Written in History Read online

  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

  Abram Hannibal to Peter the Great, 5 March 1722

  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.