![[JHG]](JHGlogo.png "Howard Gibson")
History Movies
History Movies
History is a popular subject for movies. The cool thing about historical events is that they actually happened. Fiction must make the audience believe that characters would actually do stuff like that. On the down side, history is never as neat as a conventional, melodramatic story. Filmmakers take liberties.
Spoilers abound in this article. Perhaps you want to see the movies before reading on.
Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham are oppressing the English people. Robin Hood and his merry men gallantly and entertainingly oppose them. All the good folk long for the return of Good King Richard. At the end of the movie after lots of exciting action, King Richard returns and everyone, particularly Robin Hood and Maid Marion, are going to live happily ever after.
According to my copy of Bullfinch's Mythology, Robin Hood was treacherously allowed to die of wounds, by his cousin, an abbess near Kirkley Hall. In traditional European literature, manly heroes cannot be defeated in battle, so they die of treachery. Modern movies do not seem to be based on this tradition.
Richard Coeur de Lion (he was French, he did not speak English) was crowned King of England in 1189. He immediately set off on crusade. Captured and imprisoned on the way home, he made it back in 1194. He then went to war against King Philip of France. He died of wounds sustained in a minor siege in 1199. He spent maybe six months of his reign in England. England's job was to pay for his wars. Robin Hood and Maid Marian had all of five years to live happily ever after, before Prince John regained control of the country. Great Britain's royal family are descended from King John.
Unlike with Richard III, there has been no movement to rehabilitate King John. A large part of his nasty reputation comes from people reading books and watching movies about Robin Hood. Medieval kings needed significant leadership skills to manage their feudal vassals. English kings were expected to hang onto their possessions in France. John failed to do all of this. Also, John squabbled with the church for most of his reign. History is actually not written by the victors. It is written by historians. In twelfth and thirteenth century Europe, historians all worked for the church. Never, ever piss off historians.
We do not know what ordinary English people thought about King John.
Archery did not become an important factor in English culture, society and the military until the reign of King Edward I (Longshanks), John's grandson. Obviously, this is long after the reign of John and the alleged time of Robin Hood. Edward, while conquering Wales, was impressed by the power of the Welsh longbows. He brought some home. He banned football (soccer) and required all English men and boys to spend time practising with their new longbows. It is unusual for noble rulers to insist on their commoners being armed with efficient, deadly weapons, and to insist on their being proficient with them. Edward must have been confident in everyone's loyalty.
Another factor possibly is that grandfather King John, and father King Henry III squabbled with the nobility over who got to run the kingdom. We need to view the Magna Carta from Edward's point of view. Supporting commoners to keep your nobles in line is a strategy explicitly recommended by Machiavelli.
Megalomaniac Cesare Borgia, played by Orson Welles, plots to conquer all of Italy, with nothing but the heroic Tyrone Power to oppose him.
Do the arithmetic!
In 1948, it appears that the writers remembered their WWII history better than they remembered Renaissance Italian history. Also, it appears that the people at Twentieth Century Fox Studios had no desire to find out what Catholic Church influenced censors would have done to them if they had portrayed Cesare Borgia and his dad, accurately.
Cesare impressed Nicolo Machiavelli. Romagna was misgoverned. This provided Cesare an opportunity to present himself as a fair and competent ruler, regardless of how illegitimate he was. This he proceeded to do. Machiavelli claims that Cesare never lost of the support of the citizens of Romagna.
One should not criticize Machiavelli until after they have read The Prince, and The Discourses, his study and comparison of the Roman and Florentine republics. It is obvious from both books that Machiavelli believed that a virtuous people could and should rule themselves in a republic.
It can be fun to look at one of Machiavelli's critics.
In 1739, Frederick (soon to be) the Great completed his essay Anti-Machiavel criticizing The Prince for being immoral. In 1740, he started the War of the Austrian Succession by attacking Silesia. Frederick also started the Seven Years' War by attacking Saxony, although this was somewhat pre-emptive. Austria, France and Russia thought he was getting too powerful, and they were getting ready to gang up on him.
Barbara Tuchman's book The March of Folly and its chapter on the Renaissance Popes, is an excellent background read on the situation in Italy at the time of Cesare Borgia.
England misrules Scotland. William Wallace leads a revolt, defeating the English at Stirling Bridge, even though there is no bridge. King Edward (Longshanks) marches north, and defeats Wallace at the Battle of Falkirk. Edward eventually captures Wallace, and has him slowly tortured to death.
