Category Archives: Italy

by | 12 May 2024 · 5:54 am

Norman Conquest of Sicily

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 64-66:

The Normans were now effectively on its very doorstep; there was nothing to prevent their marching into the Holy City itself. Pope Leo IX resolved to move first. He raised an army, and led it in person against them. The two forces met on June 17, 1053, near Civitate, on the bank of the Fortore River, and the Pope was defeated. The Normans treated him with every courtesy and conducted him to Benevento, where they kept him for almost a year while a modus vivendi for the future was worked out. Its details need not concern us here; suffice it to say that just six years later, in the little town of Melfi, Pope Nicholas II invested Robert Guiscard with the dukedoms of Apulia, Calabria—and Sicily.

BY JUST WHAT TITLE the Pope so munificently bestowed on the Normans territories which had never before been claimed by him or his predecessors is open to doubt. Apulia and Calabria were questionable enough, but with regard to Sicily Nicholas was on still shakier ground, since the island had never been subject to papal control. It was unlikely, however, that such considerations bothered the Normans overmuch. By that third investiture, the Pope had issued Robert with an open invitation. Sicily, lying green and fertile little more than a stone’s throw from the mainland, was the obvious objective, the natural completion of that great southward sweep that had brought the Normans down the peninsula. It was also the lair of Saracen pirates, still a perennial menace to the Italian coastal towns of the south and west. While Sicily remained in the hands of the heathen, how could the Duke of Calabria and Apulia ever ensure the security of his newly legalized dominions?

To the local populations, the progeny of old Tancred de Hauteville must have seemed almost infinite. Already no fewer than seven of his sons had made their mark in Italy; and still this remarkable source showed no sign of exhaustion, for there now appeared on the scene an eighth brother, Roger. He was the youngest of the Hautevilles, at this time some twenty-six years old; but as a fighter he was a match for any, while as a statesman he was the greatest of them all. His brother Robert quickly recognized his qualities. As a recent arrival, Roger had not yet acquired any territorial responsibilities; he would clearly be the perfect second-in-command for the coming Sicilian expedition.

In the early spring of 1060 Robert and Roger together forced the surrender of the Byzantine garrison in Reggio, the Calabrian town that faces Sicily across the Strait of Messina. Now the only Italian city still in Greek hands was Bari, too far away on the Adriatic to cause any trouble; the way was clear. The Pope had given his blessing, the Western Empire was as powerless as the Eastern to intervene. Even in Sicily itself the situation seemed relatively favorable. In many areas the local population was still Christian—though of the Orthodox persuasion—and likely to welcome the invaders as liberators. As for the Muslims, they were certainly brave fighters, but they were now more than ever divided among themselves. It did not look as though the Norman conquest of Sicily would take very long.

In fact, from first to last it took thirty-one years—in notable contrast to the Norman conquest of England just six years later, which mopped up the Saxon opposition in a matter of months. This cannot all be attributed to the valor of the Saracen armies; it was due principally to the rebellious barons in Apulia, who divided Robert’s energies and resources at a time when he desperately needed all he had for Sicily. And yet, paradoxically, it was these Apulian preoccupations that made Sicily the brilliant and superbly organized kingdom that it later became. As Robert was obliged to spend more and more time on the mainland, so the campaign in Sicily fell increasingly under the control of his brother, until Roger could finally assume effective supremacy. This was to lead to the division of Robert’s domains and so allowed Roger, finally freed of Apulian responsibilities, to devote to the island the attention it deserved.

