On a fateful afternoon in 2007, a book leaped off of the shelves at a local bookstore and forced itself into my hands. I read this:

“On the night the scarlet horsemen took him away — from all he knew and all he might have known — the moon waxed full in Scorpio, sign of his birth, and as if by the hand of God its incandescence split the alpine valley sheer into that which was dark and that which was light, and the light lit the path of devils to his door.”

The volume was The Religion, by Tim Willocks, the first of a projected trilogy featuring his hero Mattias Tannhauser — and the landscape of my world of history and legend would never be the same.

I plunked down the coin to purchase it, then called my brother and told him: “I think I have just found the most Howardian book ever written.” My sense of a connection to Howard — and particularly to Conan of Cimmeria would be confirmed by Mr. Willocks himself. As I and Deuce Richardson and a few others evangelized for The Religion on the Old Official REH forum, Willocks signed on to express his appreciation:

“I am honoured that you should give Tannhauser a place in Valhalla with Conan himself. REH's Conan was one of my great inspirations when I was but a lad. Along with Sergio Leone's ‘Man With No Name,’ the western novel character ‘Edge’ by George G. Gilman (the first ten were amazing; I don't know if they are still available but worth looking for), and the novels of Sven Hassel (again, the earlier ones are best — Wheels of Terror in particular).”

The two Tannhauser novels released so far fling this once-and-future soldier of fortune into the maelstrom of two of the most epic bloodbaths of the 16th Century — the 1565 Great Siege of Malta, when the Ottoman Empire sought to eliminate the fanatical Christian Knights of St. John, and the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, when tensions between Catholics and Protestant Huguenots in Paris exploded into an orgy of slaughter.

Tannhauser’s door was at his father’s blacksmith shop in the Carpathian Mountains. The scarlet devils that rode to it were Ottoman Turks, raiding for the levies of the devshirme, where Christian boys were taken for labor or military service in the corps of Janissaries. For more than a decade, Tannhauser marched with the Janissaries, learning the trade of war in a hard school. At the opening of The Religion, he has left warfare behind (though he trains at arms daily) for the life of an innkeeper and entrepreneur on the Messina waterfront in Sicily.

Tannhauser’s appeal is distinctly modern — though not handled anachronistically. He is a hero of the “hard-boiled” school, his own agent amid hordes of cause-driven fanatics.

This is a touch point between Tannhauser and Conan. Don Herron, in his essay “Robert E. Howard: Hard-Boiled Heroic Fantasist,” places Conan in the tradition of the 1930s private detectives of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Willocks says that Tannhauser is “not only an adventurer but, as Chandler so wonderfully put it, `a man fit for adventure.’”

As free-agents of the hard-boiled school, these two hard-bitten warriors share a deep skepticism of the State.

This is made explicit in the early chapters of The Twelve Children of Paris, as Tannhauser enters the great city in August 1572. His wife, Carla, had been invited to play her viola de gamba in the wedding celebrations of the sister of the French King, the Catholic Marguerite de Valois and the Huguenot Henry of Navarre, a union that was supposed to bring an end to a decade of religious civil war. Instead, an assassination attempt on a high Huguenot courtier, Admiral Gaspard Coligny has ratcheted tensions to the breaking point, and Tannhauser knows that there will be blood. All he wants to do is find Carla and get her the hell out. But he doesn’t know where she is lodged.

He sits morosely in the Red Ox tavern:

“Tannhauser had abandoned all involvement, and even interest in political matters, for there was nothing he could do to alter their course. The high and mighty remained spellbound by their own self-importance, their basest emotions turned history’s wheels. The rulers of France were no more corrupt and incompetent than those who governed anywhere else, but because he had come to love the country, their crimes caused him a deeper despair. He brightened as the drink and the pie arrived.”

Conan often expresses disdain for state policies, even of one that he serves. “In Beyond the Black River,” Conan is serving as a Ranger on the far western Aquilonian frontier. In an on-the-trail conversation with a young man whom he has just saved from being skewered by a Pictish arrow, he offers up a take on the lay of the land that might seem surprising coming from a frontiersman:

“The best land near Thunder River is already taken,” grunted the slayer. “Plenty of good land between Scalp Creek—you crossed it a few miles back—and the fort, but that's getting too devilish close to the river. The Picts steal over to burn and murder—as that one did. They don’t always come singly. Some day they’ll try to sweep the settlers out of Conajohara. And they may succeed—probably will succeed. This colonization business is mad, anyway. There's plenty of good land east of the Bossonian marches. If the Aquilonians would cut up some of the big estates of their barons, and plant wheat where now only deer are hunted, they wouldn't have to cross the border and take the land of the Picts away from them.”
“That’s queer talk from a man in the service of the Governor of Conajohara,” objected Balthus.
“It’s nothing to me,” the other retorted. “I’m a mercenary. I sell my sword to the highest bidder. I never planted wheat and never will, so long as there are other harvests to be reaped with the sword…”

