Simon Sebag Montefiore

In his 2022 tome, The World : A Family History Of Humanity, Montefiore attempts to provide a survey of dynastic rule and their blood-drenched empires from the beginning of recorded history to current times. Encyclopedic in nature, providing short digestible vignettes, each ruling family is described along with overviews of each period’s culture and commerce. One thing quickly becomes evident, rulers not only had to fear invasions from surrounding empires, but also betrayal by their own show more family members. As a result, during regime change, the first piece of business for a new ruler was to murder contending family members. Most of these dynasties survived by bloody conquest, where entire cities and communities were slaughtered or taken into slavery. Warfare, clearly, is the defining factor that propelled the spread of humanity across the globe.

The World is a sprawling history and an unwieldy read, but packed with rich detail that enlightens as well. To his credit, Montefiore’s focus is not primarily Eurocentric; the book’s scope is truly global. A downside is the difficulty of keeping track of all the key players mentioned. So many fresh names appear in each chapter that separating who’s who proved daunting. Wading through its 1,200-plus pages will put off the casual reader, but the true history buff is sure to delight in the challenge. I was both relieved and pleased when I finally finished it. show less

An immense history of the world, told as the stories of characters and families.
I am in awe of the scope and detail of this book. As Sebag Montefiore writes in an introductory note, "This is a work of synthesis, a product of a lifetime's reading, using primary sources wherever possible". He divides world history into 22 acts, noting the estimated world population at the beginning of each act, and the chapter headings are the names of the families or characters discussed. The result is a very show more readable volume, with many entertaining stories and surprising facts. His perspective is that "history started when war, food and writing coalesced to allow a potentate...to harness power and promote his or her childern in order to keep it." The narrative starts with Enheduanna, the first named author, and the first woman to write about her experiences as a ruler and probably as a victim of rape by an invader. She was a priestess and queen in the court of Sargon, the ruler of the Akkadian empire in the area of today's Iran and Iraq. The book ends with "Trumps, Xis, Sauds, Assads and Kims" in the modern day. Sebag Montefiore is careful to avoid a Eurocentric approach, writing as much about African, Central American, and Asian families as about the familiar English, Romans and Greeks. The family struggles he catalogues were often bloody and sexual. The narrative is replete with footnotes, and I have to wonder how any one person could keep all the facts to hand and organized into a narrative. The footnotes are enjoyable, but they interrupt the narrative and slow reading. The printer's marks pointing to two or more notes on some pages are hard to find in the text. I had to look up many words; that is unusual for me. The hardcover edition, with index, has 40 pages of table of contents, notes on sources (given as a link to the author's website) and introduction, followed by 1260 pages of narrative, and another 80 pages of index. Immense, it took me more than one month of steady reading to get through the volume.
I noted the following passages with book darts:
page 4: (Mesopotamia, probably speaking about a rape at the hands of an invader) "I am Enheduanna, let me speak to you! My prayer, my tears flowing like some sweet intoxicant. I went towards the shade. It swallowed me in swirling dust"
page 275: (in King Canute's day in England) "On Harefoot's death by elf-shot (a lovely euphemism for natural causes)..."
page 291: (poetry by Li Qingzhao, a lady of the Song dynasty in 1084, Shandong China, her husband going to a concubine)
"A cold window, broken table and no books
How pitiful to be brought to this ...
Writing poetry I turn down all invitations, shutting my door for now.
In my isolation I have found perfect friends:
Mr Nobody and Sir Emptiness."
Page 498: (1560, Houmayoun, the son of Babur, exiled to Kabul from Mughal India) "An opium-sampling bibliophile like many of the family, he fell from his library's ladder and met a book lover's death"
Page 640: "The vaunted Enlightenment was actually the intellectual movement of a feverishly interconnected European elite close to a nervous breakdown and identity crisis, still honeycombed with snobbery, bigotry, conspiracy theories and magical hucksterism."
Page 649: (on the Shah Nader in the 1840's, the time of Frederick the Great) "He returned from Delhi as the most successful shah in a millennium. Yet success is never final. Brilliance is never far from madness"
Page 682: (on the origins of the American Colonial revolt) "British insouciance was personified by the fourth Proprietor of Maryland, Frederick, Lord Baltimore, a psychopathic predator who in 1751 inherited the family's fortune and American estates, and almost provoked an early revolution by ordering taxes to be raised in Maryland - but not on his own estates. Baltimore killed his first wife ... by pushing her out of a speeding carriage, then set off to live in Constantinople like a Turkish pasha with a harem, stoned on opium and aphrodisiacs (observed by James Boswell, who described him as 'living a strange, wild life')"
page 875: "War was risky - Bismarck called it 'rolling the iron dice ..."
page 950: (on Edison, Ford, and Carl Benz). "These inventors were male, but in August 1886 Mrs Bertha Benz stole her husband's contraption with her two sons on board, and drove sixty-five miles, buying gasoline from pharmacies, to visit her mother."
Page 948 (on Teddy Roosevelt) "Alice grumbled that her father 'wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening"
Page 984 (on the 1918 influenza) "A virus subtype H1Ni - the flu - the name itself deriving from an Italian outbreak in 1843 supposedly caused by the influentia of the stars. It was a new strain, first registered in an Army camp in Ft. Riley Kansas, then spreading through American troops to Europe where the illness of King Alfonso XIII earned it its name, Spanish Flu (though in Africa it was called Brazilian flu and in Poland Bolshevik flu)"
Page 1035: "... Charles de Gaulle, under secretary of war, was an ungainly, six-foot four soldier-scholar of minor nobility with a small head and long nose nicknamed Le Grand Asparagus"
Page 1222 "In many countries, mobile phones were used by people who still lived in iPhone and dagger societies, dominated by kin, tribe and sect, that could barely feed or heat their people. In some cases, terrorists were beheading people with swords while chatting via WhatsApp on their iPhones"
Page 1259 (a concluding chapter) "'In individuals, insanity is rare" wrote Neitzsche, 'but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.' It is easy to criticize politicians, but this interconnected world makes it ever harder to govern: "You philosophers ... you write on paper,' Catherine the Great warned. 'Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings."

