I have no complaints about my name, but it is very common. It was near the top of most popular boys’ names for quite a few years when I was born before falling out of fashion (and, as these things tend to, lately starting to resurge). There must be a dozen other Michaels at my gym alone including a couple other “Michael S” and even another “Dr Mike” (a chiro). As a doctor for newborns, I see lots & lots of baby names. There’s far more variety these days than when your mom & I were born. We wanted you to have a relatively unique name with an interesting historical backstory. I hope you like it and don’t tire too much of explaining it to people over the years.
Thoughtful Counsel
Tancred comes from the Germanic languages that swirled around Europe during the period of the great migrations in the waning days of the Western Roman Empire. It comes from thank- (thought) and -rath (counsel), and so it means “thoughtful counsel”. This was a big appeal to your mom. Thoughtfulness in others is very important to her (and to me). We have no doubt you’ll live up to your name on that front.
The First Tancred, History’s Greatest Dad
The earliest Tancred I’ve found is the elder Tancred d’Hauteville. Very little is known about him, but he must have a strong claim to being the extraordinary father in human history. By the time he was born around 980, his Norman ancestors can only have been settled in what’s now French Normandy for a couple generations, so, genetically at least, he was very much a Viking. (Your great-grandmother on my dad’s side was Norwegian. Apart from being blonde, she didn’t exactly have a Viking’s look or demeanor. But we loved her very much and feel justified in claiming Viking heritage.) Though a man of some means, Tancred was far from the top of his very stratified society. A rough modern analogue might be the mayor of a small city. He was perhaps an acquaintance but nowhere near a peer of the powerful Dukes of Normandy.
As a man of modest means, the family of Tancred Senior faced a conundrum. With his first wife Muriella, he had 5 sons and 1 daughter. When she passed, he, too dutiful to philander out of wedlock but too human to remain celibate, married Fressenda with whom he had 7 more sons and probably just as many daughters. According to Medieval custom, his daughters would be supported by their eventual husbands, but that left Tancred’s modest means to support 12 sons. The ambitious d’Hauteville boys realized they were going to have to forge paths for themselves.
And wow, did they ever. In those days, what’s now Italy was a messy patchwork of small, independent political units of various flavors. (Indeed, that description would apply until the controversial Italian unification in 1860 – more on this to come.) William (later known as “Iron Arm”, a pretty cool nickname IMO), Drogo, Humphrey, Robert (later known as “Guiscard” – meaning the sly or the fox) & Roger made their way to Southern Italy with little more than their swords & the chain mail on their backs. To make a living, they rented themselves out as mercenaries to local power brokers. They must have had some serious hustle. In a few years, the d’Hauteville boys were rulers of all southern Italy. Roger’s son, Roger II, even got himself crowned King of Sicily on the authority of the Pope himself and extended his rule so far north to include the territory of modern Abruzzo where your grandmother was born. Restless even after all that, Roberto il Guiscardo as he was known in proto-Italian earned the even more fierce nickname of “Terror Mundi” (“Terror of the World” in Latin) by nonchalantly invading the Byzantine Empire, superpower of the day and direct successor state of the ancient Roman Empire. His son Bohemond accompanied the Fox on that campaign and, years later after earning legendary status with his exploits in the First Crusade, had his own crack at the Byzantines. They didn’t quite topple the empire but came close enough to frighten the Byzantines into dramatic policy shifts in the century to come. Indeed, that first invasion of Guiscardo had a tremendous influence on the First Crusade a few years later, of which more to come.
As the English can attest, Norman conquests were the fashion in the 11th century. What astonished me when I first heard the story was how little the d’Hautevilles started with. Their fellow Norman William conquered England at the head of some 10,000 heavily armed troops. Anna Komnene, daughter of the Byzantine Emperor and major chronicler of the age, was similarly astonished as she noted Roberto and his brothers arrived in Italy with just 30 followers. I dream of someday writing a novel about what life could have been like in Tancred Senior’s household. How did he – and his wives who must have been quite formidable as well – groom such an extraordinary brood? Tancredi, while I don’t necessarily wish you or your brother will conquer Italy, I hope I can impart something of the d’Hauteville spirit of self improvement on you.
