Part 21 (2/2)

Hoping to cement his scattered European empire with truly ”cosmetic” changes, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V ordered his entourage to cut their hair, because it was the current fas.h.i.+on in northern Europe. Although they obeyed, they wept as they cut their waist-length locks. In southern Europe, the length of one's hair, like the length of one's beard, was a sign of one's age-and therefore of authority. Unfortunately, Charles V was never able to grow a beard, and his followers were also forced to trim their beards to imitate their girlish leader.

Around this same time, Ferdinand and Isabella were presented with a great opportunity to continue their ”crusade” when a little side venture involving a Genoese sailor named Christopher Columbus produced unexpected results. In 1492, they had funded a small expedition by Columbus to find an ocean route to Asia. Columbus returned in 1494 with reports of islands he thought were modern j.a.pan and Indonesia (actually Haiti and Cuba).

I speak Spanish to G.o.d, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.-Charles V

The royal couple agreed to fund return expeditions, and soon out-of-work European thugs and petty n.o.bility calling themselves ”conquerors” (conquistadores) realized that there were two wealthy native empires-the Aztec and Inca-located across the ocean. These kingdoms were technologically primitive but socially advanced, with large, complex urban centers-in other words, wealthy targets ripe for the picking.

These people are very unskilled in arms...with 50 men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.-Christopher Columbus

The Aztecs: Running an Empire on Blood and Chocolate The Aztecs were into blood-human blood, baby. In fact, they believed their G.o.ds required human blood to live. So, as their power grew in Mexico in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they sacrificed ever greater numbers of captives from the neighboring tribes and cities. They were probably offing somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand people a year by the time of the arrival of Hernando Cortes in 1509. Even better was the preferred means of sacrifice: cutting open the rib cage and offering the victim's still-beating heart to heaven in a brazier filled with burning coals. Nice.

YES, OUR MONEY GROWS ON TREES.

From at least the fourteenth century, the Aztecs used cocoa beans as coins, valuing them because they were both rare and delicious. Indeed, if they felt like splurging, they weren't afraid to down their tasty money, drinking it in a thick beverage called chocolatl chocolatl, which probably tasted more like our modern coffee than it did hot chocolate. Calling cocoa beans ”the food of the G.o.ds,” the Aztecs also offered them to divinities alongside human sacrifices that could claim hundreds of victims from neighboring tribes. Taxes from neighboring tribes were also collected in the form of cocoa beans. Hernando de Ovieda Valdez, a historian who accompanied Hernando Cortes in his conquest of the Aztecs, recorded the prices of different goods and services in cocoa beans: a rabbit cost four beans; a slave, one hundred. A visit to a prost.i.tute would cost you ten beans.

