Trujillo is a tiny place so, much as we loved it, it made sense to leave the next morning for Badajoz. (If you missed last week’s post about Trujillo, do have a look at the pictures HERE.)
Badajoz features prominently in the Peninsular Wars, largely (as far as Brits are concerned) because of the siege of 1812. British forces eventually stormed the city, but the main attack through a breach in the city wall was unsuccessful. (The successful attack came through the castle.) Four thousand British and Portuguese troops died in the assault and the reprisals taken against civilians after British troops entered the city were terrible.
I did wonder how you lose 4,000 men in a breach assault and then I saw the wall that was breached.
Badajoz: Site of the breach (on the wall away from the camera)
The astonishing thing is that it was breached at all. The walls are very thick with many gun emplacements, although presumably one of the reasons for making the breach here is that, unlike much of wall, this section is not covered by redoubts on either side.
I’m no expert on siege warfare, so I just admired the engineering feat that is the walls of Badajoz, most of which still stand.
From Badajox in Spain, we drove to Elvas in Portugal. It’s a short drive with no geographical features to suggest a natural border and, given that both are in the Schengen area, no sort of border formalities at all, so we were soon checking in to our Portuguese hotel which had been designed by a top Portuguese architect in 1942. Later we were to see photographs of the hotel in the Guggenheim Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon but the pride that the staff take in the history of the place is quite obvious.
Hotel Santa Luzia, Elvas
The hotel is a very short walk from the town so as soon as we had checked in, we were off to enter through the town gate. (Well, one of the town gates – the wall is pretty well intact.)
Elvas is not only ridiculously pretty, but also an astonishing work of military defence. Elvas was (and still is) a frontier town, guarding the road from Spain. Built in the 17th century, the walls, with their seven bastions and four semi-bastions, represented the very best in the defence technology of the day. The town was further defended by two separate fortresses which occupied higher ground that could be used as artillery positions outside the town walls. The thickness of the walls is clear in this photo.
An interesting detail on the walls is the presence of toilets for use by the guards.
There is a castle, but it’s something of a disappointment as it really isn’t a particularly strong defensive position but seems rather a place that people might withdraw to make a desperate last stand in the unlikely event of the walls being breached.
You can see Badajoz from Elvas and Wellington was briefly based in Elvas.
That’s Badajoz on the horizon
Some officers who died at Badajoz were brought back to Elvas for burial. The British cemetery is just below the castle walls and well worth a visit.
Oh, yes, there’s an aqueduct too. Started in 1529, the aqueduct was plagued with construction problems and not finished for almost 100 years. It’s an impressive piece of work, though.
Campaigns and Culture
We did have an amazing trip (yes, there is more to come), visiting fantastic places and staying in beautiful hotels. We couldn’t ever have organised it ourselves. Our itinerary was planned by Robert Pocock, who was planning to join us to check out some of places on his next tour for Campaigns and Culture. Unfortunately he had to postpone his trip, but thanks to his instructions we saw most of the things he had planned. He is now busy planning future tours to the Peninsula with the possibility of bespoke tours before that if you want to hire his services privately. You can find details of his business at www.campaignsandculture.com.
Robert is a well-regarded expert on the Napoleonic Wars with a wider interest in military history that means he can provide significant insight into battlefields from Ramilies to Dunkirk. If you are interested in a trip like ours and don’t want to take your chances driving on some of the ‘interesting’ roads we found ourselves travelling on, I do recommend that you get in touch with Robert.
Next week
More serious history in next week’s post as we discuss Wellington’s defensive fortifications that made up the Lines of Torres Vedras. You still have to look at my holiday photographs though.
I’m writing a book set in the Peninsular War and featuring the battle of Talavera, but I have never been to Spain. (Barcelona doesn’t count.) Last week I put that right with a whistle-stop tour of some key Napoleonic War sites in Spain and Portugal. We took a look at quite a lot of medieval stuff too, just because it was fabulous.
Day 1: Toledo
Arrived Madrid to discover that the hire car we booked had been upgraded to something bigger. This was (as you will soon discover) not necessarily a good thing.
Drove to Toledo. It’s not that far and it turns out that Spanish motorways are uncrowded and easy to drive on. It’s only when we turned off for Toledo that things began to get sticky.
Our hotel was on the very edge of the old centre of town, just after a very sharp turn-off. We missed it and by the time we realised our mistake a few seconds later, we were unable to turn back. Instead we had to drive right through Toledo and swing round for a second attempt.
