Ash: A Secret History (19 page)

The author of the 1939 second edition of the ASH documents, Vaughan Davies, basing HIS theory on not much more than the text referring to Northern Europeans as ‘Franks’, treats the Visigoths as the standard Saracen knights of the Arthurian legends – the ‘Saracens’ are mediaeval Europe’s idea of the Arab cultures, mixed with folk-memories of the crusades to the Holy Land. I don’t think Davies does anything at all scholarly to address this problem.

Now, we include the other problem – Carthage! The original North African Carthage, settled by the Phoenicians, WAS eradicated, as you point out. The Romans rebuilt a city on that site.

The interesting thing is that, after the last Roman Emperor was deposed in AD 476, it was the Vandals who moved in and took over Roman North Africa – the Vandals being, like the Visigoths, a Gothic Germanic tribe.

They moved in as a small military elite, to rule and enjoy the fruits of this great African kingdom, under their first king, Gaiseric. Although they remained somewhat ‘Germanised’, Gaiseric did bring in an Arian priesthood, make Latin the official language, and build more Roman baths. Vandal Carthage became a great naval centre again, Gaiseric not only controlling the Mediterranean, but at one point sacking Rome itself!

So you can see that we already have had a kind of ‘Gothic Tunisia’. The last (usurping) king, Gelimer, lost Vandal Africa in three months to the Byzantine Empire in AD 530 (and was last heard of enjoying several large Byzantine estates). The Christian Byzantines were duly driven out by the surrounding Berber kingdoms, and Islam (chiefly by the military use of the camel) in the 630s. All trace of Gothic was eradicated from Moorish culture from then on; not even occasional words survive in their language.

Ask yourself, where could Germanic Gothic culture have survived after AD 630?

In Iberia, close to North Africa, *with the Visigoths*.

As you are aware, I believe that the entire field of academic research on Northern European history is going to have to be modified once my ASH is published.

Briefly: I intend to prove that there was a Visigothic settlement on the Northern coast of Africa as late as the fifteenth century.

That their ‘resettlement’ took place much later than Vandal North Africa, after the end of the Early Middle Ages; and that their period of military ascendancy was the 1400s.

I intend to prove that in AD 1476 there was an actual, historical mediaeval settlement, peopled by the survivors of the Roman Visigoth tribes – with no ‘golems’, no legends about ‘twilights’.

I believe it to have been peopled by an incursion of Visigoth-descended Iberians from the Spanish ‘taifa’ (mixed/border) states. One might reasonably think this, from the racial type described here. The Fraxinus text calls the settlement ‘Carthage’, and indeed it may have been close to the site of the original Phoenician or Roman or Vandal Carthages.

I believe that this Gothic settlement, intermingling with Arab culture (many Arab military terms are used in the del Guiz and Angelotti manuscripts) produced something unique. And I believe that it is perhaps not the fact of this settlement’s existence that is so controversial, so much as (shall we say) what this culture did, and their contribution to our culture as we live in it today.

There will be a Preface, or Afterword, perhaps, setting out the implications fully, that will go with the ASH documents; this is as yet unfinished.

I am sorry to be so cagey about those implications at this stage. Anna, I do not wish someone else to publish ahead of me. There are days when I simply cannot believe that no one else has read the ASH ‘Fraxinus’ manuscript before I saw it – and I have nightmares of opening THE GUARDIAN to a review of someone else’s new translation. At the moment, I would rather not put my complete theory on electronic media, where it could be downloaded. In fact, until I have the whole translation complete, word-perfect, and the Afterword at first-draft stage, I am reluctant to discuss this editorially.

Bear with me, please. This has to be rigorous and water-tight, or I shall be laughed out of court – or at least, out of the academic community.

For now, here is my first attempt at transmitting translated text to you: Section 2 of the del Guiz LIFE.

– Pierce

  Message: #12 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash, historical theory

Date:    04/11/00 at 02.19 p.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

Vandals, yes, but I can’t find *any* hint in my books on European or Arabic history, no matter where I look – *WHAT North African ‘Visigoths’?*

Are you SURE you’ve got this right?

