Travelogue 1147 – 7 October
The Donation of Pepin

Until 751 CE, Rome had more or less always been Roman. Rome had belonged to Rome. For a thousand years after its founding, it had been autonomous and the centre of the early Roman Kingdom, then the Roman Republic, and then the Empire. Since the late days of the Roman Empire and then under the Byzantines, who called themselves Romans, Rome had still been “Roman”. Suddenly, Rome being Roman was in question. The Lombards were at the gates; the Byzantines had been ejected from Italy.

In 754, the pope was in residence with the Frankish king. Pepin the Short was sending embassies to the stubborn king of the Lombards, who had conquered the Byzantine lands in Italy and was threatening Rome. Pepin was cajoling his own lords, convincing them that the pope’s interests were their own.

Finally, the Franks invaded in 755. They invaded again in 756. Apparently, one sound defeat each year was enough to convince Aistulf of the Lombards that the Franks were going to dictate their own terms. A treaty was signed in 756 that would become one of the foundational documents of the Middle Ages. It came to be known as the Donation of Pepin – a document that didn’t survive physically. The treaty awarded to the papacy the lands that were formally Byzantine in northern and central Italy. This was the beginning of the independent Papal States. Rome would be Roman again, this time until the nineteenth century.

Fascinating to me is the power of the Franks to make all this happen. There was no Caesar writing about the army’s crossing of the Alps. But we know that that was no mean feat; we learn that from classical authors before Pepin. The Frankish era is relatively silent; there are no epic poems or memoirs or verbose monuments. But clearly Francia was a martial power, restless and aggressive. Clearly, they had a reputation. They were intimidating. Aistulf did not need much convincing. And in another generation, Charles would simply put an end to the independent Lombard kingdom (taking the crown for himself). The Byzantines wanted to claim back the land that Pepin had rewon, but had no power to do it. They offered Pepin a fortune to return their lands, and he refused. That was that. The Franks were the new power in the West. And they would be the protector of the papacy.

Travelogue 1146 – 24 September
The House Guest

The story of the Bishops of Rome - the papacy - and the story of Northern Italy in general after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century is bound up with the story of the Byzantine Empire and the Exarchate of Ravenna. For two centuries the exarchate stood against the Goths, first the Ostrogoths and then the Lombards. As long as the choice was between Byzantine and Gothic rule, many places were happy to be counted among the Byzantine camp, even as they effectively rebelled against Byzantine control, as the Bishops of Rome did. The petty infighting only weakened the Exarchate. In 751, the post-Roman order finally collapsed, as the Lombard king Aistulf overcame the Byzantines and ejected them from Italy. As Aistulf turned his eye on the Duchy of Rome, the new pope, Stephen II, chosen in 752, looked outside Italy for a balancing power. It’s worth noting that Stephen II was an Orsini. The Orsini were an aristocratic Roman family that would dominate Roman politics for a millennium. It seems no accident that, when Rome was being threatened, the Roman nobility stepped forward. Stephen II appealed to Pepin, the king of the Franks. It had only been a year since Stephen’s predecessor, Zachary, had approved Pepin’s appropriation of the Frankish throne.

What follows is fascinating. Stephen II asks Pepin for safe conduct into Francia. He becomes the first pope to ever cross the Alps. And for at least two years, he is a guest of the royal family while Pepin negotiates with Aistulf. He shows the Pope great honour and respect. When the Pope arrives, he receives him as a supplicant, and he leads his horse to the palace. The Pope returns the favour with many honours. He formally anoints Pepin king of the Franks, and he similarly anoints his two sons. He names all three “patricians of Rome”. These honorifics would become important in the future, when Charles became king, and when he and his descendants became emperors. Charles would have been just a boy when the pope was a house guest. Imagine the effect on him.

Travelogue 1145 – 18 September
The Stage Was Set

Time erodes the features of the man, as though he were statuary left in the rain. Revision paints him up as it thinks he should have looked, paints the stage as it would have liked the stage to appear. The erosion has swept away his friends and his colleagues and his family, and he seems a solitary figure. We are enchanted by solitaries. We imagine them heroic.

Charlemagne stands in isolation in the imagination of popular history, emerging like a mythical figure from the mists of the “Dark Ages”. I’m guessing he wouldn’t recognise himself in any of the popular portraiture. He was hardly a solitary, and he hardly saw his times as chaotic or primitive. The kingdom he ruled had stood strong for three hundred years, always expanding. He lived in a world of precedent and tradition. He was his father’s boy.

Great-Man stories are always leaky. They are exciting and engaging, and I think they can be useful in the narration of history, but they don’t capture the sweeping showers of truth very efficiently. The irony of celebrating Charlemagne the way we do is that we are, in the main, celebrating his father, Pepin the Short. Charles accomplished a lot; he was a great leader. But the creative elements, the moulds that were set for the Middle Ages, were largely set by his father.