The good news is that old Toledo is very beautiful. It’s a medieval town and the basic buildings seem unchanged. In England we often talk about towns having “their ancient street plan” but I doubt many Saxons would relate to the Saxon street plan of Richmond (where I live) for example. Over the centuries building lines have been pushed back and roads widened to accommodate motor vehicles. By contrast, the roads in Toledo have been left pretty much as they were around 1500. One of them is shown in the photo below – and, yes, this is a regular road as used by cars.
Our car was considerably less shiny and scratch-free by the time we had circled round for our second attempt at the hotel, though I had managed to avoid hitting any of the people who (quite rightly) see the streets as being for pedestrians first and cars second.
Our second venture into the town was on foot and we wandered aimlessly about enjoying the sense of having moved back through 600 years – or rather more when we stumbled across the remains of the Roman water supply in the basement of a trendy clothes shop. It’s an amazing place, but eventually we gave up on the random wandering and went into Toledo Cathedral.
Nothing I can say about this place can begin to do it justice. It’s huge. The passage from the North to the South doors used to be used as a city street and is considerably wider than many of them. It’s impossible to appreciate the scale of the place because it is broken up with so many internal structures. The Sanctuary (with the high altar) is a church within the church, boxed off from the rest. Ditto the choir, with its dozens of bas relief carvings, not of religious scenes but of military victories over the Moors. To give an idea of size: the pillars around the choir are probably the remains of the mosque that was originally on this site. The choir, I would remind you, is a tiny boxed-off part of the nave.
The only thing I can think of that gives any idea of the almost unimaginable size of the place is the painting of St Christopher depicted as a giant on one of the walls. To get an idea of scale look at the regular sized door on the bottom left of the picture.
So vast is the cathedral and so full of chapels, offices, cloisters and assorted other stuff to see that I was exploring for over two hours and still left much unseen. With paintings by El Greco and Raphael and other great artists dotted about I must have missed a lot but my mind was completely blown by what I did see.
A ceiling in the Chapter House
I staggered out as the place was closing for the night. A visit to the castle (much knocked about in the Civil War and unsympathetically restored) let me watch the sun sinking over the town from the café. (Free to enter, decent food and probably the best use of your time in the castle area.)
Day 2: Trujillo
Left Toledo by a relatively wide road that was less exciting, but rather safer, than the roads we explored the day before and set off towards Talavera. We decided to skip the motorway this time and take the old road. Arrow straight, it was clearly a very old road indeed – clear evidence that the Romans had been here before the Moors.
Visiting the battlefield at Talavera was the ostensible purpose of the whole trip, so it’s embarrassing to say that we never found it. I had a map from 1809 and maps (and satellite images) from today, but I couldn’t marry the two together. I had rather expected road signs and maybe a museum, but I got the distinct impression that Spain was in no hurry to celebrate Talavera. There is a street named after General Cuesta who, nominally at least, won the battle for Spain, but it’s a small, short one and easily missed.
There is an old town, but the area we saw was modern and unexciting, distinguished mainly by the tiles that covered everything you could tile. People in Talavera are proud of their tiles and show it.
We set off to drive to a ridge that looked to be in about the right position, but we’ll never know if we got the right place. It didn’t matter that much. The battlefield has been mucked about with a lot because there is a road built through it and other developments, so I was more interested to get a feel of the place. What was amazing was how the miles of Spanish plain suddenly turned into really quite steep lines of hills. The idea of trying to attack up slopes like that was quite terrifying. The time we spent driving to and from Talavera also gave the notion of the scale of these campaigns and the days that must have been spent marching across dusty, unshaded plain. We were there in February, albeit an unusually hot February, and we had air conditioning in the car and we still found ourselves uncomfortably hot and thirsty at times. It’s no wonder that throughout the Peninsular War there were always more than 10% of Wellington’s troops in hospital, even when no fighting was going on.
My wife had come along to see Spain and had no interest in spending hours driving round looking for a battlefield that, in the end, was going to look much like any other bit of the country, so we gave up pretty quickly and headed on toward Trujillo. Tammy had read all about it and couldn’t wait to get there.
We did make one detour to see the castle at Oropesa. It was clearly visible from the road and looked too good to pass up. We couldn’t go in (I don’t think there was anything to see inside anyway) but we enjoyed walking round it and the view was fantastic.
It was also our first sight of storks in Spain. Warmer winters and the availability of food from landfill sites means that storks no longer migrate down into North Africa and the ones we saw were already busy with their nests.
Trujillo is fantastic. We learned from our mistake at Toledo and as soon as the satnav tried to take us the wrong direction up a one-way street into the old town we parked up on a wider road and walked the rest. We were booked into the Eurostars Palacio Santa Marta, which is an actual 16th century palace.
It’s a nice modern hotel, but I really wouldn’t have cared if it hadn’t been. Imagine sleeping here. Actually, I don’t have to.