On January 10, 1072, the brothers made their formal entry into Palermo. Subjection of the island was still by no means complete. Independent emirates struggled on in Syracuse and Trapani, but henceforth final pacification could be only a matter of time. Robert Guiscard as Duke of Sicily claimed suzerainty over the island, but with his two mainland dukedoms to look after could never remain there long; Roger would be the effective ruler, with the title of Great Count. Sicily was to be effectively transformed. Since the first half of the ninth century it had been wholly or largely in Muslim hands, constituting a forward outpost of Islam from which raiders, pirates and the occasional expeditionary force had maintained an unremitting pressure against the southern bastions of Christendom. For some 250 years, separately and in combination, the two great empires had striven in vain to subdue them; Robert and Roger, with a handful of followers, had succeeded in barely a decade. Moreover, the Norman conquest of Sicily was, together with the contemporary beginnings of the Reconquista in Spain, the first step in the immense Christian reaction against the Muslim-held lands of the southern Mediterranean—that reaction which was shortly to develop into the colossal, if ultimately empty, epic of the Crusades.

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Filed under France, Italy, Mediterranean, migration, military, nationalism, religion, war

by | 10 May 2024 · 4:44 am

Arab Conquest of Sicily

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 58-59:

Sicily, like neighboring Calabria, became a haven for refugees from the iconoclast movement in the empire; but in the ninth it was shattered. The Arabs had waited long enough. They had by now occupied the entire length of the North African coast, and had already been harassing the island with sporadic raiding. Then in 827 they saw their chance of achieving permanent occupation. The local Byzantine Governor, Euphemius by name, had recently been dismissed from his post and recalled to Constantinople after an unseemly elopement with a local nun. His reply was to rise in revolt and proclaim himself Emperor, appealing to the Arabs for aid. They landed in strength, rapidly entrenched themselves, took little notice of Euphemius—who soon came to a violent end—and three years later stormed Palermo, making it their capital. Subsequent progress was slow. Messina fell in 843; Syracuse suffered a long and terrible siege, during which the defenders were finally reduced to cannibalism. The city surrendered only in 878. After this the Byzantines seem to have admitted defeat. A few isolated outposts in the eastern part of the island held out a little longer—the last, Rometta, even into the middle of the tenth century—but on that June day when the banner of the Prophet was raised over Syracuse, Sicily became, to all intents and purposes, a part of the Muslim world.

Once the wars of conquest were over and the country had settled again, life continued pleasantly enough for most of the Greek Christian communities. Although they had to endure a degree of discrimination as second-class citizens, they were normally allowed to keep their freedom, on payment of an annual tribute which many must have preferred to the heavy taxation and compulsory military service imposed by the Roman Empire. Meanwhile the Saracens displayed, as so often throughout their history, a degree of religious toleration which permitted the churches and monasteries and the long tradition of Hellenistic scholarship to flourish as much as ever they had done. In other ways too the island benefited from its conquerors. They brought with them a whole new system of agriculture, based on such innovations as terracing and siphon aqueducts for irrigation. They introduced cotton and papyrus, melon and pistachio, citrus and date palm and enough sugarcane to make possible, within a very few years, a substantial export trade. Under the Byzantines Sicily had never played an important part in European commerce, but with the Saracen conquest it soon became one of the major trading centers of the Mediterranean, with Christian, Muslim and Jewish merchants all thronging the bazaars of Palermo.

And yet, among the many blessings conferred upon Sicily by her Arab conquerors, that of stability was conspicuously absent. As the links of loyalty which bound the Emir of Palermo and his fellow chieftains to the North African caliphate grew ever more tenuous, the emirs themselves lost their cohesive force; they became increasingly divided against one another, and so the island found itself once again a battleground of warring factions. It was this steady political decline that was to bring the Greeks in strength back to Sicily—together with their Norman allies.

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Filed under Italy, language, Mediterranean, migration, military, religion, war

by | 7 May 2024 · 7:03 am

Sicilian Slave Revolts vs. Romans

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 36-39:

One thing is certain: that the Romans treated Sicily with little respect. That monstrous inferiority complex to which they always gave way when confronted with Greek culture led to exploitation on a colossal scale. A few Greek cities managed to retain a measure of independence, but much of the island was taken over by the latifundia: those vast landed estates, owned by absentee Roman landlords, setting a pattern of land tenure which was to ruin Sicilian agriculture for the next 2,000 years. Liberty, meanwhile, was almost extinguished as the slave gangs toiled naked in the fields, sowing and harvesting the grain for Rome.

