Profiles in "Courage" II

Peredeus the Lombard

[It behooves me to remind everyone that earlier this year Macmillan released my book of alternate-history scenarios, Impossible Histories, and those who read it say they like it, even behind my back; even people who don’t like me, such as Library Journal; and you may like it too. If you hate even a whiff of non-fiction, perhaps try instead Sudden Glory, a “really funny, bonkers satirical philosophical novel about life in NYC in the early 2000s, American masculinity, sex, and the epistemological state of masking/closetedness” (according to an online review from a strange that I liked).]

Peredeus

Sometimes there’s no escape for you and you’re just screwed, like a film noir protagonist. History is filled with examples of people in just such a predicament, and ahistory is even more filled with examples, insofar as people are screwed all the time and no one even bothers to write it down. You’re born into a crummy situation you can never escape, and then you die in pain before you even get to try, and these lives do not even get recorded.

But sometimes such a life does get recorded; and if there is also recorded in that life one moment of striving against the current as it drowns that sorry soul—I don’t know if courage is the right word, but I lift my hat to it.

Take the story of Peredeus, a sixth-century Lombard warrior. Peredeus would have had a fine life, or at least a fine life for a Lombard, feasting and fighting and slaying Romans, except he had a lover among the handmaidens of the king, and the king had a queen who was up to tricks.

Queen Rosamund had herself a fine reason to be up to tricks. Alboin, king of the Lombards, had fallen in love with her (at first sight, quite naturally) when he was a mere prince, and she a princess of the Gepids. Alboin was the kind of romantic hero that would fall in love at first sight, and who would vow to have the fair Rosamund as his wife, a vow made challenging by the enmity between Lombard and Gepid. As befits romantic heroes, Alboin let no obstacle stand in the way of his love. War with the Gepids! and the now-King Alboin slew King Cunimund, Rosamund’s father, perhaps with his own hand, and made her his bride.

Events from the sixth-century tend to come to us filtered through legend or romance, and perhaps our chroniclers are irresponsible in ascribing such romantic motivations to Alboin. Perhaps no one, not even he, was quite so enamored of the match, a marriage of treaty of convenience. And how did Rosamund feel?

Perhaps as a sixth-century princess you come to accept that your fate may be the bed of your father’s murderer. But Alboin, in true barbaric custom, had had the skull of King Cunimund made into a drinking cup. Again, Rosamond may have been resigned to such things; but then Alboin, passing toasts around, compelled, one night, his wife publicly to drink from her father’s own skull. “Carry this goblet to the queen, and request in my name that she would rejoice with her father,” Gibbon has Alboin proclaim, and indeed the queen drinks. But that, apparently, was too much. Rosamond began plotting.

The king had a trusted armor-bearer (and foster-brother, some sources say) named Helmichis, and Rosamond seduced him, first to the prosaic sin and thence to the somewhat more unusual desire of assassinating the king. Hey! Rosamond and Helmichis could rule the Lombards together!

Helmichis was down with the first part of this seduction, the sex part, but had a few issues with the second, chiefly that King Alboin, being a romantic hero, would be really hard to assassinate. Could Helmichis accomplish the feat alone? Probably not, and then where would that leave either of them, but especially Helmichis?

And this is where Peredeus comes in.

Peredeus had no desire to assassinate anyone, let alone his king. He just wanted to sleep with his girlfriend and then go out and kill people who were not King Alboin, Lombard-style. But he was big and tough and perhaps freakishly strong and perhaps looked like the kind of guy who could kill King Alboin, if such killing were to be on the menu. And could was good enough for Rosamond.

Somehow (and doubtless being a queen helps in these circumstances) Rosamond learned of a coming assignation between Peredeus and his paramour, and contrived to substitute herself in the bed, in the dark, until it was, as one might say, too late.

Tricking someone into having sex with you is the kind of thing that is frowned upon in these post-Revenge of the Nerds days, but compared to the other crimes in our tale, let alone the SOP for the sixth century, it seems a mere peccadillo. Peredeus would doubtless have been annoyed, at least, in any event, but here was something worse: If you have sex with the queen, even by accident, the king will be displeased. Did you really want to displease King Alboin?

