History

Frederic

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Peculiar sends a link to the latest– there always seems to be news– on Emperor Frederic the Second (1194- 1250), of Sicily and the Holy Roman Empire (which wits will still tell you was none of the three)…

I have been trying unsuccessfully for years to sell a book on Frederic and his surviving relics like the amazing Castel del Monte (good book here). It might begin thus:

“Born a German Emperor in Sicily, to a mother nearly 50 years old; raised a street kid in Palermo, reclaimed his heritage at 16; feuded with popes, was excommunicated (often); made a reluctant crusade that ended in a mosque, shaking hands with Saladin and discussing falconry; died at 57 of malaria; left only an Italian Moslem town that survived him for less than a century, a son who was soon to die defending his cause and bloodline, a strange castle in Puglia , and a book of advanced science and art in the form of a hunting manual , The Art of Hunting with Birds.

“He was reputed in his lifetime to be the Antichrist, and was known as Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World. Dante, of the opposing political party, wrote him into Hell.

“The Nazis liked him for maintaining power as a northerner among Mediterraneans, despite his keeping a court of Jews, Moslems, and heretical troubadors, maintaining a beacon of rational tolerance in a time with little enough of that. Also despite the fact that his leading historian was the Jewish Ernst Kantorowicz, who they exiled (he ended up teaching at Berkeley).

“He defeated a Moslem guerilla army in Sicily , then made them into a kind of mercenary guard, settling them in the walled city of Lucera on the mainland and building them a mosque. He tempted St. Francis of Assisi with naked dancing girls. He was reputed to have experimented on humans, raising children without speaking to see what tongue they spoke, weighing bodies before and after death to attempt to discover the weight of the soul. As in his falconry manual, he was, perhaps to an excessive degree, the first anti – Aristotelian empiricist.

“When the opened his tomb not long ago they found he was sharing his tomb with an unknown young woman. Today he is remembered mostly by falconers, Sicilian patriots, and perhaps the Mafia, which some legends say started as a local patriotic society, fighting occupying forces and landlords in his memory.”

The in- print translation of his de Arte Venandi cum Avibus will be in my “book of books”. And Vadim Gorbatov has painted him, more than once.

My other side

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I was asked by email if I knew anything about the history on my Italian side. Not from books is my answer. Bodios (and my grandmother on that side, Sylvia Arzeni) came most recently from Ispra on the east shore of Lake Maggiore a few miles south of the Swiss border; a village called Bodio sits on the river that flows into the north end of the lake, in Switzerland. I am always interested in info from the region. There is a sub- Alpine tunnel there, and here is a pic of, well, a car wreck.

My grandparents’ generation spoke “real” Italian and often German, but at home a “patois” (their word) that resembled the French that folks of the same age spoke in Provence when I was there in the 90’s, including “ng” endings like the Medieval French you see in Villon’s poems- all use “pang” rather than panno or pain for bread, “ving” (“buon ving”) for wine instead of vino or vin. My contemporary cousins seem to speak Italian and French– the second is what I have used to communicate with them.

The old ones, some who have been in Massachusetts and Vermont for two generations longer than my own immediate line, were good stone masons and brilliant bird-eating poverty cooks, but unlike the rowdy venturesome Scots on my mother’s side they tended to stay in their Alpine valleys, where I suspect they have been since the glaciers receded. If they don’t have that odd Mongol gene that some Lombards carry I suspect this is our most famous ancestor.

A fishy coat of arms

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A month or two ago David Zincavage, who is both an old friend and a sort of dog relative (his Uhlan is Ataika’s nephew) emailed me asking if I knew anything about my mother’s family, the McCabes.

In fact I did, but mostly family folklore; that though they came to the New World (the Canadian Maritimes) through Ireland, and though many had been involved with the rebellions of the 1770’s, they were in fact a military family of Scots mercenaries, “gallowglasses”, in service to various Irish kings and nobles. That in addition to being a seriously combative clan– in the words of the Ezra Pound poem on Bertrans de Born, great “stirrers up of strife”– they conspired with other such English- Irish troublemakers such like the Duanes and the Loveless (Lovelace, Lawless) family, and intermarried with them (often in France, fleeing English pursuit); or, after 1800, in Canada. One Duane was also expelled from Calcutta, was probably born in Newfoundland whence other ancestors came but lied about it, and was a friend of Thomas Paine’s. My maternal great grandmother was a Lawless.

All oral folklore. All, I have found, true. For years I never thought about it or looked into it (difficult pre- Internet anyway), but David hooked me*. A serious salmon fisherman, he said: “Do you know why they have three salmon on their coat of arms?”

As you can see, they do, and I have no idea why. Suggestions encouraged.

The other things I have found is that they originally hail from one of the Western Isles (Aran?), and that their combativeness is probably real. Their motto is “Aut Vincere Aut Mori”: “Conquer or die!”

* I don’t see why Reid has any monopoly on bad puns.