It was thus hardly surprising that the second half of the century should have seen two great slave revolts. Tens of thousands of men, women and children had been sold into slavery during the third-century Sicilian wars, tens of thousands more as a result of warfare on the mainland in the century following. Meanwhile, the Hellenistic east was in a state of turmoil. The tidy distribution of territories among Alexander’s generals was a thing of the past; Asia Minor, Egypt and Syria were now torn apart by dynastic struggles. This meant prisoners, both military and political, a vast proportion of whom, with their families, were swept up by the slave traders and never heard of again. And in Sicily, still steadily developing its agriculture, a strong and healthy worker would fetch a more than reasonable price.

The slave population was in consequence dangerously large, but it gave the authorities little cause for alarm. After all, mass revolts were rare indeed. Almost by definition, slaves—branded, beaten and frequently chained together—were permanently demoralized by the life they led, while the conditions under which they were kept normally made any consultation and planning between them impossible. On the other hand, it should be remembered that many of those who had landed up in Sicily were intelligent and educated, and nearly all of them spoke Greek. And just sometimes, out of sheer desperation, they were driven to action.

The first revolt began, so far as we can gather, in 139 B.C. on the estates of a certain Damophilus of Enna, “who surpassed the Persians in the sumptuousness and costliness of his feasts” and whose slaves most understandably resolved to kill him. Before doing so, however, they consulted another slave, a Syrian named Eunus, who was generally believed to possess magic, or at least oracular, powers. Would the gods, they asked him, give their blessing to such a plan? Eunus’s reply was as categorical as any of them could have wished. He personally marched into Enna with a following of some four hundred fellow slaves; the murder, rape and plunder lasted for several hours. Damophilus and his termagant wife, Megallis, were away in their country villa, but were quickly brought back to the city; he was killed at once, she was handed over to her own female slaves, who tortured her and then flung her from the roof. Eunus had meanwhile been proclaimed King, making his mistress (and former fellow slave) Queen at his side.

Once started, the revolt spread like wildfire. A certain Cleon, a Cilician herdsman working near Agrigento, joined Eunus with 5,000 men of his own; soon they were at Morgantina, then at Taormina. By this time their numbers probably approached the 100,000 mark, though we shall never know for sure. Another mystery is why, in contrast to the speed and efficiency they showed in dealing with similar but much smaller uprisings in Italy, the Romans were so unconscionably slow in sending troops to restore order. Admittedly they had other preoccupations at home and abroad, but the truth is that all through their history the Romans consistently underestimated Sicily; the fact that it was not part of the Italian peninsula but technically an offshore island seemed to lower it in their estimation. Had they properly considered the scale and importance of what was going on, had they sent an adequate force of trained soldiers to the island as soon as the first reports arrived, Eunus and his followers would hardly have stood a chance. As things turned out, it was not until 132 B.C.—seven years after its beginning—that the revolt was finally crushed. The prisoners taken at Taormina were tortured; their bodies, living or dead, were flung from the battlements of the citadel. Their leader, after wandering for some time at liberty, was finally captured and thrown into prison, where he died soon afterward. The vast majority of the rebels, however, were released. They no longer constituted a danger—and, after all, if life were to go on as it always had, slaves were a vital commodity.

