtered 8 000 people and crucified 2 000 others for their entertainment. The French queen Catherine de’ Medici collected embalmed crocodiles and orchestrated a massacre at her daughter’s wedding after condoning that same daughter’s rape by her sons. When Mohammad took over Mecca, he punished a tribe of Jews by “striking off their heads as they were brought out in batches” and enslaving the women and children.
The World lives up to German philosopher Hegel’s observation that history is a “slaughter bench, upon which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtues of individuals were sacrificed”.
In his conclusion, Montefiore details the world as it stands today, the perils we face, the high and low roads that can be taken. The threats of further pandemics, ever more sophisticated weapons of war, surging autocracies, and ebbing democracies are just some things to fear. But he is convinced that we still have reason to hope: “The harshness of humanity has been constantly rescued by our capacity to create and love: the family is the centre of both. Our limitless ability to destroy is matched only by our ingenious ability to recover.”
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Our world drawn in bloodlines
Montefiore writes up the history of humanity through its families
Image: Supplied
While a great many people were tending sourdough starters and watching Tiger King during lockdown, Simon Sebag Montefiore was busy with an altogether more ambitious project: writing up the history of the world. At more than 1 300 pages, The World: A Family History of Humanity is a gargantuan, gravid book bursting with drama and machinations. Ranging from caves to Covid, from primordial slime to Vladimir Putin, it is a staggering work.
Montefiore is a distinguished historian, and his studies of Russia, the Romanovs, and Jerusalem are greatly admired. Here, though, he sets out to tell history in a different way from the usual discourses on wars and economics. He was determined to get to what he calls the grit of history, the “juice” of life. And to do that, he hit upon the idea of focusing on families. Nuclear families and power families, political dynasties and royalty. What’s more, Montefiore broadens his aperture from the traditional Eurocentric, imperialist view to take in other continents and less well-known rulers.
Meet the kings of Haiti and Brazil, the emperor of Akkad in Mesopotamia, and Kamehameha I, conqueror of Hawaii. He brings on numerous female figures, such as Sayyida al-Hurra, a Moroccan pirate queen, and the Japanese courtier Lady Murasaki, reputed to have become the first female novelist in 1010. He writes with relish and an eye for the odd: Soviet politician Leonid Brezhnev couldn’t prevent his daughter Galina from “brazenly having affairs with gangsters and lion tamers”; Queen María Luisa of Spain had a “preposterous lover nicknamed El Chorizo”, a nod to his “formidable sexual equipment”. The Roman emperor Justin went mad and started biting his eunuchs and crowing like a cock.
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When it comes to southern African history, Montefiore relates the famous tales of the mercurial and cruel Shaka Zulu, who had thousands upon thousands killed during his reign, but also nudges Moshoeshoe, leader of the Sotho people, to front of stage. In a 50-year reign that ended in 1870, the “majestic, benevolent” Moshoeshoe, more humane than Shaka, defeated the British, Afrikaners, Zulus, and Ndebele. In the same chapter we read of the formidable Zambezi donas, women of Portuguese lineage who ruled over massive estates with slaves and private armies in what are now Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
Slavery looms large in this telling of history — not only the Atlantic slave trade but also the east African, Ottoman, and Arab trades, as well as those of Russia, Ukraine, and the Balkans. It seems, depressingly, that slavery is stamped into the very blueprint of humanity.
The World is by no means all about ancient civilisations. Montefiore is fascinating on the subject of, for instance, the Kennedys and their cohorts such as Frank Sinatra who, he points out, was much more than an entertainer. He was at the very nexus of politics, mass culture, and the mafia. John F Kennedy, he writes, routinely shared girls with Sinatra. “If I don’t have sex every day,” JFK famously said, “I get a headache.”
Given its immeasurable, fluctuating breadth, this is a book that should be read in small doses. It moves quickly but is minutely detailed and dense. It is also indescribably violent: not just wars, massacres, and suchlike, but also acts of such debauchery and ingenious cruelty as to make the reader queasy. The effete, obese “Fatso” — Ptolemy VIII of Egypt — married both his sister and his sister’s daughter, dismembered his young son and sent the body parts to the boy’s mother on her birthday.
A queen in Greece punished her son’s three killers thus: one was skinned alive, another forced to drink molten lead, and the third killed by scaphism, “in which the victim was enclosed between two boats while force-fed honey and milk until maggots, rats and flies infested their living faecal cocoon, eating them alive”.
Atrocities scatter across the chapters. Alexander the Great let his troops loose in Tyre, Lebanon, where they slaughtered 8 000 people and crucified 2 000 others for their entertainment. The French queen Catherine de’ Medici collected embalmed crocodiles and orchestrated a massacre at her daughter’s wedding after condoning that same daughter’s rape by her sons. When Mohammad took over Mecca, he punished a tribe of Jews by “striking off their heads as they were brought out in batches” and enslaving the women and children.
The World lives up to German philosopher Hegel’s observation that history is a “slaughter bench, upon which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtues of individuals were sacrificed”.
In his conclusion, Montefiore details the world as it stands today, the perils we face, the high and low roads that can be taken. The threats of further pandemics, ever more sophisticated weapons of war, surging autocracies, and ebbing democracies are just some things to fear. But he is convinced that we still have reason to hope: “The harshness of humanity has been constantly rescued by our capacity to create and love: the family is the centre of both. Our limitless ability to destroy is matched only by our ingenious ability to recover.”
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• From the May edition of Wanted, 2023.