"Freedom!"
Somewhere along the line, Wallace screws Edward the Prince of Wales' wife Isabella, and fathers her kid, another Edward. The movie is not clear that it is another Edward, but the real kid was another Edward.
Wallace revolted against the English. He defeated them at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, where there was a bridge. King Edward assembled an army, marched north, and defeated Wallace at Falkirk. Wallace eventually was captured, and hanged, drawn and quartered. Princess Isabella would have been around ten at this time, and living in France. The Wikipedia page on the movie Braveheart has a long section on the historical inaccuracies. There are all sorts of articles on this, elsewhere, including on YouTube. Read the other sources. I will cover the stuff I find interesting. We all need to stop massacring Mel Gibson's families.
There is much historical context missing from the movie.
After the Romans left Britain in the fifth century, there were all sorts of confusing and poorly documented invasions. Saxons from Northumbria conquered what is now southern Scotland. The Picts continued to control northern Scotland. The actual Scots were from Ireland, and they conquered something called Dál Riata. Vikings invaded all sorts of places. By the time King Edward got interested in Scotland, the feudal fiefs in the south were dominated by nobles of French origin, much like England at the time. These included the Balliols, the Comyns (Cummings), the Bruces, and the Stuarts. The (Andrew) Morays, the Campbells, and the MacDonalds were of Gaelic origin. The French/Scottish nobility held fiefs on both sides of the border, which made wars between England and Scotland messy. Nationalism as we know it, did not exist back then. People swore fealty to other people, usually someone they respected. The Scottish brogue we all are familiar with and that is used in this movie, as well as in other movies like Brigadoon, is really an English dialect. The Scottish Highlanders, the guys who would eventually run around in kilts and tartans, spoke Gaelic.
Scottish King Alexander III fell off his horse and was killed. He had no heir. Scottish barons contested the crown, chief of whom were Robert Bruce, 5th Lord of Annandale, and John Balliol. In one of the less intelligent moves in history, they asked English king Edward Longshanks to mediate. There is a history of old Saxon kings styling themselves as "King of Britain", or Bretwalda, sort of a King of Kings. Edward was a capable, ruthless and ambitious soldier, who had already conquered Wales. Edward demanded that they acknowlege him as their liege lord. Edward recognized Balliol as king of Scotland, probably because he was the most easily dominated. The Scots fairly quickly revolted, and William Wallace and Andrew Moray defeated an English army, not commanded by Edward, at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. The Stirling Bridge was an important tactical feature. The English had to cross it to get at the Scots. The Scots waited hidden until a manageable number of English had crossed, and then they attacked.
The problem the Scots had in any battle with the English was that they were outnumbered. The Scots employed asymmetric tactics. Instead of relying on a small force of mounted noble Knights, they recruited (or drafted) peasants, and formed them into massed pike formations called Schiltrons. Western Europe, after the fall of the western Roman Empire was a feudal system in which warfare and politics were dominated by a ruling class trained as heavy cavalry. The massed infantry formations that could stop cavalry were technologically feasible, but against the interests of the ruling warrior class. The Flemish employed massed pikes successfuly at the Battle of the Golden Spurs. Finally, the Old Swiss Confederacy revolted. They either lacked knights, or they felt they had too many knights and were out to cull the herd a bit. They formed the pike formations that dominated European warfare into the seventeenth century.
King Edward I generally is described as the greatest king of England's Plantagenet dynasty, and one of the most capable and successful kings of Medieval Europe. Edward's father and predecessor Henry III, faced a baronial revolt. He was forced to accept a parliament with commoners in it, in addition to the usual nobles and clergy. In the end, Edward put these revolts down. When he inherited the crown, Edward, surprisingly for a bloody minded control freak, continued to work with parliament and the House of Commons. Given that Kings John and Henry were fighting with the nobility, Edward's championing of commoners makes sense. As noted above, Edward was eager to equip his peasants with deadly longbows, an unusual thing for a feudal monarch to do. Edward regarded himself as king of all Britain, and the liege lord of all the other princes and kings on the islands. He conquered Wales. Scotland was next. Edward had the leadership skills needed to manage feudal nobility, and a strong sense of duty.
Edward did badly at succession planning . The real Edward did not throw his son's boyfriend Piers Gaveston out of a castle window. Edward II might have been better off if he had. Gaveston eventually was executed/murdered by rebellious nobles. Edward II was overthrown by his wife Isabella and her boyfriend, and then murdered.
Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, about to die, has no confidence in his son Commodus. He tells his general Maximus that Rome needs to re-establish the republic.
Marcus Aurelius dies. Commodus seizes power and orders the deaths of Maximus and his family. Maximus escapes, becomes a slave and a gladiator. Eventually, he becomes a champion gladiator. He kills Commodus in the ring, but dies from the poison Commodus had him administered. It looks like they are going to change to a republic.
The movie The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire follows much of this plot, including Commodus' death in the arena.
When I was a kid, I had a book about the ancient Romans.
Its name escapes me.
The chapter "Oh those Emperors" described a bunch of tyrannical emperors.
According to the chapter,
Commodus was regarded as the
very worst of the monsters to have infested Rome
.
The book then went on to describe a drunken, egotistical party animal.
This is not the best emperor one could have,
but certainly not as bad as Tiberius, Caligula and Nero.
Perhaps he was worse then
Vitellius.
From the book,
I had no idea that Vitellius ruled for only a few months during 69CE
and was one of four emperors
either murdered or forced to commit suicide that year.
The correct title for Augustus and his successors, was Caesar. Our word Emperor comes from the Latin word Imperator which, originally, was a military rank, eventually reserved exclusively for Caesars.
Marcus Aurelius was the last of the Five Good Emperors. Under Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, Rome experienced a century of mostly peace, and it reached the peak of its power. Wikipedia's article on Commodus is surprisingly sympathetic. Still, he did not meet the standards of his predecessors. After twelve years in power, he was poisoned by his mistress Marcia, then strangled by his wrestling partner, Narcissus.
Commodus was succeeded by Pertinax, who was probably involved in the murder plot. He lasted three months, being killed by the Praetorian Guard over a pay dispute. The Praetorian Guard auctioned off the title of Caesar to Didius Julianus. The Roman army refused to recognize his authority. Pescennius Niger, Clodius Albinus and Septimius Severus all were proclaimed Caesar by various factions of the army. Septimius Severus defeated and killed the rest, and then had Didius Julianus killed.
Septimius Severus,
reigned from 193CE.
In 197CE, he defeated the Parthians and sacked Csetiphon.
He waged several other successful wars in Africa and Britain.
Dying of natural causes in 211,
he had advice for his sons Caracalla and Publius Septimius Geta.
My favourite translation is
Stick together. Pay the troops. To hell with the rest.
Caracalla murdered Geta in 211CE, and was himself murdered in 217CE by an officer in his bodyguard. His successor, Macrinus, was the first Caesar who was not a member of the Roman senate. He was overthrown and executed in 218CE, by members of Septimius Severus' family, who replaced him with fourteen year old Elagabalus (sometimes spelled Heliogabalus). He was a priest of the god El-Gabel, and he scandalized the Romans, who killed him in 222CE. His cousin, Alexander Severus managed to last until he was murdered by mutinous solders in 233CE.
The next Caesar, Maximinus Thrax, was the first of the barracks emperors. In the approximately fifty years between 235 and 284CE, the Romans went through a series of civil wars, and somewhere between twenty and twenty five Caesars, all of whom were murdered or killed in battle, with one exception. One guy was captured by the Persians. According to tradition, Persian King Shapur I used him as a footstool. The civil wars devastated the Roman empire.
The century between the accession of Commodus and that of Diocletian was a disaster for the Romans. It goes a long way to explain why they hated Commodus so much.
Roman monarchy had nothing in common with the Germanic monarchy that came to dominate Europe, and that we understand today. The imperial Romans had no concept of Royal descent, or the Divine right of kings. Any Roman boy could become Caesar, as long as he joined the army, and did not mind being murdered.
Rome was a failed republic. The Caesars were the armed strongmen who controlled the army. They had no constitutional or traditional authority other than the loyalty of their troops.
How did we ever manage without Wikipedia?
300 Spartans confront the invading Persians. They die gloriously amid a vast heap of Persian corpses. At the end of the movie, some more Spartans are getting ready to administer an ass-whupping, presumably at Platea.
Pretty much that, however...
A big problem with history is that people like to tell stories, and they tend to fit their stories into one of a series of literary conventions. In this case, the tale of the Persian invasion of ancient Greece is reduced to melodrama, a battle between Good and Evil.
A good case can be made that the Persians were one of the more reasonable and enlightened empires of the ancient world. Read your Herodotus, or search your bible for references to Cyrus (the Great). A similar case can be made that the Spartans were the one of the most evil cultures of the same period. The Spartans completely militarized themselves in response to revolts by their savagely repressed peasants, known as helots. The average person living in Sparta would have experienced, at the hands of the Persians, an improvement in their material state, as well as their civil rights.
