 
### AROUND THE WORLD FOR 900 YEARS

### Watching History Happen

Second Edition

Copyright 2012 George J. Cole

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CONTENTS

Introduction

The Ten Hundreds

The Eleven Hundreds

The Twelve Hundreds

The Thirteen Hundreds

The Fourteen Hundreds

The Fifteen Hundreds

The Sixteen Hundreds

The Seventeen Hundreds

The Eighteen Hundreds

Bibliography

About the Author
INTRODUCTION

It has been said that history enables us to recognize our mistakes when we make them again, and it is well known how lessons from the past go unheeded in the passions of the present. The "fight for love and glory", and its frequent interplay with religion, have routine outcomes that vary only in detail. But history also catalogues the progression of human understanding and achievement.

So let us treat history as a biography, as everyone's biography, as an absorbing account of what people have been doing over the ages. And let us not stay too long at one place before looking around to see what is happening at the same time somewhere else. Let us climb aboard an orbiting space station so we can see King John of England signing Magna Carta at the same time as Genghis Khan's cavalry is invading northern China, and see fourteen year old Marie Antoinette marrying the future Louis 16th of France, while Captain Cook is claiming Australia for England. We might also notice that while Marie Curie and husband are discovering radium in 1898, the USA is declaring war on Spain. Of course by moving around like this we might miss a lot, but we can't expect to see everything. Sometimes comment will be necessary to make what we see from the space station intelligible, or to embellish it, and in such cases a **bold** font will conveniently distinguish comment from observation.

Before we take off it should be noted that the historical sources are essentially those listed in the bibliography. There has been some cross-checking on "facts" where something seems unlikely or a conflict appears, but in general the information has been taken as read. In defence of this it is assumed that all historical "facts" range from inaccurate in detail to completely false, and in most cases we will never know the truth. Truth is an unclear concept anyway. Since this book is intended for recreation rather than study, reference to specific sources has been avoided except where it is necessary to acknowledge an author's own words or interpretation of some matter.

While reckoning time by the Christian calendar is commonly accepted in today's international commerce, more than half of humanity would not regard the calendar as beginning in the year of their Lord. A modern terminology has therefore been adopted in which AD becomes CE (Common Era) and BC becomes BCE (Before Common Era). Our starting point is the first day of 1000 CE, and our journey will finally end on the last day of the year 1899 CE.

~~~~

THE TEN HUNDREDS

January 1 1000 CE

On the first day our space station is drifting over **China**. Below are the two great rivers Huang He (the Yellow River) and Chang Jiang (the Yangtze) flowing across the country from the high mountains in the west. Vast quantities of silt are being deposited at their shallow mouths on the east coast. Most of the 80 million people down there are working their farms or the farms of big land-holders. They are carefully recycling the waste materials from their diet to maintain the fertility of the soil. This has the advantage of making sewerage systems unnecessary. Some of the other people are mining the ores of copper, silver and iron and extracting their metals. They are living in a period of relative stability under the Song ( _ong_ pronounced like _ung_ in German _Lunge_ ) dynasty and the economy is booming. Traders are using money rather than barter, and some of it is paper money. Paper is also being used for writing, and the formula for gunpowder – saltpeter (potassium nitrate), charcoal and sulfur – has been recorded.

A young girl is having her feet distorted or broken, then bound so that they will be permanently deformed. Symbolically the big toe is sometimes allowed to grow. She will be painfully crippled for the rest of her life. Ostensibly this is to make her petite and more feminine, but in fact it is to create a damaged image, which enhances a man's perverted sexual excitement. This is part of a currently developing attitude towards women who are increasingly being kept apart until wanted, and not heard unless spoken to. We observe the continuance of the foot mutilation procedure over the next thousand years.

Passing a little further to the east we are above **Australia**. We can see the stone-age inhabitants as they move about the country. The men are hunting reptiles and marsupials and the women are removing tubers from the ground with wooden tools. They are black skinned and usually naked, or nearly so. They have constructed no permanent dwellings.

Archaeological and genetic evidence suggests they migrated from south China during the last ice age when the sea level was low and there was not much water to cross. They brought with them a wolf-like dog called a dingo. These humans and their dogs are the only mammals on the island apart from marsupials, and those two monotremes the platypus and echidna. The Australian land and climate must have suited their Paleolithic way of life so well that there was no pressure to change, and the migrants have remained Paleolithic for the 40,000 years or so since their arrival.

Looking north from Australia to **Japan** we can watch the Ainu on the north-most island of Hokkaido. The bearded faces of the men contrast with the less hirsute faces seen on the islands further south.

These people are assumed to have arrived in Japan before the others and been displaced by them to the less salubrious parts. But it could be that they arrived later and gradually drifted south where they encountered the more advanced folk moving north. In any case those who arrived in the south, today's Japanese, did push the Ainu out of the way, so the net effect was the same.

We are fortunate to be here just as a group of Ainu are engaged in one of their bear-eating rituals. We hear that two years ago they captured a bear cub which was suckled by one of the women and then kept caged until it grew to maturity. While bears are one of their gastronomic staples, this ritual is only partly concerned with food. It is a sacrificial festivity. The animal is being taken from its cage and the participants are weeping and apologizing to it at great length. Now they are picking up two poles and squeezing the animal's neck between them. It dies and they disembowel it, catching its blood in cups from which they eagerly drink. Now the mood changes to one of great merriment and they are dancing about and rejoicing. The bear is cooked and eaten as the fun continues.

This sort of ritual has been performed all over the world by primitive societies, the ambivalent attitude towards the animal being typical.

Meanwhile in the islands further south, there is an organized Japanese society divided into clans. There is an Emperor, and he lives in Kyoto.

Where the Japanese originated is uncertain, but while they brought metallurgical skills with them they could not write. Writing was picked up only after an envoy from Japan visited the Chinese court in 57 CE. Little is known of Japanese activities before halfway through the first millennium CE. It was then that Buddhism, originating in India, arrived from Korea. There are no gods in that religion, Buddha being merely one of a series of enlightened persons. The chief doctrine is that of "karma" in which good or bad deeds meet their just deserts either in this life, or in other lives after reincarnation. Shintoism is the indigenous religion of Japan. It is based on loyalty to the descendants of the Sun goddess – yes, the reigning dynasties of Japan were so regarded – and on empathy with nature. A great deal of Chinese culture was brought across in the following centuries and this included the philosophy of Confucius, which focuses on tradition and ethics.

Drifting over the Pacific ocean we can see a convoy of canoes from Tahiti approaching what their crews are calling "the land of the long white cloud" –Aotearoa, New Zealand. There seems to be no one on the islands at present but we cannot be sure of this.

Further on we reach the western shores of **North America**.

The people here are assumed to have walked over from Asia when it was joined to Alaska. That migration would have taken place more than 12,000 years ago because by then, water from melting ice had inundated the low-lying strip of land that connected the two. Migration from elsewhere by sea is also a possibility.

In the beautiful red rock canyons of Utah, we can see the Anasazi who have made houses out of rocks and live by a mixture of farming and hunting.

Further east and south the Toltecs of **Mexico** and the Maya of **Central America** are struggling to cultivate the ground with digging sticks. There is no sign of a plough. They have built significant cities of rock and clay, and worship a variety of gods.

Did they come from Asia then? A previous civilization, that of the Olmecs, has left traces of its presence all over the area. It is interesting that their carved rocks in the form of human heads often have faces with negroid features, from which one might guess that at least some of the Olmecs came by sea from Africa. Also, the heartland of Olmec culture is on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico between Veracruz and the Yucatan Peninsula, a likely landfall after drifting with the south east trade winds and the Caribbean current. Africans could have integrated with those from the north, from Asia, both Caucasian and Mongol. A racial mix like that in Brazil today seems both possible and likely.

Up north in **Newfoundland** Vikings who have just sailed across the Atlantic are attempting to make a settlement on the coast. Heading in the opposite direction we approach the landmass of Eurasia.

Over central north **India** , the remarkable temples of Khajuraho are being completed. They are constructed out of fine sandstone, which no doubt facilitates and encourages the deep carving of the outside surface to form horizontal grooves. These are interrupted at various levels by rows of sculptures of human figures, a number of which portray sexual orgies and other erotic activities.

Turks under one Mahmud are at present conquering the **Punjab**. As we watch over succeeding years this famous predator is continuing his invasions of India plundering as he goes. Further Muslim invasions follow.

The India of the 900 years covered by this book differs from modern India. Modern India excludes Pakistan and Bangladesh which were sectioned off after World War 2, leaving a new India of reduced size. These two new states are occupied mainly by Muslims. The new India is principally a Hindu country.

Access to the old India was easiest via the Khyber Pass or one of the other passes of the north west frontier. Peoples from surrounding areas drifted in or invaded and became absorbed into the existing population. "Aryans" of uncertain origin were among the early arrivals, "Turko-Mongols" from central Asia and Afgans among the more recent.

Remarkably no historical record of India was constructed before 1200 CE. Prior to that there was literature and poetry from which inferences can be drawn, and also the accounts of life in India written by travellers, but clearly all of these can give only a very limited insight to the thousands of years preceding.

Fortunately modern archaeologists have unearthed ancient city ruins from which much can be deduced. In particular coins of various periods have made dating possible and it appears that Indian civilization goes far back in time like the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Contact with other countries was general, and commercial-cultural exchanges took place. An Indian kingdom was founded in Kampuchea in the four hundreds CE and there is a strong Indian influence in the architecture of the temple of Angkor Wat.

Sanskrit is the language of religion in India and most of the hundreds of spoken dialects are derived from it. Urdu is the principal language of the Muslim countries and contains much Arabic. Hindi is the national language of India and Hinduism the principal religion. Hindus believe in transmigration of the soul which takes many journeys until it reaches its final goal - which is formless and undefinable! According to D.P Singhal in "A History of the Indian People" Hinduism as a faith is vague, and seems to embrace many beliefs and practices that often contradict each other. It is surprising that Buddhism, which an Indian Prince Gautama Buddha derived from Hinduism, is almost extinct in India. It is however still strong in Sri Lanka. Its most evident difference from Hinduism is the absence of gods, and there is also the process of reincarnation. Eventually, after many reincarnations, the individual reaches Nirvana, where he or she exists in a state of perfect serenity by the eradication of all desires. This state can also be conceptualized as a loss of identity, or absorption of the self in the infinite. It is interesting how religions tend to regard desires as something sinister, something that might jeopardize immortality.

North of India can be seen the vast grasslands or steppes stretching out to the east and west from Russia to China. They are occupied by scattered herds of horses and cattle and the nomads who move them about from one pasture to another.

As in Europe there have been constant invasions of one tribe by another and inevitable racial mixings. Historians have given special names to these groups of people and inferred their movements and activities from what scant historical data may be available. They can be designated for convenience, Turko-Mongol nomads.

**1002 CE**. Over **Spain**. Almanzor an Arab, is the Muslim ruler of Moorish Spain. He is more interested in plunder than in administration, and Muslim control of the Iberian Peninsula is weakening. The country is breaking up into statelets ruled by emirs. Almanzor is returning from his fifty seventh campaign of pillage and he dies. The Cordobans are lamenting the loss of their "provider of slaves".

He built a palace in Cordoba, paid for with the booty and slaves taken from the Christian principalities in the north.

In 712 CE Muslim Arabs leading some of the warlike Berbers of north West Africa (the combination force known as Moors) invaded the Iberian Peninsula and within a few years had wrested control of most of what is now Spain and Portugal from Christian "Visigoths". These in turn had been invaders, pushed into the peninsula by the Huns and not popular with the Celtiberian inhabitants. There were Moors on the peninsula for 700 years after this but Christians gradually retrieved the land they had lost. During that time a great deal of Arab learning, much originating from Greece, was passed on to Christian Europe via Moorish Spain. Hindu-Arab numerals, 0 1 2 3 etc. are an example. The population of the Muslim-occupied part of the peninsula became progressively less Christian but Christian Princedoms remained in the north and north west and by the time of Alfonso 7th, King of Castile in 1126 there were Christian kingdoms in central Spain. In the Moor area Christians and Jews lived side by side with Muslims more or less peacefully, but with group mentalities of mutual wariness and dislike – as in any multicultural society.

**1013**. Local Berbers are sacking Cordoba the center of Muslim authority. Christians and Berbers are fighting together against other Christian-Berber alliances and this is regenerating the Christian significance in the country at the expense of the Muslim.

**1014**. **Ireland.** On Good Friday, a battle is raging at Clontarf near the mouth of the Liffey. A local Irish king has joined forces with Sitric, the Norse king of Dublin and taken on Brian Boru the legendary Irish hero and king of most of Ireland. Although over seventy years old, Brian has been defeating the Vikings for forty years, and with a track record like that must have gone in favorite. Sure enough his army is routing the enemy as usual, but Brian is in his tent, probably suffering a heart attack because he dies before the day is out.

Incidentally, the "O" in O'Brian and such words means "grandson of " or descendant of.

There was a great deal of ethnic interaction in Europe before 1000 CE. It seems that one of the great human drives is to increase one's territory. This is an instinct we share with other animals, constantly striving to acquire new pastures or hunting grounds, in general more living space. If this instinct leads to the death or displacement of others, so be it. The reasons for the wars and invasions that history records appear to reduce to this. Even civil wars seem to have annihilation of the opposition as the basic aim, although the outcome necessarily falls short of that. In the mid nineteen hundreds the removal of millions of unwanted people from Germany by the use of poisonous gas and from the USSR and China by starvation, hints at the instinctual motive of civil war. The near extermination of Armenians by Turks around 1900, the attempted genocide of Tutsis in Ruanda in the late 1900s and the concurrent tendencies in Yugoslavia add to the evidence. In Africa, the controllers of many countries have done their best to prevent food sent in by naive outsiders from reaching the disposable section of the population that is starving.

The "how" of conquest is not much discussed by historians but the interesting thing is that invasions of the more distant past usually seem much easier than one would expect. A small number of Norsemen in large wooden canoes progressively attacked and occupied places all the way from Ireland to Russia. A confederation of nomads from central Asia that historians have called Huns, swept all before them as they advanced to central Europe, far from their home base and in unfamiliar territory. William the Conqueror had a brief skirmish at Hastings and almost immediately became King of England. Invasions were much more difficult in recent times!

The western part of the Roman Empire had disappeared before 500 CE, broken up by incursions from all sides and replaced at first by various Germanic kingdoms. The eastern part of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, remained, and became influential around the eastern Mediterranean and Black Seas. The Germanic kingdoms coalesced and absorbed neighboring areas to form the Carolingian empire. This was begun by a king with the delightful name of Pepin the Short. His son Charles extended the empire and became known as Charles the Great or Charlemagne. He appointed governors across the country and imposed uniform laws of a kind which nevertheless allowed for the customs of the conquered. He also set up schools and in general was an effective ruler. However the Norsemen then arrived and considerably disturbed the empire. They settled in numerous places, and particularly in the part of the empire that is now France. In 885 the Carolingian king Charles the Simple (did the courtiers call him that behind his back or is it an historian's idea?) signed a treaty with the Danish leader recognizing him as Duke of Normandy, thus confirming the presence of a Viking state. The Carolingian empire rearranged, and particularly in the region of Germany became the Holy Roman Empire – not to be confused with the old Roman Empire. Christianity had spread across Europe.

Now in the east the Christian Byzantine empire is being extended in both directions by Basil 2nd (the "Bulgar Slayer") at the expense of the Bulgars and the Arabs. The capital of the empire is Constantinople, named by the Christian convert Constantine the Great in 330 CE when he moved the capital of the Roman Empire there.

To the south is **Egypt** , which is essentially the Nile river valley and estuary, protected on both sides by deserts.

These deserts would have helped to keep the kingdom of Egypt free of invasion from its beginning in about 3000 BCE until 1640 BCE and perhaps this lack of interruption allowed time for the development of efficient government and the technology required to build pyramids. However since Alexander the Great's conquest in 332 BCE Egypt has been constantly under foreign control up to the nineteen hundreds. It is likely that the prosperity and growth of the country in the early days was significantly affected by the fact that the prevailing northerly winds allowed boats to go upstream with sail, and then return with the current - a very economical transport system.

At this time, Egypt is controlled by Islamic Arabs.

To the north, Vikings (Norsemen, Northmen, Normans, the people of Scandinavia) are navigating rivers deep into the country and establishing a town at Kiev.

To the east the two great rivers that contain **Mesopotamia** are coming into view. An intricate system of canals leads water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers far into the barley fields on either side.

The Greek word Mesopotamia meant "between the rivers" and it was here that some hunter-gatherers started farming about 8,000 years BCE.

It was fortuitous that wild barley and wheat grew in the area, assisting the nomads in their move to agriculture, and settlement in the cities that evolve when there is no need to roam. Cities provide the opportunity for doing other things than acquiring food and there is time for discovery, invention and art. Mesopotamia in 1000 CE had been familiar with the wheel, with bronze and steel and the written word for more than two thousand years. A certain Alharzen had experimented with light, and shown that things can be seen because light is reflected from them, not as previously thought because the eye sends out invisible feelers to the object being looked at. He had also found that a ray of light is bent when passing through glass, and thus laid the foundations of optics.

The trouble with progress of this sort is that those on the outside looking in are motivated to acquire the benefits for themselves and successive waves of nomads invade and are in turn absorbed by the cities.

At this time the Muslim world is in control of the area, in particular the Shiite faction. But further to the east, Turkish Sunni Muslims are moving in this direction from central Asia.

**1055**. Prince Tughril (Tughril Beg) has arrived, leading his Seljuk Turks from Persia, and is entering the capital, Baghdad. The Sunni caliph of Baghdad is an unwilling puppet of the Shiite rulers of the district and is welcoming Tughril Beg as a fellow Sunni. He confers upon Tughril Beg the title of Sultan.

According to Muslim law a caliph is a successor to the Prophet and in theory there can be only one caliph in the Islamic world at one time. This raises a problem because a caliph has also been proclaimed in Spain.

**1057. Scotland.** Macbeth, King since he killed Duncan 1st in 1040 is killed by Duncan's son Malcolm 3rd .

**1066. England.** Edward the Confessor has died and left England without a king. The Witan, the council of the Anglo-Saxon kings, is electing Harold Earl of Wessex to deal with the threat of invasion from the Norsemen of France. The Norsemen (Normans) are now on their way under the leadership of William Duke of Normandy. Known as the Conqueror, he is the illegitimate son of Robert the Devil the previous Duke of Normandy, and a relative of Edward the Confessor. In fact he claims that Edward promised him the English throne. Harold's army is meeting William at Hastings and being defeated. Harold is killed, and William is installed as King William 1st of England.

Since the rulers of England came from Denmark and Lower Saxony just to the south, the Norman invaders had a similar Scandinavian origin. Perhaps this explains the ready acceptance of William. Now on the one hand the English Kings remained vassals of the King of France to whom they paid homage for many years, but on the other they increased their possessions on French soil. It is as if England were seen as an extension of France, where warring barons won or lost land to each other while remaining vassals of the King. For the time being the Channel was invisible.

**Granada** , in southern Spain. A pogrom is in progress and large numbers of Jews are being put to the sword.

The people were stirred up by a senior official of this Muslim town. He pointed out in a poem (!) that the Jews had established themselves so firmly throughout the town that they were collecting taxes, were entrusted with state secrets and in general were living off the fat of the land. They should be slaughtered in God's name. This information comes from Richard Fletcher's book "Moorish Spain". He says that this was an isolated incident and that the ten hundreds were, by and large, a time of peace and prosperity for Spanish Jewry. All this raises once more the question of why Jews have been so persistently persecuted. On the evidence of this isolated case it is because they are too successful, and so pose a threat. There are other cases like it. Even in a relatively homogeneous society tall poppies tend to be cut down, and it seems likely that such aggressive-defensive behaviour has survival value and will therefore persist. There are of course religious reasons for Jewish persecution also.

**1072. The Middle East.** Turks now occupy Asia Minor and control a wide area around Mesopotamia. Their leader is Malik Shah who is much more than just a warrior. He is building mosques and roads and canals and setting up a committee of scholars that includes Omar Khayyam the Persian poet and astronomer.

Omar is best known to us for his philosophic poetry rather than for his competent efforts to devise a better calendar. His quatrains (rubaiyat) extol the joys of wine, lament the transitoriness of life and express doubts about the Maker. Here are some examples:

And much as wine has played the infidel,

And robb'd me of my robe of honor – well,

I often wonder what the vintners buy

One half so precious as the goods they sell.

One moment in annihilation's waste,

One moment, of the well of life to taste -

The stars are setting and the caravan

Starts for the dawn of nothing – oh, make haste!

And, strange to tell, among that earthen lot

Some could articulate and others not:

And suddenly one more impatient cried -

" **Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?"**

These English versions are free translations by Edward Fitzgerald, who selected and re-assembled some of the hundreds of rubaiyat that Omar wrote. They were first published in 1859.

**1076. Palestine.** Muslims now occupy the country and Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem are being harassed. Atrocity stories of their treatment are reaching Europe.

**1081. Greece**. Alexius Comnenus aged twenty four is ascending the throne of a weakened and demoralized Byzantine Empire.

Its condition arose from the religious schism with Rome in 1054, coupled with constant harassment by Seljuk Turks. The empire began in 395 CE when it separated from the western part of the Roman Empire, and now it extends from Italy across Yugoslavia and Greece to the capital Constantinople. That city has changed names several times: In 330 CE Constantine the Great transferred the capital of the Roman Empire to the Greek town of Byzantium, in existence since 660 BCE. It grew to become the great walled city bearing its founder's name, and most recently is Istanbul.

**1096.** Emperor Alexius has proved himself a most capable general in defending Christian Constantinople against various Muslim attacks and has the idea of regaining for the empire Anatolia, the Asian part of what is later called Turkey. To this end he is making contact with Pope Urban of Rome asking for help against the infidel Turks who he asserts are a threat to Christianity in the East and indeed to Christendom in general.

Unfortunately for Alexius the Pope is quite carried away with the idea and is arousing the whole Christian world to assist in a fight not just to help Constantinople but to wage holy war against Islam. The new aim includes freeing Jerusalem from Turkish control. Alexius foresees with dismay, hordes of people crossing his domain and passing by his capital on their way. And here they come, a rabble of people on route from the west following a fanatic called Peter the Hermit. There are 12,000 to 40,000 peasants, **depending on whose history you are reading,** whole families in some cases, all seeking the salvation the Pope seems to have promised for taking part. Their enthusiasm is unrestrained. They are now sacking Belgrade, setting it on fire and killing 4000 inhabitants in the process. On they go through Bulgaria but the Byzantine governor is sending in his cavalry and many are being killed or taken prisoner. By now a great many of those who had set out are missing. Alexius seeing the rabble knows they will have no chance against Turkish armies, but ferries them across the Bosporus anyway, because they are already looting and raping in the area where they are encamped. As expected they are soon wiped out, either killed or taken into slavery. Peter the Hermit escapes, but the "People's Crusade" is over.

Constantinople is on the Bosporus, a 1.6 kilometer wide strait connecting the Black Sea (ultimately) with the Mediterranean. It offered a convenient way to Asia, and nowadays is spanned by two bridges.

**1097. Europe.** The First "Crusade" (so named because of the Christian cross sewn onto the front of each man's uniform) is on the move and is very different from the People's. Its leader is Adhemar of Monteil Bishop of Le Puy, a highly respected papal legate who was once a knight himself. He is popular with both the knights and common soldiers, which makes it easier for him to control the French (Frankish) barons whose armies make up the crusading force. The barons are traditional enemies at home and are still competing with each other while leading their armies in the common endeavor against Islam.

The armies are composed of knights, archers, common soldiers and technicians. There are also many non-combatants usefully employed in one way or another. Even the wives of some of the soldiers and their leaders have come along. The soldiers are armed with short lances clubs and daggers. Many of the archers have the fearsome crossbow. The knights who keep half a dozen picked soldiers close to themselves are mounted on armored horses and wear armor themselves. They carry lance, sword, dagger, mace and shield. The technicians do such things as build siege engines for attacking forts.

Now in the **Middle East** the first Crusade has crossed the Bosporus and is approaching the great fortress city of Nicaea in Anatolia, in Seljuk Turk hands for the last sixteen years. It is of great importance to Constantinople, and the Byzantine King, Alexius Comnenus has sent an army to help the "Franks" retake it.

Six weeks later and the city surrenders following secret negotiations with the Byzantine army. This upsets the Latins, particularly the soldiers, who were anticipating a profitable looting – the last thing Alexius wanted in what was, and again is, his own city. This divergence of aims is causing suspicion and disharmony amongst the Christian armies.

The next clash between the Franks and Turks is at Dorylaeum. A huge Islamic army is bearing down on one section of the Crusaders under the command of Bohemond. Fortunately this competent baron is holding fast until the remainder of the army arrives. And now it is here, and the heavy armor and weapons combine with the fury of desperation to drive the Muslims off. There is much rejoicing and much booty from the sultan's camp.

It is midsummer and the Turks are following a scorched earth policy as the Crusaders push on across Anatolia. They are filling in wells and generally laying waste to the land. The Crusading army is suffering greatly and many are dying in the march to Antioch. This city was one of the principal cities in the Byzantine Empire and is therefore the main interest of the expedition to the Greeks. Baldwin of Boulogne is getting sick of what he sees as fighting for the Greeks and is heading off on his own account towards Edessa across the Euphrates.

October. Four months after leaving Nicaea the armies have reached Antioch. Its outer walls are ten kilometers long, there are four hundred towers, and with mountains behind it looks impregnable. It is not possible to blockade the city completely and after two months it is the besiegers who are near starvation. They are also cold and wet and dying. It is not until June next year that a traitor from the city is arranging with Bohemond to let the besiegers in through the gates. This happens and the Crusaders are inside, which is just in time because a powerful army under one Kerbogha has arrived. It would probably have destroyed the weakened besiegers – who are now the besieged. Food and water supplies are low and the army is weak from the stress of more than seven months camped outside the city. Many who can get out are deserting and who else among them than Peter the Hermit! One of the few survivors of the people's Crusade, he is trying to repeat his performance. However he is caught, and while Bohemond has some words to say to him, this survivor incredibly remains in favor.

In Jerusalem the Vizier of Cairo is driving out the Persian occupants and installing his own troops – nomads of the Arabian desert and Sudanese warriors.

In Antioch the desperate Crusaders are suddenly highly motivated. A nondescript civilian pilgrim has reported a dream in which it was revealed that the Holy Lance (that which had pierced the Savior) was buried under one of the churches. Since this relic is currently on show in Constantinople and has already been adored by the leaders of the Crusade there is a degree of skepticism. But excavation has produced a piece of rusty iron, which has put the skeptics in the position of either accepting the miracle or demoralizing the troops once more. There is clearly only one way to go and the leaders are enthusing with the rest. Exhausted men are now resolute fighters. God has made it clear whose side He is on, and victory is assured. The Crusaders are charging out of the gates and over the drawbridge and the army of Kerbogha, partly split by disagreements, is driven back and broken up. The Crusaders are in hot pursuit cutting them down as they flee.

Back in Antioch after their victory the soldiers of Christ are settling down to a few months rest and recuperation. Their commanders are quarrelling among themselves about who is to have the city, and when to proceed to Jerusalem. In August the leader Adhemar dies and is replaced after much argument by Raymond of Saint Gilles. Bohemond is to hold Antioch which however the Greeks reasonably regard as theirs. Baldwin has already made himself Count of Edessa on the eastern side of the Euphrates.

By January **1099** the common soldiers are rebelling. They are fed up with the selfish bickering of their leaders and want to get on with the holy war. Their point made, the army is on its way – now reduced to only a thousand knights and five thousand men at arms, together with technicians, pilgrims, women, children and priests.

In June, after a six weeks' siege the Crusaders are entering Jerusalem. They are slaughtering every Muslim in the city and burning all the Jews alive in the synagogue. Their leaders are attending the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for prayers and thanksgiving.

**Spain.** Islamic fundamentalists are invading from Africa. They are taking sides in the wars between the emirs of the statelets. This is further weakening Muslim unity to the advantage of the Christians.

By 1248 Christian rulers had re-conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula. This left Granada, which was handed over to Queen Isabella more than two hundred years later in 1492.

**1099.** El Cid ("the boss") is dying peacefully in his own little state that has Valencia on the east coast of Spain as its center. He (Rodrigo Diaz to use his less famous real name) laid siege to Valencia and captured it five years ago. The private army he used for the purpose was raised with money earned fighting wars for Alfonso 6th and in pillaging the countryside. This Castilian nobleman, portrayed in legend as a Christian hero, fought for and against both Christians and Muslims during his colorful self-serving career.

Suggested events to associate with the ten hundreds

1066 William the Conqueror invading England

1099 The first Crusade capturing Jerusalem