It was Pepin who took the throne for the “Carolingians”, as his line came to be called, named after his son, Charles. Pepin made manifest what had been fact for generations, that his family had ruled the Merovingian kingdom. He deposed the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, and he did it with the quiet blessing of the Greek pope, Zacharias. Pepin united the north and south of Francia, subduing Aquitaine and seizing Septimania from the Muslims. He was responsible for installing Tassilo III as a vassal on the ducal throne in Bavaria. Charles’s dispute with Tassilo would eventually lead to the incorporation of Bavaria directly into the empire. Pepin was fond of reforming the Frankish church, and he supported the church’s evangelism in Saxony. Pepin forged an alliance with the papacy, perhaps the most enduring of his achievements in the romantic imagination of the Middle Ages.

Travelogue 1144 – 8 September
Baptising Saxons

Charlemagne picked up the family business with gusto. He pursued war strategies upon every frontier, expanding into Spain, Italy and Germany. In Germany, this translated into a long series of conflicts and negotiations with the Bavarians and with the Saxons. He ruled for almost fifty years, and the subjugation of those peoples was a project for almost his entire reign.

What might often be forgotten is that Charles was fighting pagans on both eastern and western fronts. We know the Spanish ‘Saracens’ were Muslim, but it might have been overlooked in high school history that neither the Saxons nor the Avars were Christian.

Context is always important in understanding history. When we recall Charlemagne as the first “Holy Roman Emperor” (and the title can be argued,) it’s easy to imagine him as a heroic leader taking the helm of a homogenous and unified Christendom. We imagine it because it was a convenient simplification and prejudice for later histories. The further distant the period, the less we care for detail.

But in fact (and here I indulge in my own cheap simplifications,) Europe was wilder and more heterogeneous than we are comfortable in admitting. Charles was far more focussed on tidying up affairs on his borders than on the big themes of history that we like to associate with him. He was more an agent in the expansion of Christianity in Europe than a glorious symbol of the already-consolidated Christian continent. It’s almost comical how many times he returned, not only to pacify the Saxons, but to force conversion and baptisms. But this mission would bear only a passing resemblance to the mission of later Europeans colonizers. The two eras would have seen their converts, their own religion, and the relation of church to state all very differently.

There’s enough evidence to believe in Charles’s sincere religious faith, but it is equally clear that he understood the political capital invested in the church. The bishops were internal allies. The pope was an external ally. A Christianized Saxony would have Saxon bishops he could summon. Charles was very fond of ecumenical councils and doctrinal capitularies.

Travelogue 1143 – 2 September
Just Another Rival

Charlemagne’s grandfather was Charles Martel. “Martel” was a sort of cognomen given him later, signifying “The Hammer”. His life story is an account of ceaseless aggression, making it a kind of history of the Franks written small. The Franks seldom rested from war, from the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West until the kingdom’s territorial peak under Charlemagne, a period of more than three hundred years. The expansion started under the mysterious, long-haired Merovingians and continued through the leadership of their majordomos, who eventually became the Carolingians. Martel himself moved from war to war, battle to battle, with every year of his life devoted to some campaign. We know about him because he was so successful at it.

His father’s wife tried to sideline him early on, pushing Pepin of Herstal to pass Charles over in favour of Pepin’s grandson, Theudoald. The poor boy didn’t last long. He was eight years old when he became majordomo. The Neustrians rebelled, and the Austrasians broke Martel out of his prison and gave him command. Etcetera.

Martel’s claim to fame these many centuries later – in large part thanks to the eighteenth-century historian, Edward Gibbon, – is the Battle of Tours (or Poitiers), in which he defeated a Muslim army under Abd Al-Rahman. This battle stopped Muslim expansion into Aquitaine, if only because Abd Al-Rahman, who was killed in battle, had proven to be irreplaceable.

This victory earned Martel a reputation as “Saviour of Europe” … but only centuries later, when the concept of Christian Europe had developed well beyond anything Martel himself would have recognised. Martel was deep into his own territorial strategies and ambitions, and he cast his own hungry eye on Aquitaine. The Muslims were not the existential threat that later Christian nationalists perceived, but just one more rival, much like the others.

Travelogue 1142 – 29 August
Long Time Ago

Charlemagne, or “Charles the Great”, was only the second king in his line. His father had had himself declared King of the Franks a few years after Charles was born. But his family had been running at least one of the Frankish kingdoms for more than three generations already, acting as majordomo to the Merovingian kings who had ruled for two and a half centuries.

It’s helpful to remind myself of the spans of time occupied by the early Middle Ages. They easily telescope from our vantage because there is so little surviving detail. Two and a half centuries is the amount of time the American Republic has survived so far.

It doesn’t seem possible to say when the Merovingian line was established. They were the kings of one small contingent of Franks, the Salian Franks, living some happy place like Brabant when Roman rule collapsed. It’s likely that Merovech, the source of the name ‘Merovingian’ allied himself with the last Roman general trying to maintain order. He wouldn’t even have been the first of his line, just the first with a profile in history.