Aside from this incredibly brutal aspect of their religion, the Aztecs achieved a level of social complexity and urban organization exceeding any other Native American state in history. With about two hundred thousand inhabitants, the capital Tenocht.i.tlan, located on an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco, ruled an empire with millions of subjects.The Aztecs began building their empire in the late fourteenth century, driven by the ambition of their warrior caste and the orderly organization of Aztec society in general. Beneath the warrior caste of Eagle and Jaguar knights, most Aztecs were farmers, tending giant floating gardens on Lake Texcoco, where they grew corn, cotton, and vegetables. Meanwhile, Aztec merchants traveled the length of Mexico looking for luxury goods such as gems, precious metals, dyes, and plumage from exotic birds.In some ways, the Aztec religious pantheon resembled the divine households of the Olmecs, Toltecs, and Mayans. But Aztec G.o.ds had a mean streak a mile wide. There was Coatlicue, a clawed G.o.ddess representing pain, who wore a skirt made out of snakes and a necklace of human hearts. Xipe Totec was the G.o.d of spring and rebirth, but also of suffering, requiring priests to skin a sacrificial victim alive and then don the skin to symbolize the cycle of life.To be fair, not all Aztec G.o.ds were cruel. The sun G.o.d, Huitzlipochtli, protected the Aztecs and granted victory in battle. Xochipilli, the ”good times” G.o.d, embodied dawn, dancing, and love. And Quetzalcoatl, the ”feathered serpent,” represented wisdom and creation. In fact, in the fifteenth century, Quetzalcoatl became the object of a popular cult that forecasted his return in physical form to free the Aztecs from the burden of human sacrifice. Unluckily for them, the last Aztec emperor, Montezuma (or Moctezuma) II, may have mistaken the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes for the returning messiah Quetzalcoatl-with disastrous results.The Inca: Another Golden Target Like the Aztecs, the Inca Empire was relatively young, and the neighboring tribes they conquered were not terribly fond of them.When the Spanish showed up in 1532, the Inca Empire was a fairly recent construction, less than a hundred years old. It was founded in 1438 by a dynamic military leader named Pachacuti, who subdued the central mountain valleys of modern Peru. His successors added modern Ecuador, Bolivia, and northern Chile. Geographically the Inca Empire was far larger than that of the Aztecs, measuring 2,500 miles from north to south.The Inca developed a sophisticated urban society with large cities supported by productive agricultural hinterlands. Again, like the Aztecs, they demonstrated both impressive engineering skill and an ability to mobilize ma.s.s labor for big projects by constructing huge ceremonial structures. The chief Inca ceremonial centers, Cuzco, the capital, and Machu Picchu, a mystical mountain redoubt, required tens of thousands of laborers to move stone blocks weighing up to fifty tons to positions high in the Andes Mountains.The Inca also constructed fourteen thousand miles of roads that rivaled Roman roads in their durability; in fact, some Inca roads are still used today. Deep ravines in the Andes were spanned with rope bridges. Like the Romans, the Inca used their elaborate system of roads to facilitate trade and the movement of armies.The empire was blessed with enormous mineral wealth, including silver and gold deposits, and Spanish conquistadores' eyewitness descriptions of Incan cities, while mind-boggling, are likely accurate. It seems the walls of the Court of Gold in Cuzco-an astronomical observatory housing about four thousand Inca priests-were hung with thin sheets of gold; a solid gold disc representing the Sun G.o.d reflected sunlight on the sheets to illuminate the building's interior.Of course this incredible wealth made the Inca Empire a prime target for Spanish conquest, as with the Aztecs in Mexico. In 1532, shortly after Hernando Cortes conquered the Aztecs, a Spanish adventurer named Francisco Pizarro attacked the Inca and-wait for it-looted the empire. The Spanish melted down priceless Inca objects into gold bars, which they s.h.i.+pped back to Spain, and enslaved the Native American population to mine rich ore deposits at places such as Potosi, Bolivia.China: On the Money Any comparison of Western Europe and China at this time has to look at the numbers-the number of people, for starters. In 1300, China probably held upward of one hundred million people. And these were all subjects of one emperor. Compare this to Europe, which had about fifty million people. It's no surprise that the Mongols of the Yuan Dynasty found themselves hopelessly outnumbered. But the Mongols weren't doing themselves any favors. In 1348, the last Mongol emperor, Togan Timur, appointed a particularly nasty SOB named Bayan as his prime minister, who suggested the best way to end Chinese dissent was to exterminate nine tenths of the population. Shockingly, the Chinese did not like Bayan, or his boss Togan, and 1348 saw the beginning of a twenty-year rebellion, led by a charismatic commoner named Yuanzhang.So who was Yuanzhang, who took the imperial name Hongwu, and founded the new Ming Dynasty? As with earlier dynasties, he founded a new administration that mirrored the structure of previous ones-but unlike most self-made emperors, he was a peasant. In fact, he was able to succeed in part because the old aristocracy had been sidelined by the Mongols. As emperor, Hongwu was deeply insecure about his humble background, and ruthlessly suppressed his enemies-real and imagined. But he also pa.s.sed agrarian and tax reforms to make life easier for peasants. To keep the Mongols out, Hongwu undertook the reconstruction of the Great Wall, which was supposed to seal off northern China from Mongolia. Previous Chinese dynasties had built long walls along the route of the Great Wall, but the modern structure of that name is mostly a Ming construction.China was broke when the Mongols left, and it was about to get broker. After taking over the reins of power, Hongwu gave almost all the copper coins in circulation to the Mongols, basically as ”protection money,” so they wouldn't invade China again. The Mongols would have laughed at paper money, which they considered worthless-and how right they were. To make up for the shortfall in copper coins, Hongwu introduced paper money in the late fourteenth century, leading to a boom in trade. But he soon discovered the great thing about paper money: you can print as much of it as you want! There was just one small problem: it became worthless, falling to one seventieth of its previous value, and in 1425 the Mandarin bureaucrats were forced to reintroduce copper coinage. Despite the mixed results, China still deserves credit as the first state in history to try using paper money on a large scale. It was an example that would be followed by Europe in the seventeenth century, often with a similar outcome (a lot of useless paper stuff).India: Babar's Shop In the early sixteenth century a Mongol prince named Babar (yes, the cartoon elephant is probably named after him) founded the powerful Moghul (Mongol) dynasty.Babar came from the same stock as the earlier warlord Tamerlane, who claimed to be a descendant of Genghis Khan and certainly slaughtered and conquered with similar flair. Around 1500, Babar decided to follow the example of his ill.u.s.trious predecessors by saddling up and kicking some serious a.s.s. But Babar was actually a just, evenhanded administrator as well as a capable military commander. With a reputation for delivering both serious smack-downs and good government, he was soon in control of a large amount of northern India.Still, it would fall to Babar's weird, charismatic grandson Akbar to consolidate the empire. Akbar (who sadly does not have a cartoon elephant named after him) a.s.sumed the throne in 1561, at the age of thirteen, and immediately began expanding his territory to cover all of northern India as well as Pakistan and even Afghanistan. Governing from the central city of Delhi, Akbar developed a sophisticated administration to rule his vast empire. He appointed military governors who were held responsible for any government misdoings in their province, including corruption-sometimes on penalty of death.