~~~~

THE ELEVEN HUNDREDS

Our space-station is drifting over the Mediterranean coast of Africa. This coastline was occupied around 500 BCE by Phoenicians, an advanced Semitic people from the Middle East. They founded an empire based in Carthage which traded and fought with countries on the other side of the sea. It is best known for its brilliant army commander Hannibal, who drove elephants across the alps to fight the Romans. However that particular venture was as unsuccessful in conquering Rome as it was cruel to elephants. By 146 BCE the empire had finally been defeated by the Romans. At the same time south of the Sahara, towards the Equator, Bantu speaking herders and farmers were spreading across Africa from west to east. Some iron working was practiced, the knowledge almost certainly imported from north Africa or Egypt since the area was still in the stone age prior to that. Further south the people were hunter-gatherers.

At present we see that the Mediterranean coast is Arab Muslim territory. In other parts of Africa there are large settlements along rivers and at waterholes, and States are beginning to form by aggregations of these settlements.

In the Crusader territory of the **Middle East** the French barons are continuing their conquests and intrigues and establishing Frankish states in Syria and Palestine. But Bohemond, fighting Turks in the Taurus mountains in south east Anatolia, is captured and held in chains for ransom in a tower in Niksar where no Christian army can reach him.

**1103.** In order to make sure that the Frankish Crusader who expropriated Byzantine Antioch five years ago is kept out of Asia Minor and Syria for ever, Alexius is offering a large ransom to have Bohemond delivered into his hands. However due to a complicated interplay of competing factions, Bohemond is released on conditions that keep him free of Constantinople. Having spent three years in chains he is upset by his former ally's behavior, and Alexius in turn is furious that he has escaped.

Two years later Bohemond is trying to convince Pope Pashel 2nd to proclaim a holy war against Alexius and the Byzantium empire. Since the two Christian cities, Rome and Constantinople, have long been in a dispute about icons which are dear to the Byzantines, there is some chance that Bohemond's ploy will succeed. However the Pope is not quite persuaded. Another two years later Bohemond is attacking the Byzantium empire on his own account, but his attack fails, and the would-be holy warrior dies in obscurity a few years later.

**1117. Paris.** Abelard and Heloise the famous lovers, are in each other's arms.

It has been common to romanticize their tragic affair as passionately erotic, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Actually these days many people have not even heard of the pair, but those who have will be interested to follow them for a while. Abelard was born in Brittany the son of a knight who believed the boy should have a broader education than knights received. By age twenty one he was a pupil of one of Paris' leading philosophers and a year later, after claiming he knew more than his teacher, he set up his own school of logic in 1102. His specialty was the dialectic of Socrates, a method of argument through dialogue and conversation. He became famous and much sought after by those wishing to improve their education. A simmering paranoia kept him at war with his peers, but apparently he was such an outstanding philosopher, that they appointed him master of the school at Notre Dame anyway.

Abelard is now thirty seven and has become private tutor to seventeen year old Heloise. Her wealthy uncle made the arrangement while Abelard was in lodgings at his house. It seems likely that Heloise is seducing Abelard, because according to his Historia Calamitatum (The History of My Misfortunes) this is his first amorous or sexual encounter. Not exactly stud form for a thirty seven year old. Uncle Fulbert is understandably upset when his niece gives birth to a son. He is placated only when Abelard agrees to marriage, albeit a secret one. Surprisingly Heloise is opposing the marriage but it happens anyway. She strenuously denies to all who ask that it has taken place. This upsets Fulbert who wanted to avoid a scandal, and he becomes more disturbed when Abelard persuades his lover to live in a nunnery. This curious move and who knows what else, enrages the uncle, and he sends a party of thugs to Abelard's room to castrate him. Uncle does not quite get away with this. He is disgraced and fined. Two of the perpetrators are caught and in turn castrated. For good measure they are also blinded.

Abelard's reaction is not what one would expect from a great lover. He regards his castration with shame, and feels that God is justly punishing him. Now, strangely, he is practically forcing Heloise to become a nun. It is a nice piece of selfishness on Abelard's part to ensure that she cannot enjoy the life she may have wished for with anyone else. Having tied up Heloise, Abelard himself becomes a monk and studies and teaches theology.

Heloise nurtured an enduring resentment towards Abelard for this as revealed in her subsequent love letters to him. However John Marenbon in "The Philosophy of Peter Abelard" (Published in 1977 which shows the continuing interest in Abelard) quotes suggestions that the elaborate to-and-from letters that have come down to us may be apocryphal. Other students of the matter claim that Abelard wrote them all – both his and hers. Whatever the truth, the letters add to the curiosity of the matter.

**1126. China.** The social situation in China has been deteriorating. Rich landowners are demanding more and more from the tenant farmers who become progressively worse off. The lack of national unity is probably undermining the effectiveness of the substantial Song army. In spite of its being supplied with a yearly production of millions of arrowheads and thousands of suits of armor, it cannot repel nomadic invaders from Manchuria who are now in control of the north.

The southern two thirds of China is still under the control of the Song dynasty and living a separate existence with the capital at Hangzhou south of the Yangtze estuary. The introduction of Vietnamese rice has made two crops a year possible, and tea and cotton growing is flourishing. Foreign trade is adding to the country's wealth with Chinese porcelain much sought after. China now has a substantial navy and ocean-going junks are capturing trade from the Arabs in the Indian Ocean. The trading ships can carry up to 300 tonnes of goods and 500 people. They can travel 400 kilometers a day under favorable conditions. It is interesting that the merchants who conduct the valuable trade are looked down on by the landed gentry and therefore aspire to be landed gentry themselves. The result is that trading profits are directed towards buying land instead of expanding trading activities. By 1161 the Chinese navy has the ability to hurl gunpowder bombs at the enemy. Some of their warships have concealed paddle wheels powered by men on treadmills. They present the frightening image of ships propelled by magic.

**1138. The Middle East.** A Kurdish man Ayyub moves from Armenia to Baghdad to take up an administrative post and is currently stationed at Tikrit on the Tigris. Ayyub must have unusual talents because he becomes a companion of the Turkish sultan, even though in these days also, Kurds are looked down on by Turks. Now at Tikrit he fathers a son and the boy's name is Salah-al-Din – yes Saladin – who at age fourteen is taken into the service of Nur-al-Din the sultan of Aleppo, and educated in religion and warfare. By age eighteen he is an aide-de-camp to Nur-al-Din and becomes his favourite partner at polo. By age twenty six he owns a house in Damascus and is assigned to an expeditionary force to Egypt commanded by his uncle Shirkuh. A few years later in Egypt again, he is assisting his uncle in driving out an army of Crusaders, who are still busying themselves in the area. But the situation is complicated with Syrians, Egyptians and Crusaders forming alliances of expediency with each new situation.

