The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are by Michael Pye

Author:Michael Pye [Pye, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9780241963845
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

8.

Science and money

They were not just different: they were the opposite of everyone else. Flat noses, little eyes far apart, prominent chins, eyebrows from their foreheads to their noses and an absolute refusal to wash their clothes ‘especially in time of thunder’; their thick, short thighs, their short feet and pigtails made them seem ominously different from people who imagined they had noses like Roman statues, big blue eyes and long legs to show off with short clothes. The faces of the Mongols were ‘contorted and terrible’, so the archbishop Ivo of Narbonne heard from an Englishman who had lived with them.1

They were nomads, always moving, just when Europe was netted with solid towns. They didn’t use money as Europeans did for almost everything from buying a better afterlife to settling the account on a market stall; William of Rubruck said ‘there was nothing to be sold among (them) for gold and silver, but only for cloth and garments’, and if you offered them a gold coin from Byzantium ‘they rubbed it with their fingers and put it to their noses to try by the smell whether it was copper or no’.2 They hadn’t got the point of money at all, the Westerners said; they still thought it was a kind of barter.

They were single-minded drunkards and ‘when any of them hath taken more drink than his stomach can well bear, he casteth it up and falls to drinking again’. They ate their dead, and even the vultures would not touch the bones they left; they gave their old and ugly women to the cannibals,3 and subjected the better-favoured ones to ‘forced and unnatural ravishments’. They seemed to be doing their best to be appropriate for the world east of the Baltic and the Caspian, which Europeans had populated thickly with their own fears and legends, with dog-headed, ox-hoofed men who hopped on one foot and lived on the steam from their soup.

They were a surprise, because nobody had known about the Mongols. They were appalling because they were winning.

Even the Assassins, the Ismaili Muslims of modern Syria who were famous for their courage, their ingenious killings and perhaps their smoking habits (although the name ‘assassin’ probably does not come from ‘hashish’), sent ambassadors to France and England to ask for help in beating them back. By 1241, Mongol armies had taken Hungary, taken Poland; they had all of Russia except for Novgorod, which was their vassal. They had defeated the Teutonic Knights, they were harassing the borders of Bohemia and Saxony. Their spies were all around Vienna, but when the Duke of Austria asked for help from the West, there was silence. Indeed, for all the flurry of talk and arming and planning in various castles, there seemed to be nothing that could stop them moving west as far as the edge of the world. Christendom was cut up between factions, between the friends of the Pope in Rome and the friends of the Roman Emperor, and there was no time to spare from that struggle just to save Christendom itself.

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