It was Clovis, probably the grandson of Merovech, who created what would become France, taking advantage of the vacuum left by the Romans, fighting his way to the top of the Frankish heap, uniting all Franks into one kingdom that begins to be recognizable to moderns familiar with the map of Europe. He converted to Christianity and converted the kingdom. His name, Clovis, was an early form of Louis. So many patterns for French history were set so early, almost three hundred years before Charlemagne became Emperor. Again, that’s a chunk of time that would swallow up U.S. history whole, Washington to Biden. Fun fact: it's likely the language Clovis spoke was much closer to modern Dutch than to modern French.

Travelogue 1141 – 19 August
Lubber

The waves were high during our last visit to the beach. The girls waded in intrepidly. They needed no warm-up time; they were immediately splashing and diving and soaked with sea water. Joy was completely at the helm on their beach day. Their father, on the other hand, required a long time to enter the water. Past the knees, every centimetre was hard-won. Cold water translated into pain. There was no mediating sensation, like “refreshing” or “bracing”. No, it just hurt. All the way up the back and shoulders. But the water was relatively warm, and it was too windy to hang out on the beach, anyway. The blowing sands stung my legs.

Eventually, I was all the way in, out past where the girls could go, in the roar-and-silence of deeper waters. This is a nice meditative moment I get to experience a few times a year, bobbing among the waves in summer, just long enough that the family doesn’t miss me.

Strangely, it’s the troubled seas that draw me out. I am pulled by the bobbing motion, overcoming my fear of the sharp cold. I drift out beyond the feel of sand underneath my feet, and I watch the waves and the ships on the horizon. I look up at the clouds. I glance at the shore, and at the long pier half a kilometre off my shoulder. It’s comforting.

In the lobby of the Maritime Museum in Rotterdam, a video loops on a big screen, films recorded on ships in the high seas during storms. We watch the waves crashing on the decks. The camera’s perspective drifts away from the ship, and out into the raw motion of the waves, huge, threatening, violent. The waves rise, they loom, white ribs of foam forming in the rushing wall of water. There is no stable POV, as the camera tilts with the motion of the sea. It is dizzying and frightening.

I live by the North Sea. I swim in the North Sea. But it’s a stranger. It has a reputation as a stormy sea, temperamental and dangerous. But I haven’t fathomed it. Finally, I’m just a landlubber, try as I have to always live by the sea. As fascinated as I am, I have never had the opportunity to see through the eyes of a seafarer. All those generations the Dutch plied the seas, thousands of people living out much of the lives on water, and the rest of us have so little idea what it felt like.

Travelogue 1140 – 13 August
The Philosophy of Binnenste Buiten

Last night we took the girls to see “Inside Out 2”. We all know the story: the emotions are made into personalities who man the control panel behind the eyes. The idea sounds miserable, but it is masterfully executed. It’s touching and funny. The girls loved it.

Little Ren had been begging to see it. I’m not sure how it got lodged into her mind, but she would not let it go. We happened to find ourselves standing outside a theatre after a visit to the beach. Mama and I checked with each other, and we shrugged, why not? Once I had understood the themes being developed in the film, that puberty had entered the control room in the sequel, I worried that we had made a bad call. I watched Baby Jos in particular, the older girl of the two. But she seemed to simply have fun with the story.

I myself was challenged by the film. It doesn’t take much to excite my imagination. I’m on old sentimentalist. The film created a bigger stage set than the control room of the mind. It painted an internal landscape for the emotions. In the story, the childhood emotions were exiled, and they had to fight their way back to HQ through a terrain bubbling with ideas and memories and moods. The mental earth trembled with the violent changes of adolescence. All that was amusing, but it made me reflect again on the complexity of the human organism.

Being someone on the other side of the lifetime equation, closer to the end than the beginning, I wonder at human complexity in a different way than a child or young adult might. I remember the inspiration I felt when I was young, discovering the vast terrain both inside and outside myself. When I was young, I was confident I could solve all the mysteries out there. Now the scale of things raises questions; like, what was all that about? Such a grand project is the human being, it must mean something more than what I happened to notice along the way. Now, the mysteries have moved from the ethers into my house. They’re arranged on my desk. They tease like ink blots that mean something different every day.

Travelogue 1139 – 12 August
The Olympics

It is hard to believe we watched the entire women’s marathon from start to finish. The coverage was that good, and Paris was that enjoyable a background. We did lose the girls in spells, lost them to their games. The games they played were often spinoffs on the sport motif of the past few weeks. But they always came back, rooting for the Ethiopians and rooting for the Dutch.

The Dutch woman won, edging out the last Ethiopian competitor. Literally. She elbowed Assefa out of the way with one or two hundred metres to the finish line. It was an exciting race.

