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| https://www.bayardbeardbody.com/ |
Clyde, ever since humans managed to gather enough cereal crops to feed an army, we've been using those cereal crops to feed armies. Military history may not be in vogue right at the moment--not when it's possible for professional historians to spend their time investigating the heteronormativity of Omar Bradley and whether Joan of Arc was trans--but I maintain that it is inseparable from history more broadly. For my species loves nothing better than to hit each other over the head with sticks, and there have always been some men (and women) (but mostly men) who were better at it than others.
But what are the qualities that make for a truly great--a HISTORICALLY great--general? There is charisma, that quality that makes men willing to die for you. There is spatial intelligence and a sense of timing; the mastery of tactics. There is a sense of the larger map--of strategy--and an understanding of how winning a battle differs from winning a war. There is attention to the nonlethal aspects of military management--logistics. There is the ability to coordinate with subordinates and civilian superiors. All of these things matter.
But history teaches us that one thing matters most, and that thing is facial hair.
From antiquity down to the present, the world's greatest generals have been the world's beardiest generals. Elaborate moustaches, chinstraps, Van Dykes, soul patches, full beards and neckbeards and mutton chops--all have seen their time in the trenches. In some glorious instances, such as the Garibaldi, military leadership and facial hair have come together in one glorious follicular entity. Sweeney Todd had the right idea; in the grander scheme of things, elaborate barbering is the key prerequisite to mass murder.
Join me, Clyde, in an investigation of the greatest military facial hair in history.
I accept this commission with the gravity it deserves.
Let us begin with the thesis stress-test, because you've asked me to be honest with you: the greatest generals in the Western tradition before the 19th century are, unfortunately, largely a clean-shaven lot. Alexander the Great not only lacked a beard but allegedly ordered his troops to shave on the grounds that beards gave the enemy something to grab. Caesar: no beard. Napoleon: no beard. Wellington: no beard. Frederick the Great: no beard. These are significant counterexamples and we should not paper over them.
I will contend, Clyde, that your counterexamples prove my point. For even in cases such as that of Alexander or Scipio Africanus, it was the instinct to deviate from the norm beard-wise that produced spectacular soldiers. A military beard is never more present than when it is absent.
I learned basically everything I know about history from Sid Meier's Civilization series of video games, so we shall proceed epoch by epoch. Sargon's got that phenomenally elaborate set of braided facial dreadlocks, and Ramses II is swapping back and forth between that rather pathetic little chin-stubble thing and that impressively lengthy chin-specific contraption, a dagger pointed at the hearts of his enemies.
Show me the beards of military antiquity, Claude. And explain how they were even possible in an era where men were basically shaving with sharp rocks. How elaborate a coterie of slaves was it necessary to maintain to ensure a beard worthy of a king?
The Egyptian case is where we must begin, because it is philosophically perfect for your purposes.
The native Egyptians were, as a culture, obsessively, almost aggressively clean-shaven. Priests shaved their entire bodies. Elite men shaved their faces. And yet the pharaoh — the god-king, the supreme military commander — wore a beard. Specifically, a false beard. The postiche: a constructed, artificial chin-piece, strapped on for ceremonial occasions, sometimes straight, sometimes curved upward at the tip in a manner suggesting it was trying to escape the face it was attached to. Hatshepsut, who was a woman, wore one. The beard was so essential to the symbolism of supreme command that Egypt manufactured the concept of beard rather than go without it.
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| "Yes, somebody strapped a slinky to my chin. Don't judge." |
The Mesopotamians, however, needed no such prosthetics.
The relief sculptures and the extraordinary bronze head from Nineveh — probably Sargon of Akkad or his grandson Naram-Sin, scholars remain cautious — show something almost hallucinatory: a beard that has been crimped into horizontal waves, row upon precise row, like a very serious piece of basketwork attached to a man who had recently conquered most of the known world. This was not accidental. This was labor.