A very impressive book. show less

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Jerusalem : The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore is a history of the famous city and the rise, and fall, of empires and individuals within. Mr. Montefiore is a British historian and author, with a personal connection to Jerusalem through this grandfather, Sir Moses Motefiore.

This is an amazing book, where the author treats the city as the protagonist, not a setting. He tells a tragic story, but also that of a city full show more of dancing, poets, songs, lovers and literature.

Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore is a meticulously researched book, telling of the rise and fall of individuals, religions and empires.

This is not a boring, academic book, but rather focuses on the people living is the city across time. Each section focuses on a person or family. Through King David, Jesus, Mohammad, Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, Napoleon, and Churchill we learn of the strong personalities. Through the great families of times ago, like the Herods or the Hapsburgs, we discover the shifting politics which define Jerusalem to this day.

The book treats all three Abrahamic religions fairly, honestly, and reasonably. So I would guess that no fundamentalist would be very happy – which as far as I’m concerned is a compliment.

Jerusalem’s history is a constant cycle or war, slaughter, sieges but it managed to be rebirthed and rebuilt each time. Mr. Montefiore writes just as much about the myth of Jerusalem and compares it to the gritty reality. Myth, however, when it comes to Jerusalem it is just as important as the facts, if not more important.

After all, how many people are willing to die for myths vs. how many are willing to do so for facts?

The writing is highly descriptive, and epic story told with a historian’s depth. This big book feels much shorter and manages to stay objective – a huge undertaking given the political symbolism given to the city. show less

Oh, Jerusalem. There is no other place on Earth quite as tragic, drenched in both blood and history.

And it makes for reading that cannot be put down.

Here's the short version of why you should read Simon Sebag Montefiore's history of Jerusalem: In just under seven hundred pages, Jerusalem: The Biography is a satisfying, narrative-based history one of the most contested pieces of real estate in world history, if not the most contested. In those relatively few pages, Montefiore manages to give show more at least the appearance of objective attention to each of the major religions that dominate the city's history, as well as to the many, many conquerors that pass through its gates over its thousands of years of history. With all the sordid intrigue of an Italian opera, Jerusalem: The Biography is painfully tragic, proceeding chronologically with the march of history as it demands to be read from the introduction to the last page. Not a tale of the daily, mundane, or pedestrian, it is a story of kings, rulers, and the powerful. The average Jerusalemite appears only as a pawn of history, to be butchered, starved, driven-out, or resettled.

As a Christian, it's hard to deny the allure of the holy city that was the setting for Jesus Christ's life. Indeed, even Christianity's god bemoaned the city, already ancient when he appeared, for its tragic past while alluding to the blood that would spill in its streets in coming years. And yet, as the reader turns through pages filled by debauchery, sieges, massacre, and horror, it is difficult to turn away from Montefiore's writing. Full of detail, Jerusalem is full of more detail than could possibly be necessary to know the history of the three-thousand-year old city,

To point to how varied and thorough the detail Montefiore brings to bear as he tells his story, New York Times reviewer Jonathan Rosen started randomly opening pages throughout the book:

"[O]n Page 4, Roman soldiers are crucifying 500 Jews a day in the run-up to the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70; on Page 75, Alexander Jannaeus, a much-loathed Jewish king of the first century B.C., after slaughtering 50,000 of his own people, celebrates his victory “by cavorting with his concubines at a feast while watching 800 rebels being crucified around the hills.” Crucifixion was so common in the ancient world, Montefiore notes in one of his many fascinating asides, that Jews and gentiles alike had taken to wearing nails from victims as charms, anticipating what became a Christian tradition. And when the population dwindled — as after the First Crusade, which like a neutron bomb eliminated the infidels but preserved the holy places — you could always dash across the Jordan, like Baldwin the crusader king in 1115, and bring back “poverty-stricken Syrian and Armenian Christians, whom he invited to settle in Jerusalem, ancestors of today’s Palestinian Christians.”"

Despite his penchant for detail, Montefiore never seems to lose control of his narrative. Where tedium might threaten, a danger when facing a constant march of dates, names, and places, Montefiore seems to imbue his story with a kind of epicness... It is a city that is larger than history, exerting a magnetism on the peoples and nations that seem unable to avoid its attraction. Like a black hole, it seems to distort the laws of history and the decisions of otherwise rational actors who come too close to its gravitational pull.

And yet, the city is by no means as romantic as each successive re-writer of history would imagine it. From the barbarity of the crusaders at the turn of the first millennium to the dung-heap on the Temple Mount Caliph Omar found when he took the city in the 600s, to the modern-day controversies (including Yassir Arafat's head-scratching claim that Jerusalem had never been the site of the Jewish Temple). Still, Montefiore takes pains to be fair to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic relationships to the city, all while correcting oft-repeated myths and politically charged rewrites of history.

In some senses, it can be hard to read Jerusalem: The Biography and see a god in all of this violence. And yet, it is not any god that has brought the seemingly unending death and war to the Holy Land, but the errant followers of the faiths that call Jerusalem home.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-evIyrrjTTY

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