Sometime in the 1450s, knight errant Tirant the White began the long journey from his native Brittany to the embattled city of Constantinople. The capital of the eastern empire teetered on the edge of history, with formidable forces arrayed against it. The Ottoman siege, however, would fail to claim its prize, thanks in no small part to Tirant’s outstanding service, which the Breton at once offered to the Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XI, upon entering the latter’s realm.
In short order, he impressed the Byzantine authorities with sheer tactical mastery. Aware of the urgency of their situation, they quickly bestowed honors and responsibilities on the foreigner, raising him to the rank of Megaduke, from where he immediately took command of the lion’s share of the imperial army.
Constantine himself was present at his titular investiture, knowing more than any member of his court, and just as well as any of his generals, the value of the newcomer. Indeed, the Emperor had a clear and abiding intuition that this western Celt was intimately connected with the fate of the second Rome.
Tirant was one of only a smattering of his countrymen who had hearkened to the call. Overwhelmingly, the city was defended by Hellenes and Latins, wherefore Constantine’s famous speech, reminding them of their ancestry, in which context he cited the Homeric epics. Tirant’s military prowess and unwavering devotion to the Byzantine cause would, therefore, go a long way to redeeming the Franks in the eyes of Greeks, who still remembered the sacking of their city by Catholics during past crusades.
Hard fought, but definitively won, our knight and the men under his banners succeeded in beating back the forces of the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmet II.
And yet, we have no record of Tirant’s career prior to the epic defense of Constantinople. Indeed, we have no records of him at all, apart from a single document by the Spaniard Joanot Martorell, who recounts the whole triumphant affair. Written in 1490, this fictional testament of the history of the traumatic loss that had struck Europe in 1453 is an early example of this article’s subject: alternate history.
“What if things had gone otherwise?” is the ask-thing posed by this genre—“ask-thing” being one of the purely Anglo-Saxon words replacing the French “question” in 1960s writer Paul Jennings’ alternative England.
From the siege of Constantinople, we turn now to the Battle of Hastings, for Jennings presents us with an England in which William the Conqueror did not conquer, being remembered instead as William the Defeated.
By changing the fate of a single man, Jennings can imagine an English language that never took on French (and, therefore, Latin and Greek) borrowings. Thus did he write in an alternative “Anglish” language in which every historical cul-de-sac becomes a “bottom-end,” and the “name-known” English tongue is at last done right-by.
The desire for a pure Saxon speech recurs in English literary history, partly as a reaction against excessive Latinate usages. Churchill’s “Anglo-Saxon words with few syllables” speech-writing formula is a pithy definition for the corrective in question, whose roots go back to the Inkhorn vs. Purist tensions of the 16th century, which pitted long-worded scholarly prose against Germanic brevity (albeit the opposition between long and short prose styles manifested in other countries as well, and perhaps entails more general questions, in part obfuscated in the English case on account of the Latin v. Saxon controversy).
Fictional, alternate histories, then, can be used to defend a present cultural-linguistic project (a humorous one, in Jennings’ case, but part of an earnest trajectory marshaling the sympathy of the likes of Dickens and Tolkien). A fictional past becomes the basis for a possible future.
Its reconciliation with actual history can be sought in the idea that certain defeated identities go ‘underground’ for a time, before returning in a form that is somehow strengthened by defeat, having learnt something from their conqueror. Indeed, alternate history is often motivated by the will to recover something lost.
Apart from its resonance with liberal, Romantic nationalism, we may think of the medieval tendency to connect kingdoms to Roman imperial diocese and pre-Roman native peoples (see the ‘Celt-Iberians’ as the basis for the concept of Spain in St. Isidore of Seville’s 7th-century Etymologies or king Alphonse X’s 13th-century Histories).
Frequently, medieval pseudo-histories present us with accounts that emphasize a certain archetypal pattern and national essence, allowing for a continuity with the pre-Roman and pre-Christian past that nonetheless incorporates and indigenizes Romanitas and the Gospel. Cervantes does the same thing in his Siege of Numancia, where ‘Spain’ is the reincarnation of Celt-Iberian rebels against Roman excesses, receiving a new form as the Visigothic Regnum Hispaniae and appropriating (not only being appropriated by) the ideal of Roman imperium through the figure of virtuous, Christian Emperorship (identified with Charles V).
Alternate, or selective, history becomes the totemic invocation of an alternative future. A future other than the one we seem to sleep-walk into, marked by forgetfulness of what could have been and might yet be, rescued by nostalgia-cum-heroism that perceives the past as a traversable terrain.
Actual history need not be experienced as tragedy, but as the surface to which our ‘alternative’ is the depth. The surface is where depth goes to experience the world and find itself, just the same as we display ourselves in contrast to what we are not, ‘proving ourselves’ through competition and struggle.
The alternative is explored in order to determine what we want to keep from history, what its purpose was; to understand mere accidental surface accretion and depth. What we keep may be the statecraft of a politically more sophisticated invader, or the trade networks he established, or the religion he brought. This will also determine whether we consider empire as bearing a familial relationship with our identity, one we incorporate, or as being essentially foreign to it—to be learnt from but not married to.
In the European context, the Greco-Roman legacy is (aesthetically, spiritually) consubstantial to our national identities. Europe is the heir to Rome, and therefore to Greece. In contrast, for many former European colonies, the national identity articulated after independence may imitate European technology and government, but it also sees the old metropolises as more foreign than familial. There are also cases of both trajectories coexisting in one country: Segments of Peruvian society consider themselves ‘Hispanic,’ implying a different relationship to the Spanish imperial legacy than those who perceive more continuity with the Incan state and its institutions.
Here, the issue of identity and how it is to be given political expression is paramount. In particular, when conflict breaks out, this can prompt reflections on how remote-seeming historical currents could have made for different outcomes, and might serve as the basis for future, peace-building ‘myths.’
In the Ukrainian context, for example, we may consider the end of the Russian-Polish war and its Treaty of Vilna. If the tsar had pursued conditions satisfactory to the Cossack leader (and successor to the famed Khmelnytskyi), Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky, we might not have seen an alternative Treaty of Hadiach between Cossacks and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1658, leading to renewed conflict. Likewise, if a defeated Tsar Vasily IV and Polish King Sigismund III had come to terms decades prior, or if Sigismund had agreed to the boyars’ wish that his son, Władysław IV, convert to Orthodoxy and reign from Moscow as Tsar of Russia, that east-west faultline might have been welded shut. Outcomes, where the three sisters (Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine) did justice to their common root while overlapping with the ‘three partners’ (Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania) of the proposed 1658 Commonwealth, would likely have made for greater stability.
How we read history becomes a measuring stick. Alternate histories should not reject what history has wrought, just as a ruler does not replace the material it measures, but helps us determine what extent of that material we want to keep.
