Chapter Text
History’s Worst Closet - By George Whitaker
Introduction: Nicolò, Yusuf, and the Eight-Hundred-Year Effort Not to Say Husband
Right. We’re back!
After several months of behaving, briefly, like a respectable public historian — a phrase which still feels illegal in my mouth — I am returning to the subject that started this entire nonsense project: the medieval Consortium of Genoa, also known as the world’s oldest glass closet, also known as that time a warrior-king and a merchant prince accidentally built a Mediterranean superpower while everyone pretended they were just very committed to maritime reform.
For the next eight weeks, we are talking about King Nicolò II of Genoa and Prince Yusuf ibn Ibrahim Al-Kaysani, because apparently I enjoy pain, footnotes, and watching historians perform interpretive gymnastics around the word “husband.”
And before anyone writes me an email beginning, “Dear Mr Whitaker, as a serious scholar of medieval institutions—” no. Stop. Breathe. Have a biscuit. I know the Consortium was not a sacramental Christian marriage. I know medieval categories are not modern categories. I know identity, sexuality, household law, dynastic symbolism, ritual kinship, and governance structures are complicated.
However!
That is precisely why this story is interesting.
There comes a point where “complicated” becomes a very expensive but transparent curtain over the obvious.
Because what do we have here?
Introduction to the Introduction
We have Nicolò, former Benedictine monk, reluctant king, cavalry commander, emotional repression event in boots, inheriting a political arrangement from his dead brother and deciding, because he has the moral flexibility of a cathedral wall, that the oath must be honoured.
Then we have Yusuf, merchant prince, sailor, possible pirate depending on whose ships were on fire at the time, arriving in Genoa with grain, silver, soldiers, silk, accountants, cooks, perfumes, and the audacity of a man who absolutely knows every clergyman in the room is uncomfortable and is choosing to enjoy it.
We have a legal structure nobody is allowed to call marriage, despite the fact that it involves shared household obligations, ceremonial permanence, princely rank, mutual fidelity (yes, that was a clause in the Consortium contract!), treasury integration, and everyone acting as though a bride has been smuggled out of the room and replaced with a devastatingly well dressed Muslim naval magnate, and no one noticed!
We have the King leaving a chair opposite his own at council even when the Prince refuses to attend. (Because “A king honours the position, even we dislike the man occupying it.” as one of our most important primary sources tells us. Well, we will get to him later!)
We have Yusuf criticising the King’s wine, food, sleep, military risk-taking, and general commitment to self-destruction with the confidence of someone who has either known the man for twenty years or too addicted to flirting with doom.
We have Nicolò building Yusuf a prayer room inside the palace. I repeat: Inside the Palace! And certainly had not rolled in his grave when later historians looked at this and said, “Ah yes. A remarkable political partnership.”
Was it a remarkable political partnership? Yes. Obviously.
Genoa did not become a maritime powerhouse because two men exchanged longing glances and traumatised their court. The Consortium worked because of amalgamation of policies: fleet investment, grain security, naval reform, credit networks, anti-piracy campaigns, port law, and the extremely unromantic fact that Yusuf’s accountants could apparently smell embezzlement through stone walls.
But also, please unclench.
Because it was not only that.
The mistake older generations historians made and I say this with love, malice, and a stack of printed articles beside me, was assuming that “political” and “emotional” are opposites. They are not. Especially not in courts. Especially not in dynastic systems. Especially not in medieval political culture, where bodies, households, rank, ceremony, sex, food, beds, bloodline, religion, property, and power were all tangled together in one enormous legally perfumed knot.
Nicolò and Yusuf did not love each other despite the Consortium.
Their love eventually became part of how the Consortium functioned.
That is the thing everyone keeps trying to tiptoe around while wearing iron boots.
But what are we actually talking about?
Now, if you are new here, hello. My name is George Whitaker, which is unfortunately the most English name ever issued to a human being. I sound like I should be chasing late council tax payment in a damp cardigan, not shouting about eight-hundred-year-old queer disasters on the internet. Yet here we are. History is cruel and branding is worse.
This series is personal for me, not because I believe Nicolò and Yusuf map neatly onto modern queerness. They do not. Nicolò would not have called himself gay. Yusuf probably had categories of desire and attachment that do not translate cleanly into ours, too. Neither man was sitting around inventing Pride merch between council sessions.
But queer history is not only the history of people who used our words.
It is also the history of people whose lives were made illegible by later readers who refused to understand what the sources were telling them. (Oh yes! I will be writing about the monstrosity of the Consortium historiography! Mark my words! Even when everyone unsubscribes faster than they can say Consortium!)
BUTT! The Consortium archive is one of the great monuments to that refusal.