**1154. Italy**. Englishman Nicholas Breakspear becomes Pope Adrian 4th.

No English Popes were created after him. He later refused Henry 2nd 's request that Ireland should be granted to the English crown. The next Pope Alexander 3rd supported Henry but then imposed penance on him after the murder of Thomas a Becket.

**1160.** **Central Asia.** Temujin is an aristocratic child of the Asian Steppes, the land between 40° and 140°E. His family is being torn apart by the inter-clan warring that is normal among the nomadic tribes and at present the situation is precarious. His father is killed and with his mother he escapes capture. However Temujin is both tough and intelligent and in growing up not only survives, but rises to a position of prominence in his clan. He becomes its leader, overcoming and absorbing neighboring clans. Soon he has so much power and support that other clans are willingly joining his. The well known Tatar (Tartar) tribe for example which has grazing lands in the extreme east of Mongol territory becomes part of Temujin's organisation, and it is not long before all the tribes are united under his leadership and regarding themselves as Mongols. There may be an historical predisposition for such unity since language similarities show that Mongols are closely related to the other Steppe inhabitants, the Turks and Manchus. Temujin is forming an army of fighting nomads that will soon have to find someone to fight.

**1161. Japan.** a ferocious civil war is raging between the two leading clans. The ultimate outcome is a victory for the Minamoto clan whose leader assumes the title of Shogun, meaning commander in chief, and takes up residence at Kamakura.

The royal court is still in Kyoto but power is moving towards Kamakura and with it the emphasis of Japanese interest – from courtly arts to martial arts.

**1166. Ireland.** It is a hundred years since the Normans conquered England and they are now moving into Ireland at the invitation of the ex-king of Leinster who wants his throne back. One of the leaders is the earl of Pembroke nicknamed Strongbow, and he is bringing many Welshmen with him. But Welshmen are largely Celts like the Irish and they are soon inter-marrying with the Irish and becoming Irish in sympathy, language and customs.

Who were the Celts anyway? According to Nora Chadwick who has spent much of her life studying the subject, they were a people vaguely defined by their culture who occupied territories from Ireland to Greece during the first millennium BCE. The scant evidence Chadwick presents in her book "The Celts" makes it difficult to see how a prehistoric people living in small groups scattered over the countryside came to be bundled together by historians and known by a particular name. And if this was justified, what distinguished them from neighboring groups who were not Celts? Anyway these people entered the Iron Age but remained illiterate until their contact with more advanced societies. The Romans defeated them in Gaul and England and changed their way of life, but did not invade Ireland and had limited impact on Wales, and therefore until the Viking invasion around 950 CE, the Irish and Welsh remained the best examples of those who have been called Celts.

**1169. The Middle East.** Saladin's uncle Shirkuh has become obese and dies. Saladin becomes Sunni vizier of the previously Shiite Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt, and Syrian commander in chief. His sultan is beginning to see Saladin as a rival and addresses him in letters as "Emir Salah-al-Din", ignoring his vizier status. He is also refusing Saladin's request that his brothers join him. But the situation in Egypt is becoming critical and the sultan sends Saladin's brothers just in time to help against a palace faction in league with the Crusaders. Sorely pressed by Sudanese slave soldiers under palace control, Saladin sets fire to the barracks where their families are housed. This gentle maneuver creates the desired diversion and Saladin wins the day.

**1172.** Saladin's brothers are successfully repelling an attack by Nubian troops on Egypt's southern frontier. Nepotism comes naturally to Ayyub's family and before long Ayyub and other family members are also with Saladin in Egypt. His father who has a history of political astuteness advises him to express every possible sentiment of loyalty to the sultan who is getting ready to move against a too powerful Saladin. The advice is taken and the delicate situation defused. Two years later Nur-al-Din dies and Saladin installs himself as King of Damascus. He is now the leader of the Crusaders' opposition and of the holy war against Christianity.

**1187.** Saladin recaptures Acre from the Crusaders. After various battles and truces between Franks and Turks things have come to a head. It is said that Muslims can never make peace with infidels – only truces of convenience. Saladin has gathered all available troops for a showdown and the Franks are doing the same.

It is interesting to compare the two sides. Saladin's Syrian cavalry carry spears and swords and wear quilted tunics padded and strengthened with scales of lamellar armor. His Iraqi Turkish cavalry are horse archers with up to three quivers of sixty arrows each. These are not effective against Frankish armor but not all Franks are armored and any unarmored horses are vulnerable. The Turkish cavalry also carry a light lance tipped with iron, a sword and a mace. They eschew body armor but wear long topcoats of brocade, tall boots and loose trousers. Their hair is long in three pigtails and they have plenty of facial hair. The Frankish infantry includes crossbowmen greatly feared because of the heavy steel arrows they fire. The knights and their horses, both armored, have much in common with the modern tank. The foot soldiers carry a short lance, club and dagger.

The Knights Templar were an interesting lot. These Knights of the Temple of Solomon would probably be called religious fundamentalists today. Their Christian military order was founded in the early eleven hundreds with the primary aim of protecting the pilgrims to the holy land and they were responsible only to the Pope. They swore oaths of poverty, chastity and obedience and rarely bathed. They were dirty and hirsute and in holy war battles they fought like fanatics. How they entertained themselves when not at war is not recorded in the usual texts.

Saladin lays siege to Tiberias on Lake Galilee and the Franks advance in mid summer carrying insufficient water. They stay the night on the hill of Hattin and wake next morning to find the opposition surrounding them. Half dead with thirst they are in no condition to fight and many surrender in the first few hours. Some of the leaders and their knights make a break for it by charging through the enemy lines and leave the rest to their fate. That fate varies with the person. The Knights Templar are given the chance to convert to Islam. A few do and the rest are executed, since to Saladin they represent the essence of Christian opposition. The leaders who are not executed are held for ransom but the crossbowmen are executed because they are too dangerous alive. The common soldiers are later being sold in Damascus as slaves and the price is at a record low on account of the rich supply.

Having virtually wiped out Frankish opposition, Saladin is proceeding to Jerusalem. The city is defended only by the few soldiers not recruited for the big fight, and soon negotiates a surrender. This involves the paying of a ransom for their freedom by those who can afford it, and slavery for those who cannot. Jerusalem is again in Muslim hands.

**1189.** Another Crusade has landed at Acre just north of where Haifa now stands. It is of course motivated by the loss of Jerusalem two years ago, and this time not only French nobles but kings and barons from all over Europe are leading their soldiers in this holy war. They have Acre under siege and are camped around the city in their tens of thousands. But epidemic disease is carrying them off as fast as reinforcements arrive and by the time Acre is taken in 1191 the army is in poor shape. The defenders are regarded by the Crusaders themselves as heroes, on account of their valiant stand, and crusade leader Richard the Lion Heart negotiates a huge ransom for their freedom. Saladin was not a party to the deal and is slow to settle. After waiting six weeks Richard orders the gallant defenders beheaded – about three thousand of them. This piece of barbarism combined with the effects of the long siege seems to have demoralized the Crusading army and it is not long before Richard and the rest are looking for an excuse to go home. Richard obtains a guarantee from Saladin of safe access by Christians to Holy Places in Jerusalem and possession of the Holy Sepulcher – the buildings over the cave where Christ was buried outside the walls of Jerusalem. In return the Crusaders will leave.

**1192.** The Crusaders are dispersing and Jerusalem remains in Muslim hands. The Frankish provinces, reduced in size and significance, are now vassals of Saladin's empire.

Richard and a small group of followers are trying to return home via Austria disguised as pilgrims. Apparently Richard has made a lot of enemies around Europe and it is hard to find a safe route. He fails, and is captured by Leopold of Austria while hiding in some humble abode outside Vienna. His ransom is enormous and impoverishes the English people.

Saladin died six months after Richard's departure from the holy land. Muslim and other historians have made much of Saladin's noble mindedness and chivalry, portraying him as the most compassionate and gentle person, shy and politically naive. He sometimes behaved in ways that justify such compliments, but even apart from his later record, the unstable political situation of his time with the break-up of the Seljuk sultanate, makes it unlikely that he could have got the start that he did with such a personality. His father Ayyub for instance was notorious for political astuteness and succeeded in furthering his ambitions by readily switching alliances.

Andrew Ehrenkreutz is not convinced of Saladin's gentle nature when he writes "Most of Saladin's historical accomplishments should be attributed to his military and governmental experience, to his ruthless persecution and execution of political opponents and dissenters, to his vindictive belligerence and calculated opportunism, and to his readiness to compromise religious ideals to political expediency". Certainly he never made the pilgrimage to Mecca. This casts serious doubt on his piety and his commitment to a holy war. Maybe he was simply ambitious. Whatever the case there is no doubt that both he and Richard would be tried as war criminals today, if only for the massacre of prisoners.

**1199. France.** Not daunted by his ignominious capture and unpopularity in Europe, Richard is away from England again, this time laying siege to a castle near Limoges where he thinks some treasure is hidden. He gets an arrow in the neck and the barbed head has to be cut out. He dies from the subsequent infection of the wound.

King Richard could not speak English and during his ten year reign as King, visited England only twice, staying for just a couple of months both times. The heavy taxes he levied to wage wars, and on that notable occasion to pay his ransom, reflected on his ministers at home rather than on him. So long as he was the dashing hero abroad his popularity was assured, and he remained the revered sovereign for a thousand years.

**England**. Young brother John becomes king of England and continues the heavy taxation to pay for a losing war with the king of France. Unlike Richard he is hated for his taxation.

Nichola of Hermingford, widow of William Rufus, is offering King John money – 100 pounds – so that she should not be forced to re-marry. The King is accepting on condition that if she decides to marry again she should do so at his advice. Such buying off of the monarch to escape the law is normal. The possibility that a widow would not re-marry and hence remain in possession of perhaps a large inheritance, is apparently disturbing to the male law-makers.