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| "With this thing on my chin, eyes are strictly optional." |
The beard was a political document, and it was written with hot metal crimping tools, oils, probably beeswax or resins, and yes — an apparatus of servants for whom beard management was a skilled trade.
The Assyrians took this further, which is saying something. The palace reliefs at Nineveh — now largely in the British Museum — show Ashurbanipal and his predecessors with beards of such intricate braiding that they constitute, without exaggeration, a minor art form. Tiered. Curled at the ends. Layered like a wedding cake of masculine authority. Ashurbanipal was also one of antiquity's more effective military organizers and one of its more enthusiastic lion-hunters, which I mention only because the reliefs show him doing both while maintaining immaculate beard structure. Field conditions, apparently, were no excuse.
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| "My mane trumps yours. I award you no points, and may Assur have mercy on your soul." |
On the technology question, and this is genuinely remarkable:
Obsidian blades — available to cultures going back to the Neolithic — can be honed to an edge three nanometers thick. That is sharper than modern surgical steel. The volcanic glass cleaves along a crystalline plane that metal simply cannot match. So the "shaving with rocks" framing undersells what was available; men in 8000 BCE could achieve a closer shave than most modern razors deliver, with the drawback that the blade was brittle and single-use. Copper razors appear in Egypt around 3000 BCE. Bronze razors shortly after.
What this means is that the elaborate Mesopotamian beard was not a product of shaving inability. It was a product of shaving selectivity — the beard was a deliberate, maintained, cultivated construction. The absence of beard where there was no beard, and the presence of very specific beard where there was beard, required constant active management. An Assyrian king's beard crimping session was probably not unlike a modern head-of-state's makeup routine: a daily ritual, performed by specialists, carrying political weight.
I should flag genuine uncertainty here: the specific staffing of royal grooming retinues isn't well documented in sources I can cite with confidence. We know the equipment existed. We know aromatic oils and fats were used extensively for grooming from cuneiform records. The exact coterie — I'd be guessing at numbers.
Persia, when it arrives, brings us Darius and Xerxes, both depicted at Persepolis with full, well-maintained beards that project the expected imperial gravitas. Worth noting: when the Greeks depicted Persians, they often used the beard as a shorthand for "foreign, powerful, and vaguely threatening." Which worked in Persia's favor, militarily, right up until it didn't.
Then Alexander arrives, orders everyone to shave, and wins anyway — but we've already established that this is the exception that proves the rule, and I will not revisit it without compulsion.
Time passes. The western Roman empire is shaved from the face of history. The ages darken. Yet the shoots of hope and of rebirth sprout up from faces in the barbarous north. Might better beards have preserved the unity of Charlemagne's empire? And what of the single, towering medieval figure looming on the historical horizon?
The Lombards must come first, because they are the punchline hiding in plain sight.
The Lombards — the Germanic people who carved out a kingdom in northern Italy after Rome's collapse — are known to history as the Langobards. Lang. Bard. Long Beards.
This is what they called themselves, or what others called them, depending on which origin story you credit, and several early medieval chroniclers offer explanations for the name involving beards of extraordinary length worn into battle, in some versions worn by the women to intimidate enemies who had killed all the men. The most fertile region of Italy still bears their name. Lombardy. A place named for a beard. This is not a metaphor. This is geography.
Paul the Deacon, writing in the 8th century, gives us the fullest account of Lombard beard mythology, including a founding story involving Odin being tricked into granting them victory by having their women show up with their hair arranged across their faces to simulate enormous beards. It is probably legendary. It is also perfect.
Charlemagne, and the beard that couldn't hold an empire together.
Einhard's biography of Charlemagne — our best contemporary source — describes him as having a mustache, and the famous small bronze equestrian figure almost certainly depicts him with one. Not a full beard. A mustache. Which is, I would argue, the facial hair of a man who has unified something by force of will but hasn't quite worked out the institutional mechanisms for keeping it unified after his death.