We had watched Sifan win her bronze in the five-thousand. We had watched her win her bronze in the ten-thousand. She has been amazingly strong.

We have watched a lot of the Olympics, mostly gymnastics and track and field. And we did have to watch the women’s final in hockey. The Netherlands won, and we cheered.

It is just the right moment. The girls are old enough to be involved in sports now; they are innocent enough to simply enjoy the show. I have found all of it very enjoyable. I know how cynically some people approach the spectacle and the hype. Their visceral reaction to it looks like fear. I can understand: if everyone is a type of athlete, I am a marathoner. I am an introvert. The noise can be overwhelming.

When Sifan runs the marathon, she finds her own space. She has a faraway look. She talks to herself after she crosses the finish line. She looks to stifle a yawn during an awards ceremony. She pointedly says, “I don’t care” when a commentator asked her how she feels when a co-medallist is threatened with disqualification.

There is something wonderful about sport, wonderfully human. No matter how people try to politicize it, monetize it, psychoanalyse it, or make philosophy of it, something essential slips away. It defies both the impulse to glorify and the impulse to dismiss it.

Travelogue 1138 – 14 July
Flying Ant Day

Last week we experienced Flying Ant Day. The temperatures had finally risen enough to feel like summer. The air was dense with humidity. And then they appeared, the double-sized ants, crawling like stumbling drunks across the pavements of the city. They had wings, but they never used them, submitting themselves to the perils of land exploration. Behaving quite unlike our everyday ants, they spent the day in uncoordinated riot, released upon the world without direction, and scattering every which way. By mid-afternoon, most had perished under heel and tire.

Baby Jos had a hard time with all the carnage. She stepped very carefully, slowing us considerably in our errands. She cried to see the massacre, and protested when we were not mindful of the ants underfoot.

In response, as solace, as philosophy, Little Ren issued her summary and conclusion, and quite a nice aphorism, after all: “Life is nice, and sometimes you can squish life.”

I’ve been reading a lot of history. It’s an indulgence, now that I have recovered my mind from the rigours of teaching and correcting, to sit and read. I read like I have centuries of history to catch up on. The result is a sensation something like Flying Ant Day, surveying the succession of wars and the waves of slaughter. Generations divide and turn on their neighbours, needing only the slightest pretext, squishing life with all the hesitation and mindfulness of rushing pedestrians traversing a field of struggling ants.

Of course, Americans seem hellbent on joining time’s grim pageant. This morning, the news reached Europe of an assassination attempt on Trump. It’s a sad thing to wake to. Are we really such helpless little creatures? Is squishing all we’re good for?

Travelogue 1137 – 7 July
Drama

“I’ll never have fun again,” said Baby Jos with tears in her eyes. Somehow we had missed another notice from school. The next day, water guns would be allowed at school.

The days had been hot and sunny for a string of miraculous days. The school year running out, the days left running short, the teachers had decided some play outside was well-earned. But we are rubbish at checking the myriad messages from school, and Baby Jos is terrible at calendars.

We had thrown last summer’s water guns out long ago as messy clutter. Baby Jos spent a frenzied twenty minutes digging for the lost guns. Forced to give up, she declared in tears that fun had become impossible.

Of course, it was easily solved. We stopped by a supermarket in the morning, and the world was put right again. Fun had been readmitted into the world.

I hope I do not sound like a sadist if I say I am enjoying the girls’ dramas. They are such pure products of childhood. And, happily, they are often quickly remedied.

Baby Jos brought home her first friendship drama recently. Two friends had quarrelled, and one friend had declared that she was renouncing the whole group of girls. Baby Jos was the bridge between the pariah and the rest, and she was anxious to resolve the dispute. Fortunately, Baby Jos was more puzzled than hurt by the episode. By the next day, it was resolved. It made for good family discussions.

We are into real childhood now. Little Ren is younger, and her dramas are simpler. The girls recently discovered a deck of playing cards at a café, and we taught the girls a simple card game, something I used to play in my childhood, something Menna and I used to play in Ethiopia to while away the time. The girls really took to this game, and particularly Little Ren, who had a lucky streak. It wasn’t lucky enough for her: she dissolved into tears any time she did not win a hand.

I grew up the youngest in my family, and I recognised these tears. I shushed Baby Jos when she tried to shame her little sister. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a child learning how to lose.

Imagine how much more pleasant all of our lives would be if a certain orange plutocrat had learned how learned how to lose when he was a child.

If there were gods, one or many, would they find similar nostalgic pleasure in the trials of humankind? I doubt that they could if they had never been children themselves. It is the tragic flaw in our experimentation with AI, I think. We program computers to accumulate data; we even try to program them to play. (Without a sense of the frivolous, how does one define play?)

The processing in AI remains cold and merciless. Human learning is accidental, even if it follows similar patterns. Every time a kid does something we recognise, it is original. And their interaction with others colours the learning. The child’s mind absorbs it all. Critically the child’s mind absorbs it with the nuance and shading that create character.

