Praise for Simon Sebag Montefiore’s
Written in History
“If you loved Ernst Gombrich’s A Little History of the World and are in the mood for another…global history from a different angle, this collection of historically significant letters through the ages compiled by Simon Sebag Montefiore might well hit the spot….He has distilled a few millennia of world history into 240 extremely un-boring pages….Montefiore has an eye for the spicy, the horrifying, the passionate and the shocking….Very moving.”
—The Times (London)
“Some [letters] are truly revolutionary and visionary….Others are very personal….But all are fascinating, as are the compiler’s comments on each letter, little gems…in their own right.”
—Daily Mail (London)
“Written in History is a search through the millennia, the result an astonishing array: all human life is here encapsulated, in just a few paragraphs or even just a sentence; all are surprising, and mostly unfamiliar….Everything here is a revelatory marvel, whether a hideous rant from the Marquis de Sade (1783), or the impassioned logic of religious tolerance from Babur to his son Humayun (1529). Truly the spectrum of human belief and behavior is revealed in this selection.”
—The Arts Desk
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Written in History
Simon Sebag Montefiore is a prizewinning historian whose bestselling books have been published in more than forty-eight languages. Catherine the Great & Potemkin was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards; Young Stalin won the Costa Biography Award, Los Angeles Times Biography Prize, and Le Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique; Jerusalem: The Biography won the Jewish Book Council’s Book of the Year Prize and the Wenjin Award from the National Library of China; The Romanovs: 1613–1918 won the Lupicaia del Terriccio Book Prize. Montefiore is also the author of the acclaimed Moscow Trilogy of novels Sashenka, Red Sky at Noon and One Night in Winter, which won the Political Fiction of the Year Prize. He received his PhD in history at Cambridge University and now lives in London with his wife, the novelist Santa Montefiore, and their two children.
www.simonsebagmontefiore.com
@simonmontefiore
ALSO BY SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
Catherine the Great & Potemkin
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
Young Stalin
Jerusalem: The Biography
The Romanovs: 1613–1918
Titans of History
FICTION
Sashenka
One Night in Winter
Red Sky at Noon
CHILDREN’S FICTION (WITH SANTA MONTEFIORE)
The Royal Rabbits of London series
Copyright © 2018 by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., London, in 2018. Published by arrangement with The Orion Publishing Group Ltd. First published in the United Kingdom in 2018. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sebag Montefiore, Simon, 1965– editor.
Title: Written in history : letters that changed the world / Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Description: First Vintage Books edition. | New York : Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019028006 (print) | LCCN 2019028007 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Letters.
Classification: LCC PN6131 .W77 2019 (print) | LCC PN6131 (ebook) | DDC 808.86—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028006
Vintage Trade Paperback ISBN 9781984898166 Ebook ISBN 9781984898173
Author photograph © Sasha Sebag-Montefiore
Cover design: Studio Helen/Orion Books
www.vintagebooks.com
v5.4
ep
To Lily Bathsheba
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Love
Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, May 1528
Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera, undated
Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway, 12 October 1786
Catherine the Great to Prince Potemkin, c.19 March 1774
James I to George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, 17 May 1620
Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, 21 January 1926
Between Suleiman the Magnificent and Hurrem Sultan, c.1530s
Anaïs Nin to Henry Miller, c.August 1932
Alexandra to Rasputin, 1909
Horatio Nelson to Emma Hamilton, January–February 1800
Napoleon Bonaparte to Josephine, 24 April 1796
Alexander II to Katya Dolgorukaya, January 1868
Josef Stalin to Pelageya Onufrieva, 29 February 1912
Family
Elizabeth I to Mary I, 16 March 1554
Vilma Grünwald to Kurt Grünwald, 11 July 1944
Kadashman-Enlil to Amenhotep III, c.1370 BC