Suggested events to associate with the eleven hundreds

1126 China developing a merchant navy active in the Indian Ocean

1161 The first Shogun installed in Japan

1187 Saladin recapturing Jerusalem and defeating the second Crusade

~~~~

THE TWELVE HUNDREDS

**Over India.** Turki-Afghan rulers are invading from the North West, defeating the Hindu rulers in Northern India who are busy fighting amongst themselves. The Hindu masses are not mounting a national uprising against the relatively few Afghans, perhaps because it is a matter of indifference whether their overlord is this one or that one. On the other hand if the Hindu faith is important to them they should fear the invader will not allow them to practice it. It is not obvious why there is so little opposition to the Muslims.

Over Africa "The Great Enclosure" an impressive stone building in Zimbabwe is being constructed. This is happening millennia later than the construction of the pyramids in the north of the continent.

Around the fertile farmlands of the upper Niger River, an African empire known as Mali is developing. Arab Muslim states on the other side of the Sahara are playing an important role in its creation, presumably as a way of acquiring what the area has to offer. Mali now has a standing army noted for its cavalry division, the horses being imported from those Mediterranean Muslim states. In return the Mali merchants send ivory and gold, and those of their fellow tribesmen who can be rounded up as slaves. The exchange takes place in the trading town of Timbuktu. Apart from horses, the merchants of Mali import also salt and luxury goods from the Muslims. It would seem that a wide gap separates those at the top from those at the bottom in the new African empire.

**1204. Greece.** Crusaders are sacking and taking over Constantinople!

This is an ironic twist considering that it was that city's plea to the Pope for help a little over a hundred years ago that created the Crusaders in the first place. Bohemond would have been delighted and Alexius dismayed. It seems that the schism between Rome and the Greek Orthodox Church is manifesting itself once more. The locals retake their city five decades later.

**1206. India.** A Muslim "Sultanate of Delhi" is established and it now rules northern India.

**Central Asia.** The chief shaman, spiritual leader of the Mongols,, announces that "The Everlasting Blue Sky favors Temujin who is its own envoy on earth". He is henceforth to be known as the universal khan, the Chingis, or Genghis Khan.

(Temujin's early life was observed in 1160).

This Ching spelling of B. Vladimirtsov in "The Life of Chingis-Khan" lends support to the pronunciation given by Asimov in his book "The Near East" for Genghis, that is, jeng'-gis. Incidentally is there not something appealing and sophisticated about "the everlasting blue sky" as a god? When he died in 1227 on campaign in northwest China, Chingis' age some say, was seventy two, some say sixty. He was therefore either thirty nine or fifty one when he became the Khan of all Mongols and began to extend his empire. Alexander the Great was only twenty one when his odyssey began and was dead before reaching thirty nine. According to Vladimirtsov, Chingis did not regard himself as a leader of the people but as the leader of an aristocratic clan (the Golden Clan) that unified all the Mongol aristocracy. Perhaps a Russian professor in 1930 would be likely to interpret the situation in that way.

**Persia.** (later Iran) Genghis Khan, following his conquest of Central Asia with his united Turko-Mongol tribes, is sweeping into the country slaughtering anyone who shows the slightest resistance and recruiting those who surrender. This army of nomads is mounted on shaggy ponies and can move quickly from place to place. It is seemingly invincible, which is strange considering that as nomads they can have no metal industry and their bows and arrows must be less than "state of the art" in more developed countries. Muslims fighting the Crusaders had bowmen on fast horses less than twenty years ago, so there is no novelty in that. Is it Genghis' ability as a military general that accounts for their success, or is it something to do with their sheer toughness and dedication to murder and destruction.

All of Genghis' senior guardsmen are of noble blood. A leader who arrives by force is in constant danger of a coup by ambitious rivals, and while Genghis' competence as a general makes it difficult for rivals to find allies, it seems he also has other tactics to win loyalty. Ordinary soldiers of his bodyguard can feel secure and special because the commanders of his bodyguard are not allowed to punish their subordinates without Ghengis' specific permission, and anyone he knows personally can not be chastised by his superior – only by Genghis himself. His imperial guard is the nursery of the new empire's ruling class, whose chief concerns are personal superiority and enrichment. Naturally.

There is almost no such thing as a civilian Mongol man, since all men under sixty are conscripted. The military forces are organized decimally, 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, the latter being the major fighting unit. Communications over the vast empire are a problem, which has been solved by the establishment of post stations about forty kilometers apart. These carry stocks of horses and fodder and couriers, and express couriers can use eight of them in a day.

Although illiterate for life, Genghis encouraged others to be literate when he discovered writing in the places he conquered. He decreed that all judgments in cases of theft and fraud be recorded. He ordered that laws be written down, and imagined that they would remain unchanged for 10,000 years. Not only writing came from the people he conquered, he adopted everything of value. The empire he founded was extended by his successors and became the largest empire (in area) ever.

**Europe.** Our space station is drifting over France. Domingo de Guzman a Spanish monk of noble stock is in southern France and is shocked at finding so many Cathars there. The Cathars have partly Christian beliefs, partly Gnostic and partly others, and uphold the sort of moral standards that Christians profess. They deplore the corruption they see in the local representatives of the Church, whose priests and bishops are principally occupied enjoying the luxuries of life. In some churches Mass has not been said for thirty years.

Domingo (French Dominic), believing that the best way to rectify the situation is to set an example, is founding a network of itinerant monks to travel the countryside barefoot and spread the true word. He selects educated fellows who can debate effectively with Cathars and who live frugally and piously. As for himself he prays incessantly and often flails himself with an iron chain. Unfortunately not all Cathars are persuaded and Dominic can't come to terms with this.

**1208.** A certain Francis, born in Assisi about twenty seven years ago is undergoing a religious conversion. He had been living a debauched life of pleasure as the son of wealthy parents until some years ago when he decided to become an ascetic and work with the poor. Now he is going to devote himself to preaching like his contemporary Dominic. He gains an enthusiastic following and it is not long before Pope Innocent 3rd approves of his work and the Franciscan Order is established. The brothers of the Order must reject worldly possessions, and subsist by begging. They must however do manual work. This sort of life holds little long-term attraction for some, and the Order begins to change, especially during a period when Francis is in Egypt. Subsequently it becomes rich and powerful, but later reverts to something like its original style, emphasizing the importance of spiritual things above worldly ones. This brings it into conflict with the Inquisition at a time when that organization is trying to justify ecclesiastical wealth. Argument between the Dominicans and the Franciscans continues for centuries.

Francis was canonized in 1228 by Pope Gregory 9th, only two years after his death.

In 1252 one of his followers, St. Clare, saw from her sickbed in a convent, the Christmas services being held in Assisi. For this piece of "tele-viewing" Pope Pius 12th in 1958, proclaimed her the patron saint of television.

**1209.** A Crusade is in progress against the recalcitrant Cathar "heretics" of southern France whom the Pope has described as worse than the Muslim infidel. A minor baron Simon de Montfort is in charge, and Dominic has joined the fray, upset by his failure to convert all the Cathars and determined to win by other methods.

Simon is the father of the famous Simon de Montfort who married the sister of Henry 3rd of England. His previously established ability as a Crusader made him an easy choice to lead this Crusade.

Now in Beziers, a town in which many Cathars live, 15,000 men, women and children are being slaughtered without regard to whether they are Cathar or Catholic. "No worry," says the Papal legate and spiritual leader of the Crusade "God will recognize His own".

**1212. Nottingham, England.** King John is preparing to lead his troops towards Wales in response to a threat by Llywelyn who has crossed the Welsh border into England. John holds hostages to dissuade Llywelyn from breaching the peace, but apparently this does not bother the Welshman and John is therefore hanging 28 hostages - boys from noble Welsh families. There is no report on the reaction of the noble families. John receives word that his barons have plotted to betray him to the Welsh and returns to his home base London. Perhaps it was this prospect that led Llywelyn to take a chance.

**1213. Italy**. Pope Innocent 3rd is excommunicating King John who has appropriated Church property and in general defied him. John quickly capitulates, restores the property and pays compensation. He also installs the papal nominee Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury. John is thereby absolved on condition of a promise of good government.

**1215. England.** May. The barons are formally renouncing allegiance to the King. On June 15th. at a certain meadow between Staines and Windsor known as Runnymede, a five-day conference between the king and barons is beginning. In return for the king's signature on their "Magna Carta" the barons renew their oaths of fealty. This famous document officially documents laws of the land and limits the power of kings.

September 1215. A papal bull dated August 24th arrives in England. The Pope thereby annuls and abrogates the Charter. John has been to Rome lobbying his cause and presumably doing deals. The bull begins by describing John's wickedness and subsequent repentance and his Crusaders' oath, and goes on to denounce the Charter completely. Inspired by this support, John and his mercenaries take Rochester castle by assault and engage in various other attacks on barons around the country. Thoroughly sick of John's behavior, the barons offer the crown of England to Louis the French King's son and now 7000 French troops are arriving in London.

**Italy.** Pope Innocent 3rd has summoned everyone of importance in the Catholic world to attend the Fourth Lateran Council. Among the many significant items on the agenda is the excommunicating of the English barons who the Pope says have persecuted "John King of England crusader and vassal of the Church of Rome by endeavoring to take from him his kingdom, a fief of the Holy See".

Another important item on the agenda is the endorsement of the official establishment of the Dominican Order. This is in response to the great work of Dominic in recruiting trained theologians for the preaching of the faith and the hunting down of heretics.

Later in the proceedings the assembly is decreeing that when the priest at the altar pronounces the phrase "hoc est corpus meum" (this is my body) the bread and wine changes into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. In the words of the Definition : The body and blood of Jesus Christ are truly contained under the appearance of bread and wine in the sacrament of the altar, the bread being transubstantiated into the body and the wine into the blood.

According to Reay Tannahill in "Flesh and Blood" the "Host" (from "hostia" meaning a sacrificial victim) had formerly been eaten as a symbol of the body of Christ. Now it was an actuality, and anyone who disputed it was guilty of heresy.

Whatever other heresy may have arisen from this, a well known one was committed by the Lollards nearly two hundred years later in England. Under the leadership of John Wycliffe they not only rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation but also advocated the diversion of ecclesiastical property to charitable uses and denounced war and capital punishment. Such compounded heresy suggests a death wish and many were in fact burnt after the passing of the statute "De heretico comburendo" – the necessity of burning heretics - in 1401. Wycliffe incidentally had friends in high places and kept his cool.

**China.** The Mongols and their cavalry are invading the country and terrorizing the people as usual. They massacre all who resist and are subjugating large populations with relatively few soldiers. Soon they capture Beijing from the previous conquerors, the Manchus, (see 1126) who are occupying it. The locals are not entirely upset by this and inclined to support the new invaders, but soon find the Mongols are no improvement on the Manchus.

**India.** Iltutmish, the present monarch of the Sultanate of Delhi is diplomatically avoiding an attack on his Indian kingdom by Genghis Khan who has moved his activities east from Persia. In 1236 Razia, the daughter of Iltutmish, is queen (begum) of Northern India. She is what is known in the 2000s as a cross-dresser (transvestite) and is leading her armies personally against rebellious chiefs.

Not many sons can mimic an outstanding man's achievements, and significantly Razia's brothers were not selected as Iltutmish's successor. Did she know of Boadicea and Zenobia, and will Joan of Arc know of _them_? How can we account for these extraordinary women?

**1216. London, June.** The French Prince Louis is arriving in London hoping to become king of England. However this does not eventuate because King John dies in October and an English boy prince is sworn in as Henry 3rd King of England and vassal of Rome. Magna Carta is accepted as the rule of government.

A great deal has been written about Magna Carta, wrestling with the question of why it is seen as almost mystically significant to England. Authors have pointed out that it was not particularly well constructed and not original and little of it is left today in British law.

It handed on some of the usages of the old English law and confirmed many rules of the feudal law brought into England by the Normans after 1066. It also preserved the fine judicial and administrative system established by the wise Henry 2nd and in some cases extended it.

McKechnie defends the Charter's immortality convincingly when he says "Apart from and beyond the salutary effect of the useful laws it contains, its moral influence has contributed to an advance in the national spirit and therefore in the national liberties. Such considerations justify enthusiasts who hold that the granting of Magna Carta was the turning point in English History".

Here are a few clauses from the document: ("we" is the king speaking)

15. Henceforth we will not grant anyone that he may take an aid (a levy) from his free men, except to ransom his person, to make his eldest son a knight and to marry his eldest daughter once; and for these purposes only a reasonable aid is to be levied.

23. No vill (a vill is a small village) or man shall be forced to build bridges at river banks, except those who ought to do so by custom and law.

27. If any free man dies intestate, his chattels are to be distributed by his nearest relations and friends under the supervision of the Church, saving to everyone the debts which the deceased owed him.

38. Henceforth no bailiff shall put anyone on trial by his own unsupported allegation without bringing credible witnesses to the charge.

58. We will restore at once the son of Llywellyn and all the hostages from Wales and the Charters delivered to us as security for peace.

This last seems to confirm the sympathetic connection between the barons and Llywelyn and the English-Welsh conspiracy against John.

**1217. Southern France.** Eight years after the Cathars were first targeted by Dominic, the Crusaders have Toulouse under siege and their leader Simon de Montfort gets in the way of a rock thrown by one of the defenders. His death slows the Crusade down but it resurges again in 1224 inspired by Louis 7th and continues until about 1255 when organized Cathar resistance finally ends.

**1223. Rome.** Pope Gregory 9th issues a Bull that confers on the Dominicans the specific task of eradicating heresy, allowing them to proceed against heretics without appeal and call for assistance from the secular arm if necessary. A permanent tribunal is established, staffed by Dominican brothers. These _Inquisitors_ act independently of the local bishops but as things settle down members of the clergy are brought back into the operation and Pope Gregory 10th in 1273 orders the Inquisitors to operate in conjunction with local bishops.

**1228.** **Jerusalem.** Frederick 2nd the Holy Roman Emperor, has led the sixth crusade here and recovered the city by treaty without fighting. Fred is an unlikely Crusader, being a religious skeptic, and he is in constant conflict with the Pope who excommunicates him three times.

**1234. Rome.** Dominic is admitted into the calendar of saints (canonized) only thirteen years after his death. More than a hundred houses of his Dominican Order now exist.

**Europe.** The eastern states are being terrorized and Russia invaded by the "Golden Horde". It is a Mongol–Turkish army commanded by Chingis Khan's grandson Batu Khan. There are various reasons given for the name "Golden Horde"– because of the wealth they acquired from plunder, because of the color of the chief's tent and so on. However since Chingis Khan's own clan was called the Golden Clan there seems little need to look beyond that.

A Mongol presence on the western steppes in the form of the Khanate of the Golden Horde lasts another 200 years and extracts tribute from Russia during that time.

**1238. Spain.** The Inquisition is established in Aragon. It remains relatively dormant over the next two centuries.

**1250. Egypt.** Slave soldiers are turning the tables on their masters and taking over Egypt. They are known as Mamelukes (Mamlukes, Mamluks) and are now the ruling class. How heartening to see the oppressed defeat the oppressor! Unfortunately it is not long before metamorphosis produces a new oppressor.

Likewise the Seljuk Turks who took over Persia and Mesopotamia and fought the Crusaders were once mercenaries who changed their status from employees to employers.

**1252. Japan.** The famous Kamakura Daibutsu the Great Buddha is being cast in bronze. The warriors are getting culture and also attracting artists and intellectuals who previously congregated at Kyoto.

**England.** About this time Roger Bacon, a Franciscan priest, is extending the work Alhazen began two hundred years ago in Mesopotamia, by studying the magnifying lens. He is also exhorting scientists to depend on experiment rather than relying on dogma from the past.

**1257. The Middle East.** Genghis' successor Hulagu is carrying on the tradition and attacking anyone in sight. By chance some good for Muslims is coming from this, in that the Assassins are being wiped out. These fanatics are a breakaway sect from Shiite Muslims and their name is either a corruption of hashish or a reference to their master Hassan (it is a matter of scholarly dispute). They specialize in the public murder, hence "assassination", of political figures. Their stronghold in the hills, previously impregnable, is not impregnable to Hulagu who then goes on to sack Baghdad, and destroy the irrigation canal system that supported the population of Mesopotamia for 5000 years.

This seems to be an example of aggression for aggression's sake rather than for territorial gain. Perhaps the love of sadistic violence is linked to effective territorial activity.

**1260.** Near Damascus the Mamelukes are meeting Hulagu head on and inflicting the first significant defeat of the Mongols anywhere. From now on we see no further Mongol expansion in the west.

**1261.** The Byzantines are recapturing the city from the Latins. It is hard to see just what is going on, since presumably the Byzantines have been living in and around the city since 1204 in far greater numbers than the Latins.

**1265. China.** The Mongols are moving steadily south into Song territory, undeterred by the bamboo-tube firearms the Chinese armies now have. Genghis' grandson Khubilai Khan is taking over the brutality of his ancestor.

Khubilai is indeed the one who built a pleasure dome in Xanadu in Coleridge's opium induced vision.

The Mongols' continued success appears to be facilitated by collaboration of the landed gentry, whom Khubilai is leaving in undisturbed possession of their estates. The Mongols are also enlisting the help of the Song navy commanders who are tutoring them in the construction of ships.

**1271.** The Song dynasty is no more and Khubilai Khan having pressed on into the south is the ruler of the country and master of a huge navy. The Mongols proclaim the beginning of the Yuan dynasty. Yuan means "The Origin", and the capital is now on the site of Beijing.

Marco Polo the Italian adventurer claimed to have become part of Kubilai's court and been shown ships with water-tight bulkheads, something he had never seen before.

Apparently Marco Polo never learnt Chinese and no trace of him has ever been found in Chinese sources. This has led some commentators to suggest that he never went to China at all, and learnt what he talked about from travelers on the silk route, who knew the country.

**1274.** Khubilai is attacking Japan with 900 ships and terrorizing the coastal towns, but a storm has blown up and a third of his ships are now on the rocks.

**1281.** Khubilai is at it again this time with 4500 junks and 150,000 men. The Japanese are fighting back strongly if desperately. A typhoon arrives and the Mongol ships are being wrecked. After the typhoon passes, 4000 junks and 130,000 soldiers are at the bottom of the sea. It is not surprising that the Japanese regard the typhoon as a divine wind – the Kamikasi.

**1290. The Far East.** Merchants are introducing Islam to Indonesia and Malaysia.

The West. Gun-powder is known and sources for its ingredients are well established.

**1291. The Middle East.** The Mamelukes are capturing Acre, destroying what remains of the Crusader states and sending the Crusaders home.

**1293. Anatolia.** A Turkish chief who began his career in the service of the Seljuk Turks, is founding the Ottoman dynasty and receiving the title Osman 1st or Othman 1st, from which the name Ottoman is derived.

**1294.** **China.** Khublai Khan dies and Tibet regains limited independence.

**1296.** **India.** In the north Ala-uddin Khalji now heads the Khalji dynasty. He is a patron of art and learning and is introducing administrative reforms. He has also raised a large and efficient army and stopped Mongol invasions. Later he marches into the south and extends his empire at Hindu expense. He becomes the greatest monarch among the sultans of Delhi.

Suggested events to associate with the twelve hundreds

1215 Magna Carta signed

Franciscan and Dominican orders established by the Catholic Church

1271 Mongol invader Khubilai Khan establishes his Yuan dynasty in China

~~~~

THE THIRTEEN HUNDREDS

**1300. Italy.** Italian merchants develop double-entry book-keeping.

**1309. Avignon.** Pope Clement 5th takes office in Avignon rather than Rome. This location of the Papacy lasts until 1377 when Catherine of Siena persuades Pope Gregory 11th to move it to Rome. Catherine is a mystic who is said to have received the stigmata (representing Jesus' wounds) and who once drank a cup of pus to prove some philosophical point. Anyway Clement 7th a Frenchman, moves the Papacy back to Avignon again in 1378. This starts a schism which lasts until 1417 when no fewer than three Popes are claiming office at once. The matter is resolved when Martin 5th takes office the next year.

**1314.** The Pope is officially dissolving the Order of the Temple. The Order was founded in the early eleven hundreds, but now its members, the Knights Templar, have fallen foul of the Inquisition. They are charged with tolerating heretics and dabbling in magic, and two of its highest dignitaries are being roasted to death over a slow fire.

**1318.** Four Franciscans who reverted to the principles of their founder St Francis and advocated poverty and the ascetic life for monks, are also being burnt as heretics. Their timing was bad because the Church has recently been defending its accumulation of wealth, and to the Inquisition the alternative view is therefore heretical.

**1325. Mexico.** Aztecs are founding their capital Tenochtitlan in the valley of Mexico by partly draining a lake. Later on Mexico City incorporates this site.

**1330. East Asian Steppes.** A combined epidemic of bubonic and pneumonic plague is raging. It is moving along the silk road towards Europe.

**1348. Europe.** The "Black Death" arrives from Asia and reduces the population from about 75 million to 50 million within two years. It is spread by fleas of the black rat. An early symptom of bubonic plague is swelling of the lymph nodes in the armpit and groin, the swellings being called buboes. Victims die of blood poisoning. There is also a pneumonic form. For the next 250 years this "Black Death" remains endemic in Europe flaring up in places weakened by famine.

It has been suggested that the periodic extermination of cats, sometimes associated with the persecution of "witches" after 1500 CE, allowed rat populations to flourish and increase the chance of their fleas carrying the disease to humans.

**1351. China.** The Mongol controlled authorities are impressing a large number of peasants and soldiers to repair broken dykes along the Yangtze. This is the last straw for a secret society known as the White Lotus and it is organizing a revolt. Its so-called Red Turbans are achieving mixed success. Later the land-owners are joining in against the Mongols and the rebellion is gaining momentum. At the same time great numbers of the population are being killed by the Black Death.

After seventeen years of revolution the Chinese forces succeed, and the last Mongol emperor is driven out. Zhu Yuanghang the leader of the Red Turbans is replacing him as emperor and declaring the establishment of the Ming dynasty in 1368. As we move forward in time we can observe this dynasty until 1644 when the Manchus replace it with the Qing (pronounced ching).

Zhu as emperor probably notices a change of lifestyle, having once been an orphan when his poor tenant farming parents fell victims to famine. As time goes by his army grows to a strength of two million. He recruits Mongols, who are encouraged to remain in China, perhaps because of the population decrease caused by the plague, and perhaps because they make effective troops.

**1353. Italy.** Giovanni Boccaccio finishes _The Decameron,_ a collection of bawdy tales that becomes very popular in spite of the Church's opposition.

**1354. Gallipoli.** Ottoman Turks are taking this Byzantine town on the European side of the Dardanelles. In another hundred years they are taking Constantinople after an epic siege and thus finishing off the Byzantine Empire.

**1361. Samarkand.** Tamerlane, (or Timur the Lame, or Tamburlaine The Great) who claims descent from Genghis Khan – though he is more Turkish than Mongol – is appointed Emir of Samarkand. This town is north of Afghanistan close to the fortieth parallel – which incidentally also runs through Beijing, Turkey and Spain. His genealogical claim gets some support from his future career which is characterized by the compulsive killing of human beings. He differs from Genghis only because of his inability to build an empire.

**1381. China.** Zhu Yuanghang completes the defeat of all Mongols that were holding out against him. He employs the time-honored practice of castrating the young sons of prisoners. The standard technique is to remove all the genitals with a single stroke of a curved knife. This not only reduces the number of enemy descendants but also provides a source of harem servants and courtiers for the future. Among the survivors of this procedure is a boy named Ma He. He is of Turko-Mongol stock, and in 1402 we see him in an interesting capacity in the new government.

**Europe.** The mechanical clock is invented. It is powered by descending weights and governed by an escapement mechanism to produce the time intervals. Bronze cannon are being made.

**England.** The peasants are revolting. Most of the population of Europe are peasant farmers, many not free, but not quite slaves, because they have certain established rights. The revolt is put down with the usual determination and vigor.

**1382. China.** Movable wooden type is being used for printing.

**Central Asia.** Tamerlane is raging over the country. He defeats sections of the Mongol "Golden Horde" in 1395, and in 1398 he sacks Delhi.

**1389. Europe.** Ottoman armies crush Serbs at Kosovo and the Serbian Empire becomes a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire.

The Serbian national consciousness still holds the memory of this aggression more than 600 years later. Spurred on by Government propaganda and carried away by the euphoria of war, the Serbs of 1990 inflicted on the descendants of the Ottomans the sort of treatment their ancestors suffered.

**1390. England.** Geoffrey Chaucer is working on his "Canterbury Tales", one of the great classics of English poetry.

He was born in 1340 and became a courtier under both King Edward 3rd and King Richard 2nd . He also became a significant "civil servant" as comptroller of customs, and made many trips abroad.

Chaucer is related by marriage to his friend John of Gaunt, third son of Edward 3rd, and this might be assisting his rise and rise. Incidentally Wycliffe of Lollards fame is also a friend of John of Gaunt.

The Tales were not Chaucer's invention. His contribution was the poetic presentation of stories in circulation at the time. English language has changed so much in 600 years that we can scarcely understand them now, but fortunately Neville Coghill has given us a poetic modern version. A group of pilgrims to Canterbury agree to tell each other a story along the way. Some are bawdy, some pious, but the flow of words and rhyme holds them together:

" **Some time ago there was a rich old codger**

Who lived in Oxford and who took a lodger".