Travelogue 1136 – 27 June
The Price of Vocation

Rome was a city of summonses. Rome was God’s city, and this God was a micro-manager. In Caravaggio’s day, in Michelangelo’s day, in Fra Angelico’s day, popes were summoned by God, and artists were summoned by popes. One could call it a game of thrones. Maybe a game of mitres and laurels.

Seeing all the monuments in Rome, all the silent stone, a tourist may form the impression that the Eternal City was never born and never suffered an awkward adolescence. Watching the measured irrelevance of the modern papacy, one may be forgiven for imagining papal history as a long chain of murmuring gravitas, academic theology, and the medieval version of photo opps. It’s easy to forget that, as the Renaissance budded in Florence, Rome was in shambles. It was in its worst state since the barbarian invasions a thousand years before.

In 1309, Pope Clement V had moved the papal court to Avignon, and the court had stayed away for nearly seventy years. Even after it returned, the papacy wandered for several generations, seeming only to intermittently settle in Rome. This was a period of schism – during which rival popes conspired in Avignon – and of warfare – during which Italian city states skirmished over territory and the popes endeavoured to reassert their own dominance over Rome itself and then over adjacent lands in Central Italy.

History being what it often is, the kindly pope who first determined to move the papacy back to Rome died soon after accomplishing it, and he was succeeded by two rather brutish men who helped plunged the church and the city into new rounds of chaos. One was grouchy, one was greedy, and for both Rome was often too dangerous – threatened both by the mobs and by the patrician families that had run the city while the popes were absent.

In their defence, Grouchy and Greedy each pursued a Rome-first policy, setting the foundations for a revived city and papacy, even at the expense of its integrity. Papal income had dwindled: schismatic popes drew funding away, and proceeds had diminished from diminished papal lands and from Rome itself. Meanwhile, expenses increased: wars and urban renewal are not cheap. These renewal popes were not shy about “monetizing” their spiritual powers, selling off positions in the church, selling the same positions as futures, selling indulgences, announcing jubilee years in which pilgrims could dump their sins and their cash in Rome. These were tricks that both rebuilt the Renaissance church and sowed the seeds of Luther’s rebellion a hundred years later.

Travelogue 1135 – 17 June
La Nostra Vocazione

The spotty rains continue. If you are outside as much as I am on an average day, you witness all the phases of our weather, the gathering clouds, the showers, the clearing and the sun between the waves of clouds, like rings above us, the vestiges of a god stirring his finger in the atmosphere. It means I never leave the house without rain gear, for myself and for the girls. Everyone shakes their head now when you mention the weather. Where is summer? Every day we wake to temperatures like 11 or 12˚C.

It is easy to forget how prone we are still to the tricks of a god’s idle finger, our colds and our hots, our wet hair, and the joints in our knees still subject to the finest variations among Nature’s complex moods. Every day, in very mundane ways, we are like Matthew Levi, caught counting his coins. We look up from our tabletop, one thumb still pressed against the greasy surface of a silver florin, and we see one of our lords beckoning. Me?

When we are young, the concept of summons is grandiose. Why would one be summoned at all, if not to greatness? But Nature’s tide will wash that away. That will feel like a death of sorts, but when one’s eyes adapt to the darkness of ignominy, one sees the many small ways people are called and every day. To inconsequential things. If we are not called by Gandalf or by Christ, we are called by Nature itself; and if we are not called to bear the one true ring, we are called to step in a new puddle on Marconiplein, one formed in the tram tracks by the last rain shower.

Little Ren has received her summons of the season. She has been enjoying lessons in gymnastics every Thursday evening for a year and a half. Last month, the coach of “A-Team” came to watch the little girls at practice, and a week or so later, we heard that Little Ren had been chosen. Now she attends practices on Mondays in the big high school gym at Wolfert Tweetalig by the zoo. The mood is quite different. The head coach is tall and fit man, cheerful and encouraging, but also very serious. He directs the girls in setting up the considerable amount of equipment involved in gymnastics. They do this every week, and it is undertaken with sober self-discipline. Once the mats (and bars and trampolines, etc) are out, the teens are tumbling straightaway, executing long sets of harrowing flips and turns. One teen takes charge of Ren and begins drilling her.

Here I have the answer to a question I have entertained for years now: how do serious athletes and artists and scholars emerge from the system that I had experienced as the parent of small children? Young hockey girls are trained by teens; ballet lessons are determinedly focused on fun over craft; music teachers keep things light; school teachers don’t drill or assign homework. Now I understand. The change in tone is dramatic.

For the rest of the summer session, we will attend both levels of gymnastics. The teens running the B-Team congratulate shy Ren and show her some new attention. The parents of the old group now eye us with something that looks like suspicion. They animate Caravaggio’s “Vocation” scene for us, acting out the moment after the summons, when the other men at the table have realised what happened.

