Amazons by John Man

Author:John Man
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473541757
Publisher: Transworld

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A PAINTING, TWO PLAYS AND A SUICIDE

IN 1600, THE Amazons were firmly lodged in Europe’s consciousness, placed there by Greek history, confirmed by exploration in the New World, cemented in place by novels. Everyone just knew they had once been real, and probably still were, somewhere over some distant horizon. So it was natural for writers to mention them and artists to paint them. There are good reasons why most contributions are forgotten. They’re boring or insignificant, just re-stating well-worn themes. But every now and then, over the next three centuries, somebody produced something worth a closer look. This chapter is about three of these instances, in which the Amazons were made to carry meanings very different from anything in the ancient world.

Prague is a beautiful city, but it has a rather ugly tradition: they throw people out of windows. That is a bit of an exaggeration. There have been three defenestrations in Prague, each separated by centuries, so you could hardly call it a tradition. The first was in 1419, when a mob supporting the ideas of the executed heretic Jan Huss slung a dozen eminent officials to the waiting crowd below, and the third was in 1948, when Communist thugs tossed the anti-Communist foreign minister Jan Masaryk to his death. Let’s focus on the middle one. In 1618 Protestant leaders defenestrated three visiting Catholic hardliners, who, rather surprisingly, survived. Later, some claimed they had been saved by divine intervention, others that they had fallen into a dung heap. The point of this story is the religions. The incident started the Thirty Years’ War, which turned the Reformation begun by Luther a century before into the most brutal and destructive outpouring of barbarity until 1914.

In fast-forward, the years 1618–48 made mainland Europe into a cloud chamber of rag-tag armies fighting for changing faiths, dying dynasties and rising nation-states: German Protestants, German Catholics, German warlords – for there was no Germany yet, only a kaleidoscope of states and cities – the Emperor, the Pope, the Habsburgs (with possessions across all Europe and beyond to India, Africa and the Americas), the Wittelsbachs, France, Spain, Holland, Bohemia, Denmark, Sweden and various Italian states – for there was no Italy yet either – all combining and opposing, acting and reacting, with mercenaries changing sides at the sight of a ducat. Firearms, disease and famine turned much of the continent to a wasteland. Millions died: perhaps 3 million, perhaps over 10 million. In Germany, the heart of it all, probably more than 20 per cent of the population perished, possibly up to 40 per cent. In the most extreme case, in Magdeburg in 1631, virtually the whole population of 20,000 were murdered or burned to death in their homes. Across the continent, no one counted the atrocities, let alone the dead.

But someone recorded a little of the suffering. He was a German, Hans von Grimmelshausen, and the suffering he saw and heard about when kidnapped by Hessian troops at the age of ten in

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