GOOD KHAN, BAD KHAN.

Babar and the Moghuls were nice guys compared to their distant cousin Tamerlane, who ranks as one of the meanest b.a.s.t.a.r.ds in history, hands down, no contest. Also known as Timur (”iron” in Turkic), he learned the ways of horse-mounted warfare early on from his father, chief of a small nomadic tribe. Timur was lame in one leg from a battlefield injury acquired as a young man (Timur+lame=Tumerlane), but this didn't impair his skill in cavalry combat. In 1369 he eliminated his chief rival for the throne of Samarkand, then led his motley collection of followers on a series of lightning campaigns against Persia, Iraq, Syria, Russia, India, and China.Some essential numbers: Timur ordered the death of seventy thousand inhabitants of the Persian city of Isfahan in 1387. At Delhi, in northern India, in 1398, his army slaughtered one hundred thousand unarmed captive Indians. In 1400, he buried alive four thousand Armenian prisoners. His soldiers ma.s.sacred twenty thousand civilians in Baghdad, where Timur ordered each soldier to return with at least two human heads. Last but not least, after his soldiers allegedly killed eighty thousand people in Aleppo and twenty thousand in Damascus, he built twenty pyramids of skulls around the devastated cities.One account recorded conditions in Delhi after Timur's visit: ”The city of Delhi was depopulated and ruined...followed by a pestilence caused by the pollution of the air and water by thousands of uncared-for dead bodies.”Although he left behind plenty of skeletons, Timur made no bones about being evil. Before burning Damascus to the ground and killing most of its inhabitants, he gathered the leading citizens for a little lecture, saying, ”I am the scourge of G.o.d appointed to chastise you, since no one knows the remedy for your iniquity except me. You are wicked, but I am more wicked than you, so be silent!”Timur was planning an invasion of China to reunify the empire of Genghis Khan when he died at the age of seventy.

The most remarkable thing about Akbar was his extreme religious tolerance. To get on the majority Hindus' good side, Akbar took the wise step of repealing the jizya, jizya, or Muslim tax on all non-Muslims; repealed a tax on visits to Hindu pilgrimage destinations; and allowed legal cases to be tried in Hindu courts. or Muslim tax on all non-Muslims; repealed a tax on visits to Hindu pilgrimage destinations; and allowed legal cases to be tried in Hindu courts.These were all smart steps. But his descendant Aurangzeb, who ruled three generations later, was a Muslim zealot who persecuted Hindus and alienated the Hindu majority. This kind of cruelty paved the way for the British conquest of India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Brits benefited from Hindu resentment toward their Muslim rulers.

