Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [238]
52. In Lady Wilde, “Speranza,” Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms & Superstitions of Ireland with Sketches of the Irish Past, to Which Is Appended a Chapter on “The Ancient Race of Ireland” by the Late Sir William Wilde, London: Ward and Lock, 1888.
53. See Mertus, Kosovo.
54. Ibid., p. 100.
55. Andrić is quite specific that those who impaled the victim, the peasant Radisav, were Gypsies. Martus cites the source as M. Jankovic, “Zlocin kao u vreme Turaka” (“Crimes as in the Time of the Turks”), Politika Ekspres, January 14, 1991; see Martus, Kosovo, p. 119. The most moving account of the continuing plight of the Balkan Gypsies is Isabel Fonseca’s fine book, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, New York: Vintage, 1996.
56. Mertus cites the author as žirovad Mihajlović.
57. Mertus, Kosovo, p. 112.
58. Weine, When History, pp. 107–9. Weine was an American psychiatrist who spent five years interviewing in Bosnia on memories of ethnic cleansing.
59. He liked to carry the gusle, with which Njegoš and other poets are often depicted. One of his colleagues in the Kosovo Day Hospital at Sarajevo described how “I heard his first talks in the villages and on television. He was very familiar with the language. He was making jokes … He used much more his knowledge of the culture, of the spiritual archetypal needs of the Serbian people than psychiatry to seduce them. He was using stories, legends, gusle and religion”; Weine, When History, pp. 114–15.
60. Robert Browning, “The Pied Piper of Hamlin,” in Browning, Poetry and Prose, selected by Simon Nowell-Smith, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950, p. 110.
Part Five
CHAPTER 12: “TURBAN’D AND SCIMITAR’D”
1. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, writing with V. N. Volosinov in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, looked at the emblems of their own day. A hammer and a sickle were just tools. But put them together, and they become a symbol, the insignia of the nascent Soviet Union. “Any consumer good,” Bakhtin and Volosinov observed, “can likewise be made into an ideological sign. For instance, bread and wine become religious symbols in the Christian sacrament.” There is a long-running debate as to whether this was written by Volosinov or by Mikhail Bakhtin under Volosinov’s name, or by them jointly. I have given them both credit. See Morris (ed.), Bakhtin Reader, p. 50.
2. It was first published in a large Latin folio at Basel in 1559, and in English in 1563. It went through four editions in Foxe’s lifetime: there was a corrected edition in 1570 and two more in 1576 and 1583. Six further editions appeared in 1596, 1610, 1632, 1641, 1684, and 1784. Further versions came out in 1837–41 and 1877, growing larger and more weighty. The edition of 1684 was published in three folio volumes of 895, 682, and 863 pages.
3. Impalement was a significant and evolving trope in Western depictions of the Muslim East. Impalement is a dominant visual element in Lamenta et ultima disperatione di Selim Gran Turco … Venice, 1575: see “Ahmad I and the Allegories of Tyranny in the Frontispiece to George Sandy’s Relation of a Journey Anno. Dom. 1610,” in Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World, ed. Gülrü Necipoğlu, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001, p. 208. Later, in Jean de Thévenot, Voyages de M. de Thévenot tant en Europe qu’en Asie et en Afrique (Paris: Charles Angot, 1689), vol. 2, there is an image of impalement in Ottoman Egypt. It depicts an Arab on a camel with burning brands strapped to his arms (so that boiling fat would drip down and burn his skin). In the background are two pyramids, and in front of these two impaled men, one smoking a pipe. The text in chapter LXXIX, “The Punishments,” criticized Egypt. However, in the Dutch edition of 1723, illustrated by Jan Luyken, the image is changed. It now depicts a European or Anatolian setting (the dominant camel has vanished and the extraordinarily brutal visual details