Unlike the first, the second slave revolt had a specific cause other than general dissatisfaction. It began in 104 B.C., when Rome was once again under severe pressure, this time from Germanic tribes to the north. In order to deal more efficiently with these, she appealed for military assistance from Nicomedes III, King of Bithynia in Asia Minor.*2 Nicomedes replied that he unfortunately had no young men to spare, thanks to the activities of the slave traders who were seizing so many of them and who were actually protected by the Roman authorities. At this the horrified Senate ordered that all those of Rome’s “allies” who had been enslaved should be released at once. The effect of this decree when it reached Sicily may well be imagined. Huge crowds of slaves assembled before the Governor in Syracuse, demanding immediate emancipation. He granted freedom to some eight hundred, then realized that, if he continued, he would be destroying the entire base of the Sicilian economy. Laying down his pen, he ordered that the still-growing crowds should disperse and return to their homes. Not surprisingly, they refused—and the second slave revolt was under way.

Since the Roman decree—and the Governor’s refusal to enforce it—affected the slaves all over Sicily, the whole island was soon in an uproar.

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Filed under economics, Greece, Italy, labor, Mediterranean, slavery

by | 4 May 2024 · 3:38 pm

Introduction to Sicily

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. xxv-xxvii:

The celebrated words from The Leopard, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, that form the epigraph to this book—words spoken by Prince Don Fabrizio Salina to a Piedmontese officer in 1860, some months after the capture of Sicily by Garibaldi—encapsulate the island’s history to perfection and explain the countless differences that distinguish the Sicilians from the Italians, despite the almost infinitesimal distance that separates them. The two differ linguistically, speaking as they do what is essentially another language rather than a dialect, a language in which the normal final o is replaced by u and which nearly all Italians find incomprehensible. In their place names, they have a passion for five-syllable words with a tum-ti-ti-tum-ti rhythm—Caltanissetta, Acireale, Calascibetta, Castelvetrano, Misterbianco, Castellammare, Caltagirone, Roccavaldina—the list is almost endless. (Lampedusa gives Don Fabrizio’s country estate the wonderful name Donnafugata.) They differ ethnically, a surprising number having bright red hair and blue eyes—characteristics traditionally attributed to their Norman forebears, though it seems likelier that the credit should be given first to the British during the Napoleonic Wars and more recently to the British and Americans in 1943. They even differ gastronomically, with their immense respect for bread—of which they have seventy-two separate kinds—and their passion for ice cream, which they even demand for breakfast.

Wine is also a speciality; Sicily is now one of the most important wine-producing areas in all Italy. It is a well-known fact that the very first grapevine sprang from under the feet of Dionysus as he danced among the foothills of Etna. This slowly developed into the famous Mamertino, the favorite wine of Julius Caesar. In 1100 Roger de Hauteville established the winery at the Abbazia S. Anastasia near Cefalù; it is still in business. Nearly seven hundred years later, in 1773, John Woodhouse landed at Marsala and discovered that the local wine, which was aged in wooden casks, tasted remarkably like the Spanish and Portuguese fortified wines that were then extremely popular in England. He therefore took some home, where it was enthusiastically received, then returned to Sicily, where by the end of the century he was producing it on a massive scale. He was followed a few years later by members of the Whitaker family, whose descendants I well remember and whose somewhat oppressive Villa Malfitano in Palermo can be visited on weekday mornings. So too can the nearby Villino Florio, a riot of art nouveau and much—in my opinion, at least—to be preferred.

Any conversation about Sicily is bound to produce a question about the Mafia; and questions about the Mafia are notoriously difficult to answer, largely because it contrives to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We shall look at it rather more closely in chapter 16; here, the important thing to be said is that it is not a bunch of bandits—the average foreign visitor will be as safe in Sicily as anywhere in western Europe. Indeed, he is extremely unlikely to come into contact with the organization at all. It is only if he decides to settle on the island and starts negotiating for a property that he may receive a visit from an extremely polite and well-dressed gentleman—he could well be a qualified lawyer—who will explain why the situation might not be quite as straightforward as it first appeared.