The evidence is not thin. That is what makes this funny, maddening, and occasionally moving enough to make me stare out of a train window like a Victorian widow. The evidence is everywhere. In the charters. In the council records. In Lady Caterina Spinola’s letters. In Gregorio’s reluctant observations. In Marco II’s memories. In Yusuf’s letters to Khalid. In Nicolò’s journals, where the poor man is spiritually wrestling God, duty, desire, and Yusuf’s cheekbones, and losing on all fronts.
Nicolò’s private writing is, frankly, devastating. He is not coy. He is ashamed, yes. Frightened, yes. But not vague. He knows he desires Yusuf. He knows he loves him. He knows this love has undone something in him. Reading those journals is like watching a monastery catch fire and then apologise for the smoke.
Yusuf, meanwhile, is a catastrophe in silk. A magnificent, dramatic, self-aware catastrophe. He spends half his letters (that we have of him) insisting he must leave Genoa immediately because loving Nicolò will destroy him, and the other half noticing whether Nicolò has eaten, slept, bled, smiled, or looked lonely in a way that requires intervention. Yusuf is the sort of man who would walk into a room in perfect couture, pretend he had not spent an obscene amount on it, enjoy making every bishop nervous, and then go privately insane because one emotionally unavailable ex-monk smiled at him while being kind to a horse.
Disaster.
Absolute disaster.
I love him!
And Nicolò! God help him! Nicolò is the gay panic.
Not in the silly modern meme sense only, though yes, also that. But in the deeper sense of a man raised in discipline, sacrifice, kingship, and Christian restraint suddenly discovering that desire is not an abstract theological hazard but a beautiful pirate-prince standing too close during council.
Someone hug that poor man.
Though not Yusuf, because every time Yusuf gets near him, Nicolò begins sweating and the entire council order sweats with him.
What makes them compelling is not that they are perfect lovers. They are not. They are proud, jealous, stubborn, dramatic, occasionally manipulative, frequently exhausting, and allergic to communicating normally. Their courtship, if we can call it that, often resembles two heavily armed nations attempting emotional diplomacy through sarcasm.
But the tenderness is real. That is what gets me.
Not the scandal. Not even the sex, though don’t worry, Lady Spinola has apparently preserved enough there to make several archivists reconsider their life choices. What gets me is the care. The repeated, inconvenient, politically dangerous care.
Yusuf taking wine from Nicolò’s hand before the council because the King has had enough.
Nicolò throwing his cloak over Yusuf in the rain before he can think better of it.
Yusuf refusing to let Nicolò injure himself in the name of duty.
Nicolò making space for Yusuf’s faith inside the palace.
The two of them surviving the Sicilian storm and returning altered, because near-death has a way of making denial look stupid.
This is not a story about two men being secretly sweet in private while history happened elsewhere.
This is a story about two men whose private attachment became historically consequential.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and everyone on every spectrum, is why we must talk about them. (And certainly not, because George needs to work and decided to revel in his old pet peeves.)
How we go about it!
When later historians call them “companions,” “partners,” “political intimates,” “co-rulers,” “close associates,” “consortium-mates”, yes, I have seen that one, and no, I have not recovered, they are not just choosing neutral language. They are participating in a long tradition of making queer evidence harder to see by making it sound respectable.
Respectability is often where truth goes to be embalmed.
So over the next eight weeks, we are going into the archive. We are going to talk about the Consortium ceremony, the empty chair, Yusuf’s arrival, Nicolò’s journals, the Sicily shipwreck, Lady Spinola’s spectacular inability to mind her own business, Gregorio di Castagna pretending to be above gossip while recording suspiciously intimate details, Marco II reading about his guardians’ correspondences and regretting literacy, and the modern scholars who have been trying to sort this beautiful mess into something like respectable history.
Professor Alessandro di Ventimiglia will be here in spirit as the voice of old-school institutional seriousness. I respect him enormously. I also think the man could watch Nicolò fall asleep in Yusuf’s lap and produce a paragraph about administrative trust.
Dr Lucia Ferrante will be our patron saint of “actually, the intimacy mattered to the political structure.” She is careful, rigorous, and responsible for making several traditionalists deeply cross, which is always a public service.
Eleanor Ashcombe will guide us through Yusuf’s pre-Genoa life, which is less “mysterious pirate-prince” and more “maritime network genius with suspicious friends and excellent branding.”
And I, George Whitaker, Britain’s least useful export since boiled vegetables, will be here asking the obvious questions with the subtlety of a falling chandelier.
Were Nicolò and Yusuf modern gay husbands? No.
Were they husbands in the way their world could make possible, politically, domestically, emotionally, and physically?
I am going to say yes until someone produces better evidence than eight centuries of nervous euphemism.
Welcome back to History’s Worst Closet.
Bring snacks. Bring sources.
And for the love of God, stop calling them roommates.