Travelogue 1134 – 15 June

He Saw a Man

One of my favourite paintings from Caravaggio’s time in Rome is the “Vocazione di San Matteo”, which can still be seen in its original site. It was commissioned for a chapel endowed by a French cardinal in the (then) recently built church for the French congregation, San Luigi dei Francesi. The painting still hangs there today, part of a trio of paintings by Caravaggio about the life of St Matthew.

It’s a lovely painting, dramatic and endlessly engaging. Caravaggio is known for the expressiveness of his compositions. His Bible stories and mythological scenes are theatrically portrayed: the emotions are raw, characters are emotive; the action is often gory. We follow the artist into any scene at the height of its drama. This isn’t Renaissance serenity or Mannerist grace. We aren’t contemplating a hushed Annunciation scene or a mournful Pietà. No, we are confronted by John the Baptist on the ground getting his head sawed off or we are staring at a wild Medusa at the moment of death.

The “Vocazione” should be a chance for Caravaggio to indulge in a quiet moment, or at least a happy one. “And as Jesus passed forth from thence, he saw a man ….” But somehow it becomes challenging, mysterious, and tense. Five men sit at a table counting up their coins when a pair of men in the garb of ancient Palestine step up to the table. If it weren’t titled, if it weren’t part of a biographical trio of paintings, we might struggle to understand what’s going on.

We understand by the body language that someone is being called. That the summoner at the head of the table is Christ seems clear, even though his figure is almost entirely covered by his companion, a grey-haired saint whose back is to us. The setting as it is portrayed is largely empty, the high spaces of the room almost equal to the space occupied by the men seated at the table. The room is dark. One window offstage allows a spreading shaft of light to fall on the table. But there seems to be a second source of light, illuminating the back of the saint and the faces of the men looking up.

The painting is a question. Who is being summoned? Christ points, with a gesture self-consciously modelled on that of Adam in Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel, hand held vaguely over the small assembly of tax collectors. The object of his attention is uncertain. The man who we might presume to be Matthew also points, but it is left unclear whether he points to himself or to the man next to him, whose head is still bowed in the act of counting coins. This bearded man who might be Matthew is humble, almost nondescript. The expression on his face reflects only his uncertainty. It delivers no hint of his piety or his intellect or his mission. Here he is a man at the moment of summons, and nothing more. “He saw a man.”

Travelogue 1133 – 29 May
Golden Years

So the sun shines on in Italy. It always did. Despite the evidence of the gloomy scenes he painted, the bright Mediterranean sun shone on Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio, too. His chiaroscuro, his browns and heavy shadows may have come to define the era, at least in my mind, but they never actually diminished the sun. Maybe his colours were informed by his lifestyle as much as anything. It may have been bright outside, but interiors in the 1590s were still lit by candles. And the famous carouser may not, in fact, have seen much daylight. But when the sun did occasionally find him, it shone on him with equal grace, at least until the fateful summer day in 1610 when a fever swept him away.

By the time he died, Caravaggio had been on the run for four years. He died while on his way back to Rome. He had been hoping for a papal pardon. In 1606, he had murdered a rival in a fight over a woman, some say in the process of castrating the man, and a death sentence had been imposed on him. On his final journey, he was carrying new paintings to offer the urbane Pope Paul V, hoping for the best.

Popes still figured prominently in the lives of top-tier Italian painters in this period, as they had throughout the Renaissance. But things had changed since the days when Caravaggio’s namesake, Michelangelo, had argued with the fiery Pope Julius II in the Vatican. Things were cooler and more distant in 1600 than they were 1500. Courts, royal and papal, had evolved into grand productions. There was a lot more money. And much of it was Spanish.

In Julius II’s day, Portugal and Spain were staking out claims to the New World. It amounted to little more than a diplomatic exercise for the popes of the day, and a rather academic one at that, because there was so little knowledge about the extent of the new discoveries. The Portuguese and Spanish had been bickering over territories all over the Atlantic in their race for new trade routes and ports. It was only a question of commerce then, and who would inherit the type of trade wealth that Venice had monopolized for centuries. The corrupt Borgia pope, Alexander VI, who was born in Spain, had brokered a rather abstract deal drawing a line on the map, dividing the western hemisphere between the two maritime powers. A dozen years later, Julius II himself was dragged into the affair, ratifying an adjustment to the deal and a new treaty with a bull called “Ea quae pro bono pacis”, which means roughly, “in the interest of promoting peace”. I’m sure the whole thing seemed trivial to the no-nonsense Julius, whose attention was entirely absorbed by the petty wars among the Italians.

By 1600, Europe was awash with colonial gold. Everyone was getting a taste of it. Courts and kings were spending lavishly. Everywhere there was more pomp and circumstance. The pope was Clement VIII, a cultured and competent Florentine who had taken on a lot of building projects. Though Caravaggio never met the pope personally, that I’m aware, his ambitions and the pope’s dovetailed nicely and Caravaggio flourished in Rome.