Finally, a word or two about Sicily’s writers. Two Sicilians have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Luigi Pirandello and Salvatore Quasimodo (the pen name of Salvatore Ragusa). Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author was an early example of the Theater of the Absurd and provoked such an outcry at its premiere in Rome in 1921 that he was forced to escape through a side entrance; since then, however, it has become a classic and is now performed the world over. Pirandello himself became an ardent Fascist and enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Mussolini. Quasimodo’s poems are hugely popular in Italy and have been translated into over forty languages. But if you want the true feel of Sicily, you should go not to these giants but to Leonardo Sciascia (pronounced Shasha) and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Sciascia was born in 1921 in the little town of Racalmuto, between Agrigento and Caltanissetta, and lived there for most of his life. His best novels—The Day of the Owl, To Each His Own, Sicilian Uncles—are first-rate detective stories with a distinctive Sicilian flavor; but they also analyze the tragic ills that beset his island, such as political corruption and—as always—the Mafia. Lighter, but still irresistibly Sicilian, are the crime novels of Andrea Camilleri, which have recently been adapted to make a superb television series about his hero, Detective Inspector Salvo Montalbano, chief of police in the fictional city of Vigata. So popular has the series been that Porto Empedocle, Camilleri’s birthplace, has recently had its name formally changed to Porto Empedocle Vigata.

As for Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, he is for me in a class by himself. The Leopard is certainly the greatest book about Sicily that I have ever read; indeed, I would rank it with any of the great novels of the twentieth century. To anyone interested, I would also enthusiastically recommend David Gilmour’s admirable biography, The Last Leopard. Several other works of interest are listed in the bibliography.

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Filed under food, Italy, language, literature, migration, nationalism

by | 6 April 2024 · 8:32 am

Turning Point at Locarno, 1925

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 377-379:

When the question of Germany’s entry to the League of Nations cropped up, Stresemann defended his government’s unwillingness to be bound by Article 16 of the Covenant. Germany, he said, could not pledge itself to support Poland in a war involving the Soviet Union. Briand tried to reassure him by saying that as Germany would be given a permanent seat on the League Council it could veto any proposal it disagreed with. A formula was finally worked out whereby each member of the League was obligated to cooperate against military aggression ‘to an extent which is compatible with its military situation, and which takes its geographical situation into account’. In return, Stresemann promised Germany would seek entry into the League of Nations as soon as possible.

Mussolini, the Italian Prime Minister, was initially lukewarm on the proposed Locarno agreements. He wanted a guarantee of the Brenner frontier between Italy and Austria to be added to the treaties, but Stresemann said this would only be possible if Germany was allowed to unite with Austria, something the Allies were not willing to accept. However, once it became clear the agreements would be signed, Mussolini turned up, on 14 October, wanting to share in the glory of joining Britain in guaranteeing the peace of Europe.

The ‘big day’ of the Conference took place in the town hall in Locarno on 16 October 1925. It witnessed the signing of the Treaty of Mutual Guarantee between Germany, France, Belgium, Great Britain, and Italy (the Locarno Pact). Under its terms, Germany recognised its western borders as fixed by the Treaty of Versailles, and the continuance of the Rhineland demilitarised zone in perpetuity. Stresemann emphasised the voluntary affirmation of Germany’s western borders was much more acceptable than the dictated terms of the Versailles Treaty. Germany, France and Belgium all agreed not to attack each other ever again, and Britain and Italy agreed to function as the joint guarantors of the agreement. All the parties agreed to settle disputes by peaceful means in future. The Locarno Treaties would only come into force when Germany was finally admitted to the League of Nations. The signatories further agreed to meet in London on 1 December for a formal signing ceremony.

Annexed to the main treaties were the German–Polish, German–Czechoslovak, German–Belgian, and French–German arbitration treaties, which promised all disputes which could not be settled amicably through normal diplomatic channels would be submitted to an Arbitration Panel or to the Permanent Court of International Justice. To add further insurance in Eastern Europe, France signed binding treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia, pledging mutual assistance, in the event of conflict with Germany. Polish and Czech leaders signed these agreements in fear rather than hope. The agreements reaffirmed existing treaties of alliance concluded by France with Poland on 19 February 1921, and with Czechoslovakia on 25 January 1924. The British government refused to be a party to the arbitration treaties.