Oliver Cromwell to Valentine Walton, 4 July 1644
Toussaint L’Ouverture to Napoleon, 12 July 1802
Alexander I to his sister Catherine, 20 September 1805
Charles I to Charles II, 29 November 1648
Svetlana Stalina to her father, Josef Stalin, mid-1930s
Augustus to Caius Caesar, 23 September AD 2
Joseph II to his brother Leopold II, 4 October 1777
Rameses the Great to Ḫattušili III, 1243 BC
Creation
Michelangelo to Giovanni da Pistoia, 1509
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to his cousin Marianne, 13 November 1777
Honoré de Balzac to Ewelina Hánska, 19 June 1836
Pablo Picasso to Marie-Thérèse Walter, 19 July 1939
John Keats to Fanny Brawne, 13 October 1819
T. S. Eliot to George Orwell, 13 July 1944
Courage
Sarah Bernhardt to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, 1915
Fanny Burney to her sister Esther, 22 March 1812
David Hughes to his parents, 21 August 1940
Discovery
Ada Lovelace to Andrew Crosse, c.16 November 1844
Wilbur Wright to the Smithsonian Institution, 30 May 1899
John Stevens Henslow to Charles Darwin, 24 August 1831
Ferdinand and Isabella, King and Queen of Castile and Aragon, to Christopher Columbus, 30 March 1493 and 29 April 1493
Christopher Columbus to Ferdinand and Isabella, 29 April 1493
Tourism
Anton Chekhov to Anatoly Koni, 16 January 1891
Gustave Flaubert to Louis Bouilhet, 15 January 1850
War
Peter the Great to Catherine I, 27 June 1709
Napoleon to Josephine, 3 December 1805
Dwight D. Eisenhower to all Allied Troops, 5 June 1944
Catherine, Duchess of Oldenburg, to her brother Alexander I, 3 September 1812
Philip II to the Duke of Medina Sidonia, 1 July 1588
Harun al-Rashid to Nikephoros I, AD 802
Rasputin to Nicholas II, 17 July 1914
Blood
Paiankh to Nodjmet, c.1070 BC
Vladimir Lenin to the Bolsheviks of Penza, 11 August 1918
Josef Stalin to Kliment Voroshilov, 3 July 1937
Mao Zedong to the Red Guards of Tsinghua University Middle School, 1 August 1966
Josip Broz Tito to Josef Stalin, 1948
Destruction
Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg to Count Leopold Berchtold, 6 July 1914
Harry Truman to Irv Kupcinet, 5 August 1963
Disaster
Pliny the Younger to Tacitus, c.AD 106–107
Voltaire to M. Tronchin, 24 November 1755
Friendship
Captain A. D. Chater to his mother, Christmas 1914
Mark Antony to Octavian (later Augustus), c.33 BC
Between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, July 1862–November 1864
Franklin D. Roosevelt to Winston Churchill, 11 September 1939
Adolf Hitler to Benito Mussolini, 21 June 1941
Between Prince Potemkin and Catherine the Great, c.1774
Folly
Georg von Hülsen to Emil von Görtz, 1892
The Marquis de Sade “to the stupid villains who torment me,” 1783
Between Empress Alexandra and Nicholas II, 1916
Decency
Maria Theresa to Marie Antoinette, 30 July 1775
Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler, 24 December 1940
Abraham Lincoln to Ulysses S. Grant, 13 July 1863
John Profumo to Harold Macmillan, 5 June 1963
Jacqueline Kennedy to Nikita Khrushchev, 1 December 1963
Babur to his son Humayun, 11 January 1529
Émile Zola to Félix Faure, 13 January 1898
Lorenzo the Magnificent to his son Giovanni de Medici, 23 March 1492
Liberation
Emmeline Pankhurst to the Women’s Social and Political Union, 10 January 1913
Rosa Parks to Jessica Mitford, 26 February 1956
Nelson Mandela to Winnie Mandela, 2 April 1969
Between Simón Bolívar, Manuela Sáenz, and James Thorne, 1822–1823
Fate
Oscar Wilde to Robert Ross, 28 February 1895
Between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, June 1804
Anonymous to Lord Monteagle, October 1605
Babur to Humayun, 25 December 1526
Nikita Khrushchev to John F. Kennedy, 24 & 26 October 1962
Alexander Pushkin to Jacob von Heeckeren, 25 January 1837
Power
Stalin to Valery Mezhlauk, April 1930
Winston Churchill to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 20 May 1940
Between Richard I and Saladin, October–November 1191
Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, 2 November 1917
George H. W. Bush to Bill Clinton, 20 January 1993
Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, 3 August 1514
Henry VII to his “good friends,” July 1485
John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 20 February 1801
Between the Duke of Marlborough, Queen Anne, and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 13 August 1704
Donald J. Trump to Kim Jong Un, 24 May 2018
Downfall
Abd Al-Rahman III to his sons, AD 961
