The Legend of Broken

Broken, considered a heretical cult, but which was already an established religion in the region, and perhaps a major one; certainly, it was one that would undergo an enormous revival when it was reasserted by the Nordic tribes, many of which blended it with various interpretations and narrative chapters of Christianity. —C.C.

† “… his saddle’s iron stirrups …” A detail that goes unnoticed by Gibbon reveals itself, in the modern era of military history (and military technological history, especially), as being of enormous importance: Broken’s mounted troops were using metal stirrups. The Romans had no such advantage, accounting for why their cavalry units were not the most feared parts of their armies: it was the bracing offered by stirrups that created the stability necessary for men on charging horses to drive spear and lance points into massed infantry, as well as the control needed for mounted archers to fire without gripping the horse’s reins. (There were Asian steppe and American Indian tribes whose warriors could perform this action by way of using their thighs alone to control their mounts, but such were highly exceptional troops, at this time, and relatively rare). Without the stability and control made possible by iron and steel stirrups, horsemen were relatively easily knocked to the ground; whereas, possessed of this seemingly simple advantage, they were very hard to dislodge from their mounts. Two questions concerning Broken’s cavalry, however, remain: If they were indeed using stirrups, why were their mounted units not larger, more heavily armed, or trained in the performance of massed shock tactics that the innovation allowed? Furthermore, from whom did they borrow the all-important advance in mounted technology, which would literally change the face and fate of Europe? Whatever the case, by failing, on the one hand, to increase the size of units that had been given drastically increased shock power, and, on the other, to arm them with the full range of weapons that heavy cavalry mounted with metal stirrups could employ, and by electing instead to maintain their imitation of the Roman model despite possessing a tremendous advantage, the Broken army committed an error of enormous magnitude. —C.C.

† “… elected officials …” It is worth underscoring the point that the Bane’s process of electing various governmental officials, including their chief, was in keeping with the “barbarian”—or at least the Germanic — norm of the Dark Ages. Indeed, Western democracy owes as much (or more) to the codes of these societies than it does to those of ancient Greece and Rome. The Bane’s granting of an at least occasionally preemptive right of fiat to the High Priestess of the Moon does reveal, however, as the narrator suggests, a paradoxical, simultaneous, and deep tie between the exiles’ government and that of the city out of which they had been cast. —C.C.

† “… raft of parchment documents …” Although both the people of Broken and the Bane could make parchment from the organs and hides of calves, goats, and sheep, “the Tall” were considered the more advanced of the two peoples, in this context, mainly because they preserved the technique of manufacturing parchment scrolls: long sheets of parchment wound around two rods, or batons, with “pages” being “turned” by unwinding one rod and winding the other. The Bane, for their part, relied on loosely bound sheets of parchment, the irony being that, today, the image of the scroll has become emblematic of the archaic: indeed, it is virtually synonymous with ancient and early medieval cultures, while the bound sheets of parchment that the Bane employed were of course the earliest forms of modern books, and were symbols, therefore, of progress.

† “… four-year-old Effi …” The names of Keera’s children, like those of Sixt Arnem’s, offer important clues as to the cultural drift of each society, Bane and Broken. Effi is a form of the modern German Elfriede, Baza is an Old High German variation of the Slavic Boris, while Herwin is related to the modern Erwin, which is itself a variation of Hermann, still a common enough name in contemporary Germany, despite its original meaning: “friend of the army.” In short, the Bane, for all their imagined “inferiority,” may have been more closely linked to the modern German people than were the subjects of Broken. —C.C.

† ackars Ackar is believed to be the Old High German word for “acre,” and the amount of land it represented was reasonably close to that which we continue to assign to the term today. Some premodern definitions of an “acre” can vary a little, since the word literally refers to the amount of ground an ox can plough in a day, and certain unscrupulous, land-hungry authorities used teams of two oxen to get an increased measurement. Then, too, not all ground is equally easy to plough; but despite these and other considerations, the differences between the several legitimate versions tend to be small, and come out somewhere near the modern number of 43,560 square feet. —C.C.

† Alandra Another Broken dialectal rendering, this time of the modern German Alexandra, which is derived from the older Alessandra. Like its male counterpart, Alexander, the name means “protector”—a fact that, in the case of this particular woman, will prove accurate in one sense, but far more ironic in another. —C.C.

† sukkar The Arabic term for sugar, Arab traders having introduced granulated sugar made from Indian cane into the West only in the early eighth century: very shortly before the events recounted in the Broken Manuscript took place. Gibbon may have let this usage go without comment simply because he found its meaning obvious. —C.C.

† “phrenetic” There are cases in which an archaic spelling for a word that we might think anachronistic goes a long way toward demonstrating how very old some seemingly “modern” concepts are, and I have therefore left them in their original form; “phrenetic” is one such example. —C.C.

† the newts The color and general appearance of these creatures, together with their living in northern Germany, mark them as almost certainly being Great Crested Newts (Triturus cristatus), whose range once included almost all of Europe, and who have been reduced in number in modern times only by the loss of their habitat due to human development, to the point that they are now a threatened species. Newts are not, as Isadora seems to indicate, precisely the same animals as salamanders: but both do make up the two classes of the family Salimandridae, and it is therefore likely that no distinction was drawn between them in the ancient world, or during the Dark Ages. In addition, while the differing feeding, mating, breathing, and breeding habits and techniques of the seventy-odd members of this family are impossible to completely detail here, both newts and especially salamanders did, indeed, possess certain very important mystical and spiritual properties, in certain religions and folklores of those eras: they were fire spirits, or “elementals,” just as undines (or, variously, ondines) were water spirits, gnomes Earth spirits, and sylphs spirits of the air. Elementals were thought to be actually composed of their basic element, and the human who could control such a creature could, at least temporarily, control that element. —C.C.

† Emalrec Though it passes unmentioned by Gibbon, this name contains a mild irony: if we account for the vowel shift of Old High German, it becomes the fairly common Amalrec, a variation of Emmerich, both of which connote “powerful worker”—hardly accurate, in this case, and perhaps an intentional comment upon the state of affairs in the Fifth District, and in Broken’s society generally. Berthe, meanwhile, is obviously an archaic form of Bertha, drawn from the root beraht, meaning “bright” or “famous”: also an irony. —C.C.

‡ “sackcloth,” “smock,” and “rough material” Gibbon continues to pay little attention to the questions of how, and to what extent (a considerable one), judgments concerning wealth and station were drawn from elementary statements about clothing, particularly among women, in Broken as elsewhere in “barbarian” Europe. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that we find still more proof, here, that a woman’s clothing and therefore station in life were signaled by, in descending order, material(s) used, the quality of needlework, and color (expensive dyes obviously being available only to people of means). “Fashion,” as we understand the word today, scarcely existed, even in one of the most advanced societies of the time. In the case of the unfortunate Berthe, for example, the flat statement that she wears “a simple piece of sackcloth … poorly stitched” (sackcloth being a material that, since the time of the ancient Hebrews, had been used by penitents and mourners, who wished to deliberately torment themselves) seems intended to fix her station, in our minds. And indeed it can, if we are aware that sackcloth was no more than the burlap-like substance used, as the name indicates, for making sacks to hold grains, cotton, root vegetables, and similar items; it cannot, in short, have been a comfortable garment, even if “well stitched,” especially not for a woman who was pregnant, and even less for one who had no “smock,” which, again, during this period referred to a simple robe, usually cotton, that women wore as an undergarment, if they could afford it. —C.C.

† “plague” If this seems a leap to a conclusion on Isadora’s part, we should remember