I love my own religion. Is there anything that I will not do for my religion?...The Hindu Minister also loves his religion. Does he not have the right to love the thing that is his very own?-Akbar the Great

Ottomans (No, the Plural Is Not Ottomen) The Ottomans were originally employed by the Byzantine emperors as border guards holding off fierce Mongol incursions into Asia Minor-modern-day eastern Turkey-on the theory that ”it takes a nomad to fight a nomad.” Later the Ottomans were almost ”out-nomaded” by Tamerlane, who killed Sultan Bajazet I, ”The Thunderbolt,” in 1403. But Tamerlane died, and the Ottomans continued their climb to power. They turned on their weak Byzantine masters (never hire Central Asian nomads as your security detail) conquering Constantinople in 1453.The city's ma.s.sive triple walls had protected it for centuries, but the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II ordered a Hungarian metallurgist to build him a twenty-seven-foot monster cannon nicknamed the ”Basilic” (”King”), which could hurl a twelve-hundred-pound cannonball as far as a mile-the most powerful gun in history up to that point. Meanwhile, Ottoman naval commanders figured out how to get around the giant underwater chains protecting Constantinople's harbors: they drafted local peasants to carry their s.h.i.+ps overland around the barriers.On the morning of May 29, 1453, the b.l.o.o.d.y final battle began with human-wave a.s.saults by poorly armed Ottoman Bas.h.i.+-bazouk fanatics. The exhausted Byzantines were able to fend off another attack by Turkish regulars on the northeastern walls, and even stopped a third a.s.sault by the sultan's elite shock troops, the Janissaries. Ironically, this fateful battle was decided by a slight oversight: the Byzantine defenders forgot to lock one of the small gates in the northeastern wall, and the Janissaries poured into the city. The last emperor, Constantine XI, probably died fighting in the streets. Because no one saw him die, there was an enduring myth that he would one day return to save the Greeks from Ottoman rule. (Didn't happen.)

In the early dawn, as the Turks poured into the City and the citizens took flight, some of the fleeing Romans managed to reach their homes and rescue their children and wives. As they moved, bloodstained, across the Forum of the Bull and pa.s.sed the Column of the Cross, their wives asked, ”What is to become of us?” When they heard the fearful cry, ”The Turks are slaughtering Romans within the City's walls,” they did not believe it at first...But behind him came a second, and then a third, and all were covered with blood, and they knew that the cup of the Lord's wrath had touched their lips. Monks and nuns, therefore, and men and women, carrying their infants in their arms and abandoning their homes to anyone who wished to break in, ran to the Great Church. The thoroughfare, overflowing with people, was a sight to behold!-Eyewitness account of the Greek historian Doukas on the fall of Constantinople

Ottoman power peaked under Suleiman the Magnificent (one of history's best names). Coming to power in 1520, he is known in the Muslim world as ”the Lawgiver” because of the code of law he issued in 1501, which is an amalgam of Islamic Shari'a and good old-fas.h.i.+oned Turkish tribal law.Suleiman also dispensed a substantial amount of whup-a.s.s. He laid siege to the great Christian city of Vienna, Austria, in 1519, forcing the Holy Roman emperor Charles V to summon troops from all over Christendom to defend the city. The siege failed, but Suleiman picked up the Balkan Peninsula as a consolation prize. He also conquered Iraq, Armenia, Libya, and Algeria.Unfortunately many of Suleiman's successors sucked. In fact, his son Selim II is remembered as ”the Drunk”-a nickname that speaks for itself. Meanwhile, newcomers called the Portuguese were already scheming against one of the Ottomans' main sources of revenue: customs duties on spices from Asia.WHO'S UP, WHO'S DOWN [image]

Explorers: UP UP Spain wasn't actually the first European power out of the gate in the race to explore and brutally conquer the rest of the world. That dubious honor goes to Spain's smaller neighbor Portugal.The pioneering king who launched Portugal's empire was Prince Henry, fittingly called ”The Navigator.” Born in 1394, Henry (at the tender age of nineteen) led the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta, in modern-day Morocco, where he saw the incredible riches of Africa and Asia on display in the markets, including spices, Oriental rugs, gold, and silver. It occurred to him that Portuguese sailors could reach the sources of these luxury goods directly via sea, cutting out the numerous middlemen who dominated the land routes.Henry showed an early interest in seafaring and recruited cartographers from all over Europe to help him at his headquarters in Sagres, Portugal. Around the same time, Portuguese merchants were perfecting a new type of s.h.i.+p, the caravel, which became the workhorse of global exploration. They also invented important navigational tools, such as the quadrant, and filled books with ways to calculate lines of lat.i.tude (distance north or south of the equator) through observations of the sun.Beginning in 1420, Henry supported Portuguese colonization of the Canary Islands, the Madeira Islands, and the mid-Atlantic Azores. He also sponsored voyages of discovery down the west coast of Africa. He also gets credit for initiating one of history's most barbaric types of commerce. In 1444, Portuguese traders bought slaves from native African princes who were later sold back in Lagos, Portugal. After Portugal settled Brazil, Portuguese slave traders transported millions of African slaves to work on rubber, sugar, and tobacco plantations. The success of slavery in Brazil set the precedent for the importation of slaves by other colonial powers such as Spain and England.

