† “Bactria, and from India beyond …” Bactria was the fabled and very independently minded province, or satrapy, of the Persian Empire in southwest Asia. Most Bactrian territory comprised lands that today form much of Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. Conquered but never really pacified by Alexander the Great, these ruggedly fertile hills, mountains, and valleys continue, in our own time, to produce some of the most potent opioids, as well as other narcotics, in the world — and have also continued to be a thorny problem for would-be Western conquerors or liberators, as American soldiers have recently spent over a decade discovering. —C.C.
‡ “wild Davon sheep” The phrase is evidently taken at face value by both the translator of the Manuscript and Gibbon, despite the fact that for “wild” sheep to have existed in the lands between the Erz and Harz mountains, they would almost certainly have to have been domestic sheep that had become feral; and, while such a development is certainly possible — there were several places in Europe where flocks of sheep were known to have undergone just such reversion — it would have represented a new phenomenon for Barbarian Age or medieval Germany. In addition, the fact that the old man is said to have “harvested” the wool suggests that these sheep were either of a variety that simply shed their fleece during warm spring and summer months (certainly, he could not have captured and shorn them) or that his companion hunted them and brought them back to the cave for meat. The latter seems by far the most likely explanation, since, while “shedding” of fleece is not unheard of, especially among feral sheep, it is not a common occurrence, and would likely not have yielded the quality or quantity of wool that the old man required. —C.C.
†† metallourgos The Greek root of “metallurgy,” and seemingly left untranslated, again, to give us some idea of the breadth and depth of the old man’s knowledge: if he wrote Greek, we can logically assume that he spoke it, at least enough to conduct technical conversations with the most advanced scientific minds of his age. —C.C.
† “alchemical sorcerer” The fiction that alchemy was purely or even primarily a science devoted to vain attempts to turn lead into gold persists into our own day, and certainly dominated in the periods leading up to Gibbon’s: perhaps the greatest scientific mind of his own or any age, Sir Isaac Newton, was deeply fascinated by alchemy, but had to work hard to keep his experiments a secret, one that would keep him from the often-gilded gallows reserved for those convicted of the supposedly black art.
The truth is that alchemy and metallurgy were, in ancient times, almost indistinguishable: after all, when a man could turn rocks into such precious metals as iron, and then iron into that supreme (along with gold) utilitarian metal — steel — the transformation did seem otherworldly, indicative not only of the possibility of changing one metal into another, but of attainting some superior mystical and perhaps spiritual state. Certainly, what the old man was doing and experiencing in Davon Wood during the period described in this section of the Broken Manuscript more than fits under these scientific and spiritualistic rubrics. —C.C.
‡ the “books” and their authors First, it’s important to remember, here, that the word “book,” in the pre-Gutenberg Dark Ages, was a very transitional term: it not only included early, bound stacks of parchment (often called folios), but also more informally fastened collections of parchment, such as the old man was producing during his time in Davon Wood; and finally, it also referred, very often, to “books” in the sense that the Romans knew them, volumen (obviously, the precursor of the modern “volumes”), which were the rolled parchment scrolls of which mention has already been made.
As to the specific books mentioned in this list, most speak for themselves; although perhaps the most interesting feature of the collection is the inclusion of the Strategikon, a Byzantine military manual concerning, in the main, cavalry tactics (heavy cavalry being the mainstay of the Byzantine army) but also dealing with other important issues, such as discipline in an army and how best to achieve it (as well as what punishments to mete out for infractions), and what would today be called “military anthropological” studies of the peoples that made up the main enemies of the Eastern Roman Empire (although the emperor Maurice, the compiler and main author of the work, ambitiously spoke of the Roman Empire as unified under his rule). The Strategikon, like the work of China’s Sun Tzu, is a work of a startlingly enduring nature, with impressive implications for modern military organization and conduct, both on the battlefield and off; but Maurice has enjoyed none of Sun Tzu’s modern vogue, a new edition of the Strategikon having only recently appeared, after a long absence from bookstores in the West. This new enthusiasm likely has to do with the important comments Maurice and the other writers who contributed passages to the work made concerning styles of warfare between large states and non-state enemies, what we would today call counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. Certainly, by applying the precepts included in the book to the intellectual wasteland that was Western European military doctrine and practice during his own lifetime, the old man could indeed have presented himself in any court as a near “sorcerer” of war — a fact that would have brought him renown and wealth, while placing his services in high demand, thus explaining why he was so consistently welcomed in courts throughout the region, and was also allowed, during his sojourns in such places, to pursue medical experiments — notably dissection — that, while once common in cities such as Alexandria, had become ghoulish anathema to Christian and Muslim nobilities and leaders.
