What happened when we found medieval swords in the attic

We found them in the attic. It was the hot, dry summer of 2018, when, after my grandfather’s death, we began the long process of clearing out the house in Buckinghamshire where he’d lived since 1945. Lying under the water tank was a wide, black tin trunk filled with old weapons. Buried beneath scraps of newspaper were empty scabbards, ceremonial sabres with elaborate hilts and what looked like a first world war helmet. Underneath them were four stranger weapons: long, flat, medieval-looking swords, sketched brown with rust. Their blades were still sharp. Unsure of their origin, and overwhelmed by the task at hand, my father and I decided to move them temporarily into storage.

In September 2022, we returned to the trunk. This time, we noticed a maker’s mark on one of the swords: the lines of a wolf, etched like an ancient chalk outline on an English hill. We checked the other three swords again and, sure enough, each of them bore a maker’s mark: a crown, a “P” and a faint indecipherable squiggle. My father contacted the Wallace Collection in London, known for its impressive galleries of arms. They passed him on to Clive Thomas, an expert in medieval swords. Thomas knew exactly what they were. “I’ve been searching for these for years,” he said.

There’s a photograph from 1889, taken inside the Ottoman Arsenal in Istanbul. Swords, revolvers and spears are criss-crossed in a panoply of arms on a white pillar flanked by hanging suits of armour. At the top, Thomas confirmed, were two of the swords from the trunk.

My great-grandfather, Rupert Victor Carington, 5th Lord Carrington, had been posted to Istanbul, then Constantinople, from 1922 to 1923 during its occupation by the Allied forces. An inventory made by his wife after his death in 1938 indicated he’d returned with souvenirs: “Relics from Turkey brought by Rupert.” But how had he acquired them? And what should we do with them now?

Curators, lawyers, academics and politicians across the west have been grappling with increasing intensity with the imperial roots of their museum collections. The revelation last summer of the alleged decade-long theft of thousands of poorly catalogued items from the British Museum by one of its own curators reignited calls for the return of the Parthenon marbles to Greece. The Metropolitan Museum in New York created a new provenance team in 2023, and returned looted items to Cambodia, Nepal, Thailand, Yemen and India. Benin Bronzes from institutions as far-flung as the Smithsonian, the Horniman Museum, the University of Aberdeen, Jesus College, Cambridge and several German museums are in various — and in some cases contested — stages of repatriation to Nigeria or the Kingdom of Benin, now part of the Nigerian republic.

Questions of restitution are usually fraught. For many Britons, a pride in their country’s past and an attachment to the historic art and artefacts held in public collections is hard to shake. It might mean unpicking attitudes and assumptions, examining deeply held convictions. But what about the treasures picked up by individual soldiers over centuries of conflict and colonial expansion? How should families across Britain handle the smaller, scattered fruits of conquest in attics or stately homes, their origins unknown? And what light might these objects shed on a family’s own history?

I wanted to piece together the history of the swords in the attic. If they came from Istanbul, I wondered, why did they look so . . . western? I turned to Thomas for help. As he explained, they are not Turkish at all, but rather 14th- or 15th-century European swords. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the city’s new Ottoman rulers converted a Byzantine church, the Hagia Eirene, into a military depot, filling it with equipment as well as arms and armour taken as battle trophies. Late 19th-century photographs show the church’s interior walls strung with flags, swords and spears, the suits of armour its only congregants.

The four swords from our attic bore the arsenal’s distinctive patina, Thomas told me, a brown feathering along their blades in reaction to its air conditions. Three of them are engraved with a “Y” flanked by two dots, the mark of the Ottoman Arsenal. The fourth sword, the one with the wolf, has no arsenal mark. Instead, it has an Arabic inscription that betrays its different route from Christian knightly weapon to Ottoman booty.

The inscription “hubs al-khizana” (“pious donation to the storehouse”) indicates that the sword resided in the Alexandria Arsenal during the Mamluk sultanate, Thomas said. Between 1367 and 1437, emirs of the sultanate placed European swords in the arsenal as pious donations to the empire. These came into Mamluk possession during wars and skirmishes, or as diplomatic gifts from the Kingdom of Cyprus. The act of inscription was highly symbolic. The text, sometimes etched over a European maker’s mark, converted a Christian weapon into a sacred Islamic one.