Ah, but who’s going to tell?

And yet it was perfectly clear who was going to tell. Peredeus had but one opportunity to save his own life, and that was: Kill Alboin first.

Perhaps it was an awkward moment when Rosamond introduced Peredeus to Helmichis, but the two fellows got along well enough to arm themselves, gird their loins, and sneak, with Rosamond’s contrivance, into the king’s bedroom, where, again with Rosamond’s contrivance, the king was incredibly drunk, unconscious, and quite alone. Still not an easy killing: Alboin leaped out of bed, as befits a romantic hero, before anyone could just gack him in his sleep, but his sword had been quite thoroughly fastened into its scabbard (Rosamond’s contrivance), and if the chair he hoisted to defend himself with, lion-tamer style, would have held off Helmichis, it was not going to work against stout Peredeus. So falls King Alboin.

And that should have been it, right? Peredeus could bow to the new king and queen and return to his previous life of garden-variety Lombardizing. Unfortunately, the Lombards were either undeceived or unforgiving; however the palace coup was being sold to them, the Lombards would not have it. Rosamond and Helmichis fled ignominiously, and Peredeus, himself compelled to flee, too, and lacking the options royals had, went with them. The three made it to the nearby city of Ravenna, where the Byzantine exarch, Longinus, welcomed Rosamond, at least. She had with her a daughter (scion of the house Alboin), some surviving Gepids, and a whole lot of Lombard treasure. Perhaps Longinus saw opportunity in these things, opportunity to divide the loyalties of the Lombards and (always a Byzantine goal) reconquer or rereconquer Italy. Perhaps he was merely, as Alboin had been before him, smitten with the beautiful Rosamond. In any event Longinus proposed that he might marry the queen-in-exile.

Another roller coaster turn of fortune for Rosamond! But there was the pickle that she was already contracted to marry Helmichis, if she had not hastily married him already. Perhaps it will be hard to justify her next decision, which was to murder the de trop Helmichis—but after all, he did help kill her husband. This time, though, she’d take care of the autowidowing herself, with poison. Helmichis naively drank down the brew she handed him, but…he must have suspected something was amiss. Maybe the draught tasted funny? Maybe Rosamond was acting squirrelly? Maybe Helmichis began ruminating on the last time he saw Rosamond holding a drinking cup, and the whole fallout from that. Before the poison could take effect, he forced Rosamond to imbibe as well. And so they both died.

But this is not the story of Rosamond or Helmichis. They had plenty of options! No one made them kill anyone, let alone each other. This is the story of Peredeus, who, of no use to Longinus, was sent back east to Constantinople. There he impressed the Byzantines with his freakish strength, killing a lion (perhaps in an arena? my sources are vague); but the Emperor Justin II, wary of a regicide of such prodigious power wandering around the city, had Peredeus blinded.

Perhaps our hero had a moment to think of what he could have done differently. Perhaps he should not have killed that lion? And yet generally if one refuses to kill a lion one is oneself killed. As with lions, so with Alboins. It’s hard to spot the offramp from this destiny. And now Peredeus, like Samson, was eyeless in a strange land.

But Peredeus still had fight in him. He requested an audience with the Emperor Justin. Secrets of the Lombards, perhaps, for imperial ears only. Concealing two daggers in his cloak, Peredeus allowed himself to be led to the imperial presence. There were two figures by the throne, and a blind Peredeus could not tell which one was Justin. No problem for a man like Peredeus; had he not two daggers?; he killed them both.

Unfortunately for Peredeus, a paranoid Justin had sent not one but two impostors in his imperial stead. Two Byzantine nobles died that day, but Justin lived another six years or so. What happened to Peredeus is unrecorded but was probably unpleasant.

But he gave it his best shot. “Life wears an iron iris,” Rosamond colorfully if somewhat cryptically tells Peredeus (in George Sterling’s Rosamund, a Dramatic Poem (1920)), and sometimes an iron iris is all you get.

(Almost all of this is from Gibbon, with help from Charles Morris’s Historical Tales. I assume almost none of this actually happened, but I didn’t make any of it up.)