" **But others said a woman's real passion**

Was liberty, behaving in what fashion

Might please her best, and not to be corrected

But told she's wise, encouraged and protected".

We also learn something of life in those times. The perennial matter of how Christians view and treat the authors of the first half of their Bible comes up in the Prioress's Tale. It tells of a young boy who walked to school through a Jewish section of the town singing a hymn. This annoyed the Jews who killed the lad. They were found out and:

" **The Provost then did judgment on the men**

Who did the murder, and he bid them serve

A shameful death in torment there and then

And he condemned them to be drawn apart

By horses. Then he hanged them from a cart."

Suggested events to associate with the thirteen hundreds

1348 The Black Death killing 30% of Europe's population in 2 years

1351 The Mongol Yuan dynasty replaced by the Chinese Ming dynasty

1390 Chaucer working on his "Canterbury Tales"

~~~~

THE FOURTEEN HUNDREDS

**1400. The Middle East.** Following his sack of Delhi, Tamerlane, now over seventy years old is invading Syria and occupying Damascus. He does what Hulagu could not do – defeat a Mameluke army. The following year he invades what is left of Bagdad and massacres 20,000 of its inhabitants, and the next year meets the Turkish army at Ankara and smashes it. On his way to attack China he dies.

Such people as heroin or nicotine or gambling addicts make a limited number of other people miserable, but the misery caused by power addicts is unlimited.

**1402. China.** Zhu Di is the present Ming emperor, and is reinforcing his position by murdering all his old opponents and their families and friends. The eunuchs who helped him to gain power he rewards in kind. His favorite is Ma He, who is renamed Zheng He and becomes commander of China's huge fleet. Within a few years he sets out with over 300 ships and 27,000 men on a trading mission to India. Some of the ships are huge wooden junks one hundred meters long. No other ships in the world are as big as these.

By 1408 a massive encyclopedia of 11,095 volumes has been constructed. In literature the first novel appears. Twelve years on, the building of the Forbidden City complex is completed but it is struck by lightning in the following year and set on fire. At present Beijing is the capital, and the population of China is about sixty million. However famine and epidemics are killing many.

In 1418 Zheng He is taking his "treasure ships" around India to the coast of Africa at Mogadishu. He astonishes the Ming court when he returns with a giraffe. China is dominating trade in the region, and Zheng remains commander of the fleet for another twelve years before retiring at sixty two.

**1422. France.** Charles 7th inherits the throne of France upon the death of his father Charles 6th.

This was not as routine as it seems since his father was forced to sign a treaty with the English in 1420 that led to making his heir not his son, but his son in law, Henry 5th of England. This followed English victories in France towards the end of the "Hundred Year's War". However Henry 5th died before Charles 6th, and Henry's son, an infant, became King Henry 6th of England in 1422. Logically then, this one year old King of England would be heir to the French throne.

Charles is accepted by some as King of France. Philip Duke of Burgundy favors the English claimant, in spite of being Charles' cousin, and there is a significant English occupation of France. In fact an English-Burgundian alliance holds Paris and Charles merely has some authority over a small part of the kingdom.

**1429.** The English have laid partial siege to Orleans, by building forts at strategic places around it. A detachment of French soldiers is bringing general supplies and driving edible animals into the town through the one avenue still open. Among them is an eighteen year old girl wearing armor and mounted on a horse. She has been hearing voices from heaven that have told her to dress and fight like a man, drive the English out of France and confirm that Charles 7th is the proper King. The voices are those of several saints.

It is she who will become known as Jeanne or Joan of Arc.

She has gained a popular following and been admitted to the King's court. Charles is persuaded to give her a chance to do something useful but so far has only permitted her to accompany the supply convoy. He is annoyed that she refers to him as the Dauphin, a name given to a king's eldest son. Her implication is that he is at present no more than a king's eldest son and will not be the King until properly acknowledged as such after the English are removed. Although favored by the public, she is highly suspect at court.

Once inside Orleans , "the Maid" as she calls herself (meaning maidservant of God) stirs up the populace to go with her against the forts. They rally to this girl who has God on her side, and she leads them to victory. The English retreat from the forts and the siege is over . She is injured by an arrow in the shoulder during the fighting.

Charles has mixed feelings about Joan's activities. He is a skilled diplomat who prefers intrigues to battles. But public opinion is with Joan, and he goes with her to Rheims where he is crowned, as a formal statement of his position. Joan now wants him to liberate Paris by force, which is not what he has in mind at all. Finally he supplies her with a small army to launch an attack on Paris, but it is easily driven back by the more numerous Anglo-Burgundians, and next day Charles orders the operation to cease. Joan takes an arrow in the leg on this occasion.

Abandoned by the King, Joan gathers two hundred mercenaries together, apparently using money she has acquired while at court, and moves about the country with no clear intention. Burgundian mercenaries capture her for ransom. The King ignores her plight, but the English who have suffered severe indignities and defeats at her hands, pay the ransom and then "lend" her to the Church and Inquisition. This is on condition they get her back if the Church finds she is not guilty of whatever they charge her with. As it happens they charge her with heresy because of many things such as wearing a man's clothing and ordering and practicing the shedding of human blood. Her "voices" are assumed to be spirits from Hell rather than from Heaven and she refuses to acknowledge this. Ultimately she is burnt at the stake as a heretic.

Joan lacked diplomatic skills. She was inclined to be arrogant, and arrogance is acceptable by allies only if not directed at them. To call the King the Dauphin was logical in the context of her goal but scarcely wise when Charles asserted he was already King whatever others might say. The Church could not accept her assumption that she dealt directly with heaven and did not need the Church as an intermediary, and that was probably the reason for its determination to destroy her.

**1456.** Charles 7th is now in a much stronger position than earlier and has had considerable success against the English. It is now time to remove the stain on his crown – having consorted with a heretic. Pressure is brought on Rome, and after the production of "new" evidence the Pope declares the decision of the Inquisition null and void and formally proclaims the Maid of Orleans innocent of the charge of heresy.

She was canonized in 1920 and revered in France as their foremost patriot – Saint Joan of Arc.

**1440. Germany.** Johann Gutenberg is creating a printing press using movable metal type. There is a possibility he is assisted by someone who worked with a Dutchman called Coster now dead, who also used movable metal type. However he is credited with the invention and thirty years later an Englishman Caxton learns the technique and prints the first book in English.

**1452. Italy.** Leonardo da Vinci is born. In about 1495 he paints "Last Supper" and about 1505 "Mona Lisa". He becomes state engineer and exhibits an unusually inventive and enquiring mind in the fields of natural science and engineering.

**1453. The Middle East.** Ottoman Turks are battering the thick walls of Constantinople with enormous cannons. They take the city, and it becomes their capital with a name change to Istanbul. The great cathedral Sancta Sofia founded by Constantine in 325 CE becomes a mosque.

**1467. Japan.** The Ashikaga and Hosokawa families are fighting a civil war. Hosokawa are winning but then call themselves merely deputy shoguns.

**1469. India.** At Nankana on the banks of the Ravi river, Guru Nanak is born. No doubt in an attempt to reconcile the two societies in the region, he goes on to found the Sikh religion in which Muslim beliefs blend with basic Hindu.

Compare Akbar, India 1582

**1473. Poland.** Nicholas Copernicus is born. In the years ahead he does calculations indicating that the sun, not the earth, is at the center of things, that the earth and planets orbit the sun and that the earth spins on its axis. He assumes that the orbits of the planets are circular and this misapprehension causes some confusion in his explanations. Later on Kepler clears up the confusion by showing that the orbits are elliptical. Copernicus circulates his heretical ideas in private and his book, published on his death, is not banned by the Church until 1616.

**1475. Italy.** Michelangelo Buonarroti is born.

Russia. The principality of Moscow has stopped paying tribute to the Golden Horde and is expanding east.

**1478. Spain.** Isabella of Castile, and Ferdinand of Aragon, monarchs of the now united Christian part of Spain, are establishing their own Inquisition and making it responsible to them.

**1480.** Two Inquisitors are appointed to the Inquisition, and by the end of the next year we see that 294 heretics have been burned alive and 79 sentenced to life imprisonment.

The Pope is concerned that the Spanish monarchs are taking control of the Spanish branch of the Inquisition, and he protests, but without much avail. However he appoints seven Dominicans as Inquisitors including one Tomas Torquamada who later becomes Inquisitor General. Jews are the prime target of the Inquisition at this time. There is considerable evidence that one of Torquamada's grandmothers was a Jew, and that this explains his passionate attacks on anyone with Jewish genes: a form of denial. In any case anti-Semitism has been rife here since the early thirteen hundreds and many Jews have been murdered, so there is nothing new in Torquemada's dedication.

**1484. Rome.** Pope Innocent 8th is issuing a Bull asserting the reality of witchcraft, such that among other things, witches can by incantations and spells, kill from afar and "blast the produce of the earth". In this connection he decrees that two Dominican Inquisitors Kramer and Sprenger be empowered to punish any person without let or hindrance. Sprenger is a notable Inquisitor operating around Cologne. He founded a popular group, the "Fraternity of the Rosary".

Within two years Kramer and Sprenger produce a book with a quarter of a million words, entitled _Malleus Maleficarum_ – The Hammer of Witchcraft. Although more like a collection of abnormal sexual phantasies, it is a handbook for Inquisitors who need to take action against those accused of being witches. It details the activities of witches, dwelling on their sexual malpractices and copulation with diabolic creatures known as incubi and succubi. Some witches they say, had been observed in the forest "naked to the navel" who, judging by their leg and body movements, were entertaining invisible Devils.

It describes witches' ability to hurt and kill by magic, citing cases known to the authors. One example concerns a witch who was not invited to a village celebration. She climbed a nearby hill in the company of the Devil and following standard procedure scraped a small trench in the ground and filled it with her urine. After she had stirred it around with her finger the Devil caused it to rise into the air and then fall as a violent hailstorm over the village, thus dampening the festivities.

The Malleus presents as a scholarly book, setting out descriptions of events that the authors collected from hearsay or from witnesses, and presenting its message in question and answer form. It also lays down rules for the extraction of confessions by torture. It attempts to justify its assertions by logical reasoning. For example it asks "Why do witches not use their powers to silence accusers?", and the answer is that their magic does not work against such lawful activity as accusation. Most witches are women and there is little attempt to discuss male witches. The book is strongly misogynistic, basing its message on repeated assertions that in various ways, women are dreadful individuals. "All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable". [Wow]. It quotes Ecclesiasticus xxv: "There is no head above the head of a serpent, and there is no wrath above the wrath of a woman", and so on.

According to the Malleus there are several ways in which a man can be bewitched to affect his potency: "If he is active and able with regard to other women, but not with his wife, he is bewitched in the second way". One of the oaths taken by witches is to renounce Christian ritual. If for reasons of secrecy a witch cannot avoid apparent participation in such a ritual it is possible to cancel the implied complicity by uttering obscenities. Kramer and Sprenger write: "We know a woman.......who when the priest at the celebration of Mass......says "Dominus vobiscum" always adds to herself.....these words in the vulgar tongue: Kehr mir die Zung in Arss umb". (lick around my arse).

In recent years many historians have grappled with the question of why witchcraft was a matter of importance for a period of several centuries. Not only the Inquisition but church groups in general were concerned. Martin Luther said "I would have no compassion on these witches: I would burn them all".

From the point of view of Christianity, it has been suggested that since certain magic rituals and superstitions of the old religions were included in witchcraft, it was a threat to the new religion, and the Church would wish to suppress it.

The rantings of Sprenger and Kramer seem to express the horror that some men feel at the thought of a woman's body. According to one school of psychology the female body can be seen as incomplete, and that can be frightening to those boys who think the missing item must have been removed, and the same might happen to them as a punishment for forbidden desires. Sitting a woman astride a broomstick in an attempt to restore the missing part fails to convince, and so the witch becomes even more frightening. Some people say the theory is worthless because it can neither be proved nor disproved. Whatever the case, this dread of women by the likes of Kramer and Sprenger, could well have contributed to the persistence of witch hunting.

A third point is made by Lyndal Roper in her essay in "Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe" – editor Barry – page 210: She refers particularly to the Augsburg trials and notes that it was typically deep antagonisms between women that brought witches to trial. The accusers were often those who had recently given birth, and the accused were live-in helpers, usually older women who were intimately concerned with the care of the child. (In such cases it was not the midwife who was accused of witchcraft, although she often was if the child was deformed or stillborn). Maybe, a "post-natally depressed" mother projected her hostility and guilt feelings on to these older women helpers. Such women, often widowed and poor with no family support, had to eke out a living looking after others and were vulnerable to attack.

**1485. London.** Henry 7th becomes King of England. In 1486 he marries Elizabeth of York and thus unites the houses of Lancaster and York.

**1489. Spain.** Ferdinand and Isabella are signing a marriage treaty on behalf of their three year old daughter the Infanta Katherine of Aragon. She is thereby betrothed to Arthur, the two year old son of Henry 7th of England. This union is intended to benefit the Spanish by inducing England to join them against France, while Henry Tudor gets the benefit of a son's royal marriage. He needs this because of his tenuous hold on the English throne which he won in battle from the Plantagenets, the previous royal line. There are many Plantagenets around with more hereditary claim to it than he. His Welsh grandfather Owen Tudor produced a son from a Plantagenet woman to whom he may or may not have been married, and Henry himself married a Plantagenet, but nevertheless claims the throne by right of conquest. However there is a certain young Earl of Warwick with a clear claim to become king when Henry dies.

**1492 Jan 2. Granada.** The Catholic sovereigns Isabella and Ferdinand and their court are receiving the surrender of the Moorish king as he emerges from the Alhambra. They have given him assurances of freedom of movement for those Moors who wish to leave Spain, retention of their property by those who would stay and freedom to worship according to Islamic law. The Iberian Peninsula is once more under Christian control. Three months later all Jews in Spain are commanded to convert to Christianity or get out.

April 17th. Queen Isabella appoints the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus "....governor general of all such islands and continents as he should discover in the western ocean....". Columbus appears to have convinced her after years of trying that he can reach the spice islands and the lands of Marco Polo by going west. The wording of the appointment seems to suggest that Isabella suspects there is something else than Asia to the west, and we might wonder whether the search for an alternative route to Asia is the real reason for her interest in the voyage.

It brings to mind the only reason that was officially promulgated for Cook's expensive voyage across the world in 1768. Not to explore the Pacific Ocean and claim some new territory for England, but to make an astronomical observation!

It is interesting that while history used to assert that people before Columbus thought the Earth was flat, many people knew otherwise. In about 200 BCE a Greek mathematician not only assumed the Earth was a sphere but calculated its circumference with surprising accuracy. He recorded the simultaneous length of the shadows of two sticks 800 kilometers apart and applied the geometry of spheres to make his calculation. How he measured the 800 kilometers would be of interest. Fifty years later, Ptolemy the Greek-Egyptian astronomer pictured the Earth as a sphere and developed a map of the known world with a system of latitude and longitude.

August 2nd According to an edict prepared by the Holy Inquisition and signed by Ferdinand and Isabella, today is the deadline for the last Jew to leave Spain, and eight thousand are sailing from Cadiz, mainly to north Africa, north Italy and Holland. Next day Columbus is setting sail. He has estimated the circumference of the earth to be less than Ptolemy's estimate, which was already too small, and imagines he will be in Asia quite soon. His flagship is the _Santa Maria_ a tiny vessel about twenty meters long, a fraction of the size of the huge Chinese trading ships of ninety years ago. (see 1405)

October 12th. Columbus reaches San Salvador in the West Indies and moves about touching various islands including Cuba and Haiti. To his surprise he finds the natives stark naked and peaceful, and decides they will make good slaves and good Christians. Thinking he has landed in the East Indies he calls the natives Indians. He notes that they carry about with them bunches of burning herbs called "tobacos" which they sniff a few times and then pass on to a companion. He boasts in his journal that he could overrun these islands without opposition and order the people about and make them work and wear clothes.

In spite of generally brilliant navigation among the coral reefs of the islands Columbus loses his flagship to the coral, and after salvaging what he can from the wreck, uses its wood to make a fort. He leaves forty men behind to build a settlement and sets off home.

**1493. March.** He is back in Spain, bringing with him a boatload of syphilis, and the knowledge that significant land exists in the west. He remains convinced that he had reached islands off the coast of Asia.

September. A second voyage to the newly discovered islands is under-way with the purpose of establishing a permanent colony there. With remarkable navigation Columbus soon locates the islands and the buildings of the garrison he left behind. Unfortunately it turns out that the men in the garrison had been fighting amongst themselves, and behaving like barbarians towards the natives. These finally rose up and killed them all. Not particularly troubled by this Columbus moves to a site on the north coast of Haiti to establish the colony, and then pushes inland to find gold. There is a little alluvial gold about, but that is all. He then sails off to find mainland Asia but decides that Cuba must be it, and as "proof", he invites his men to take an oath that they believe they have reached the continent of the East Indies. They are warned that having taken the oath they cannot withdraw it on pain of a huge fine or having their tongues cut out. They all comply, probably realizing that Columbus has become deranged. Meanwhile back at the colony the usual aggressive Spanish interaction with the natives is going on.

Columbus returns to Spain and goes ashore dressed in the coarse brown garb of a Franciscan friar. This to signify humility at his failure to find gold or to establish a flourishing colony. He still asserts he reached Asia if not the places reported by Marco Polo. Two more voyages follow and in the final one (1502) Columbus follows the coast of central America for some distance east of the Yucatan peninsula. This is as near as he comes to discovering the continent of America.

Balboa and others reached South America two years earlier, and the English expedition under the Italian navigator Caboto, reached North America in 1497.

According to Askanasy, Columbus reported that the "Carib" (Caribbean) Indians ate all their male prisoners of war. He called them Caribales and this word was corrupted to cannibals. There is no known earlier use of the word cannibal.

The idea of humans eating each other is repugnant to most people, yet cannibalism seems to exert a perennial fascination. The devotees of Dracula tales need a never ending supply of them, and any actual cannibalism reported by the news media receives much attention. A recent case produced an astonishing response: In the USA in 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer a Caucasian necrophiliac, was convicted of murdering seventeen people, mostly homosexual African Americans. Not only did the victims become objects of sexual attention after death, they were also eaten. However he said he ate only the ones he liked. He was sentenced to 957 years in prison. By 1994 he had received 12,000 letters from around the world!!

Surprisingly perhaps, considering the popularity of murder and war, cannibalism is not widely practiced by humans. However it was probably more common in the past. Evidence that very primitive humans sometimes ate their own species, comes from the finding of animal and human bones together in excavation sites, both types having been scraped as if to remove flesh, and broken as if to extract marrow. A recent similar discovery indicates that the less remote Neanderthals also ate each other, at least on that particular excavation site.

More recently, around 340 CE according to Rene Grousset, a Chinese emperor Shi Hu when hosting a dinner party, would select the most beautiful harem girl and serve her to the guests, proving by displaying the girl's head on a plate, that he had not supplied some inferior meat.

Closer to the present, the natives of certain Pacific islands were reported to frequently take captives from neighboring villages as food, not because of need, but as a gourmet change of diet. European adventurers in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds tended to give these "cannibal isles" a wide berth. Australian Aborigines were reputed to eat their own for a variety of reasons. For example according to James Frazer the Theddora and Ngarigo tribes of south-eastern Australia used to eat the hands and feet of slain enemies believing that in doing so they acquired some of the qualities and courage of the dead. How much direct evidence and how much hearsay provided the basis for such a reputation is not widely known.

There is an interesting hearsay account in a book by an English adventurer Phelps Whitmarsh. He spent some time as a pearl diver in north west Australia in the late eighteen hundreds and wrote of the local natives: ".........they wear only a plaited string of human hair round their waists, from which is hung a piece of matting or skin, or sometimes a sea shell. The women adorn themselves by sticking balls of red clay to their front (?) hair, and both sexes are decorated on many parts of the body with rows of hideous, raised scars. These are produced by making deep gashes with a sharp shell, and filling the wound with sand before allowing it to heal. They cultivate nothing, have no domestic animals except the dog, dwell in rude huts of branches or bark, and seem to live like wild beasts – by instinct – rather than as human beings. I was told by one of the station owners on the De Grey River, who had a large number of natives on his "run", that among several of the tribes to the northward it was the custom to eat every tenth child born. The native explanation for this cannibalism was that it was necessary to keep the tribe from increasing beyond the carrying capacity of its territory".

In cases of famine and siege the need to survive has allowed people to overcome what seems to be a basic aversion, but these are special cases. Bobrick refers to the event in 1629 when the Russian garrison at Krasnoyask – a town now on the trans-Siberian railway – were driven by starvation to cannibalism. There is the well known nineteen hundreds case of the football team whose plane crashed in the Andes. Tannahill relates the following stories: In 1201 there was a great famine in Egypt. Abd al-Latif a doctor living in Cairo wrote "I saw one day a woman with a head wound being dragged by some labourers through the market. They had seized her while she was eating a small roast child, which they also carried with them. The people in the street paid not the slightest attention to this sight, but went on with their business......Two days earlier I had seen a child nearing the age of puberty who had been roasted. The two young people who had been found with it confessed that it was they who had killed the child, cooked it and eaten part of it".

Up until recent times primitive people and sometimes not so primitive ones have eaten token amounts of a slain enemy as a gesture of scorn. In 1971 a member of the Black September organization accused of assassinating Wasfi Tal the prime minister of Jordan, said, "I am satisfied now. I drank from Tal's blood". Others drank some of the enemy's blood in order to absorb the ex-warrior's strength or courage. This motive has been attributed to New Zealand Maoris, the Hurons and Iriquois of America, the Ashanti of Africa and the natives of Torres Strait islands.

In 1634 a Burmese monarch ordered the murder of 6000 of his subjects so that their hearts could be added to a magic elixir that would make him immortal and invincible.

The use of human parts for curative purposes is also reported. In 1483, still according to Tannahill, when Louis 11th of France was dying, he hoped to get better as a result of the blood he drank, taken from certain children.

In Greek legend Kronos, father of the gods, ate his children because it was prophesied that one would overthrow him. His wife saved her son Zeus by a stratagem, and Zeus did in fact overthrow him.

Nowadays cannibalism seems to be largely restricted to sexual perversions, as in the case of Dahmer referred to above, and – sometimes symbolically – to religious rituals and ceremonials. The ingestion of a loved departed one figures in the Christian ritual of "communion". Similarly in Japan there is a funeral ceremony in which the widow sits with some of the bones of her cremated husband on a plate in front of her and passes pieces with chopsticks to each of her children in turn. They receive the pieces on to their plates with their own chopsticks in such a way that in the moment of transfer the bone is held by both pairs of chopsticks at once. The symbolic significance of the ceremony is clear, and it is interesting that at a meal in which several diners reach into a communal bowl with chopsticks, it is considered bad luck if by chance two of them pick up the same piece of food at once.

**London 1497.** Probably inspired by Italian Columbus's discoveries, Henry 7th is commissioning an Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto and his three sons to sail west and discover unknown lands. Like Columbus, when Giovanni reaches North America he thinks he has reached north east Asia. His achievement is recorded in English history as that of "John Cabot". Henry makes no move to exploit this discovery.

**Lisbon, Portugal.** July 8th. Vasco da Gama is leaving for the Cape of Good Hope and places east. Portugal wants him to find a sea route to India and the spice islands and has provided him with four ships. The voyage down the west coast of Africa goes against both prevailing winds and ocean currents, and in a sailing ship requires not only skill, but a good deal of time.

**1498.** April 6th. The great explorer and his crews have now reached Mozambique and it is ten weeks since their last landfall. Vasco notes that many of the sailors have swollen hands and feet, and their gums are also sore and swollen, and partly grown over their teeth so that they can scarcely eat. A trading ship laden with oranges is making contact and selling its wares to the stricken Portuguese. The crew members are eating the oranges with enthusiasm.

**April 12** th **. Mombasa.** Vasco is writing in his journal "....it has pleased God in his mercy that....all of our sick have recovered their health, for the air in this place is very good".

This quotation comes from Kenneth Carpenter's book "The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C". Up until 1497 sea voyages without a landfall had lasted less than ten weeks. Columbus took barely that to reach San Salvador and in any case called in at the Canary Islands en route. So Vasco's description of the disease was the first reference by a mariner to what we now know as scurvy. The good captain does not seem to know whether to credit God or the good air with the cure. Oranges get no mention.

December. These Portuguese are sailing home across the Arabian Sea from Calicut in southwest India with a valuable cargo of spices, and have had no contact with land for twelve weeks. Vasco reports that the disease has returned, and that in the advanced stages the swellings spread to other parts of the body, and this is followed by death. Half of his men have died.

**1499.** Jan 7th. The ship has now anchored off the African coast and someone has been sent to bring a supply of oranges aboard because says Vasco "They are much desired by our sick". It is clear that the afflicted have made the connection between oranges and a cure for scurvy – if only unconsciously. Vasco does not mention that he has made such a connection.

We now know that vitamin C (ascorbic acid) is necessary in the diet to prevent scurvy, and that oranges and other citrus fruits are rich in that vitamin. But such knowledge is not required to notice that oranges cure the condition. We must assume that da Gama was a very intelligent and practical person, so perhaps he did not think any more about what was to him an isolated difficulty of no future interest. But from then on scurvy was a well-known disease, and subsequent Portuguese expeditions had similar experiences to da Gama's. It was noted that by the time they got to Mombasa some were sick with the "curse of the mouth". At Mombasa "the oranges made them well again". How can it be that there was any further problem with scurvy?

In 1593 Sir Richard Hawkins described the benign effect of oranges and lemons on scurvey (sic) as it was called and spelt by then. He recounted how on one of his expeditions only four men were healthy by the time they landed in Santos in mid October. "There was great joy amongst my company and many with the sight of the oranges and lemons seemed to recover heart... I caused them all to be divided amongst our sick men..." This quotation is also from Carpenter's book. So not only the uneducated crew but also the captain were now in no doubt as to the value of oranges? Well, Hawkins goes on to say that oranges are the most fruitful for this sickness but adds that the "principal of all is the air of the land, for the sea is natural for fishes and the land for men". One of the sad and ironic things about scurvy was that many captains blamed indolence for the disease, noting that those who developed symptoms had previously been observed lying about!

In 1607 the British East India Company's minutes included "lemon water" in supplies to be provided for future expeditions. However probably due to the quality or quantity of lemon water provided, scurvy did sometimes occur in the Company's ships and this might have shaken the confidence in citrus fruits as a prophylactic. Lemon water was produced by boiling lemon juice down to concentrate it, and we know this causes progressive loss of the vitamin. Nevertheless the Company had a good reputation for avoidance of scurvy, and whatever reservations anyone might have had, it is difficult to explain why their methods were not imitated. The Dutch accepted the value of citrus fruits on their long trading voyages and in 1661 actually established citrus orchards at the Cape of Good Hope to cater for their visits to the far east.

More than seventy years later the message had still not got through to many people. In 1736 Russians exploring the Arctic coast of Siberia over-wintered in a house they made out of driftwood. By spring, 41 out of the 50 had died of scurvy.

In 1746 James Lind, a Scottish surgeon in the British navy, carried out a neat scientific experiment in which twelve sailors suffering about equally from scurvy were divided into six pairs. They were fed the same basic sailors' diet plus something that might cure the disease. One pair had cider (which was presumably unfermented because it would otherwise contain no ascorbic acid). Another pair had oranges and lemons. The remaining four pairs had other supplements and showed no improvement and the cider pair showed a little. The citrus pair were much improved in six days. The Admiralty took no notice of this elegant experiment until in 1781 Gilbert Blair, an upper class Scot, endorsed Lind's findings and forcefully presented them to the Admiralty in a way that Lind of more humble origins could not. He also pointed out that in a twelve month period in the navy's fleet of 12,000 men there were 1,600 deaths of which 60 were due to enemy action. Many of the remainder were due to scurvy. By year 1800 lemons were at last included in ships' rations.

Note however that Navy Captain Scott's amateurish expedition to Antarctica in 1902 was beset by scurvy outbreaks, and a noted member of the party, Ernest Shackleton was one of the victims. The expedition's senior surgeon, one Reginald Koettlitz, averred that there were no such things as antiscorbutics (anti-scurvy substances) and that it was a waste of time to look for them. Disaster was probably averted by the chance that the explorers often ate seal liver, and also again by chance, had marmalade at the base. Nine years later Scott's sled party to the south pole had no rations that contained vitamin C for a journey that took more than a hundred days. The debility that precedes overt signs of the disease could easily have slowed the party down and cost the five returning members their lives. On the other hand while many people might not have known that antiscorbutics were necessary for life, everyone knew that food was, and Scott failed to provide enough of that either, for his ponies, his dogs or his men. Perhaps the reason why scurvy was not eliminated four hundred years ago had something to do with bad management.

We can understand that a huge mental jump was necessary to grasp the idea that _absence_ of something could cause illness. Until then it was understood that the _presence_ of something could make one sick, for instance poison or spoiled food, and that plague was something caught from others. Medicine could cure an illness but could the absence of the medicine cause it? Furthermore some other things than citrus fruits were later found to prevent scurvy and with the common denominator of vitamin C not known, this produced confusion. However people are generally ready to try anything that is offered as a cure, whether it be snake oil or witchcraft. They are not interested in the rationale. But again people are not sick with scurvy when they first set out on an expedition. Perhaps in the case of the navy those who made the decisions were not personally involved, and sailors were expendable.

For some influential people they were not expendable. In 1805 Horatio Nelson ordered increased rations of oranges for his men although he remained convinced it was salt that caused scurvy and refused to add salt to food himself. Captain Cook was similarly pragmatic. He accepted the value of oranges but classified them as fresh food and believed they were effective because they were fresh. This theoretical error made him advocate such things as malt wort which could be prepared freshly from malt but in fact contained no vitamin C. His success was due to his determination to pick up fresh food at each port and particularly to see that the sailors ate it. "Eat your greens". One of his techniques was to order some crew members each day to dress so as to sit at the captain's table. The newcomers were offered a particular food that they might otherwise have refused. The officers all ate it with apparent relish and soon the crew were demanding this special dish. His other technique was to flog any recalcitrants. His men got all the vitamin C they needed even if some of the fresh food contained very little.

**London. 1499.** King Henry is receiving a message from Ferdinand in Spain telling him that unless he gets rid of the Earl of Warwick, Katherine stays in Spain. Ferdinand fears that Henry's son may not become king if Warwick is alive and hence his betrothed daughter Katherine would be but a princess, not a queen. Henry acts without delay. Warwick is convicted of treason and his head separated from his torso. The marriage will proceed.

Suggested events to associate with the fourteen hundreds

1429 Joan of Arc begins her drive against the English

1440 Gutenberg creates a movable type printing press

1492 Columbus sets sail to the West