Travelogue 1132 – 26 May
Setting the Stage

The weather has been changeable. There’s a spot or two of rain for us almost every day. There is usually a spell a sunshine, too. And when the sun does shines, I am nearly overcome. This is how I have become, living in a cloudy place. The simplest thing is miraculous; a moment of strong sunlight is a holy visitation.

We returned a few weeks ago from Italia, and the sun there was – dare I say it? – magical. It haunts me, even as the Netherlands puts on its late spring face, even as temperatures rise and the sun warms the pavements. That is because there is something unique about the Italian sun. It is bright. It leaves a mark on the memory, like the afterglow of light inside your eyelids. It’s like stage lighting. Of course history would be a grand drama there.

Dutch light is softer. It rarely dazzles. It soothes and warms. What the Netherlands offers in May is the vibrancy of the colour that I think I now love most: green. It is such a radiant and light shade of green, that it embodies spring, as though the leaves above and the grass below are pulsing with absorbed sunlight and lush with plentiful water.

Travelogue 1131 – 29 April
Strange Bedfellows

The negotiations over Malta in the 1520s were fascinating. The Knights Hospitaller were homeless, having been expelled from Rhodes by the forces of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522. They were officially guests of Clement VII, who was an honorary Hospitaller himself. They had installed themselves in Italy, and their Grand Master, rather grandly named Philippe Villiers de l’Isle Adam, travelled Europe more or less begging for a home for their order.

The idea of Malta was raised early on, suggested by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The Knights were surprisingly picky about the offers made them. They refused Cerigo, Elba, Suda in Crete, Minorca, Ponza and Ischia. They weren’t too crazy about the Malta idea when it was first brought up in 1524. The harbours were good, but the soil was infertile; there wasn’t enough running water. The natives barely grew enough food for themselves. So they took a pass. It’s amazing to remark all the doors that still opened for the old Crusading order. It demonstrates something of the power of the medieval paradigm of Christian knights and lords, courts and privilege, surviving well past their practical lifespan, into the commercial age.

In 1527, the German troops of Charles V sacked Clement VII’s Rome in a bizarre narrative turn during a dispute among these two allies against Protestantism. The German troops who dominated this army were in mutiny against Charles over lack of pay. Many of those soldiers (of the Catholic emperor) were Lutheran, and they found a certain righteousness in doing violence to the papal city. Charles V had been unhappy with Clement because of his politicking against the emperor in northern Italy. He had never intended an attack on Rome, but he found himself holding a terrible power over the Church, a power he was not going to disavow or sully with apologies or defences.

It's one of the sad ironies of history that a nice guy pope was elected just as the Lutheran cry of “anti-Christ” was reaching a crescendo. A century of decadence in the Vatican was laid on the shoulders of this cultured and moderate man. He did what he had to: he paid off the German soldiers, he surrendered territory to the Emperor, and he bided his time.

He didn’t abandon the Knights Hospitaller. He interceded with Charles on their behalf when the Grand Master finally decided to negotiate in earnest for Malta. The Knights wanted autonomy. The emperor sought feudal servants. In the end, Charles decided he could forego all traditional tribute but the gift of one Maltese falcon every year.

Travelogue 1130 – 25 April
The Knights

Suleiman the Magnificent came to power in 1520, almost seventy years after the Ottomans had taken Constantinople. The Turks had become a force for Europe to contend with. Before the end of the same decade, Suleiman and his armies would be laying siege to Vienna.

In 1522, it was the island of Rhodes that would fall to the Turks. The Christians had held on there remarkably long, considering that it was just off the coast of Asia Minor, already surviving one siege in 1480. The enemy the Turks faced on that island was the order of the Knights Hospitallers, who had retreated there from Palestine two hundred years before. They were still a formidable force.

Suleiman was triumphant, riding a wave of manifest destiny for the Turks. With the graciousness of a conqueror who had history behind him, he offered clemency. He allowed the Knights Hospitallers to leave the island in orderly fashion after their defeat. They moved to Italy first, but they moved again when they were gifted Malta by Charles V and a pope who was himself a Knight.

Suleiman ruled the Turks until 1566, roaming Hungary, challenging the Persians, taking war to the Abyssinians. In 1565, the Turks paid a visit to the Knights Hospitaller again, besieging Malta unsuccessfully. I’m thinking a few people sighed with relief when Suleiman passed away a year later. It wouldn’t be until 1683 that another attempt at Vienna could be mounted.

Advance a few generations, and the Knights of Malta are led by their 54th Grand Master, a proud man named Alof de Wignacourt, a French nobleman who had fought in the siege of 1565. He was much revered by the Maltese and by the Knights, resolute and generous. He built fortifications and an aqueduct. He was a patron of the arts. In 1608, he obtained permission from the pope to admit an artist into the order who would normally not have been eligible. He would not have been eligible because he had been charged with murder in Rome and was fleeing justice.

