Fire and Ink

If I asked you how fast a message travelled in the ninth century, you would most likely answer: at the speed of the horse the messenger was sitting on. That is not a bad answer. It held almost everywhere, and for a good many centuries afterwards. Between the Arab frontier and Constantinople, though, the ninth century was running slightly ahead of itself.

Byzantium had a chronic problem with Arab raids through the Taurus mountains. Once an army was through the passes, the fate of whole cities was settled in days, and a man on horseback needed too many of them. So Emperor Theophilos handed the task to his finest mind, a scholar known as Leo the Mathematician (a magnificent name, and I would warmly support bringing descriptive surnames of this kind back into use). He had a line of signal beacons built from the frontier fortress of Loulon all the way to the Great Palace in Constantinople. That was the main line - there were others along the coast and in the Balkans, because Byzantium needed guarding against the Bulgars and the Slavs as well.

The main line ran some four hundred and fifty miles, with stations set out along the hilltops every thirty-five to sixty miles depending on the terrain. Modern experiments have confirmed that a signal covered the whole route inside an hour. In the ninth century, then, one particular message crossed Asia Minor faster than today’s express train does (in Turkey, at any rate - as far as I know the Yüksek Hızlı Tren tops out at 155 mph).

Anyone who has seen a certain very old film about dwarves and metrosexuals knows this system well, and might reasonably suspect that such a postal service had a rather limited vocabulary. But Leo had one more trick up his sleeve. He set identical, synchronised water clocks at both ends of the line and assigned twelve pre-agreed messages to twelve different hours of the day. When a revolt / a siege / a light bit of raiding came along, it was enough to light the fire at the right hour and the far end knew exactly where it stood (things clearly did not move that fast back then, although it must have been rather trying to have a visitor from the Abbasid Caliphate tap you on the shoulder at five minutes past five, with twenty-three hours still to wait and your torch poised over the Send button).

Later chronicles claim the whole chain of fires was shut down by Emperor Michael III the Drunkard (another fine name, and he was the son of the very Theophilos who had the system built, so it did not last long), because news of invasions was distracting the crowd from the chariot races he himself took part in. It looks more like propaganda from a later age out to blacken the emperor’s name. Either way, under Manuel Komnenos - that is, in the twelfth century - the beacons were burning again. After that the trail goes cold, and the final blow to Constantinople and that whole corner of the world was dealt in 1204 by Christians (if we may use the word for the murderous mercenary maniacs of the Fourth Crusade).

Clever inventions tend to do well in history, because sooner or later somebody finds them useful. They stay written down somewhere, even after an emperor shuts them off. Clever people have poorer prospects, and clever women the poorest of all.

In Salerno, in southern Italy, the medical school of the twelfth century was where Latin, Greek, Arab and Jewish medicine all ran together, and even women were taken seriously there - over fifty of them are documented. Among those teaching was a physician by the name of Trota, and one particular story about her survives: a patient with pains in the womb, whom her colleagues were preparing to cut open on the spot (they had decided she was bloated and reasonably enough wanted to let some of it out - genuinely), was taken home by Trota and cured with a herbal bath and a plaster of radish juice and barley.

The compendium of women’s medicine that carries this story tells it in the third person and draws together the texts of three different authors - only one of them is Trota. She was the most famous of them, though, and so this (not exclusively) gynaecological handbook, Europe’s most copied for three whole centuries, came to be known as the Trotula. Alongside the advice to dull the pains of labour with opiates, which ran against church doctrine, it held tips on make-up and body hair, and with them general rules on lifestyle and longevity that were not meant for women alone.

Then came the 1560s, and Trota’s fame - the very thing that had let her overshadow the rest of the book - was of no use to her whatsoever. Learned men concluded that a mistake had been made: a woman could not possibly have written the work an entire field had been learning from for four hundred years. The texts began to be credited to an invented man named Trottus, and the editor Caspar Wolf went furthest of all, striking the name Trota out, replacing it with the masculine Eros and diligently rewriting the feminine grammar of the text into the masculine.

Nobody banned those books or burned them; they went on being copied and went on being used to heal. The only thing that disappeared from them was their author. The argument over whether she had ever existed at all then dragged on into our own times. In 1985 the historian John Benton found a manuscript headed Practica secundum Trotam, the practice according to Trota, and the historian Monica Green finally established both the author’s existence and her mastery of the craft, with a sad footnote about all her colleagues whose names we shall never learn.

So much for the facts of our own world. Where and why a woman physician crosses paths with a line of signal fires, you will find in the story The Labyrinth of Memory.