~~~~

THE FIFTEEN HUNDREDS

**1501. London, November.** Katherine of Aragon has arrived from Spain and is meeting for the first time the lad she is scheduled to marry in two weeks – Arthur, heir to the throne. They converse in Latin. They are both fifteen.

The Archbishop of Canterbury marries them amid great pomp and ceremony and later sees them to bed.

**Italy.** Michelangelo is attacking a huge block of marble that was already partly sculptured into human form forty years ago. From it is emerging the larger than life statue of David. When completed it is five meters high.

**1502. London, June.** Prince Arthur dies of some sort of fever. His younger brother eleven year old Henry is now heir, and Ferdinand suggests he will do in place of Arthur. However according to ecclesiastical law a man may not marry his brother's widow except by special dispensation from the church. This is expected to be easier if the marriage had not been consummated and Katherine is quick to assert that it had not been. In any case a Bull of Dispensation is issued permitting Henry and Katherine to marry, notwithstanding the fact that she had "perhaps" consummated her first marriage.

**Mexico.** "Aztecs" now occupy much of the land that was Toltec territory until the twelve hundreds when the Toltec empire declined into obscurity. Moctezuma 2nd also known as Montezuma is elected chief of the Aztecs at age thirty four. Choosing him is easy in spite of many suitable candidates. He is a famous and brave warrior and a fine orator. He is also noted for his piety. This includes an obligation to sacrifice thousands of humans to the gods, who respond by keeping the sun on its course and the world secure. Typical of these sacrifices is the ripping out from the body of the still beating heart, but victims of the fire god are burnt and those of the hunting god pierced with arrows. There are other gods to be appeased and they take their turns each month. The sacrifices are accompanied by days of fasting and feasting and include some ritual cannibalism.

The chroniclers claim that there was no great resistance on the part of some of those selected for sacrifice. They were usually prisoners of war and addressed their captors as "my beloved father". Their captors responded by addressing them as "my beloved son". A further complication, typical of many primitive societies was the ambiguous nature of the victims' identity. They were at once or alternately the sacrifice and the god. Sometimes they were dressed to resemble the deity itself and on occasions were feted and honored before being killed. Discussions of this complicated barbaric behavior can be found in "Totem and Taboo" and in "The Golden Bough".

But there were other sacrificial victims than captive warriors. Children were often selected, as in other cultures. For example mummified remains of Inca child sacrifices have been found in the Andes. Abraham of biblical fame was prepared to sacrifice his son. In all cases of human sacrifice to gods the basic message seems to be "Take these but spare us". Not an altruistic gesture but also not surprising if Richard Dawkins' thesis of the selfish gene is applied.

**1509. London** _._ King Henry 7th dies of tuberculosis and two months later eighteen year old Henry 8th is marrying Katherine in a private ceremony. In accord with the current marriage vows Katherine pledges to be "bonair and buxom in bed and at board" – whatever that means. Henry 8th is a fine looking man about 193 centimeters tall. His voice is a little high pitched. He is intelligent, well educated and good at all the sports played by the nobility. He is also musically gifted.

**1510. Berlin.** Thirty eight Jews are being burnt alive for tormenting the body of Christ (in the form of consecrated wafers). The wafers left lying around in a church had developed a pink coloration and the Jews were assumed responsible for the body's "bleeding".

**India.** Alfonso de Albuquerque a Portuguese naval commander is capturing the rich port of Goa from the Sultan of Bijapur. With the long history of Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula it is not surprising that Alfonso is anti-Muslim. Later he gloats over the fact that he had killed every "Moor" he could find in Goa and burnt their bodies in their mosques. The subsequent settlement of Portuguese at places along the West Coast of India is characterized by barbarous and inhuman atrocities as they spread Christianity by the sword. Nevertheless even they are not able to cope emotionally with "sati", the Hindu ritual in which widows burn to death on their husband's funeral pyre, and are trying to stop the practice in their territories.

It is interesting to consider why such an act as sati (pronounced suttee and usually spelt that way in English writings) receives little more than dismissive mention by the historians that are normally read. Looked at from a demographic point of view, if such a practice were general it would mean that most Hindu women who did not die from disease or accident would be burnt alive, since women tend to live longer than men and marry younger. At first thought this is ridiculous, at second thought it is still ridiculous. Perhaps sati was practiced only by some deranged Hindu sects and the idea of its being general was spread by hearsay.