The perception and the portrayal of the Spartans as uber-warriors is complicated. The Spartans were brought up from childhood to fight in closely packed formations as heavy infantry known as hoplites. The important thing about being a hoplite was discipline. A group of hoplites had to do everything quickly and efficiently, in unison. For the Spartans, the individual was nothing. The group was everything. Their whole ideology was that the Spartiates were equals. A Spartan gloried in the idea that he was surrounded by other Spartans just was worthy as he was. In his Histories, Herodotus quotes the Spartans, stating that they had no advantage over other Greeks in one on one combat. Their advantage was their superior discipline, fighting in formation. It is noted also that the Greeks had longer spears than the Persians.
A weirder point, especially given the delivery of dialogue by the Spartans in the movie 300, is that they had a sense of humour. It wasn't a violent sense of humour in which they joked about their enemies getting ripped apart in entertaining ways. It was a gentle sense of humour, often intended to enlighten and instruct other Spartans, and even foreigners. Plutarch's book on the Saying of Spartans is full of one liners. When it was announced that Persian arrows would darken the sky, the Spartan who said he would fight in the shade, was joking. Even Leonidas' line about dining in hell (Hades, actually) was a joke. Dinner was the big meal of a Spartan's day. Leonidas was reminding his men to enjoy their breakfasts. This must have been quite the thigh slapper. Thermopylae may have been the funniest bloodbath in history.
One ought to wonder who was writing all this stuff down, given that all the Spartans were killed. Could it have been the Persians? Perhaps they should have been more focused on the fighting.
The sequel to 300, 300: Rise of an Empire is a bizarre movie if you are a history freak. Yes, there was a guy named Themistocles. Yes, there was a queen named Artemisia. Yes, there was a Persian king named Xerxes. Yes, there was a naval battle which the Persians lost. The weird thing is that they missed interesting stuff, including a great one-liner. At some point, watching Artemisia in action, Xerxes shouted out that his men were women and his women were men.
The Athenians won the battle of Salamis without the aid of Sparta, who would certainly not have been led in battle by queen Gorgo. The Athenians, saved from Persian subjugation by Themistocles, showed their appreciation by ostracising him. Fleeing Greece, he wound up at the Persian court. Xerxes' successor Artaxerxes must have appreciated irony. Missing a golden opportunity to string his father's nemesis up by the testicles, he appointed Themistocles satrap of Magnesia in Asia Minor. This would make a good movie.
The writers have a hard‑on for their ancient Spartans.
The Titanic is the biggest ship in the world and it is proclaimed unsinkable. All sorts of drama takes place among the passengers and crew. You know the rest.
Again, an historical event is systematically reduced to a literary convention, in this case, Greek Tragedy. The stories hype up the size of the ship, and the confidence of the owners and crew that it could not sink. Then, it sinks.
Oh dear. We forgot the spoiler alert. :(
Let's dispose of the various myths.
In the first decades of the 20th century, a bunch of nations and shipping lines competed to see who could build the biggest, fastest ocean liners. The White Star Line planned a series of three ships, intended to be the biggest in the world, with an emphasis on luxury and comfort, rather than speed. These were the Olympic, Titanic and Britannic. At time of launching, the Olympic and Titanic were the biggest ships in the world.
| Olympic | Titanic | Britannic | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Length | 882'7" | 882'9" | 882'9" |
| Beam | 92'6" | 92'0" | 94'0" |
| Registered Gross Tonnage | 45,324 | 46,328 | 48,158 |
| Displacement Tonnage | 52,067 | 52,310 | 53,000 |
| Commissioned | 1911 | 1912 | 1915 |
The SS Imperator, built by Vulcan Shipyards in Germany for the Hamburg America Line, went into service in 1913. She was 906' long, and 52,117 tons gross.
All figures are from Wikipedia.
A gross ton is a measure of volume, 100 cubic feet enclosed by the ship structure. This makes more sense than you might think. The tonnage of a ship like the Titanic tells you how much money you can make with it. However fun the concept sounds, you do not call someone up and tell them you need two and a quarter tons avoirdupois of millionaires.
Deadweight tonnage, not listed above, is the maximum weight of cargo, fuel, food, crew and their comic books you can load onto your ship, in long tons, 2240lb. This is used on oil tankers and bulk carriers. Again, it makes sense. Ask yourself how much a three quarter ton pickup truck weighs.
