Ash: A Secret History (224 page)

15
– [Originally the sacred banner of St Denis.]

16
– [Actual birthplace of Jeanne d’Arc.]

17
– [Slave troops, often attaining high rank.]

18
– [I have regularized the text, which indiscriminately refers to him as ‘Bishop Jean’ and ‘Bishop John’ of Cambrai. There appears to be some independent evidence for Floria’s comment in this text – Bishop John’s funeral mass, in 1480, was attended by a total of thirty-six of his illegitimate children.]

19
– [‘Machina plena malis’: ‘a contrivance full of evils’. Used punningly in the text to refer to a ‘contrivance’ in the sense of a trick or snare, as well as a constructed device.]

20
– [c. 3 November? If this is the astrological sign of Scorpio.]

21
– [Margaret of Anjou, wife of the English King Henry VI; funded in some of her attempts to regain the crown for her husband or her son by Louis XI of France. In 14763 Margaret is reported as just having been ransomed from England, and present in the French court.]

22
– [The Flemish part of the estates-general: representatives of the cities and provinces there. In fact, these events appear to closely parallel the history of the early part of 1477, after Duke Charles’s death in battle at Nancy.]

23
– [Anthony de la Roche was taken prisoner at Nancy, in January of 1477, when Charles the Bold was killed. Rather than staying loyal to Margaret, or indeed to his half-niece Mary of Burgundy, he transferred his allegiance with breath-taking haste to Louis XI, and thus retained his lands in the conquered Duchy.]

24
– [In fact, the Lord of Chimay was taken prisoner at the battle of Nancy, on 5 January 1477, and after being ransomed, returned to loyally serve Mary of Burgundy and her heirs, in Duke Maximilian’s court.]

25
– [In the winter of
1476/77
, raising troops for her husband, Margaret is reported as having raised another four thousand men from these towns.]

26
– [Is this a reference to Pope Leo III? This would put Gundobad’s death at or before
AD
816.]

27
– [This fixes the date! If these are accurate references, the year is
AD
816, two years after Charlemagne’s death. Although dissolution began the year after Leo’s death, some do not date the fall of Charlemagne’s empire until
AD
846 and the Treaty of Verdun.]

28
– [Lavatory.]

29
– [Matins: midnight; Lauds: 3 a.m.; the time referred to is therefore 2 a.m.]

30
– [Raised wooden platforms that strap on over shoes, for walking through mud.]

31
– [‘
Pus bonum et laudabile
’: a misunderstanding of Galen’s actual writings that must have cost hundreds of thousands of lives in Europe, between the decline of Roman military medicine, and the Renaissance.]

Part Fourteen:

1
– [French: ‘Witness my hand’s blood here placed’. Variant on the more usual ‘witness my
seing manuel
[signature] here placed’ on contracts and other documents? Sible Hedingham ms part 4.]

2
– [In post-Roman Western Europe, the practice of burying the dead at a distance from the living, and of organizing army latrines, dates from the beginning of the fifteenth century.]

3
– [A Greek theatre of war in which the Turks fought the Venetians.]

4
– [Europeanised as ‘Ottoman’. From Osman Bey, founder of the Turkish empire.]

5
– [Mehmet II (ruled 1451-81) was, in fact, Sultan of the Osmanli or Ottoman Empire at the time of their conquest of Constantinople; and was thus the man known to be responsible for the fall of Byzantium, the eastern Christian empire.]

6
– [The Sible Hedingham text here reflects the horrendous variety of languages being used. The Burgundian court habitually spoke French when in the south, and Flemish when they went north. Ash’s company would speak English (in several varieties), Italian, German, French (of two varieties); their own patois; and probably a smattering of Greek, Latin, and ‘Gothic’. I suspect that the Turkish officer uses a few words of German simply because that is the farthest west he has travelled up to this point I have attempted to imply interpretation, rather than spell it out each time as the Sible Hedingham ms does…]

7
– [7 ‘Bey’: ‘commander’.]

8
– [‘Yeni çeri’, ‘Janissaries’, literally ‘new troops’.]

9
– [Regiment. The text is inaccurate here, as an
orta
would be commanded by a higher-ranking officer than a mere başi: a çorbaşi, or colonel, perhaps. (Literally, ‘chief soup-maker’.)]

10
– [Literally, ‘the city’; post-conquest term for Constantinople.]

11
– [9 a.m.]

12
– [John the Fearless, d. 1419.]

13
– [A trusted servant of Louis XI, reportedly sent in the autumn of 1476 to abduct Duchess Yolande of Savoy on behalf of the King of France, for political reasons.]

14
– [This description is tantalisingly similar to some of the rumoured results of military experiments with extreme electromagnetic force. The ‘curtains of light’ are presumably charged particles, like the
aurora borealis
.]

15
– [“By God!”]

Part Fifteen:

1
– [‘Always something new out of Africa.’ (The more common rendering of Pliny the Elder’s ‘Semper aliquid novi Africam adferre’.) The Sible Hedingham ms part 5.]

2
– [In the original text, ‘one of God’s touched’, and ‘God’s fool’.]

Part Sixteen:

1
– [Final section of the Sible Hedingham ms.]

2
– [‘Agape’, Greek: ‘Charity’. Of the New Testament.]

3
– [Rome?]

4
– [10 a.m.]

5
– [Small cannon.]

6
– [‘Without fear’.]

7
– [All quotes taken from the transcript of audio and visual sources, location RRFU HQ, Brussels, 14/5/2009 (Project Carthage archives).]

Table of Contents

Praise

Books by

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

ASH: A Secret History

Introduction

PROLOGUE

I

II

III

IV

PART ONE

I

II

III

PART TWO

I

II

III

IV

PART THREE

I

II

III

IV

V

PART FOUR

I

II

III

IV

V

PART FIVE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

PART SIX

I

II

III

IV

PART SEVEN

I

II

III

IV

V

PART EIGHT

I

II

III

IV

PART NINE

I

II

III

IV

PART TEN

I

II

III

IV

V

PART ELEVEN

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

PART TWELVE

I

II

III

PART THIRTEEN

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

PART FOURTEEN

I

II

III

IV

V

PART FIFTEEN

I

II

III

IV

PART SIXTEEN