I have to be honest and say that we don’t need any controversy about the scholarship associated with this book. *Please* reassure me on this. Today if possible!

  Message: #19 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash, historical theory

Date:    04/11/00 at 06.37 p.m.

From:    Ratcliff@

Anna –

Initially, I had all the same doubts that you have. Even the Vandals had, by the fifteenth century, been gone from an entirely Islamic Tunisia for nine centuries.

At first, you see, I thought the answer must lie in the mediaeval mindset – let me explain. For them, history isn’t a progress, a sequence of things happening in a particular order. The fifteenth-century artists who illuminated histories of the Crusades put their twelfth-century soldiers into fifteenth-century clothes. Thomas Mallory, writing his MORTE D’ARTHUR in the 1460s, puts his sixth-century knights in the same armour as his own Wars of the Roses period, and they speak as knights in the 1460s spoke. History is *now*. History is a moral exemplar of the present moment.

The ‘present moment’ of the Ash documents is the 1470s.

Initially, therefore, I thought the ‘Visigoths’ referred to in the texts must be, in fact, Turks.

We can’t easily imagine, now, how *terrorised* the European kingdoms were when the vast Osmanli Empire (that’s Turkish to you!) besieged and took Constantinople (AD 1453), the ‘most Christian city’. To them, it literally was the end of the world. For two hundred years, until the Ottoman Turks are finally beaten back from the gates of Vienna in the 1600s, Europe lives in absolute dread of an invasion from the east – it is their Cold War period.

What I thought at first, then, was that it was not too surprising if Ash’s chroniclers decided that she (simply because she was a famous military commander) *must* have had some hand in holding the Turks back from defenceless Europe. Nor that, fearing the Osmanli Empire as they did, they concealed its identity under a false name, hence ‘Visigoths’.

Of course, as you know, I had later to revise this.

– Pierce Ratcliff, Ph.D.

  Message: #14 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash

Date:    05/11/00 at 08.43 a.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

I have no idea how I can explain to my editorial director, never mind sales and marketing, that the Visigoths are actually Turks, and that this whole history is a farrago of lies!

  Message: #20 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash

Date:    05/11/00 at 09.18 a.m.

From:    Ratcliff@

Anna –

No, no, they’re NOT Turks! I just thought that they MIGHT be. I was WRONG!

My theory posits a fifteenth-century Visigoth enclave on the North African coast. It is my *point* that the evidence for this has been shuffled under the academic carpet.

This happens – it happens with many things in history. And events and people not only get deliberately written out of history, as with Stalinism, they seem almost to slip out of sight when the attitude of the times is against them – I could cite Ash herself as an example of this. Like most women who have taken up arms, she vanishes from history during patriarchal periods, and during more liberal times, still tends to appear only as a ‘figurehead’ warrior, not involved in actual killing. But then, this happens to Joan of Arc, Jeanne de Montfort, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and hundreds of other women who were not of sufficiently high social class that their names couldn’t be ignored.

At various times I’ve been fascinated both by the PROCESS of how this happens – cf my thesis – and by the DETAILS of what gets written out. If not for Charles Mallory Maximillian’s ASH (given to me by a great-grandmother who, I think, had it as a school prize in 1892), then I might not have spent twenty years exploring ‘lost’ history. And now I’ve found it. I’ve found a ‘Lost’ piece of sufficient significance that it will establish my reputation.

I owe it all to ‘Fraxinus’. The more I study this, the more I think its provenance with the Wade family (the chest in which it was found supposedly brought back from an Andalusian monastery, on a pilgrimage) is accurate. The mediaeval Spains are complex, distant, and fascinating; and if there were to have been some Visigoth survivals – over and above the bloodlines of these Roman-era barbarians in the Iberian ruling classes – this is where we might expect to find it recorded: in little-known mediaeval manuscripts.

Naturally, the ASH manuscripts contain exaggerations and errors – but they contain a coherent and ESSENTIALLY true story. There WAS at least a Visigoth city on the North African coast, and possibly a military hegemony to go with it!

– Pierce

  Message: #18 (Pierce Ratcliff)