Displacement tonnage is the weight of water displaced by the ship. In other words, it is the weight of the ship. Wikipedia is not clear on this, but the unit of measure almost certainly is long tons. Displacement tonnage usually is used to rate warships. Note how the displacement tonnage does not change much in the three White Star liners. Replacement of a flat window with a protruding bay window would have minimal effect on on the weight, but it would affect the volume, and the gross tonnage. Other sources list Titanic's displacement tonnage as 66,000. Displacement tonnage can be quoted for an empty ship or a loaded one.
The differences between the three White Star ships are trivial. The World's biggest liner prior to Olympic was RMS Mauretania at 31,398 gross tons.
Incidentally, the Mauretania captured the Blue Riband in 1907 by crossing the Atlantic at 26.06 knots, and she held it until the Bremen exceeded this in 1929. Titanic's top speed was 23 knots. She was no threat to capture the Blue Riband. The crew were not trying to, although passengers may have been making bets.
The myth emphasizes that the Titanic was regarded as unsinkable. This, combined with the ship's size was the hubris that provoked the Good Lord into sinking her.
![[Unsinkable Ships Book]](UnsinkableShips.JPG)
It is not clear when the ship was declared unsinkable.
White Star publicity apparently states that the series of
ships were "designed to be unsinkable". Contemporary
news reports described Titanic as "practically unsinkable".
![[Unsinkable Ships Book -- title page]](PracticallyUnsinkableShips.JPG)
The book Unsinkable Ships was published by J. Stone
and Company, manufacturers of hydraulically controlled marine safety
bulkhead doors. The title page waffles a bit, adding the word
"practically". This came out a bit before the Titanic, but it is
quoted in the articles. Many of the ships listed in the book were
sunk during World War I.
It is sometimes implied that Titanic was the first ship to have a subdivided hull. Actually, subdividing came in with iron hulls. The bulkheads, watertight or otherwise, are a critical part of the hull structure, as are double hulls. However much stronger iron or steel is, the sides of a wooden hull are thicker and stiffer. It takes some engineering to make up for this. Ancient Chinese junks had subdivided hulls.
The famous HMS Birkenhead had a subdivided hull in 1845. The bulkheads were opened up, providing more space for the troops she was to carry, and providing an opportunity for them to stand bravely at attention while the ship sunk after striking a rock off the coast of Africa.
The innovation on Titanic was that the bulkhead doors were electrically operated.
Titanic was designed to remain afloat with any two adjacent holds opened up, or with the first four holds opened up. What she suffered was a freak accident in which she gently grazed the side of an iceberg, creating a thin opening, six holds long. If she had hit the iceberg more directly, there would have been massive damage to the front of the ship, people would have spilled their drinks, and there would have been no opportunity to heroically emulate the troops on the Birkenhead as Benjamin Guggenheim, John Jacob Astor IV, and Isador and Ida Straus did.
This is not mentioned enough in the legend.
There were two serious failures of seamanship on Titanic. The first failure was hitting the iceberg. Titanic had no business speeding through iceberg infested fog. Even if the ship had not sunk, there would have been massive damage, and the ship would have spent months out of action. This is precisely what happened to Olympic when, under Titanic's eventual captain, Edward Smith, she collided with HMS Hawke.
Titanic's lifeboats were not adequate to take the ship's full complement. As the ship sunk, they also were not fully loaded. Titanic sunk fairly slowly, in calm water, knowing that a rescue ship was on the way. One must wonder what would have happened if the ship's officers had ruthlessly set out to rescue as many passengers as possible. They could have worked fast to ensure that each and every lifeboat was launched. They could have overloaded the lifeboats. They could have assembled rafts out of all the wooden stuff on the ship. They only had to last a couple of hours of good weather.
A number of modern accounts state that Titanic's metal was faulty. I do not think this is important. Steel has improved since 1912. All steel ships in 1912 were built out of 1912 steel. There were few structural failures.
Structural problems with ships really started in the two world wars, when vast numbers of ships were mass produced by half trained workers, using all sorts of new, untried technologies.
Much of our knowledge of brittleness and fatigue dates from WWII. This information was not available to marine architects in 1912, so they designed with larger safety factors. Today, we can build a ship of Titanic's size and strength, with a much lighter hull.
I read a lot. I am not sure that "bibliography" is the right term.
Last modified: 2023-02-20