A note on the back of the photograph reads, ‘Revolvers etc taken from Turks.’ These words made me uneasy

In 1517, the Ottomans defeated the Mamluks, I learnt, as I leafed through academic papers and histories of the Ottoman Empire at the Brooklyn Library in New York. They cleared out the Alexandria Arsenal, placing the swords in their own arsenal in Constantinople as spoils of war. There are some 200 known “Alexandrian swords”. Around half are now in museums or private collections. The rest remain in Istanbul; the arsenal went through its own transformations over the centuries, from the old royal collections of the Hagia Eirene to what is now the Istanbul Military Museum (in the 19th century, its contents were split between the former church and a new location in the Maçka neighbourhood of Istanbul, where the panoply featuring our two swords was photographed).

After the first world war, in which the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany, the Allies partitioned Constantinople between the British, French and Italians. Its de facto occupation after the war in 1918 was formalised in 1920. My great-grandfather, Rupert Victor, arrived two years later, as a captain and transport officer for the 2nd Battalion of the Grenadier Guards. Having established where the swords were from, I needed to know how — and why — he got his hands on them. It was here that the histories of these well-travelled swords became entangled with my family’s own history. If I wanted to keep piecing them together, it was time to delve into our past.

I knew little about Rupert Victor. He’d always seemed a somewhat sad figure. We had a few boxes of papers containing his war record, his passport, some letters. Born in 1891, he’d had a colonial upbringing in Australia, I learnt, his renegade father having been brought there by his brother, the governor of New South Wales, to stop him from racking up gambling debts and illegitimate children. It was a time of economic turmoil in the British colony, and of continued oppression and displacement of the indigenous population. Rupert Victor left Australia in 1914 and fought in the first world war, where was wounded both physically and mentally. He died at 46, when my grandfather was just 19.

Rupert Victor took hundreds of photographs when he was in Constantinople, many of which he sent home to his wife, Sybil. They depict strikingly young-looking soldiers boating, water-skiing, playing football, camping and picnicking in their swimsuits. Modern Turkey was never a colony, but the British forces were an occupying power there and my great-grandfather and his fellow officers seem to have treated the city as their playground. He sent home snapshots of derring-do. “Nationalists on guard in Yildiz Palace grounds the afternoon of the Sultan’s departure,” he labelled a picture of two armed soldiers in long coats. “The one on the right at first threatened to bayonet me but thought better of it.”

Another of his photographs shows modern Turkish swords and pistols hanging on the wall of his bedroom. A note to Sybil on the back reads, “Revolvers etc taken from Turks.” Those words made me uneasy, as did my relief when there was no evidence the items came from the Ottoman Arsenal, nor any sign of the medieval swords in the photograph. How would I feel if I discovered he’d stolen them? Would it change anything?

A contemporary westerner in Constantinople provides some clue as to how Rupert Victor might have got the swords. In 1920, Bashford Dean, the Metropolitan Museum’s first curator of arms and armour, visited the Ottoman Arsenal on a collecting trip. His photographs show it in a state of disarray, crates overflowing with armour, swords under cabinets on the floor. He bought five helmets for the Met and two Alexandrian swords for himself, one of which he bequeathed to his employer.

Did Rupert Victor buy his swords in the same way? It’s unlikely we’ll ever know. Thomas suspects the authorities had been selling items such as these from the Ottoman Arsenal for some time, but there’s no record of a purchase. Even if their acquisitions were above board, it’s hard not to see both Rupert Victor and Bashford Dean as having taken advantage of the sorry state of affairs in Constantinople, the once magnificent capital of an empire, now overrun by foreign soldiers and convulsed by political unrest. It’s possible that Rupert Victor simply wanted the swords as souvenirs. That we discovered them languishing in a trunk, mixed up with rusty helmets and modern Turkish arms, reveals a lack of reverence that is of its time, representative of a class of people who saw no reason why they couldn’t take whatever they wanted. To him, the swords were probably Oriental curiosities of little monetary value.

