Behind the Scenes Minis: Egerton and Nika

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and Happy Friday, Am Holly Fry. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh, Tracy. We talked about Francis Centerton this week, and I love him. I bet he was probably a pill in person because he was so extraordinarily privileged and used to getting his way. But I also think he seems fascinating. Yeah. I mean, if you have a ridiculous amount of money and uh, I want to spend it on something, why why not using dogs? Mhm um. I have so many things that I want to touch on that didn't make it into the episode one. I bet people are wondering what kind of dogs were those? Well, I don't know, yep um. And part of it is because they're written up very differently, even in contemporary accounts, where some talk about his thoroughbread dogs and others are like, he picks up any dog off the streets of Paris, so I we have no idea. That's like a pretty wide range of possibility. Dog breeds and the idea of dog breeds and how we breed dogs like that's changed a lot over the left a couple of centuries to yes, so um that we don't know. I like to call that breed loved. Sure. Um, they sound like they were very adored. Uh. The other thing I wanted to talk about was his chef Viard, because this struck me as so bizarre. Right, It's like the equivalent. I want to make this clear to people in terms of how famous and well known as chef was. It would be like if I hired Jose Andres to cook for my cats, Like it's so weird. Which, by the way, if you've never been to one of his restaurants, get thee too it immediately. Um. I have been to several different ones and they're all spectacular. Uh. And also donate to World Central Kitchen if you if you have money that you can do that with, because he is amazing in that charity is the one for me. Um. Yeah, I love the idea that this incredibly accomplished chef was just like here's the here's the dog's third course. Again, there's a discussion to be had about waste and how actually spend money at a time when people in Paris did not have all that they needed. Um as I don't think anybody were ever in any any industrialized although they weren't industrialized yet. But in any big society like that, where there are things like a noble hierarchy, there are always people that don't have what they need. So there is a story that I found a mention of thirty years after he died, and I couldn't find the like provenance for it, which is that it was just like this mention that came up in a paper that three I think it was three coins had been added to I believe the Royal Society's collection. These coins had been minted, according to this very brief right up that I found in an at duties paper, had been minted by Francis Edgerton so that they could be strewn about in the rivers of England and France in the hopes that people of the future would find them and think he was like some great and important person. That's kind of awesome. I love it, But like I said, I couldn't find enough information to back that up to put it in the actual episode. But that's so like exactly the kind of stuff I would do if I had that level of cash. I mean, I already hope that people accidentally think Grito is an actual religious figure when they one day unearthed my house. But but I really like the idea of I'm gonna have a coin designed that's movie, and I think he had included Again, it was a brief writ up, but it sounded like he must have included wording on the coin about his literary accomplishments because he specifically wanted to be known as an important writer by people hundreds of years in the future. So fascinating. Yes, the manipulation of history as it will be seen in the future with your money right now is a very interesting idea to contemplate. Yeah, and scary, yes, but in this case more funny. Right, This is a pretty benign expression of that possibility someone will think he's more important than he was. Sure, go for it, Francis, Um, he seems like a hoot. I hope he was a delightful person and not crabby other than yelling about his dogs misbehaving at dinner. I never really read a lot of descriptions of his personal behavior. Yeah, well, and it's uh, it's interesting to me that it seems like there was a lot of maybe he was not in his right mind. And I'm like, really, if all if if most of what we're talking about here is having a cheft to feed your dogs and dressing all your dogs like I yeah, I'm with you. I'm like, this is just a person who was like, you know what, I didn't never think I was going to have all of this Earl money, and now I have it. I'm going hog wild with these dogs. Yeah yeah, me and my pups are having a life. Yeah. The shoes GREEDO bless you, Francis Edgerton. I understand, understand. Um, I feel like that's a cautionary tale that I tell Brian because we already have a little bit of a shoe storage problem and I could be like, I could be like this, I hate to be that stereotype of a person who loves shoes and can't buy enough shoes. But I am exactly what that is. Um any case, this week on the show, we talked about the Nika riots and the Nica massacre, and uh wow, there's there's been so much writing on the Chariot factions and whether they had a greater significance beyond being just factions Chariot factions. And on the one hand, there are aspects of this that feel like they might make a little bit more sense if there was a greater meaning like if it really was politically divided in some way, but then also having seen various riots after whatever team won whatever sporting event that fortunately didn't lead to the massacre of thirty