THIS AIN'T THE SAME OL' s.h.i.+P As England competed with Spain and Portugal for control of the seas in the sixteenth century, one of the main English advantages was the sleeker, more aerodynamic hull that English s.h.i.+pwrights introduced sometime around the middle of the century. The old-fas.h.i.+oned Spanish galleons, with large wooden ”superstructures” housing officers' quarters and storage rooms fore and aft, didn't stand a chance against new English s.h.i.+ps, called ”razed” or ”race-built” galleons, which basically chopped off the luxury housing for officers, thus decreasing drag-an all-important consideration when wind was the sole source of power. These faster s.h.i.+ps would allow England to gain control of trade routes, and also allowed English privateers to outfight Spanish s.h.i.+ps again and again.

The exploration of Asia was driven by l.u.s.t for black pepper from India. Why go to all that trouble? Because the Ottoman Turks had a monopoly over all the overland and maritime trade routes between India and Europe, and made a fortune charging customs duties on all the goods crossing their territory. To get to the source and cut the Ottomans out of the equation, Christopher Columbus, sponsored by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, tried to find a new ocean route linking Europe to Asia across the Atlantic Ocean to the west-but b.u.mped into America on the way.Meanwhile Portuguese navigator Vasco de Gama tried another route, heading east around the southern tip of Africa, and made it to India in 1498. When de Gama returned to Portugal with a hold full of black pepper, his expedition earned a profit margin of 6,000 percent! Over the next twenty years, 95 percent of all cargo from India unloaded in Portugal was black pepper-an indication of the incredible demand for the stuff.The vast profits earned by Portugal gave other European kings ideas, and before long, explorers of all nationalities were fanning out over the globe in pursuit of fame, adventure, and most of all, money, money, money. Of course, it was still plenty hazardous for the second wave. Spain hired Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese sailor, whose crew circled the globe for the first time-though Magellan himself didn't make it, as he was eaten by natives in the Philippines in 1572. The English roster included Henry Hudson, who explored the East Coast of North America, until his men mutinied in 1611. Francis Drake, the first Englishman to circ.u.mnavigate the globe, began his voyage with six s.h.i.+ps in 1577 but returned with just one in 1580, having lost the majority of his crew.Ivan the Great: UP UP (And Legitimately Pretty Great) (And Legitimately Pretty Great) As too many Russian princes learned, those who defied the Mongols usually met grim, early deaths. But in 1480, Ivan the Great struck boldly (kind of) by making camp for a couple months across a frozen river from the Mongols. (Both armies actually may just have been waiting for the ice on the river to melt to have an excuse to go home.) Nonetheless, in a brilliant show of ”soft power,” Ivan intimidated the Mongols by displaying his army of 150,000, including cannon and cavalry, before returning to Moscow to think about death.Yes, Ivan was obsessed with his own mortality, and left his army facing the Mongols across the frozen river to ask advice from monks, bishops, and his mother about whether to fight. Ivan was also under intense pressure from the Russian commoners, who would suffer the most from Mongol retaliation. Archbishop Va.s.sian urged Ivan to fight, asking, ”Is it the part of mortals to fear death?”

He has overtaxed us, and refused to pay tribute to the Horde, and now that he has irritated the Khan, he declines to fight!-An old Muscovite woman on Ivan