The swords, however, are valuable. This is in part because of their rarity, but also their condition. (Excavated medieval swords tend not to be in the greatest nick.) The one from the Alexandria Arsenal is particularly valuable. One of the two Bashford Dean bought in 1920 went for £386,500 at auction in 2015.

As I read about the provenance of other Alexandrian swords in museum guides and auction catalogues, I was struck by how little interest there seemed to be in identifying how they’d left the Ottoman Arsenal. It was often as though they didn’t exist before whichever westerner bought, sold or donated them in the 20th century. (At least one other sword was owned by another Grenadier, Major J A Prescott, who appears in my great-grandfather’s photographs.) In general, these swords were simply “acquired”, if there’s a mention of transfer at all.

The records are slight, both on the departure of swords from the arsenal and on the 400 or so years they spent there. When Filiz Çakir Phillip, a scholar of Islamic art who has studied the arsenal extensively, told me the Ottomans may have given my great-grandfather the swords as a gift, I felt a small jolt of hope. I wanted to find the answer in which he came out best, I realised. In the absence of reliable historical document, bias creeps in. “You want to deal with the facts,” Phillip said, “but human emotions are always involved.”

The swords have been sacred and profane, Christian and Muslim, spoils of war, nationalist trophies and mementos of a time of occupation

In restitution debates I’m often drawn to the idea that the place an object was made, revered and beloved is in some way part of its essence. A few individuals have returned ill-gotten antiquities to the cultures in which they originated. In 2014, Mark Walker, a retired doctor from Wales whose grandfather took part in the British army’s bloody looting of Benin City in 1897, returned two items to the Kingdom of Benin’s present oba. The artefacts, a bird and a ceremonial bell, had been used as door stops before they came into Walker’s possession.

In 2019, upon discovering that two more pieces he’d inherited were also from Benin, Walker loaned them to Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum on the condition they be returned to the royal court of Benin. But even the seemingly straightforward transfer of Benin Bronzes has been fraught. The return of the Smithsonian’s artefacts, for instance, provoked anger among the descendants of those enslaved by the oba’s predecessors at having been left out of discussions.

The swords from our attic wear their history in layers. The hundreds of years spent in the Ottoman Arsenal are there in their rusted patina. The Alexandrian sword’s Arabic inscription speaks to its revered station in Egypt. And the makers’ marks on all four blades point to the unknown European swordsmiths who forged them centuries ago. To which fallen empire, each of which long predates today’s nation states, do they truly belong?

Edward Said wrote, “Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogenous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic.” The swords have moved through cultures and empires. They are both instruments and symbols of conquest, and whether or not they saw combat, their paths would have been paved with violence. They have been sacred and profane, Christian and Muslim, spoils of war, nationalist trophies and mementos of a time of occupation. They’re polyphonic, and difficult. So is history.

Since the swords are European, my father never considered sending them back to Turkey. But more than anything, he wants them to be seen, not stashed away. “Otherwise what’s the point?” he asked. “They might as well sit in the trunk again.” (Of the roughly 100 Alexandrian swords owned by the Istanbul Military Museum, Thomas identified only 19 on display in 2022.) Thomas is writing an academic paper about the swords from our attic and, armed with this research, my father plans to approach UK museums in the hope of loaning or donating them.

But why a museum? While sorting through the attic some years ago, my father also found papers belonging to another of my great-grandfathers, the aviator Frank McClean. A chance encounter with an air marshal revealed McClean’s role in the history of naval aviation (he was taught to fly by the pioneering Wright brothers, and founded the Fleet Air Arm), so my father decided to send the papers to the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Somerset. “Some things are of great interest to parts of the general public,” he said.

The swords have been cleaned, ready and they glint like the dark sea at sunset. But the deceit of the word “acquired”, neatly printed beneath so many museum artefacts, still vexes me. It shouldn’t be so hard for visitors to find out where the items on display come from. I hope that one day the swords will be exhibited as fine examples of crusader weapons, Ottoman plunder and imperial arrogance. And that a new label will point to the sticky parts of their provenance, the way they trace the contours of conquest over 600 years. I hope the people who see them will keep asking questions about them and about themselves, especially when there’s no clear answer.

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