Within months, Caravaggio would be on the run again, having participated in, or perhaps instigated, a brawl in which a number of Knights were injured. Fleeing to Sicily, he would leave behind in Malta a number of brilliant pieces, like “The Beheading of St John the Baptist” and several portraits of Wignacourt, one as St Jerome writing and one standing beside a pretty page boy, suggestively looking at the painter. The canvases are huge, rich in the dark colours of a century.

Travelogue 1129 – 13 April

Bombs in the East

Bombs are dropping in the Middle East, and I’m reading about the invasion of Egypt. That’s the invasion in 1798, the one that most people know about from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. The conquest of Egypt was the odd and disfigured brainchild of two men, Napoleon, inspired by his fetishist reading about Alexander the Great, and that cunning old fox and consummate survivor, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. The idea had, in fact, been bandied about since the 1770s, since before the Revolution, but it took the overheated atmosphere of the Revolution to bring gravity to the crazy. (We think we live in a time of extremism. Many of us could measure our likely survival in the furnace of 1790s Paris in terms of weeks.)

Napoleon had survived the Terror, his Jacobin credentials bonafide. He had served Robespierre’s regime in suppressing rebellion in the south of France. He had survived the reaction after Robespierre’s fall, although just barely. Then the Directory had entrusted him with the Italian campaign, which had made him a celebrity. Now he schemed with Talleyrand to cut an Alexandrian figure in the exotic East. It didn’t work out so well.

Napoleon and his army were made for the big set pieces, and when they were offered opportunities for those, they won. They ‘conquered’ Egypt. But it was an ephemeral sort of victory. After the artillery went quiet, there was plenty of culture shock to go around. The day-to-day news was awfully modern in tone. Napoleon stepped clumsily all over Muslim sensitivities. The Egyptians proved quite impervious to the grand ideals of the French Revolution. Furthermore, as a people who had been ruled by Greeks, Romans, Turks, and Mamluks for quite a few centuries, they showed a disappointing lack of interest in the romance of a new Alexander. They resisted. Horatio Nelson appeared with the British fleet shut and down the Nile Delta. The French were trapped while the locals rebelled and the Ottomans prepared an offensive. So far from home, the enlightened conquerors turned rather quickly into cruel oppressors. Many people died for the sake of this vanity project.

There was a strategy of sorts behind it. The French had visions of disrupting English trade with the East, of establishing for themselves a trade route along the future course of the Suez Canal, of fomenting resistance to the Brits all the way to India. Napoleon had an image of Alexander on banks the Indus River etched indelibly into his imagination.

But the only waters Napoleon crossed were the Nile and the Mediterranean. He crossed each first in triumph and then in disgrace. His triumphs in the Mediterranean were in Malta and Crete; he swept up these islands like forgotten treasures, as he had gathered ancient cities in Italy several years before.

The Revolution boldly positioned itself as new, as opposed to all things medieval. Napoleon inherited this mission and executed it with a vengeance. He walked the continent as Reaper to all institutions feudal, aristocratic, religious, or mercantile. In the previous year, he had brought down the thousand-year Republic of Venice. In 1798, he invaded the shores of Malta, bringing modern war to the Knights Hospitaller. They couldn’t resist him. After the French took over, the order left the island, many to settle in Russia as guests of the czar.

Travelogue 1128 – 30 March
On the Water

It is Easter weekend, and the town is quiet. The early morning is particularly subdued because a drizzling rain is falling. I decide on a trip to the store before the girls wake. I throw on my running gear because it is easily available. I pull rain gear on over that, and I am ready for the bike.

I enjoy cycling in this weather, provided I don’t have far to go, provided I am not pedalling toward my work. A light, misty spring rain is refreshing. It dampens sound, and it slows time. It is contemplative. I slow as I cross the Beukelsbrug, taking a moment to catch my breath and look at the river. I see something there in the surface never still.

When I return, Little Ren is up and no one else. She is busy drawing. She has found a cartoon of a fairy that her big sister finished yesterday. In the quiet of the morning, she wants to replicate it. She asks my help. She stops me when I’ve done enough, and she carries on. She sings while she draws. She can’t sit still. She rolls back and forth on her knees. She tosses her head to the left and the right.

I feel obliged to record every stage of our girls’ growth. Things change so quickly. What I find to be the essence of this little girl now, aspects of her that I can’t imagine ever changing, her songs, her restless fidgeting, they will slip away. I’ll be reminded of them years from now, and I will be overcome with gratitude and sorrow, regret for things gone; we are allowed nothing in the transit of time.

When she has done something well, when she has played a song well for her piano teacher, when he praises her, Little Ren has a smile that is radiant and innocent. It is burned into my imagination. I think it is a part of everything I do. It’s an image floating on surface of the river in the morning.