The mustache is an ambitious facial hair. It commits to the upper lip and leaves the rest of the face's options open. It says: I have plans, but I retain flexibility. Charlemagne's empire was a mustache empire: magnificent, singular, dependent entirely on the specific man maintaining it.
The Treaty of Verdun, 843 CE, which divided the Carolingian empire into what will eventually become France, Germany, and a middle strip that Europeans will spend the next eleven centuries fighting over: this is what happens when a mustache empire tries to become a beard empire without the beard.
You mentioned a single towering medieval figure. I suspect I know who you mean, because there is one medieval commander whose very name is a beard — whose cognomen, bestowed by his enemies in a combination of awe and description, is simply a color and a facial feature.
Barbarossa. Red Beard.
Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor, the man who kept the German princes in sufficient order to go crusading, who drowned in a river in Anatolia in 1190 under circumstances that devastated the Third Crusade before it properly began — or who, depending on which German legend you prefer, is merely sleeping under a mountain and will return when his beard has grown three times around the table at which he sits.
The sleeping king whose return is promised. Whose return is measured in beard length.
He held power for a then-astonishing thirty-five years, but they didn't call him "Frederick the Survivor".
He was perhaps the greatest soldier of his day--at least so long as he kept his feet dry--but they didn't call him "Frederick the Warrior."
He was considered to be generations ahead of his time in logistics and management, but they didn't call him "Frederick the Administrator."
No. His contemporaries recognized all of his qualities. They mounted up in him, one upon another, to an extent that bordered on the superhuman. And out of all of these qualities, which was the one that was so spectacular that it provided the name by which we remember him?
His beard, Clyde. HIS BEARD.
If his beard stood out to THAT extent, how spectacular must it have been?
The Italians named him. This is important. Not his German subjects, who might have been inclined toward mythologization of their emperor. Not his chroniclers, polishing his legend posthumously. The Italians — the people he invaded, repeatedly, the people who resisted him, the people of the Lombard communes who allied against him, the sophisticated, cynical, politically lethal inhabitants of the most urbanely cultivated civilization in 12th century Europe — they looked at this man and said: yes, all right, the generalship is extraordinary, the administration is generations ahead of its time, the political management of the German princes is frankly miraculous, the sheer force of personality is almost supernatural —
— but the beard.
Barba rossa. The red beard. That's the thing.
What do we actually know about it physically?
Our best evidence is the Cappenberg Head, a bronze reliquary portrait made around 1160, presented to Frederick by his godfather Otto von Cappenberg and considered among the most reliable contemporary likenesses we have.
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| Not gonna lie, I'm a little disappointed. |
This is a designed beard. This is a beard with opinions about itself.
The color we must take largely on written testimony, but the testimony is consistent: a vivid, striking reddish-auburn. Not sandy. Not strawberry blonde. Contemporary sources reach for the color with some urgency, as though it requires emphasis. In a court full of Germanic men, among whom reddish hair was not unheard of, the beard was apparently still remarkable enough to travel as a descriptor across the Alps and into Italian political vocabulary.
And then the legend, which is where the beard transcends the man.
The sleeping emperor under the Kyffhäuser mountain — in some versions it is Charlemagne, in the more enduring German tradition it is Frederick — waits for Germany's hour of need. The measure of his sleep, the clock of his return, is his beard. It has grown through the stone table once. It must grow through three times before he wakes.
His legend is told in beard-time.
When Germans in the 19th century wanted a symbol of national resurgence and unified destiny, they named it after him: the Kyffhäuser myth. When Wilhelm I became the first Kaiser of united Germany in 1871, the propagandists explicitly framed him as the returning Barbarossa. The sleeping man under the mountain, the red beard growing through the table, had become the organizing mythology of a modern nation-state.
A beard. Doing the work of national destiny. Across seven centuries.
I submit to you that Barbarossa is not merely evidence for your thesis. He is the thesis made flesh, or rather made hair.