people, but like there there's there's some obvious violence that can happen along with sports. So it's like, depending on whose analysis, uh you you more agree with, this was either um, you know, just a routine but very large scale posts or during sports match riot situation, or like more of a politically motivated rioting situation. It is right, I will confess this story activates like all of my darkest nihilist thoughts where I'm just like, well, humans are never going to get any better. We might as well give up into the terrible way. But it's like we, you know, everyone who is alive and experiencing their history unfolding feels like the things that are happening in their lifetime are unprecedented, but of course they're not. We point out all the time that nope, it's all happened before, just in different flavors. And it's one of those things where I'm like, never getting any better, just a terrible attitude and not one that I maintained, I'm just having that moment today. Yeah. Well, and a couple of the papers I read made a point that, like, there has been writing about these riots that make it sound almost like they were unprecedented, but a lot, you know, just generally the violence not unprecedented. And then some of the specific things that happened in it, not all of which were things that we mentioned, were things that had happened before in Constantinople and other times of unrest. Procopious the Secret History as a document that you can read. I mean, there's like public domain translations of it, so you can there's places you can read it online for free. Wow, is it bizarre? And some of the stuff that it claims happens. That's one where I wonder because it was published posthumously. M hmm. And I'm clearly applying modern thinking to its existence. But there's part of me that's like, for all we knew this was procopious as like personal friend Fix Slam Journal, we don't know. We So I read several I didn't we didn't get into this in the episode at all, but I read several theories about like what had motivated him to write this work and to say it wasn't going to be published until after the people involved are dead, and then it was not published until he was dead. Uh, And like one of them was like, he might have written this thing basically as blackmail, like I have this very horrifying tell all document that's going to ruin all your reputations unless you give me x thing that I'm trying to get. There was, you know, speculation that maybe it was just a personal vendetta, that he had become really disillusioned eventually with Justinian and Theodore, like maybe that had led him to write this very scandalous Um. It doesn't even read like The Onion. It reads like the terrible websites that think they're the Onion, but they're just making stuff up with no satirical element to right more like that is how it reads to me. So yeah, uh, I'm really befuddled by the concept of, Hey, we're gonna elevate this person to emperor. Oh he's not home, burn his house down. Yeah yeah, just in general, people being like I'm gonna, we're gonna, we're gonn to name this guy emperor and the it it's interesting to me how um how the role of emperor has operated in different different societies around the world. You know, in some cases we're talking about things that were translated into emperor and they probably had different nuances in the original language or whatever. But um, you know, we've talked about empires where there was just a formal line of succession that had had to be a blood relative in some way, and then what we're talking about here is both people that came from pretty humble backgrounds and made their way up in some cases a blood relative, in some cases not a blood relative. So the fact that there they were like, well, if we find some nephews of the previous uh two emperors ago emperor, maybe that would be a suitable candidate. So yeah, that's the I did not find a lot of documentation of like prison amably, if ten percent of the population of Constantinople was massacred, that would have had like a huge effect on society, And that is not really something that I found a lot of writing on. I found a lot more writing on Justinian's rebuilding efforts and rebuilding the High Sophia and doing so much public works stuff that Procopius had this multi volume thing called Buildings that detailed all of it, like that's the kind of stuff that I've had way more about than like, that's a huge death toll for one event, right, what I mean, that's almost a snap. Right, that's um, that's something that everyone in the city would have felt every day. Yeah, because at that point is enough that everyone knew someone that was either killed or deeply impacted by it. So, yeah, that's an interesting thing. I wonder if it's just hard to quantify in terms of like, if we don't have much mention of it, how do you study it? Yeah, and then there's also, I mean potential that that number was exaggerated in some way unclear. So anyway, that was some year old sports violence for everybody. Uh, coincidentally recorded immediately after the super Bowl, Right, So it's like, I hope there's not some kind of mass super Bowl violence this year because that might seem inappropriate. Anyway, whatever is happening over folks's weekends, I hope it is going well for you. We will be back on Saturday with Saturday Classic. Next week. We will have brand new episodes. You can drop us a note if you would like. We were at History Podcast at I Heart radio dot com. We will talk to you again soon. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. 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