The Locarno Treaties were a key turning-point in the international relations of the 1920s. They were the effective diplomatic end of the Great War, and reconciled Germany and France in a way that had previously seemed impossible. Locarno was a much bigger triumph for the appeasement of Germany than Neville Chamberlain ever achieved, and how ironic that his half-brother Austen was one of its chief architects.

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Filed under Austria, Belgium, Czechia, France, Germany, Italy, military, nationalism, Poland, Slovakia, USSR, war

by | 30 March 2024 · 7:02 am

British Alien Internment Camps, WW2

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 2-4:

EIGHT WEEKS EARLIER, ON SATURDAY, July 13, 1940, Captain Hubert Daniel, a kindly, keen-drinking forty-eight-year-old army officer, had declared the camp open. Hutchinson was the seventh of ten internment camps to open on the Isle of Man, an island positioned sufficiently far from the neighboring coasts to be ideally suited for imprisonment. The island’s boat-owning residents had been instructed to stow the oars and remove the spark plugs from their vessels’ engines at night. Even if an escapee were to board a suitable craft, the journey to the mainland was perilous. If you were here, you were here for good.

Hutchinson was currently home to around twelve hundred prisoners, predominantly refugees from Nazi Germany who had been living peacefully in Britain at the time of their arrest. In recent months rumors abounded that a fifth column—a neologism to Britain, now universally understood to refer to traitors living within their country of asylum—had assisted the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Newspapers had stoked national paranoia with claims that a similar network of spies lurked in Britain.

Even before the outbreak of war, Scotland Yard, working in conjunction with MI5, the British domestic intelligence service, had been deluged with tip-offs about suspicious refugees and foreigners. The police detained one man when investigators found an entry in his diary that read: “Exchange British Queen for Italian Queen.” The detective assumed he had exposed a fascist plot against the crown. In fact, the man was a beekeeper, planning to overthrow only the tiny monarch that ruled his hive.

The police were first alerted to one of Hutchinson camp’s internees, the young art historian Dr. Klaus Hinrichsen, and his fiancée, Gretel, when a neighbor reported hearing the young couple’s lovemaking. The distrustful neighbor suspected the rhythmic knocking of the bed might contain a coded message. It was difficult, Klaus pointed out, to prove that one did not understand Morse code.

The recent German occupation of France meant an invasion attempt seemed not only plausible but imminent. Days after he became prime minister, Winston Churchill authorized the arrest of thousands of so-called “enemy aliens.” In the chaotic roundups that followed, thousands of Jews who had fled Nazi Germany—including some teenagers like Peter who came via the feted Kindertransport trains—were imprisoned by the same people in whom they had staked their trust, a nightmarish betrayal. The refugees that comprised the majority of tonight’s audience had experienced a collective trauma: to be imprisoned by one’s liberator is to endure an injustice of chronology.

Status and class, those twin, usually indefatigable armaments of privilege, had provided no protection. Oxbridge dons, surgeons, dentists, lawyers, and scores of celebrated artists were taken. The police arrested Emil Goldmann, a sixty-seven-year-old professor from the University of Vienna, on the grounds of Eton College, Britain’s most elite school. At Cambridge University dozens of staff and students were detained in the Guildhall, including Friedrich Hohenzollern, also known as Prince Frederick of Prussia, a grandson of Queen Victoria. That year’s law finals were almost canceled because one of the interned professors had the exam papers locked in his desk and had no time to pass someone the key. The police came for Peter in the early hours of the morning, without prior warning, a manner of detention that had reminded him of the Gestapo’s moonlit roundups and the muggy world of fear and distrust from which he had just fled.