Simon Bar Kokhba to Yeshua, c.AD 135
Ammurapi to the king of Alashiya, c.1190 BC
Aurangzeb to his son Muhammad Azam Shah, 1707
Simón Bolívar to José Flores, 9 November 1830
Goodbye
Leonard Cohen to Marianne Ihlen, July 2016
“Henriette” to Giacomo Casanova, autumn 1749
Winston Churchill to his wife, Clementine, 17 July 1915
Nikolai Bukharin to Josef Stalin, 10 December 1937
Franz Kafka to Max Brod, June 1924
Walter Raleigh to his wife, Bess, 8 December 1603
Alan Turing to Norman Routledge, February 1952
Che Guevara to Fidel Castro, 1 April 1965
Robert Ross to More Adey, 14 December 1900
Lucrezia Borgia to Leo X, 22 June 1519
Hadrian to Antoninus Pius—and to his soul, 10 July AD 138
Acknowledgments
Copyright Acknowledgments
Introduction
Dear Reader,
Nothing beats the immediacy and authenticity of a letter. We humans have an instinct to record feelings and memories that could be lost in time, and to share them. We desperately need to confirm relationships, ties of love or hate, for the world is never still and our lives are a series of beginnings and endings: in recording them on paper, we perhaps feel we can make them more real, almost eternal. Letters are the literary antidote to the ephemerality of life and, of course, the flimsy fitfulness of the Internet. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who reflected much on the magic of letters, thought them “the most significant memorial a person can leave.” And those instincts are right: long after the protagonists are dead, letters live on. And in matters of politics, diplomacy, and war, a command or a promise must be documented. So many different things are achieved through the medium of letters, and we celebrate them all here.
There have been many collections of peculiar and funny letters, but these are chosen not just because they are entertaining but because they somehow changed human affairs, whether in war or peace, art or culture. They grant us a glimpse into fascinating lives, whether through the eyes of a genius, a monster, or an ordinary person. Here are letters from many cultures, traditions, lands, races: ancient Egypt and Rome to modern America, Africa, India, China, and Russia, where I have done a lot of my research and work—hence the presence here of many Russians, from Pushkin to Stalin. Here, among other things, are struggles for rights that we now regard as essential and orders for crimes we regard as intolerable. Here, too, are love letters and letters of power by empresses, actresses, tyrants, artists, composers, poets.
I have selected letters written by pharaohs three thousand years ago, preserved in forgotten libraries in fallen cities—and letters written this century. The letter certainly had a golden age: the five hundred years from the Middle Ages to the widespread use of the telephone in the 1930s, declining steeply in the 1990s with the arrival of the mobile telephone and the Internet. I saw it myself when I was researching in the Stalin archives. During the 1920s and 1930s, Stalin wrote long letters and notes to his entourage and to strangers, too, particularly when he was on holiday in the south, but when a secure telephone line was set up, his letters abruptly stopped.
Letters were naturally widely used by rulers and elites soon after writing itself developed: they are the ideal tool of management and much, much more. During the last three millennia, letters were the equivalent of today’s newspapers, telephones, radio, television, email, texting, sexting, and blogging all put together. This anthology contains letters originally written in cuneiform, the a
ncient system of writing using the markings of a reed stylus on a flattened moist clay tablet and dried in the sun, utilized in the Middle East during the Bronze and Iron Ages. This collection also includes letters written on papyrus, made with the pith of the papyrus plant, from the third millennium BC. And then there are letters written on parchment or vellum—the tougher, dried animal skin—until paper was created in China around 200 BC and gradually brought across central Asia to Europe. There, its cheaper and easier manufacture finally made it ever more convenient, available, and affordable from the fifteenth century onward. Letter-writing reached a climax between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries not just because of the availability of paper but also because of the ease of travel and distribution by courier and the development of post.