Eventually Ivan returned to the scene of the battle, but moped for several weeks in his tent while the armies traded insults across the river. Then, for reasons that are still unclear, both armies simultaneously panicked and withdrew. The Mongols' withdrawal became a headlong retreat as soldiers fled toward Central Asia. This bloodless defeat signaled the end of Mongol power in Europe.”Witches”: DOWN DOWN Comically ignorant and frighteningly hateful, medieval Christians blamed women for basically everything that went wrong, which not coincidentally was a great excuse to kill them and steal their property. As a ”vessel of the Devil,” the first woman, Eve, caused the downfall of man by tempting Adam with the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Eve was the eternal archetype for all women, whose greed and l.u.s.t led to sin and corruption.So considering their evil origins, it's no surprise that women were frequently accused of being witches in medieval Europe. Of course there was no way to determine the truth of these accusations, but that didn't stop ”experts” from issuing a big book of rules for investigating and prosecuting witchcraft. The Malleus Maleficarum, Malleus Maleficarum, or or Hammer of Witches, Hammer of Witches, was a well-intentioned but fanciful work of fiction written in 1486 by two German Dominicans who were also Inquisitors. was a well-intentioned but fanciful work of fiction written in 1486 by two German Dominicans who were also Inquisitors.According to the Malleus Malleus, ”all witchcraft comes from carnal l.u.s.t, which is in women insatiable.” Unsuspecting women can be corrupted by demons that a.s.sume the form of handsome men, but they can also be recruited by other witches, who prey on them when something goes wrong, offering an easy fix through witchcraft. Witches can cast spells, fly, transform themselves into animals known as ”familiars” (such as bats or black cats), and magically move objects from far away, including stealing men's p.e.n.i.ses: ”There is no doubt that certain witches can do marvelous things with regard to male organs.” They also practice cannibalism and infanticide and have s.e.x with the Devil. Not good stuff.But how to tell if someone was a witch? The Malleus Malleus instructed readers how to carry out a ”legal” process that basically always ended with the woman dead, regardless of her guilt. There should be more than two witnesses willing to testify that the accused is a witch. Paradoxically, one of the key proofs of being a witch was denying that witches existed. Meanwhile, the judge might not be able to listen to the testimony of a witch, because she could use her words to enchant him. The proof? Sometimes judges released the accused women after talking to them! Of course, a woman could be so corrupted by the Devil that she was unable to confess to being a witch-meaning she was an extra-bad witch. And it goes without saying that any woman who didn't cry during her trial was automatically guilty of being a witch. instructed readers how to carry out a ”legal” process that basically always ended with the woman dead, regardless of her guilt. There should be more than two witnesses willing to testify that the accused is a witch. Paradoxically, one of the key proofs of being a witch was denying that witches existed. Meanwhile, the judge might not be able to listen to the testimony of a witch, because she could use her words to enchant him. The proof? Sometimes judges released the accused women after talking to them! Of course, a woman could be so corrupted by the Devil that she was unable to confess to being a witch-meaning she was an extra-bad witch. And it goes without saying that any woman who didn't cry during her trial was automatically guilty of being a witch.

D'ARC TRIUMPHS In 1425, at the age of thirteen, Jeanne d'Arc, an illiterate peasant girl, began hearing voices that she believed to be G.o.d and Catholic saints instructing her. According to Jeanne, the voices were later accompanied by a blazing light, and she was eventually able to see whichever saint was speaking to her. One theory holds that the progressive character of the visions may have been symptoms of mounting schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.In any event, the voices explained Jeanne's mission to her by 1428 at the latest, when she decided she had to help the embattled king of France, Charles VII, free the land from English domination. At that time, the English were about to capture Orleans, sealing the fate of France. Although Jeanne protested that ”I am a poor girl; I do not know how to ride or fight,” the voices insisted that she take command of the French armies and destroy the English. By this time, the French situation was so desperate that Charles VII was willing to try anything, including putting a seventeen-year-old peasant girl in charge of his armies. However, he wisely first sent her to be examined by French doctors and bishops in the nearby city of Poitiers to determine if she was a fraud.Returning to Orleans, Jeanne immediately scored a brilliant victory over the English by leading the king's troops on a lightning dash into the city to reinforce it. The sudden arrival of help cheered the defenders, who went on to throw off the English siege before routing them in a series of battles that ended with Charles VII being crowned as French king in the holy city of Rheims in 1429. Jeanne's success saved France, but not her. She was captured by John of Luxembourg in a later battle, who handed her over to his English allies. Charles VII did nothing to help the teenage girl who had saved his crown and his kingdom, remaining silent as English church officials tried and convicted Jeanne of witchcraft and heresy-in part because she wore men's clothing on the field of battle and in prison-and burned her alive on May 30, 1431. She was nineteen years old.