Sati did actually occur and it must surely be of interest to know how it was accomplished, and again historians are strangely silent. There are several possibilities: Perhaps like modern suicide cults the sati sects indoctrinated their members to perform the act when called upon. This would be easier to achieve if a relatively painless and fast method were involved than if the members of the group were invited to throw themselves into a fire or to lie on a heap of firewood that rapidly warmed up. How effective would brainwashing have to be to overcome hesitancy when such a prospect was imminent? Certainly we know of perhaps a hundred people who have deliberately and publicly set fire to themselves in the past fifty years. Out of a population of five to six billion they amount to about one twenty five millionth of one percent of people per year. Still there may have been others we have not heard about.

Another possibility is that the widows were thrown into the fire or tied down to it by one or more executioners. A subdivision of this is whether or not the victim was rendered unconscious first, and if so by what means. Again who were the executioners? Her children perhaps? All such matters require comment if such a phenomenon as sati is to be comprehended.

An Indian historian Datta in his book "Sati" deals with most of these questions to a limited extent: He draws on information documented by the British during their occupation of India in the eighteen hundreds. The Judge of the Supreme Court of Calcutta in 1829, stated that 600 widows out of 25,000 were recorded as sati victims. A much higher figure of ten percent was recorded in some publication which estimated the population of India at 100 million, with widows numbering 1 million per year and suttee sacrifices 100,000. Yet another stated that in Bengal, from a population of 4.8 million less than 600 widows burnt themselves. So we have figures ranging from one in eighty to one in ten. There are no data given for earlier times.

Datta says that sati is Sanskrit for a good woman, and in the case of a widow, one who sacrifices herself on the funeral pyre for the love of her husband. The English suttee refers to the act of burning a widow with the corpse of her husband. We might guess this implies that the English did not see the process as a voluntary sacrifice.

Hindu societies tend to discourage or forbid the remarriage of widows who in many cases are treated as pariahs, and so brain washing to suicide by Brahman priests would be facilitated in such cases. Most of the women were aged fifty to seventy, which of course is a likely age range for widows in general. However girl widows as young as eight were also burnt, and it is hard to imagine such a person lying quietly as the flames built up. The author seems to suggest that the known procedure of tying the victim down or piling heavy bamboo on top of her was usual. All castes were involved in suttee.

Datta says that there is a significant Hindu sympathy for suttee as an heroic and virtuous act even today. But he also says, apparently quoting some Hindu text: "Theoretically, after the death of the father the son executes his mother". Is the Oedipus theme relevant here? The execution would certainly prevent the second part of it.

We are appalled by the Inquisition's burning of heretics but at least they were hated by the Inquisition. With suttee (apart from that where the widow is a true suicide) the executioners and conniving husband inflicted the same agony and terror on someone they were supposed to love.

In India as elsewhere, there are those whose veneer of civilization is thinner than most: In 1987 a young widow who had been married only six months, burnt on her husband's funeral pyre. She was attractive and well educated. The act was watched by about three thousand frenzied spectators and subsequently a committee was formed to build a temple to her sacred memory. A million rupees has been collected says Datta. The government arrested fifty eight people in connection with this including her father-in-law and her husband's fourteen year old brother who lit the pyre.

**1512.** The Vatican, Rome. Thousands of visitors are staring up at the first viewing of Michelangelo's paintings on the Sistine ceiling. Eighteen meters overhead are images from the Old Testament – God creating Eve, the Flood, the Creation of the world.

**1513. Italy.** Machiavelli is publishing "The Prince" a guide to political maneuvering. One of his principles is that good men are destroyed when they have a lapse of badness and bad men are destroyed when they have a lapse of goodness. It happens to be that at the time of his publication, he and his family are in exile, presumably having failed to apply his techniques.

**1515. Spain, Avila.** Teresa Sanches de Cepada y Ahumada is born into a noble family. She enters a Carmelite convent at twenty and at forty has her first mystical experience. She calls it "the rapture" and it keeps coming regularly from then on. In an autobiography, she describes in explicit sexual detail being "ravished" by a divine lover. Her confessors are unable to deal with this, one concluding she is being deceived by the Devil and suggesting exorcism, some refusing to listen.

Teresa describes how, during her state of rapture, the soul is dissolved in God to a point at which all distinction is eradicated. The soul, God says to her, "dissolves utterly...to rest more and more in Me. It is no longer itself that lives; it is I". Teresa says "The glory that I felt within me cannot be expressed in writing, nor yet in words....".

Surely Saint Teresa – as she became twenty years after her death – underrates her powers of communication. Ecstasy involves some loss of identity, and she describes the experience very lucidly.

The quotations are from Baigent and Leigh's "The Inquisition". They point out that her type of experience is the very sort that was hunted by the Inquisition, and the fact that she escaped its attention was probably as much a miracle as anything else in her life. Overall it seems she was a lucky lady. Bernini immortalized her in marble in a sculpture entitled "The Ecstasy of St Teresa". It resides in a chapel in Rome.

**1516. London.** King Henry 8th's Queen Katherine gives birth to Mary, her only child to live past infancy.

**China.** The Portuguese are arriving in Canton to trade, but behave more like pirates than traders and are unwelcome.

**1517. Germany.** Martin Luther nails his protestations, including objections to the selling of "Indulgences", to a church door. By 1530 this leads to the establishment of a new (Protestant) church.

**1519. Mexico.** Cortes and about five hundred Spanish soldiers are arriving on the shores and moving inland. Moctezuma hears about them and is uncertain whether they are gods or enemies. With Hamlet-like indecision he does nothing.

Cortes is an exceptionally talented man. Apart from being a fine soldier and leader he is also an astute politician and soon realizes that the people who form part of Moctezumas loosely knit empire are not necessarily Moctezuma's friends and are inclined to welcome the newcomers. This situation in which subject people paying tribute to a powerful ruler are delighted to befriend anyone likely to overthrow that ruler, probably explains the easy success of many invaders throughout history. Nevertheless Cortes encounters one community that objects to the Spanish presence and engages them in battle. The superior weapons of the Spaniards demoralize the locals and they retreat in spite of their much greater numbers. And so Cortes presses on to the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, a Venice-like city built on land that had been reclaimed from a lake.

Moctezuma is sending presents of gold to persuade the invaders to go no further. Needless to say this whets the Spaniards' appetites as nothing else could. Add to this Cortes' expectation of converting the heathen to Christianity and we should not be surprised to see the invasion proceeding. At the entrance to the capital Moctezuma greets Cortes and invites him and his army inside. The Aztec leader has still not made up his mind how to deal with the invaders and actually allows them to make a prisoner of him. An odd thing now happens. The governor of Cuba, riled by Cortes' unauthorized wanderings has arrived with eighteen ships to discipline him. Cortes hears of this and decides to leave. Before doing so he smashes a lot of religious idols and incurs the wrath of the priests and the citizens. When Moctezuma tries to make peace he is killed by his own people. Now the Spanish have to leave in a hurry. Their retreat from the capital is reminiscent of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. They are followed and harassed by the Aztecs and suffer considerable losses of men and arms but their enemy seems to have no will to annihilate the retreating foe.

**Spain.** Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese who has already sailed with Alvares Cabral to Brazil, is planning to sail around South America to reach the "spice islands" from the opposite direction to Vasco da Gama's, that is, by going west. He has fallen out with the King of Portugal and offered his services to the King of Spain who has equipped him with a fleet of five ships. He sets out.

**1520. South America.** Magellan has passed through the strait that bears his name and entered the Pacific Ocean. By now scurvy is appearing amongst the crew. Either Vasco da Gama did not learn from his experience with scurvy or did not pass it on, or again Magellan may have taken no notice. In any case his fleet is also short of food, and even resorting to eating cows' hides that have been tied around the masts to prevent chafing of the rigging. As we watch what is going on, it seems that maintenance of one of the fleet's most important parts, the crew, is less than adequate.

Now the fleet has reached the Philippines and Magellan finds himself involved in a local tribal war. He backs the losing side and is killed by the opposing chief Lapu Lapu.

In the Philippines today there is a tasty fish called Lapu Lapu and the chief's head has appeared on Philippine coins. What was left of Magellan's fleet, one ship, continued on its way and circumnavigated the globe.

**Mexico.** Cortes arrives once more at Tenochtitlan with reinforcements. The city has lost large numbers of its inhabitants to a smallpox epidemic started by the invaders on their first visit. Cortes' troops have brought with them brigantines, small boats capable of propulsion by both sail and oar, to negotiate the waterways of the city. Access to the city by land is possible along three causeways. After fierce fighting and loss of many men the Spanish decide to besiege the city and it soon capitulates.

**1522.** Cortes becomes governor of "New Spain". His evangelical enthusiasm leads him to beg the Emperor Charles 5th for friars to save the souls of the Indians. So begins the process of conversion and by 1995 we find 97% of the population of Mexico is classified as Roman Catholic, according to Collins Encyclopedia 1995.

**1525. London.** King Henry has been enjoying a six year relationship with Mary Boleyn, a woman who had previously been well known to the courtiers (and King) of the free and easy French court. That association is now ending but his wife Katherine has been confirmed as incapable of having any more children, and Henry is desperate for a legitimate male heir. Perhaps his marriage can be annulled and he can remarry.

**China.** All ocean going ships are ordered destroyed by Imperial edict. The greatest navy the world has known is ordered into extinction! China is again looking inwards. It is a Confucian principle that land is the basis of prosperity, not trade.

**1526. India.** Zahir ud-Din Muhammad, or Babur (lion in Arabic) a warlord who has made a base in Kabul, is invading the country through the Khyber Pass. He is using artillery and rifles to defeat the sultanate of Delhi. Babur is a great-grandson of Tamerlane and thus an Islamic Mughal (Mogul). He founds the Mughal dynasty that we can see almost continuously until 1858. His short career ends when he dies aged forty seven.

**1527. London.** King Henry is convincing himself that his marriage to his brother's widow was not legal after all, having offended against the law of God, in spite of Pope Julius 2nd 's Bull of Dispensation. His desire for a new wife to produce a male heir is now compounded by his love for Mary Boleyn's younger sister Anne. She is one of the Queen's maids of honor. Interestingly she happens to be less free with her favors than her sister and is keeping the King at bay, being intent on nothing less than marriage. Her age is probably twenty six. She is petite, charming, graceful, witty and intelligent.

**1531.** Having been unable to obtain a ruling from Pope Clement on the annulment of his marriage, Henry demands that the Church of England acknowledge him as its supreme head and refer to the Pope as the Bishop of Rome. Parliament passes an Act accordingly. Next year the Archbishop of Canterbury dies and Henry appoints Thomas Cranmer, a closet sympathizer of the Lutheran sect, as the new Archbishop.

**1533.** Henry and Anne Boleyn are secretly married at Whitehall Palace. Some months later Anne is crowned Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury declares the marriage between Henry and Katherine null and void, adding that the Pope has no authority to dispense in such a case. He further declares the marriage of Henry and Anne good and valid. Later in the year Queen Anne gives birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, now the king's recognized heir since his marriage to Katherine has been annulled. Those who speak against the marriage or the succession do so at their peril, and some are executed for it. In spite of further pregnancies Anne fails to produce any more children. Perhaps in the light of current knowledge she is rh negative, and once more her husband is getting impatient for a male heir.

**1535.** King Henry is noticing Jane Seymour a maid of honor in his wife's household.

**Peru.** Francisco Pizarro the Conquistador is completing his conquest of this section of the Inca empire and wallowing in the gold and silver and precious stones that he finds here. The Incas believe their capital Cuzco is the center of the universe and in their language it means "navel". Pizarro's rapid defeat of the Incas was partly aided by the softening up effect of smallpox brought to Panama by the Spanish, and partly by the destructive effect of a recent and prolonged civil war.

**1536. Switzerland.** Cauvin (John Calvin) a French theologian publishes in Latin, his special Protestant ideas. They become popular in Scotland and the Netherlands particularly, and later in the USA.

**England.** Ex Queen Katherine dies of a malignant tumor of the heart.

Modern medical opinion deduces from the autopsy report that it was a tumor, but it was widely believed at the time that Anne had arranged to have her poisoned, her motive being that Katherine openly refused to acknowledge anyone but herself as Queen, rejecting the contrived annulment of her marriage to Henry. Anne was unpopular with the people and became insecure and aggressive, alienating many of her friends including the King. During the year Henry was injured falling from his horse while jousting. The accident opened an old wound on his leg and an ulcer formed which remained open and suppurating for the rest of his life. Eventually it prevented him from riding and dancing which perhaps was what drove him to food and obesity.

**Belgium.** William Tyndale is strangled and burnt as a heretic for producing an English translation of the Bible.

England. Henry decides to get rid of Anne Boleyn and asks Thomas Cromwell his chief adviser and Privy Councillor what he can do to help. The decision is taken to eliminate her. Charges of adultery and treason are made and Anne is executed. Eleven days later Henry marries Jane Seymour.

Just before Christmas the Thames freezes over and the King and Queen are riding across it on horseback. Their highnesses do not know that Europe has entered a two hundred year long mini-ice age. Agriculture is affected and population growth halted.

**1537.** Jane Seymour gives birth to a son but dies soon after of puerperal fever. She is given a magnificent funeral. Her child Edward now the heir because he is male, is healthy, but with infant mortality rates high it is desirable to have more sons just in case, and Henry looks to Europe for his next wife. Oddly enough the princesses available are not rushing for the job, but Anne of Cleves' name has been put forward and the king accepts her although they have no common language. She is the daughter of a German prince who happens to be a puritan, and is tall and thin. A portrait painted by Holbein shows her as beautiful but when Henry sees her he is dismayed and furious, liking neither her looks nor her smell which he asserts is strong. His only way out is to not consummate the marriage and put it about that he never intends to.

**1539. North America.** The Spaniard de Soto is leading an expedition that is colonizing Florida. He goes on to explore the Mississippi basin but dies on the river's bank two years later.

**London.** A new and interesting maid of honor has arrived in the Queen's household. She is a cousin of Anne Boleyn of all things, and her name is Katherine Howard. Before the year is out Henry's marriage to Anne of Cleves is annulled and he marries the fifteen year old Katherine.

**Italy.** Pope Paul 3rd is founding the Jesuits under the name of The Company of Jesus.

**1541. London.** As time goes by Queen Katherine strays, and an intense search uncovers circumstantial evidence of her adultery. The two men involved are interrogated and one, who is also her cousin, is executed. The other is tortured, admits that he and Katherine were lovers prior to her marriage to Henry (when she was about thirteen) but denies adultery. It is enough that he admits saying he would have Katherine if the king were dead. It is treason to predict the death of the king and he suffers the full penalty for treason – partial hanging, disemboweling, beheading and quartering. Katherine is beheaded as a traitor the next year.

**Italy.** The Holy Office is created. This is a permanent tribunal modeled on the Spanish Inquisition.

**India.** The Jesuit priest Francisco Xavier is arriving in India.

**1543. Italy.** Versalius publishes "On the Structure of the Human Body", a masterpiece of anatomy.

**London.** King Henry marries Katherine Parr a widow of three marriages at age thirty-one. He takes his bride to Windsor and apparently as a diversion, has three Protestant heretics burned to death in the Great Park. Katherine is an intelligent woman with a philosophical bent and often engages Henry in debate on religious matters. She can see some point in Protestant arguments and her husband is becoming a bit suspicious, egged on by the anti-Protestant faction at the palace. However Katherine is wise enough to see what is afoot and extricates herself from a potentially lethal situation just in time.

**1547.** Henry dies at fifty five probably of thrombosis associated with his ulcerated leg. His son becomes Edward 6th at age nine.

The Protestant movement in England is gaining strength, and as we saw earlier the Archbishop of Canterbury supported it covertly. Henry remained a Catholic as evidenced by his burning of Protestant heretics, but now he is gone the opposition is more powerful. During the fifteen hundreds religious strife is the norm throughout Europe.

By 1600 nearly 40% of Europe's population had renounced the Catholic faith..

It is not easy to recall the sequence and fate of Henry 8th's wives so for easy reference here is a summary:

Katherine of Aragon. Queen 1509 – 1533. Marriage annulled. Daughter Mary.

Anne Boleyn. Queen 1533 – 1536. Executed. Daughter Elizabeth.

Jane Seymour. Queen 1536 – 1537. Dies following the birth of Edward.

Anne of Cleves. Queen 1537 – 1540. Marriage annulled.

Katherine Howard. Queen 1540 – 1542. Executed.

Katherine Parr. Queen 1543 – 1547. Widowed when the King dies aged fifty five.

Katherine, still in the prime of life by today's standards, then married the man she had intended to marry before Henry made an alternative decision for her. Her fifth husband was "a ladies' man" who, during the marriage, had a fleeting warm relationship of uncertain degree with sixteen year old Elizabeth, the future queen of England.

**1549. Japan.** Father Francis Xavier is landing at Kagoshima in southern Kyushu and proceeding to introduce Christianity to the people.

**1552. Russia.** The vast Tatar state established by Genghis Khan is at last conquered by Russia, and the Turko-Mongol tribes that compose it pushed south to such places as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. They are principally Muslims.

**1553. London.** Katherine of Aragon's daughter Mary becomes Queen of England on the death of Edward 6th. She is a devout Roman Catholic and obtains the restoration of Papal supremacy. She sanctions the persecution of Protestants and becomes known affectionately as "Bloody Mary". Her reign lasts five years until her early death, and she is succeeded by half-sister Elizabeth 1st.

**China.** The Portuguese are establishing a permanent trading base at Macau. In 1583. the Italian missionary Ricci joins the Jesuit Order that now exists at the base. He moves to Beijing in 1601 and impresses the Ming court with his knowledge of astronomy and mathematics. Meanwhile at court the eunuchs have achieved great power and are noted for their corruption and terror tactics. Perhaps they have a sense of revenge.

