Banning the building of minarets and Turkish membership of the EU

All kinds of issues, all rooted in history, emerge from the controversial Swiss vote to ban further building of minarets in that strange but deeply democratic country.

It is plainly the kind of popular judgment the European Union was created to deny and is an indication of a widespread European view towards Islam, even in its rather liberal Turkish guise (most of Switzerland’s Muslims come from Turkey and the once Ottoman possessions of the former Yugoslavia). The judgment is likely to push Turkish popular opinion against the European Union, as a fascinating recent article in the Wall Street Journal pointed out (though it should also be said that the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s comment that minarets are the ‘our bayonets’ was not helpful).

France has been especially hostile towards the idea of Turkish membership of the EU. Yet, it is not widely known that in the 1530s the Most Christian King of France Francis I allied with the Turk against the Very Catholic King of Spain Charles I. More typical of European attitudes towards Turkey was James IV (r.1488-1513) of Scotland’s appeal to western rulers to unite against the Ottomans, an attempt to heal European divisions caused by the ‘Warrior Pope’ Julius II, who had formed the so-called Holy League in an attempt to quell French ambitions. Perhaps Alex Salmond has been reading his history books and eyes a similar role of European peacebroker for his ‘independent’ Scotland.

Hoard Loot

The Staffordshire Hoard, a small selection of which is currently on display in the British Museum, has been valued by the Treasure Valuation Committee at £3.285 million. The money will be shared between Terry Herbert, the metal detectorist who discovered the hoard, and Fred Johnson on whose land it was found. Should be a pleasant Christmas ahead for the pair of them, whose services to the study of Anglo-Saxon England are incalculable.

Baghdad to Baldock

By the standards of the north Hertfordshire commuter belt, Baldock is a pleasant little settlement. Situated where the Great North Road and the Icknield Way meet, it became one of the great staging centres of early modern England, hence the large number of drinking establishments found on its wide streets, and the long list of famous folk who have passed through, including Charlies Stuart and Dickens, as well as ‘Mad’ King Ludwig of Bavaria, subject of films by Visconti and Syberberg and patron of Wagner. But the strangest thing about Baldock is that it was named after Baghdad by its founders, the Knights Templars, who established the settlement in the 12th century, a time when they had their sights on the then glorious, now benighted city on the Tigris. Are there any other unlikely places with grand names?

A History of the World

The launch of a new collaboration between the British Museum and the BBC, the ambitiously titled, A History of the World took place, appropriately, in the Enlightenment Room of the BM this morning. It’s actually a History of the World ‘in 100 objects’ and the daily, 15-minute programmes will be broadcast on Radio 4 from January 18th 2010. Each one focuses on a particular object from the museum’s collection and the series will cover a wide chronological and geographical period.

Neil MacGregor, the BM’s director talked of moving away from history centred on the Mediterranean – once, literally, the ‘middle of the earth’ – to create a genuinely global history, beginning with an ancient chopper from the Olduvai Gorge in modern-day Tanzania, that tells us much about the ideas of early man. Some of the objects are especially beautiful: the colossal statue of Rameses II, for example; others, less so, but huge in their importance. Three rather ugly stubs of metal turn out to be remnants of the first transatlantic cable, created as one single 4,000-mile long object created in east Birmingham, transported to Bristol in a remarkable feat of logistics, and then laid along the bed of the ocean to join the Old World with the New for the first time. The series will be supported by an impressive interactive website with high resolution images and a children’s TV series, Relic: Guardians of the Museum.

What is especially encouraging about this series from a historical point of view is that it reaches wide and far. I have bemoaned before (and will do so again) about the elision of history with current affairs, a trend of which BBC television (and not radio) has been especially guilty. But this is a wholly admirable adventure, real history despite the inevitable roping in of ‘celebrities’: though a definition of celebrity capacious enough to include Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf, Wole Soyinka and Madhur Jaffrey is one I can live with.

One caveat was raised at the press conference. After all the talk of outreach and accessibility, why is A History of the World not being broadcast on BBC1 television, easily the BBC channel with the largest audience? Mark Damazer, controller of Radio 4, a station on a roll at the moment, talked of budgetary limitations. But the truth is, the BBC and the BM know their audience – one reason why they are so good at what they do – and it is predominantly made up of the ‘interested’ middle classes. With a third of schools failing officially to provide a decent standard of education, that’s not going to change anytime soon.

Talking of education, in the Times today, History Today contributor Andrew Roberts provides a crash course in history books for Baroness Ashton, the EU’s new foreign affairs supremo. Any list that contains Chris Wickham’s magisterial study The Inheritance of Rome (Penguin) and A World by Itself (Heinemann), the forthcoming history of the British Isles edited by Jonathan Clark (which he discusses in the January edition of History Today) gets my thumbs up.

A World by Itself

The British Museum Press has rushed out a small illustrated book on The Staffordshire Hoard. Written by Kevin Leahy, a National Finds Adviser for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, and Roger Bland, Head of the BM’s Department of Portable Antiquities and Treasure, it’s a brief, authoritative account of the story so far. It costs just £4.99, a pound of which goes to the appeal fund set up to raise money for a permanent home for the hoard. Go to the British Museum's website for further details.

Anglo-Saxon Britain has been much in my thoughts after reading the opening section of A World by Itself, the new history of the British Isles edited by Jonathan Clark to be published by Heinemann in the New Year. The section written by James Campbell is as good an introduction to the period from the Roman invasion to the Conquest as I have read and bodes well for the rest of the volume. History Today staff will be naming their favourite books, TV and radio programmes, films and exhibitions of 2009 starting next week. A World by Itself may well be mentioned in the 2010 dispatches. Jonathan Clark will be sharing his thoughts on national history in the January 2010 edition of History Today.

In Our Time's Free Archive

In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg’s radio 4 programme, is one the jewels of BBC broadcasting. Each Thursday the ageless Lord Bragg sits down with three distinguished panelists to discuss subjects ranging from the Anabaptists to Newton, Babylon to Dante. Today it was announced that the full 11-year archive of programmes is to be archived online, free to listeners. It’s a valuable, compelling and entertaining resource for anyone interested in history in all its remarkable diversity.

The British public: a public ill served?

The number of literary festivals in Britain, many with a substantial historical input, continues to grow. The London History Festival, which finished last week, saw large numbers attending Kensington Central Library to listen to historians of the calibre of Simon Sebag Montefiore, John Adamson, Saul David and Alison Weir. Such events are now staples of middle-class British life, taking place in all regions, urban and rural.

What is the reason for their success? Could it be that television no longer caters to the ‘interested’ middle class, as Richard North calls them? That’s not to say that good television isn’t still made; it is. Witness Diarmuid MacCulloch’s History of Christianity, currently being broadcast on BBC 4. But primetime, real time terrestrial TV is by and large a motley, often degrading circus of celebrity and clamour, whose prime purpose seems to be the annulment of all thought.

So, the educated prefer to head somewhere local to listen to a Starkey, a Sebag or an Antonia Fraser. The same phenomena expresses itself in the increased audience for BBC Radios 3 and 4 (where Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time performs a similar function for listeners interested in history) and in the rise in sales of box sets of challenging US dramas such as The Wire (a Greek tragedy made modern) and Mad Men. There are plenty of discerning, curious people around. But they are very ill served by Britain’s television programme makers.

On the subject of a public ill served, Simon Heffer, writing on today’s Queen’s Speech, claims that the current Parliament is the most despised since Cromwell threw out the Rump in 1653. Can that really be the case, and what are the other contenders?