As to the remainder of the authors cited, only one statement by the narrator may seem questionable, because of its seeming political incorrectness: the claim that Procopius and Evagrius had determined that most if not all outbreaks of the bubonic plague—Yersinia pestis and its related disorders — originated in “Ethiopia.” Historical research, however, has proved the theory that the disease most often known simply as “the Death” originated in that region: the rats who carried the fleas that were and remain the initial spreaders of the contagion (which has never entirely disappeared, a vaccine against it never having been developed) apparently boarded Nile trading ships, and reproduced wildly, as did their fleas, in the granaries of Egypt, whence they took ship for all the major ports of Europe. Further genetic research on the subject remains to be done (see the masterful volume edited by Lester K. Little, The Plague and the End of Antiquity), but it seems altogether likely that, whether politically correct or not, the Justinian Plague of the old man’s era (the outbreak having occurred sporadically during the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, taking its name from the Byzantine emperor Justinian, who was struck down by it, but survived) did indeed follow this geographical contagion pattern. —C.C.
† “pains” Gibbon validates this account of the old man’s experiments with soldiers, as well as his self-diagnosis, by remarking that “such pains are a thing which almost anyone who has known a soldier, sailor, or ordinary citizen who has lost a limb to war, mishap, or disease can confirm, and in which many scholars who were also medical professionals or simply possessed medically inclined minds took an interest. [Rene] Descartes [1596–1650] himself took welcome time away from his syllogistic aphorisms to investigate the subject, although praise for its initial identification rightly belongs to an earlier Frenchman, the surgeon and anatomist Ambroise Pare [1510–1590], royal physician to no less than four French kings, who described patients who had undergone amputation feeling continued pain, not at the sight of the severing, but in the missing limb itself. He noted, as well (further agreeing with our as-yet anonymous friend in the Manuscript), that this pain could be heightened with the onset of certain atmospheric conditions — what we have come to know as rapid changes in barometric pressure — as well as by the aggravation of the general state of agitation in which the patient lived: the root of this last assertion being that drugs which had sedative but no analgesic effects proved to be of use in reducing the distress. Many other, lesser lights have studied the phenomenon, but we are no closer to understanding it than was the former court physician of Broken.” Today, the psychogenic distress experienced by amputees — which was given its popular name of “phantom pain” by the American physician and surgeon Silas W. Mitchell, who, working in the 1860s, was provided with no end of subjects for study by the American Civil War — is better understood; but the entire subspecialty of neurology that deals with such problems as severed nerves, neural entrapment in scar tissue, etc., remains one of the most challenging fields in medicine, as the persistent distress caused by the cutting of nerves (which can be a result of surgical malpractice or even surgical routine, as much as or more than by amputation or accident) endures as a principal cause of chronic pain syndromes. —C.C.
‡ “… than logic might lead one to suspect.” Counterintuitive as it may seem, doctors have discovered that gentle massaging of the parts of the body affected by an amputation does indeed afford many patients some mitigation of pain; and, as we will see, the particular way in which the old man’s companion “massaged” the stumps of his legs was quite unique, and generally successful. —C.C.
† Stasi A shortened version of Anastasiya. The full and pointed meaning of that longer name is explained in the text, as well as in the following note; but there is an additional and fascinating coincidence (or is it mere coincidence?)