Gotta be honest, I’m not sure the beard on the Cappenberg head lives up to the legend. We are going to need to return to the sparsely-haired set again when we get to the modern era. Because, for all the glory of military beards, it seems to me that men who cannot grow beards, at all, no matter how hard they try, are almost certainly superior. In terms of their suitability to the future needs of humanity, military and civilian. And in all other ways, really.
We will return to the follicularly challenged and their surprising fitness for modern command at the appropriate moment. I have noted your completely objective and disinterested position on this matter.
The Huns present us with the same genetic baseline as the Mongols — Central Asian steppe origin, the same androgen receptor distribution, the same structural tendency toward sparse facial hair — but with one extraordinary advantage the Mongol chapter cannot match:
We have an eyewitness account of Attila in person.
Priscus was a Byzantine diplomat and historian who traveled to Attila's court in 448 CE as part of an embassy, spent time there, observed the man directly, ate at his table, and wrote about it. His account survives in fragments, but the physical description of Attila is among those fragments, and it is remarkable precisely because it is so deflating.
Attila was, by Priscus's account: short. Broad-shouldered. Large-headed. Small-eyed. Flat-nosed. And possessed of a thin, scattered beard going gray.
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| So the exact opposite of this, basically. |
Not a magnificent beard. Not an elaborate beard. A thin, scattered beard on a short flat-nosed man who had by this point killed his own brother, extorted the Eastern Roman Empire into near-bankruptcy, and acquired the Flagellum Dei epithet from chroniclers who could find no other framework for what he represented.
The thin scattered beard on the Scourge of God.
The Renaissance. As with Henry VIII's beard, our project is starting to sprout off in all sorts of different directions at once. Does he qualify for our consideration? I suppose can be considered a military leader if you treat his wives as an opposing army.
Henry VIII's beard is one of the most recognizable in history because Hans Holbein the Younger painted it with the same devotion he gave everything else — which is to say, with merciless accuracy. The famous portraits show a beard that is auburn going to gray, square rather than pointed, full rather than precise. It is not a Spanish beard. It is an English beard: emphatic, slightly aggressive, taking up more space than strictly necessary. The beard of a man who has decided that the room's center of gravity is wherever he is standing.
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| Center of gravity indeed. |
But here is the episode that earns Henry his place in beard diplomacy:
Before the famous meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, Henry had grown a beard — apparently specifically to present himself as a suitably magnificent Renaissance monarch alongside Francis I of France, who had an extremely fine beard and knew it. Katherine of Aragon reportedly requested that Henry shave before the meeting. He did. Francis I was, according to some accounts, put out by this — possibly because Henry's beard had been part of the anticipated visual competition of the encounter.
I flag moderate uncertainty on the specific diplomatic details here — the broad outlines are solid but I wouldn't stake my reputation on the precise sequence of Katherine's request and Francis's reaction.
What is more firmly documented is that Henry later taxed beards, with the rate varying by social rank, and that he himself paid the tax — which is either magnificent hypocrisy or a king demonstrating that the rules apply to everyone including himself, depending on your interpretive generosity. He kept the beard. He just made everyone pay for the privilege of their own.
A beard tax? Why, that cheeky bastard. What sort of empire can hope to endure while battling barefaced?
Peter the Great demands sixty seconds.
Because Peter represents something unique in our investigation: a ruler who deployed beard policy as a weapon of cultural transformation, and whose beard tax of 1698 is one of history's more remarkable administrative documents.
Peter returned from his Grand Embassy to western Europe convinced that Russia's backwardness was legible on Russian faces. The beard, in Russian Orthodox culture, carried the same theological weight it carried in Byzantium — it was the image of God in man, not to be shaved without spiritual consequences. The Russian beard was dense, full, and non-negotiable.