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Filed under Britain, education, Germany, Italy, migration, military, nationalism, war

by | 4 February 2024 · 6:44 am

Tito vs. Stalin in Greece, 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 258-259:

One country, however, did want to help the Greek communists. Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito began sending large quantities of weapons and money to the Greek Left – partly out of zeal to help comrades in need, but also to assert an independent line, what he called ‘a national route to Socialism’ – heresy in Stalin’s eyes. Tito, who had been in Moscow exile for years in the 1930s, had in many ways modelled himself on the dictator in the Kremlin. Already he had established a terrifying secret police force, the OGPI, led by the thuggish Ante Ranković, which had murdered thousands of opponents. Stalin distrusted the Yugoslav dictator, who he told Beria and Molotov was too ‘ambitious, too ardent and full of zeal’. In Eastern Europe only Yugoslavia had liberated itself, albeit with money and weapons from the Russians and Britain – but without the need of Soviet troops. Tito resented being ordered around by Moscow, as he told his cronies in comments that he knew would get back to the Kremlin. He had ambitions to be the most powerful communist in the Balkans, which would give him a big power base. Tito resented the Soviet Union’s interference in Yugoslavia’s territorial demands. For months after the war the Yugoslavs had laid claim to Trieste, and thousands of partisans surrounded the city, but the British insisted that it must remain under Italian sovereignty. Tito continued to protest and threatened a full-scale invasion. Finally, the Soviets ordered him to give up his claims on Trieste and grudgingly he agreed, though he could not hide his frustration. He said he did not want to be ‘small change in the politics of the Great Powers’.

Stalin now instructed the Yugoslavs to stop aiding the Greeks. He told two senior officials from Belgrade, Milovan Djilas and Edward Kardelj, that the insurgents in Greece ‘have no prospect of success whatsoever. What, do you think that Great Britain and the United States – the most powerful state in the world – will permit you to break their lines of communication in the Mediterranean? Nonsense. The uprising in Greece must stop, and as quickly as possible.’

But Tito defied the Russians. He continued sending arms to the Greek communists, in increased quantities. The consequences were soon dire for hundreds of thousands of loyal communists throughout the Soviet domains. It was the first sign of the spectacular Soviet–Yugoslav split which would dominate Eastern Europe over the coming few years – and the seeds were sown for a mass Stalinist purge throughout the ‘socialist camp’. Alleged Titoists would be murdered and tortured in Eastern Europe, as ‘Trotskyites’ had been in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. Again the Bolsheviks devoured their own children in an orgy of bloodshed. In Greece, the fighting would continue until 1949, leaving more than a hundred thousand dead, around one million homeless – and would increasingly turn into a front line in the Cold War conflict between East and West.

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Filed under Greece, Italy, military, nationalism, USSR, war, Yugoslavia

by | 26 February 2023 · 1:51 pm

Political Winds in Kenya’s Elite, 1930s

From White Mischief: The Murder of Lord Erroll, by James Fox (Open Road Media, 2014), Kindle pp. 46-47:

Before long, out of boredom and an acute sense of his own abilities, the ruling instinct in Erroll began to assert itself and to bloom, encouraged by Lord Francis Scott, who recognised his natural talent for politics. The opportunities for power in that community were infinite: it was a tidy constituency and there was a marked absence of competition. The Premier Earl of Scotland was likely to be a figure of some weight, and he also expressed some forceful political sentiments. In 1934 he became a paid-up member of the British Union of Fascists. Nellie Grant, Elspeth Huxley’s mother, described Erroll’s exploits on Oswald Mosley’s behalf in her posthumously published book, Letters from Africa:

11th December 1934. Wednesday last was Joss Erroll’s meeting at the (Muthaiga) Club to explain British fascism. There were 198 people there, no less, and a very good-tempered meeting, as everybody cheered to the echo what anyone said. British fascism simply means super loyalty to the Crown, no dictatorship, complete religious and social freedom, an “insulated Empire” to trade with the dirty foreigner, higher wages and lower costs of living … All questions and answers cheered to the roof … Whenever Joss said British fascism stands for complete freedom, you could hear Mary Countess [Molly] at the other end of the room saying that within five years. Joss will be dictator of Kenya.