The most famous example of Conan’s contempt for the prerogatives and the power of the State is found in “Queen of the Black Coast,” as he boards an outbound trading vessel from an Argossean port, one step ahead of the law. He explains himself to Captain Tito:

“Well, last night in a tavern, a captain of the king's guard offered violence to the sweetheart of a young soldier, who naturally ran him through. But it seems there is some cursed law against killing guardsmen, and the boy and his girl fled away. It was bruited about that I was seen with them, and so today I was haled into court, and a judge asked me where he had gone. I replied that since he was a friend of mine, I could not betray him. Then the court waxed wrath, and the judge talked a great deal about my duty to the state, and society, and other things I did not understand, and bade me tell where my friend had flown. By this time I was becoming wrathful myself, for I had explained my position.
“But I choked my ire and held my peace, and the judge squalled that I had shown contempt for the court, and that I should be hurled into a dungeon to rot until I betrayed my friend. So then, seeing they were all mad, I drew my sword and cleft the judge's skull; then I cut my way out of the court, and seeing the high constable's stallion tied near by, I rode for the wharfs, where I thought to find a ship bound for foreign parts.”

(When Tannhauser, in The Religion, is forced to make a similar exit from Messina, for similar reasons, he blows up his own tavern — spectacularly. What might Conan have done had he had access to a few quintals of gunpowder?)

Contempt for functionaries and politicians should not be confused in either man’s case with an inability to play politics. Indeed, both Conan and Tannhauser are Machiavellian manipulators of the highest order. The Continental Op himself could not have done a better job of setting paranoid men and factions at each others’ throats than Conan does in the pirate yarn “The Black Stranger,” and Tannhauser is willing to engage in great deviousness — as well as brute force — to accomplish his personal missions.

His approach to statecraft is brutal. Albert Gondi, Comte de Retz (a historical figure) corners Tannhauser, hero of Malta, and asks him what he would advise King Charles IX to do to stave off a potential Huguenot coup in revenge for the attempted murder of Coligny:

“Tannhauser, I am surrounded by sycophants and liars,” Retz says. “Your bluntness is gold, unaccustomed to it though I am.”

Tannhauser is blunt, all right. He suggests that the King kill all of the Protestant grandees. He recognizes this advice as “monstrous,” but he also reckons — if the killing is accompanied by an open hand to the common Huguenots — it will save a greater bloodletting.

Retz muses on this, then says, “His majesty counts some of them among his dearest friends.”

Tannhauser replies: “A king who cannot kill his dearest friends for the good of his people is no king at all. Suleiman strangled his own sons to preserve the peace. He strangled the wrong one, but that is another matter.”

By the Tannhauser standard, Conan as King of Aquilonia falls short of being sufficiently Machiavellian. He refuses to have the poet-agitator Rinaldo murdered to quell unrest in the kingdom. And he risks the recovery of his throne in The Hour of the Dragon on a mission of personal loyalty, to rescue the Countess Albiona, banged up in the Iron Tower in Tarantia because she refused to become a usurper’s consort:

“I’ll ride to Poitain, if it may be,” Conan said at last. “But I’ll ride alone. And I have one last duty to perform as king of Aquilonia.”
“What do you mean, your Majesty?” asked Servius, shaken by a premonition.
“I’m going into Tarantia after Albiona tonight,” answered the king. “I’ve failed all my other loyal subjects, it seems—if they take her head, they can have mine too.”
“This is madness!” cried Servius, staggering up and clutching his throat, as if he already felt the noose closing about it.
“There are secrets to the Tower which few know,” said Conan. “Anyway, I'd be a dog to leave Albiona to die because of her loyalty to me. I may be a king without a kingdom, but I’m not a man without honor.”

Conan would rather be no king at all than to sacrifice his dearest friends — or his loyal subjects. And Tannhauser rejects the kingly “virtue” he just extolled — overturns it entirely — as he and Retz part company.

Retz asks him, “Would you kill your dearest friends for the good of the people?”

“My dearest friends are all I have,” Tannhauser replies. “For their sake, I would kill anything that breathes.”

Kingship, the demands and prerogatives of the State, all that is meaningless in comparison to a man’s honor and loyalty to his dearest friends. I believe that Conan and Mattias Tannhauser sit on the mead benches of some literary Valhalla, and they are at this moment raising a horn in recognition of the principle that honor and personal loyalty are the final and true measure of the man.

Jim Cornelius resides amidst the mountains of eastern Oregon. His online campfire can be found at the Frontier Partisans website.