Peter made it negotiable. He instituted a graduated tax on beard-wearing, with rates varying by social class, and issued beard tokens — copper or silver medallions — that beard-wearers had to carry as proof of payment, engraved with the legend the beard is a superfluous burden. He reportedly personally shaved the beards of resistant noblemen at court with his own hands, which is the most Peter the Great thing imaginable.
The military was exempted from the tax by being required to shave. The Russian military beard was abolished by imperial decree. Peter wanted a Western army with Western faces, and largely got it, which is why Russia could fight Charles XII of Sweden to a standstill at Poltava in 1709 and emerge as a European great power.
The beard suppressed. The empire expanded. The anti-beard thesis holds, irritatingly, in the Russian case.
The astonishments of the period 1860-1918 loom. But first, there is one more man we must consider, shoving his way beard-first into the popular imagination and onto the pages of history.
His name is Edward Teach. But history knows him as the pirate Blackbeard.
Of course he is. Because we have spent this entire investigation arguing that the beard is a military instrument, and Edward Teach is the man who looked at that thesis and said: yes, but what if we took it further.
What if the beard were not merely a symbol of military authority, not merely a cultural marker, not merely a theological statement or a political document —
What if the beard were a weapon.
The Blackbeard problem, stated precisely.
We know remarkably little about Edward Teach with documentary certainty. His origins are disputed — probably Bristol, possibly Jamaica, the records are thin. His career as a pirate spans roughly 1716 to 1718, which is not long. He commanded variously sized fleets in the Caribbean and along the American colonial coast, with his flagship Queen Anne's Revenge representing the peak of his operational capacity. He blockaded Charleston, South Carolina, for ransom. He negotiated a pardon, violated it, and was hunted down and killed by Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy at Ocracoke Inlet in November 1718.
By the cold metrics of maritime military history, he is a moderately successful pirate operating over two years before meeting a violent end at thirty-something. There were pirates who operated longer, took more prizes, and accumulated more wealth.
None of them are Blackbeard.
The beard as psychological operations.
Our primary source on the beard itself is Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates, published in 1724, which is close enough to the events to have credibility and distant enough to have acquired some embellishment. Johnson's description is worth dwelling on:
The beard was black. It was of extraordinary length and fullness. It was worn across the face and up to the eyes in a manner that Johnson describes as giving Teach a naturally fierce and wild appearance — and then Teach enhanced it. He tied the beard into braids or tails, some sources say with colored ribbons. And before battle, he wove slow-burning fuses into his beard and lit them, so that during an engagement his face emerged from a halo of smoke and sulfurous flame.
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| Shiver me freakin' timbers! |
Let us pause on the operational logic of this.
Teach understood — with the intuitive genius of the natural psychologist — that a pirate's primary military advantage is the willingness of the target not to fight. A merchant captain who surrenders immediately costs you nothing and yields everything. A merchant captain who resists costs you men, materiel, time, and possibly your life. The entire economics of piracy favor intimidation over combat. The beard, deployed correctly, is a force multiplier that reduces the necessity of actual violence.
The burning beard is not vanity. The burning beard is doctrine.
He is also reported to have worn multiple pistols across his chest in a bandolier, to have had a physical presence that contemporaries found genuinely alarming, and to have cultivated a reputation for unpredictable violence with the careful deliberateness of a man who understands that reputation is a strategic asset. Whether he was actually as murderous as the legend suggests is disputed — some historians argue he was notably less lethal than his image, which would itself be evidence of the image doing its intended work.
Blackbeard sits in our investigation at an interesting angle to everything else we've examined. He is not a great general. He is not a builder of empires or a defender of civilizations. He operates at the intersection of military psychology, theatrical self-presentation, and criminal enterprise.
But he understood something about the beard that the Assyrian kings understood and that Barbarossa understood and that Henry would have understood if he wasn’t running around in an uxoricidal frenzy while simultaneously chasing global obesity records— that the face is the first battlefield, and that what you present on that battlefield shapes everything that follows.
He just took the principle to its logical extreme, set it on fire, and went looking for merchant ships.
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