The following year Mussolini invaded Abyssinia, and Joss Erroll dropped his membership in the British Union of Fascists. Instead he was elected, aged thirty-four, to the Presidency of the Convention of Associations, the “settlers’ parliament”—a separate and unofficial rival to the Legislative Council. Eileen Scott, who described Erroll as “much improved,” was at the election.

To my surprise and delight, contrary to the expectations of most people. Joss Erroll was voted to the chair, largely outnumbering the Left Wing, and most of the executive are sound men too. It is a pity Joss hasn’t had a year’s more practice and experience; he has a brain like lightning, and it is difficult for him to listen patiently to this slow minded, if sound, community. However, it is a great step in the right direction, he is very able and a gentleman. Nearly everyone expected a Bolshie to be elected.

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Filed under Britain, democracy, Ethiopia, Italy, Kenya, migration, nationalism, war

by | 5 December 2022 · 8:00 am

Georgian Immigrants in Italy

From Troubled Water: A Journey Around the Black Sea, by Jens Mühling (Armchair Traveller series; Haus, 2022), Kindle p. 92:

We ate smoked anchovies. Alik showed me how to gut them. You snap off the head and use the fish’s sharp jaws like a knife, slitting open its belly with its own mouth to remove its innards. You eat the rest, complete with tail and fins. It tasted divine.

A quiet thirteen-year-old girl had dinner with us, a neighbour’s daughter. She was being brought up by her grandmother because her mother was working as a nanny for an Italian family in Bologna. Many Georgians had gone to Italy in recent years to look after children, care for old people, and work as housekeepers. Alik had an interesting theory about the bonds between the Italians and the Georgians. ‘They like us because we cook well, talk a lot, like to sing, and because we are warm-hearted. The Italians say the Georgians are how they used to be when they were still poor.’

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Filed under Caucasus, economics, food, Italy, migration

by | 23 November 2022 · 6:21 am

“Who Is Djilas?”

From Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age, by Robert D. Kaplan (Random House, 2022), Kindle pp. 168-169:

As we are discussing books, I bring up the name of Milovan Djilas, the great World War II partisan fighter who was once Tito’s heir apparent, and later the original East European dissident, a man who wrote such classics of World War II and Cold War literature as Wartime, Conversations with Stalin, and The New Class. I interviewed Djilas every year in the 1980s in his Belgrade apartment behind the Parliament building. Through a clinical interpretation of history Djilas saw the vague outlines of the future, and specifically foresaw the war of the 1990s.

“Who is Djilas?” the students at the table exclaim, practically in unison. Though all are former Yugoslavs, these students and teachers have simply never heard of him. It turns out that the combination of censorship lasting into the 1990s, when they were young and in school—Djilas, after all, was a longtime dissident after he broke with Tito—and the constricting, often abstract, and theoretical reading lists of their university and graduate courses left no room for this great chronicler of an entire era in the second half of the twentieth century: an era that gave birth to the 1990s’ wars of the Yugoslav succession. Books and manuscripts vastly proliferate nowadays, even as less is really read, and so much of what is vital does not get passed down from generation to generation.

There is an air of depression and consternation at the restaurant table. And it isn’t just about the state of academia. Europe and especially the Balkans do not look hopeful. I am now told about how, among other things, Montenegro has become a colony of the Russian mafia and Albania the colony of the southern Italian mafia, accounting for the eruption of designer restaurants, bars, expensive hotels, and jewelry stores in Podgorica and Tirana. And there is, by now, the familiar litany about the poor and nasty ethnic climate in Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, and Macedonia. In this part of Europe at least, it seems that NATO is only a superficial layer of reality, and the European Union is simply out of gas and credibility.

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