Ultimately, the guilt of witches can be ”proved” by physical ”trials” using a red-hot iron or dunking them underwater. In the first trial, if the accused woman can carry a red-hot iron three paces without getting burned, she's a witch. If she gets burned, she's not a witch, although she is mutilated for life. In the second, the accused woman is bound with stones and thrown into a pond. If she survives, she's a witch, and if she drowns, she's innocent. (And dead!)If the accused woman lived long enough to be convicted of witchcraft, she would be burned alive. In the end, fifty thousand to one hundred thousand women-and a few men-were burned as witches in Europe in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Many of the women were probably accused of witchcraft because they were rude or eccentric (exhibiting behaviors that today would be cla.s.sified as signs of mental illness), were too independent, questioned the authority of male officials or the Catholic Church, or owned property. In cases where the witch owned property, upon her death the land would be divided three ways, among the Catholic Church, the Inquisitors, and the royal treasury-thus giving all three ent.i.ties a good incentive to find her guilty.Jews: DOWN. AGAIN. DOWN. AGAIN.

Comically ignorant and frighteningly hateful, medieval Christians blamed Jews for basically everything that went wrong, which not coincidentally was a great excuse to kill them and steal their property.Blackmailing Jews was also a favorite tactic of bankrupt kings looking for new sources of income. In 1290, Edward I ordered the expulsion of all England's Jews. (In one story, a sea captain ”helping” some of the English Jews to flee left his cargo of refugees-to drown-on a sandbar in the English Channel at low tide.) French n.o.bles expelled the Jews several times, confiscating all their property, but always invited them back when commerce began to suffer. Later, Jews were said to be poisoning wells during the first wave of the Black Death, 13481349, and were killed en ma.s.se; in Basel the entire Jewish population was moved to a wooden building on an island in the Rhine River, where they were burned alive.As usual, not the best era to be Jewish.Mali (and Western Africa): DOWN DOWN Although it had been one of the most powerful empires of medieval times, Mali completely collapsed during this period. The demise of this wealthy West African state had nothing to do with European meddling (which was just getting started) and everything to do with a cla.s.sic African phenomenon: the overthrow of established powers by nomads from the Sahara desert.The Tuareg and Songhai were familiar troublemakers who launched rebellions during the reign of Mansa Musa II in the early 1370s. Unfortunately, Mansa Musa II wasn't much of a king: his prime minister, Mari Djata, a.s.sumed responsibility for crus.h.i.+ng the rebels and took care of the Tuareg (temporarily). But he couldn't defeat the Songhai rebellion. From there, it was all downhill for Mali.In fact the Songhai would go on to form West Africa's next great state, covering even more territory than Mali. Like the Malinese before them, the first Songhai kings grew wealthy off the trans-Saharan trade in salt and gold. But Portuguese merchants exploring the west coast of Africa did an end run around the kings of Songhai, going straight to the source. West Africa's economy then entered a long downward spiral from which it has never recovered.SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE...

Words [image]