The advantage of a 16th century palace in a medieval town is that it is certain to be well-located. In this case it was two minutes’ walk (if that) from the grand Plaza Mayor which my guidebook describes as “one of Spain’s most spectacular plazas”.
Trujillo has a castle and beautiful churches but mostly it just has miles of winding streets crammed inside a largely complete town wall. Historically important as many of the buildings are it is, first and foremost, very, very beautiful.
‘Burke in the Peninsula’ is still being tweaked in the light of our experiences in Spain and should be published later this year. Meanwhile, why not read the first three James Burke adventures? They’re not written in order, so feel free to start anywhere, but if you want to begin at the beginning, Burke is introduced as a young and rather naive officer in ‘Burke in the Land of Silver’ – available in paperback or on Kindle.
No blog post this week because I’ve been away in Spain and Portugal, exploring some of the sites of the Peninsular War and enjoying Lisbon (pictured) because it’s lovely.
There will be blog posts about the Lines of Torres Vedras and lots of other brilliant stuff from the next regular blog post on Friday and probably for a while after that. Meanwhile, if you want something to fill the ten minutes you might have spent on my blog, there’s a video about Fort San Vicente. I think it’s best described as three separate forts (they had three separate garrisons and were counted as three positions in plans at the time) but the three are connected into one single astonishing position. There’s a lot of wind noise and the focus slips occasionally, but if you are interested in Wellington’s lines of Torres Vedras you might find it worth watching.
We’ve just celebrated Valentine’s day, so Jenny Macaire is here to talk about romance in books.
I write historical fiction with a dash of science fiction (time travel), fantasy (Greek and Nordic mythology), and romance (my heroine, Ashley, shares her life with two men – Alexander the Great and his lover, Hephaestion). When I started writing this story (believe me) I had no idea it was going to turn into a steamy, sensuous series. It started out as a short story commissioned by a magazine about time travel. But the fact is, when I started researching and found out most of what we know about Alexander the Great is hearsay and that I could let my imagination run wild – it went wild!
Alexander mistakes time-travelling journalist Ashley for the goddess Persephone and kidnaps her, stranding her in 333 BC. They fall in love and she accompanies him on his trek across half the world. But I had a modern woman from the future and a man from ancient Greece (Macedonia) thrown together, and they had nothing in common. What happens when a young man and woman get together? Do they discuss the politics? Do they talk about the weather? What common ground did they have? Well, most of you are probably nodding sagely and imagining all sorts of different…positions. Yes, you’re right. Falling in love usually means lots of sweaty, bouncy sex full of giggles, sighs, moans, and body parts moving in various directions at various speeds.
What happens when one of the partners is unabashedly bi-sexual and his lover also happens to be bi-sexual, and sex is considered a natural part of life such as eating, breathing, or learning to swim? Yes, that’s right – the pair turns into a threesome. So, reader beware – (although I don’t write about it in as much detail as some would like), there is a spicy side to some chapters (if you want, you can just skip over those parts, they don’t last very long, just a paragraph or so) but here’s what I’ve discovered: reviewers will always comment on that part of my book. If they approve, they will say “Read about Ashley’s sensuous journey across ancient Persia”, and if they don’t approve, they will say, “A very interesting book except for too much sex and marching”.
This brings us back to the question “How much sex is too much sex in historical fiction?”
If you consider ‘Clan of the Cavebear’, or the Outlander series historical fiction, you would think that my books are fairly tame compared to the caveman sex in the Clan books or the spankings and punishments in the Outlander tales (I loved both series, btw!) So I’ll go out on a limb and say, “I think that if the sex takes away from the story, it is too much sex, and if it fits with the characters and setting, it’s fine (and you can always skip over those parts).” At any rate, I’d call my books “sensual” and leave it at that. And since it’s February, and it’s the month of romance, I thought I’d dig out a love scene from my book “The Soul of Time”, which was published on January 31, so you can get it as a late Valentine’s gift and enjoy the whole story, which is about Ashley and Alexander the Great.
In this book, they are in the far north, in the Land of the Eaters of the Dead, and they are trying to get Alexander’s soul back. The druids have it, and they want to use it to save their world. The story is set (historically) in the Iron Age, in what is modern-day Denmark and Norway. Fictionally, it’s based on the theory that if the Celts had been able to unite their tribes, they would have been able to repeal the Roman invaders and our world (Europe, at least) would be vastly different now if they had. From around 750 BC to 12 BC, the Celts were the most powerful people in central and northern Europe. The word Celt comes from the Greek word, Keltoi, which means barbarians. They spoke a vaguely common language, but they were not a united group and the Romans easily conquered the tribes and imposed their rules, religion, and roads on them.
