The historian who plays cricket for Croatia
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Dr. Peter Frankopan likes to compare studying the Byzantine period to opening up the best toy box you can imagine; “There are so few people with the language skills to be able to read these texts,” he told a journalist from the Telegraph. The acclaimed historian works at Oxford University, where he is Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research.
Frankopan’s love of languages has old roots. He remembers his first Russian class with an eccentric teacher in his school. The man said, ‘You don’t need me to teach you vocabulary. What I really need to teach you is how to understand a language, so you’ve got to learn the songs of their peasants.’ When the man burst out singing, Frankopan says:“I fell hook, line and sinker for Russian literature and Russian history.”
He grew up in London – but his family spent a lot of time in Italy, Germany, Austria and Sweden, and as children they were encouraged to switch between languages. “That was one of the luckiest things – we were able not only to understand different languages, but to know that things mean different things to different people,” he says.
Today, Dr. Frankopan is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Arts, the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the Royal Asiatic Society. He works on the history of the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Persia, Central Asia and beyond, and on relations between Christianity and Islam.
He also specializes in Medieval Greek literature, and translated ‘The Alexiad’ by Anna Komnene – an imperial princess – written in the 12th century for Penguin Classics (2009). “The Alexiad [written around 1148] is the nectar that got me stuck into being an academic – I discovered it at Cambridge as I was finishing my PhD,” he says. “It’s beautiful and because of the playfulness and the puns, you need to work quite hard to work out what she’s saying. But because it is written by a woman, it has been totally ignored.”
His book ‘The First Crusade: The Call from the East’ (2012), which has been referred to as a “groundbreaking book, countering nearly a millennium of scholarship” revealing the untold history of the First Crusade was published in 2012, and since has been translated into Polish, Dutch and Italian.
A famously nifty dresser, Frankopan has royal lineage. “I come from a family that has been on the coast of Croatia since before 1200. But my father came here at the end of the Second World War, effectively as a refugee, so while it’s nice having lineage and grandeur and titles [Frankopan’s title is Prince], it doesn’t really count,” he says.
But there is one thing he is very proud of: playing cricket for Croatia when he was the president of the Croatian Cricket Federation. “That’s the achievement I’m proudest of – playing cricket for my country,” he says, explaining that cricket has been played in Croatia for 200 years because during the Napoleonic wars the British had a naval squadron on the island of Vis – where his family has land – and the sailors would come ashore to play cricket.
He also plays cricket for a team called The Authors, founded by JM Barrie and Conan Doyle. In 2012 when in India, they were taken to meet Sachin Tendulkar’s batmaker. “It was like an episode of Mr Benn– down an alleyway in Mumbai, you open two doors and a guy appears from nowhere,” says Frankopan. “He had thousands of bats and just looked at me, picked one off the shelf and told me, ‘You bat like this, you tend to do that.’ It was like he could read my mind.”