It's strange to think of a time before phrases such as ”c'est la vie” and ”menage a trois” were common, but in the medieval period, the people of France spoke a variety of dialects, some of which were so different that they were basically different languages. In the north they spoke the langues d'oil langues d'oil-different combinations of Roman Latin and Celtic dialects of the pre-medieval period. There were five major dialects in this group. Meanwhile, in the south of France, people spoke the langue d'oc, langue d'oc, a dialect more closely related to Latin and Spanish languages such as Catalan. Finally, in the west of France, the inhabitants of the Brittany peninsula spoke an old Celtic language, a dialect more closely related to Latin and Spanish languages such as Catalan. Finally, in the west of France, the inhabitants of the Brittany peninsula spoke an old Celtic language, Breton Breton.Beginning in the late thirteenth century, however, the kings of France employed a new lingua Franca, or ”French language,” that would serve as the language of administration, and the model of correct p.r.o.nunciation and spelling. Because royal power was concentrated in Paris, this ”official French” was strongly influenced by the Parisian dialect. In 1539 it was proclaimed the official language of France by Francis I, replacing Latin.Like France, the new English national ident.i.ty also required linguistic conformity.After the conquest of England in 1066 by William the Conqueror, a ”Norman” descendant of Vikings, Norman French was the language of the English royal court. Meanwhile, the regular people of England spoke a hodgepodge language descended from all the previous conquerors of the British Isles, including the ancient Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings. Over time, the ”Old English” of the regular people fused with the Norman French of the kings to produce ”Middle English” (Geoffrey Chaucer used this version of English in writing The Canterbury Tales The Canterbury Tales). Just like French, the new English language was based closely on the dialect of the royal capital-in this case, London. It was adopted as the official language of Parliament in 1362, and was also used by the Protestant reformer Wycliffe for his ”vernacular” (common language) English Bible in 1382.The Printing Press: The Most Important Invention Between the Wheel (c. 4000 BCE) and Sliced Bread (1928) The standardization of national languages such as French and English was possible only because of a world-changing invention: the printing press. The ma.s.s production of texts encouraged authors, printers, and readers to agree on standard spellings and rules of grammar. This process was accelerated by the ma.s.s printing of dictionaries, which codified national languages.The first printing presses were actually just blocks of wood that had been meticulously carved with a single page of text. Chinese printers used these primitive presses from at least the ninth century CE to print religious texts for wide distribution. The first European printers used them for similar purposes, including ”Pauper's Bibles” (generally heavy on pictures and light on text).The Chinese n.o.bleman Bi Sheng invented the first moveable-type printing press in 1041 CE. But it was another leap to ma.s.s printing, as the individual characters or letters were still carved by hand in Europe and China. In the 1450s the German goldsmith Johann Gutenberg began ma.s.s-producing metal type by casting large numbers of metal letters with reusable molds. This made moveable-type (”typeset”) printing far more economical.Gutenberg's first major publications were beautiful ”Gutenberg Bibles,” which incorporated much of the fine artistry of monastic calligraphy-including gold leaf and other precious materials-without the need for the tedious and sometimes inaccurate hand-copying that belabored the old process. Gutenberg's printing technique soon spread throughout Europe, and was quickly adapted to myriad non-religious uses, including technical manuals for mining and manufacturing and-of course-propaganda!From the end of the 1400s onward, printing presses were central to the propaganda struggle waged by Protestant sects against the Catholic Church, and to the furious counterattacks waged by the pope in Rome. In one famous example, a pro-Protestant cartoon depicts the pope issuing a ”Papal Bull”...in the form of a giant, ga.s.sy fart.Hash Browns, Home Fries, and Latkes It might seem like a weird thing to get excited about, but after its discovery in the New World in the sixteenth century, the potato took Europe by storm. (Don't laugh.) The tuber grew well in dry, sandy soil, and was a perfect staple to feed the poor peasants of Europe. Potato cultivation began as a top-secret enterprise, with a cloak-and-dagger operation started by Sir Walter Raleigh, who received a couple of potatoes from his buddy and sometime rival Sir Francis Drake, who had just sailed around the world and picked up some potatoes in Peru or Colombia.Once Raleigh had perfected the cultivation of the potato, the story goes, he informed Queen Elizabeth, but her royal cooks-who were unfamiliar with the tuber-cooked the green ”eyes” growing on the potato rather than the potato itself. This made everyone in the royal family sick, and put Raleigh firmly in the royal doghouse.Elizabeth outlawed potatoes for a hundred years, but their growing popularity in Spain, France, and Italy (where the Spanish introduced them after the discovery of the Americas) paved the way for their large-scale cultivation in the British Isles. Cultivation was particularly widespread in Ireland, where it expanded to the exclusion of other staple crops-setting the stage for disaster in the 1800s, when blight on the potato crop caused the horrendous Irish Potato Famine.Nutritious, Delicious Beer The medieval period and Renaissance have reputations for being rather drunken times, but ironically Public Enemy No. 1-good ol' beer-was usually consumed for its nutritional value, not to get drunk. Indeed, in the early medieval period, beer was probably more like porridge, but by the Renaissance it had more or less acquired its modern form, especially with the addition, in the early sixteenth century, of hops-a grain that helps preserve the beverage for longer periods of time and also gives it its bitter taste.People used all kinds of ingredients to flavor beer, from yummy things (blackberries) to weird items (garlic and tree bark) to positively bizarre stuff (chicken...yes, chicken). These ingredients probably reflected beer's continued status as a meal in itself in the late medieval and Renaissance period. Beer was also considerably safer to drink than water, because the fermentation process ”cooked” the bacteria that caused diseases such as cholera and dysentery.In fact, beer was so important as a source of nutrition and recreation that it became one of the very first areas where the German states of the Holy Roman Empire decided to cooperate and inst.i.tute a uniform legal code: in 1516, the Bavarian Beer Purity Law became the first ”consumer protection” regulation by legislating the required alcohol content, fermentation process, and appropriate ingredients for German beer. According to one anonymous monk, beer actually helped drinkers be better Christians: ”He who drinks beer sleeps well. He who sleeps well cannot sin. He who does not sin goes to heaven. Amen.”Amen.A Vodka You Can't Refuse...

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