Excerpt from “The Soul of Time”
(Ashley is sleeping in a hammock in a forest glade, resting after being wounded. The healer sent Alexander to fetch her.)
‘So you waited until I woke up. How long ago did she tell you to fetch me?’
He shrugged. ‘A few hours ago? I don’t know, but you were too peaceful to disturb. I love watching you sleep.’ His voice lowered and he grinned. ‘You looked so…harmless.’
I clambered out of the hammock and hit him on the arm. ‘Harmless?’
He chuckled, ducking away. ‘That’s what I said, my volcano princess. Do you remember I called you that once? You nearly drowned me. I still laugh when I think of it.’
I eyed him sourly. ‘You called me a “volcano princess”?’
‘Yes, it was in a river. We were swimming, and you told me that you were called the Ice Queen.’
‘That was just something some horrible boy once wrote on the bathroom wall in high school!’ I cried.
He put his finger across my lips. ‘Hush. Then we made love. Do you remember the first time we made love?’ We stopped beneath the sweeping branches of a willow tree. ‘We were in my tent. You were drunk, I think, on unwatered wine. You threw yourself on me.’
‘I what?’
‘Well, we sort of threw ourselves on each other.’ He sighed and I heard a shiver in his voice. ‘And then we made love. You were crying and saying all sorts of silly things, like how much you wanted to stay, and how you hated to leave me. Then we went swimming in the river and you put your face in the hollow of my throat, right here.’
I moved towards him as if in a dream. Our lips touched, so softly, then I pressed my cheek against his throat. I traced his collarbones with my finger, then closed my eyes and breathed in his warm scent. My face did fit perfectly into the hollow of his neck. ‘I remember everything except being called a “volcano princess”,’ I said.
‘When you sleep, your face is so soft you look like a young girl. There is something almost painful about the joy I feel when I watch over you, knowing you’re carrying a baby inside your belly, knowing that you’re mine. I took you from the Time-Senders, and I’ll never let you go.’ He trembled as he spoke, holding me so tightly my bones cracked.
Jennifer is an American living in Paris. She likes to read, eat chocolate, and plays a mean game of golf. She grew up in upstate New York, Samoa, and the Virgin Islands. She graduated from St Peter and Paul High School in St Thomas and moved to NYC where she modelled for five years for Elite. She went to France and met her husband at the polo club. All that is true. But she mostly likes to make up stories.
It’s Iceland in 1828 and Agnes Megnusdottir has been sentenced to death for murder. At the time, Iceland was ruled by Denmark, so the sentence has to be confirmed by the King in Copenhagen. As there is no prison in Iceland it is decided that, while she waits for the King’s word, Agnes should live in one of the isolated farms in the north of the island, working as a servant for the family there.
This is the background to Hannah Kent’s extraordinary novel, Burial Rites.
Nothing much happens. Agnes turns out not to be the monster people expected. She discovers that some people treat her with unexpected kindness while others don’t. The long winter turns to summer and then the days get shorter again.
As Agnes learns to trust other people around her, we learn more of the murder and how Agnes got caught up with it, but while the people she is living alongside grow increasingly sympathetic, the machinery of justice grinds on. An axe is bought and there is a bureaucratic exchange of notes between Iceland and Copenhagen as to who should pay for it. Legal processes are completed. The execution day arrives.
That’s all. That such a slight storyline becomes such a gripping read is down to the smoothness of Hannah Kent’s writing, her ability to draw us into the characters so that we not only know them but care about them too, and the detail of everyday life on an Icelandic smallholding 200 years ago.
When I was reading, I found myself wondering how much of the story was true. It was only when I had finished that I read the acknowledgements and discovered just how much research had gone into it. The basic story, it turns out, is quite possibly true, although to this day there are differing views as to Agnes’s culpability. More importantly, Kent has done an enormous amount of research into life in this remote place so long ago. Historical novelists are always caught between the danger of not providing a textured background on the one hand and of overwhelming their readers with irrelevant detail on the other. Authors are always told that they should research in depth but wear that knowledge lightly when they write. Kent is a rare and splendid example of somebody who gets it just right. When I was reading I felt that the historical details didn’t matter. Kent painted a picture of people living a harsh life, in almost constant darkness for several months of the year, in farms so isolated that you could die just walking to a neighbour. The images are so vivid that you see that harsh landscape on the shores of a grey sea that might as well be the edge of the world. It was only when I finished that I realised that the tiny details – the herbs they used, the way they slaughtered the sheep, the fuel they burned (dried dung for heat, peat to bank the fire at night) – were what made the whole thing so real. And because we see the scene so clearly, so we come to understand the people shaped by this harsh landscape and we come to understand something of their hopes and fears and, to an extent to share them.