Great Grandson Tancred & The First Crusade
More famous than Tancred Senior was his great grandson Tancred. His was the first of this this unique and remarkable sounding name to strike me via a podcast on the Crusades. This Tancred was son of Roberto Guiscardo’s daughter Emma. He earned his spurs in his early 20s by accompanying his Uncle Bohemond on the First Crusade. (Though the term “Crusade” was a much later invention during the morally fraught Crusade against the so-called Cathars and only applied retrospectively Tancred’s crew.) When Uncle stayed behind after completing the epic siege of Antioch, Tancred continued with the main force and claimed to be first Crusader into Jerusalem on 15 July 1099. While the subsequent violence of the sack of the city is nothing to be proud of, perhaps even by the standards of his day, to his credit, he is said to have tried to protect a group of civilians sheltering in the Temple of Solomon. Thereafter, the young Tancred was a fixture of the early Crusader Kingdoms. In addition to being Prince of Galilee, the region where Jesus grew up, he was regent of Edessa and, while his uncle took his 2nd crack at Byzantium, of the integral fortress of Antioch. For his efforts, he landed that accessory so essential to Medieval warlords, a hagiography in Latin. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a physical description of Tancred therein, but Anna Komnene gives us details about Uncle Bohemond:
The sight of him inspired admiration…his stature was such that he towered almost a full cubit over the tallest men. He was slender of waist and flanks, with broad shoulders and chest…he was neither taper of form nor heavily built and fleshy, but perfectly proportioned… The skin all over his body was very white, except for his face which was both white and red… His hair was lightish-brown… Whether his beard was red or of any other colour I cannot say, for the razor had attacked it, leaving his chin smoother than any marble. However, it appeared to be red. His eyes were light-blue and gave some hint of the man’s spirit and dignity. — The Alexiad, translated by ERA Sewter
It’s worth keeping in mind that Anna was casting Bohemond as her father’s archnemesis, so perhaps his look was not quite this dramatic. But she surely would have met Bohemond and likely Tancred when the First Crusade passed through Constantinople. Vikings were no strangers to the Byzantine court, thanks in part to the Varangian Guard which dated from the reign of Basil II (for whom your canine big brother is named), but their foreign looks still made quite an impression.
Still famous 500 years later, the romantic adventures of a highly fictionalized Tancredi became the central character of Torquato Tasso’s epic poem La Gerusalemme Liberata (where “liberated” is a rather polite description for the historical sack of Jerusalem).
Remixed for the Romantic Era
It seems to be this highly embellished Tancredi who became the focus of art in the capital “R” Romantic period of the 19th century when Medieval revivals became highly fashionable. Thus, a Tancredi vaguely like the historical Prince appears in Walter Scott’s Count Robert of Paris (1832) and Ben Disraeli’s Tancred, or the New Crusade (1847). Though a decent novelist, Disraeli, of course, was considerably more famous as Queen Victoria’s favorite British Prime Minister and great rival of Gladstone. In my dad’s generation, he was perhaps more famous for the Cream (Eric Clapton) album Disraeli Gears, which I still remember listening to on the flight to India in 2005 and then factored into my wild mefloquine dream prophesying the death of Rosa Parks the night of 23 Oct.
A Tancrede with no real connection to the historical one was the titular hero of a play by Voltaire in 1760. Italianized back to Tancredi, he made Rossini’s career in opera in 1813. Today, Rossini’s work is far more famous, even among people who have no idea who he is, for Largo al Factotum from The Barber of Seville. That’s 1 of the 2 main arias I’ve been singing with your brother (Mozart’s extraordinary Non piu andrai is the other).
Before your brother was born, I had hoped to speak enough Italian to raise him to be bilingual. I soon realized my Italian was just not good enough. Indeed, it has been a struggle even with Spanish which I speak much better, but I hope both of you will reap the benefits someday. As part of my Italian efforts, however, I started reading Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo in the original Italian. It tells the story of the vast social upheavals of that 1860 Italian unification, by then with the perspective of the Kingdom of Italy’s fraught experiments with African empire and two devastating world wars. In it, the young, galant Tancredi Falconeri is a central character. His uncle Prince Fabrizio of Sicily greatly admires him even when he goes off to fight with the Garibaldini, ostensibly against the ancien regime the Prince represents. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but the way the Prince compares the imminently capable Tancredi with his own rather feckless sons echoes that of King Henry with his wayward Prince Harry and the fearsome Hotspur in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1, the 2nd book I read to you in the NICU (after my favorite Hamlet, of course).
Still less than 2 months after you were born, we’ve already had our share of adventures trying to get your name spelled and pronounced right. Having a long a unusual name herself, your mother can certainly empathize. Whatever adventures await you, Son, I hope your name will be a source of pride or at least interesting anecdotes. However our choice holds up over the decades to come, we certainly put a great deal of thought into it and hope you like it.
Other Name Candidates
Your mom & I went through a lot of potential names before settling on Tancredi. Here’s a partial and growing list for the archive:
- Thurston: I was a big fan of this one. Comes from the Old Norse Thor’s stone. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. Belle didn’t like the allusion to the stuffy Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island. I can’t imagine many people in 2050 will remember that reference, but as your mom would have been one of them, it got scratched.
- Byron: George Gordon Lord Byron inspires mixed feelings. He was quite the rogue even for his day and by far the most popular poet of the time. His daughter Ada Lovelace was a pioneer of computer engineering. Apparently the name just means “cow”. We love cows – your brother’s favorite book is “Dices Mu?” and your puppy siblings love shouting at cows, especially on trips to Duncan’s Mill, CA. But just “cow” didn’t make the cut.
- Winston: We thought it a cool sounding name, but it’s one of those with a solitary, titanic historical figure attached. Hard not to make the comparison to a man with a complex history. A fascinating history! The story of his capture and escape in the Boer War is maybe even more riveting than his role in WWII.
- Zephyr: Means “west wind” in Latin. Not sure how your mom came up with this one.
- Beethoven: Probably our favorite composer and another hero of the Romantic age. I love that he dedicated “Heroica” to Napoleon…then scratched it out. Not quite first name material.