**England. Stratford** \- a thriving town of about 2000 people, not far south of Birmingham. John Shakespeare a local glove maker and merchant is marrying Mary Arden. In April 1564 the Shakespeares are blessed with a son who is lucky to survive because there is an outbreak of bubonic plague that soon tithes the population. The boy is christened Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere (sic).

There is apparently no record of registration of the birth of either Gulielmus or William Shakspere. Incidentally Galileo was born in 1564 also. Historians have concluded that this boy is William Shakespeare, the person who would later write certain famous plays and sonnets. There is no recorded information about him between 1564 (Gulielmus' christening) and 1582 when a marriage licence was issued granting that William Shagspere (sic) and Anne Hathwey (sic again) may marry.

History relates that Anne was several months pregnant at the time of her marriage and that she produced a daughter Susanna. Later, in 1585, she gave birth to twins and William left, perhaps for London, but nothing verifiable is known about him for about the next ten years. Someone called William Shakespeare became known as an actor in London and in 1598 the name appeared on published plays for the first time. Shakespeare had a patron at court, the beautiful young Earl of Southampton to whom he wrote adoring sonnets. Whatever the motivation for this, flattering patrons was a not uncommon way of retaining patronage. He continued to act and write plays for another twelve years and became wealthy.

Although a contemporary of the playwrights Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe and Francis Beaumont, his death in 1616 at Stratford was not mentioned at court or by anyone of note, yet Beaumont, a much lesser literary figure, was buried in Westminster Abbey when he died just a month before. This, and the absence of documented information about Shakespeare the person, has led some people to suggest that "Shakespeare" was a pen name for someone else and that Shakespeare the man, had nothing to do with Shakespeare the playwright. It has also been argued that his education to the age of eighteen at a country school would not possibly have equipped him to write at the level of knowledge implied in his plays. This overlooks the likelihood that during the missing ten years after he left his family, he spent time not only in London but also in Europe, where an outstanding intellect would have readily absorbed the culture and learning of the countries he visited. It is also pointed out by the skeptics that no official honors were forthcoming at Shakespeare's death. While he is regarded today as greater than his contemporaries he was so far ahead of them it is quite likely he was not recognized as such at the time.

One of the suggested "authors of Shakespeare" is the playwright Christopher Marlowe who was supposed to have been killed in 1593 but perhaps lived in exile in Italy for fear of his life and continued to write from there. It is interesting that when Marlowe's coffin was exhumed in the mid nineteen hundreds it was found to contain not the remains of a body, but sand!

**1558. Italy.** Ghislieri a Dominican is appointed "Grand Inquisitor" of the Holy Office.

England. Henry 8th 's daughter by Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth becomes Queen. Next year she enforces the Protestant religion by law. Mary Queen of Scots is regarded by Catholics as the rightful Queen, but Elizabeth has her executed for treason in 1587 after holding her prisoner in various castles for nearly twenty years. Elizabeth's conflict with Spain leads to the unsuccessful attack on England by the Spanish Armada in the following year. She remains Queen until her death in 1603.

**1560. Scotland.** Scotland is adopting the new European Protestant faith Calvinism. It is more radical and uncompromising than Lutheranism and in particular asserts "predestination". This curious concept holds that God determines beforehand that a particular individual's soul is either damned or saved, and apparently there is nothing the individual can do about it. For some reason Calvinism has an appeal, and it is unifying the Huguenot minority in France.

**Italy.** The Church is responding to the challenge of Protestantism by reviving the Inquisition, establishing the Index of Prohibited Books and restating the nature of the Catholic faith more clearly than ever before.

**1564. Europe.** The Dutch-born Johann Weyer writes a book denouncing the "Malleus Maleficarum" and the still current belief in devilry and witchcraft. He later writes a book "On the Disease of Anger" in which he claims that of all disorders anger is the most dreadful and leads to numberless evils. According to Stone, many regard him as the father of modern psychiatry.

**1565. Italy.** Michelangelo's 1541 painting "The Last Judgement" in the Sistine Chapel has more than 400 figures. Many illustrate the artist's preoccupation with the male nude, and there are numerous male genitals on show. There is currently a movement against such displays, and an artist is commissioned to shroud them with loincloths or robes. Next year Ghislieri becomes Pope Pius V and a new reign of terror begins.

**1567. Netherlands.** Ferdinand Alva a Spanish general is appointed governor of the Netherlands. He institutes a reign of terror to suppress Protestantism and revolt against Spain.

**1569. Germany.** Mercator finds a way of representing the Earth in two dimensions – as a flat map. To do this the meridians of longitude are drawn parallel and countries far from the equator look bigger than they are. But the Mercator system has the great advantage that it allows a navigator to follow a compass bearing in a straight line from place to place

**1571. The Mediterranean Sea.** Miguel de Cervantes author of the Spanish classic "Don Quixote" is losing an arm in a naval battle at Lepanto near Greece. Cannons made of iron rather than bronze are now in use. In this conflict Phillip 2nd of Spain is securing the Mediterranean Sea against the Ottomans, but the victory is "fleeting".

**1572. Paris. St Bartholomew's Eve.** Sept. 23rd . The Huguenots (Protestants) are being

set upon suddenly and massacred by royal edict. By early October some 25,000 are dead.

**1581. Russia.** A Cossack army is crossing the Ural Mountains into Siberia. It is led by "Yermak" a Volga River pirate of somewhat Mongolian appearance but with black curly hair. He is leading the army into territory that used to be under Mongol control – the Khanate of the Golden Horde – and pressing on to the Tobol River. This river is a tributary of the mighty Ob, the most western of Siberia's three great rivers that flow into the Arctic Sea, the Ob, Yenesei and Lena. Yermak is primarily concerned with plunder and kills anyone who would hinder his progress, just as the Mongols, now the victims, did three hundred years earlier. At the same time he is extending the boundaries of Russia, and the government has no argument with that.

**1582.** Ivan the Terrible, Tsar of Russia, rules a nation of about 13 million. Most are peasants working on large estates or their own tiny farms, much the same as in China. Ivan already employs the tactics that Stalin used to keep the people under control – police surveillance and "the duty to denounce". Torture of dissenters is usual and extreme. Europeans see Russia as semi-barbaric and indeed Ivan is at the moment killing his eldest son in a rage. Two years later Ivan dies.

**India.** Akbar, one of the Mughal kings, is a Sunni Muslim but tolerant of other religions. He is trying to extract a basic truth from all religions that will enable Hindus and Moslems to worship in the same shrine. As might be expected such a compromise gets a mixed reception. Under his philosophical decrees female infanticide is forbidden and no marriage is legal unless bride and groom consent. Sati is made voluntary. Widows are allowed to remarry and child marriage is discouraged. This removes some of the less attractive features of Hinduism. Concerning the Muslims, monogamy is recommended and pilgrimage to Mecca abolished. The wearing of gold and silk dresses is made obligatory. Prostration is to be offered only to the emperor.

**Japan.** A peasant's son who became a bandit, Toyotomi Hideyoshi controls the capital and much of the surrounding country. He is intelligent and ambitious and is extending his control over the whole of Japan.

**1584. Ireland.** Edmund Spencer the famous English poet ("The Faerie Queen" et al) is here as secretary to Queen Elizabeth's "deputy" in Ireland. He has also become a settler in the country, witnessing the execution of Murrough O'Brien, and reporting that "his foster mother took up his head whilst he was quartered, and sucked up all the blood running thereout".

This might be an accurate observation or the hallucination of a poet overcome by the sight of a human body being quartered.

**1585. North America.** Sir Walter Raleigh .is attempting to found a settlement on an island off what is now Carolina but without success.

**1587. Russia.** Tobolsk is being founded at the confluence of the Tobol and Irtysh Rivers by settlers following up on Yermak's incursions, and the Russian presence in Siberia is becoming clear. However residues of the Turko-Mongol invaders of the past remain. Attacks on forts and outposts are frequent and continue for decades.

Bobrick suggests that the invasion of Siberia was similar in many respects to the invasions of Australia and the United states. The original primitive peoples were displaced and fought against if they resisted. Disregard for the inhabitants on the one hand and interbreeding with them on the other was the norm. The typical pioneers were adventurers, tramps, bandits, outlaws, runaways, political and religious refugees and in general all those who expected the unknown to be an improvement on the known. The "Wild West" of the USA was the wild east of Siberia.

**Japan.** Hideyoshi issues an edict banning Christianity and ordering all missionaries to leave the country without delay. Christian converts have become so zealous that they are burning shrines and generally disturbing society. It is estimated that there are 150,000 Christians in Japan at this time, mostly around Nagasaki where Portuguese ships usually anchor.

**1592. Korea.** Hidioshi is invading from Japan, but the Chinese are helping Korea and he is driven back.

**Holland.** Hans Jansen an optician makes a two lens microscope

**1595. London, England.** Not all of the city's audiences are attending Shakespeare's plays. There are other plays and other performances. It is a holiday, and the Bedlam insane asylum is open to the public. Here the involuntary actors are entertaining the audience with their strange antics, and those who watch find them unconsciously meaningful and disturbing. Lady Macbeths and Hamlets portray their compulsions and melancholies without the need for stage directions. At other venues the spectators of bear and bull baiting fight vicariously to save their lives or take the lives of others, with the help of four legged performers that do the fighting for them. Vast numbers of bears and bulls and mastiffs are used up in this sort of entertainment.

Animal "baiting" was suppressed by parliamentary decree in 1642.

Suggested events to associate with the fifteen hundreds

1501 Michelangelo begins his sculpture of David

1519 Cortes attacks the Aztecs

In this very busy century European settlement of the Americas begins, the world is circum-navigated, Russia extends into Siberia, the Chinese navy is destroyed, Protestantism expands in Europe, Shakespeare and Henry the 8th are active in England.

~~~~

THE SIXTEEN HUNDREDS

**1600. Japan, Sekigahara.** A battle for control is being fought by Ieyasu a member of the Tokugawa clan, who took over after Hideyoshi's death in 1598. He disperses his main rivals and declares himself shogun, moving his capital to Edo (later called Tokyo). He is a competent administrator and divides Japan into self regulated regions under the control of daimyo (pronounced di-me-o). To guard against insurrection he makes each daimyo visit Edo for part of the year and leave some of his family there until next year's visit.

This is the beginning of the "peaceful period" the Tokugawa shogunate, which lasts just over 250 years. Then we observe the shogunate swept away in the aftermath of the American incursion under Commodore Perry. Throughout the Tokugawa era the Emperor remains the constitutional monarch in the royal capital Kyoto.

**England.** Queen Elizabeth 1st is giving The East India Company of London merchants exclusive right to trade with India for fifteen years. William Gilbert, her personal physician is a man of many parts and publishes a book "On Magnets" which describes his scientific experiments with magnetism. He argued correctly from his findings that the Earth behaves as a huge bar magnet.

**Russia.** Crop failures are leading to famine and mass starvation. Over the next two years we see signs of social unrest and national disunity as thousands starve to death. A peoples' revolt is put down by the army.

**1606.** A Polish invasion is installing a Polish Tsar in Moscow, and in Siberia the local tribes, sensing weakness, are making a concerted though unsuccessful effort to displace their Russian invaders.

**India.** The Sikh Guru Argen Dev is being executed. He is anti-Muslim and has influenced his community accordingly. As a result of the execution the Sikhs are becoming a military as well as a religious organization.

**Australia.** William Jansz, a Dutchman is going ashore on the west coast of Cape York peninsula. He is probably the first European to do so and seems surprised to have nine of his crew killed by savages whom he describes as wild, cruel, dark barbarous heathens and man-eaters. Seventeen years later Jan Carstenz is retracing Jansz's voyage and describes the land and its inhabitants: "In our judgment this is the most arid and barren region that could be found anywhere on Earth; the inhabitants too are the most wretched and poorest creatures I have ever seen"

**1607.** North America. English immigrants are building a settlement in what is now Virginia and calling it Jamestown. The French are settling in Canada and establishing a valuable fur trade.

**1608.** Quebec founded.by the French.

Holland. The spectacle maker Hans Lippershey files a patent for the first telescope. Next year at Padua in Italy, Galileo begins building telescopes of improved design and two years later discovers sun spots and the fact that the sun revolves on its axis every 27 days. He finds four moons of Jupiter and times their rotations with such accuracy that he believes they can be used as a time standard to calculate longitude at sea.

**1612. Russia.** The Polish garrison in Moscow's Kremlin is being driven out. A nephew of Ivan, Mikhail Romanov, replaces the Pole as Tsar the next year. The conquest of Siberia continues, and by 1619 Yeniseisk on the Yenisei is founded a further 1500 kilometers east of Tobolsk. Determined resistance by the local tribes is unavailing.

By the end of the sixteen hundreds most of Siberia was conquered and part of it settled by the new owners. The original northern tribes were stone-age folk but were skilled in making clothing, housing and weapons and in the case of those near the sea, making waterproof kayaks that could handle the roughest conditions. They were easier to defeat than the tribes in the south, the Turko-Mongol types left over from the days of Genghis khan.

With an area of twelve million square kilometers, Siberia is more than fifty percent larger than the continent of Australia and more than six thousand kilometers across.

**1614. Japan.** Ieyasu reaffirms Hideyoshi's banning of Christianity. Churches are burning, missionaries are being deported and some Christian converts are being tortured in an effort to make them recant. By 1622 many Japanese Christians have been beheaded or burnt at the stake. The reason for these extremes is the threat the Japanese perceive in the numerous Spanish and Portuguese trading ships trying to do business in Japan. The activities of the (Christian) Spanish in Mexico and South America in the fifteen hundreds are well known to the Japanese as are the Portuguese operations in Goa.

A school of painting is developing later know as ukiyo-e, paintings of the peaceful period. These are the familiar ones that depict geishas or actors or nature. Utamaro is notable for painting the women, Sharaku for painting actors and Hokusai for nature paintings. Incidentally the word for paintings is "e" (pronounced _eh_ ) and the names given are first names – by which both artists and actors are affectionately known in Japan.

**1619. North America.** The first Negro slaves are arriving in Jamestown, followed next year by puritans from England in the "Mayflower" who call their settlement Plymouth. It is near where Boston now stands. As their first bitter winter progresses they are dying of cold and by the end of it half of the original 102 have died. However the remainder keep the colony going and it later merges with the Massachusetts Bay colony.

The Dutch settle on Manhattan Island followed by the English. There is much to-ing and fro-ing of occupation and in the end the English migrants displace the Dutch.

**1633.** Catholics like the Puritans find refuge from the Church of England in a colony they found and call Maryland.

**1626. China.** A great famine is sparking a peasant rebellion which assists the Manchus to begin invading China once again through its northern border.

**1628. England.** William Harvey, originally a farmer's son describes elegant experiments he performed to demonstrate that blood in the body circulates, rather than ebbs and flows as was previously thought. This raises the question of how the blood gets from the arteries to the veins, and it is speculated that there must be very tiny vessels that provide the route. In Italy Malpighi applies the recently invented microscope to confirm this and discovers the capillaries.

**1629. Australia.** The Dutch ship _Batavia,_ has hit a reef off the west coast and is breaking up. Most of the passengers and crew are managing to reach nearby islands and salvage sufficient food and other things to survive for some time. Among the things salvaged are several chests of silver.

The ship's captain Francois Pelsaert, is taking a few of the crew in a lifeboat and sailing for the town of Batavia (now Djkarta) 2000 kilometers away, to get help. He succeeds in this difficult endeavor and returns in a ship borrowed from the town's governor. On arriving back he finds that some of the crew, presumably gone insane, have murdered 125 men women and children with the intention of somehow getting away with the silver. The murderers are tortured and hanged.

**England.** Oliver Cromwell, a descendent of Henry 8th's Thomas Cromwell, becomes convinced by a spiritual experience that he is one of God's Elect. Like the majority of English Protestants at present he holds Calvinist beliefs of which the basic one is "predestination". This asserts that God chooses certain people in advance for either salvation or for damnation of the soul, and there is nothing the individual can do about it. It seems an idea unlikely to appeal, but perhaps like Oliver the adherents come to believe they are the chosen ones. Before his revelation Oliver consulted the prominent Dr. Theodore Mayerne who reports in his casebook that Cromwell is suffering depression. His own doctor Simcotts reports at the same time that he was often called by Cromwell who fancied he was dying. It seems that his spiritual conviction has resolved his problems. He becomes a member of parliament.

**1634. Italy.** The Holy Office jails Galileo for heresy. He dies in prison eight years later.

**1637.** **Japan.** Japanese Christians still remaining after the 1622 purges, together with oppressed peasants on Kyushu, are rising up against the local Daimyo, which in effect means they are challenging the Shogun who in turn represents the Emperor. Their initial success can therefore be only a prelude to utter defeat. Troop reinforcements are now on the way and the insurgents are retreating to the old abandoned castle of Hara on the edge of the Shimabara peninsula. There are now 15,000 –some say more than double that number – whole families with their cattle and other belongings in the ample grounds enclosed by the outer walls. Some of their leaders are Spanish friars.

The imperial forces are bringing up canons purchased from the Dutch who have a trading post in the same (Nagasaki) prefecture. Some months later, and the castle is taken. A few escape, many are tied together and pushed over the cliff and the rest are killed in more conventional ways.

Japan's window on the outer world slammed shut after this worrying experience. Foreign trade was forbidden apart from a limited amount with the Dutch and Chinese and this remained the case for more than 200 years until Perry forced his way in.

**1642. England.** King Charles 1st is in conflict with Oliver Cromwell who now rules Parliament. This develops into a civil war over the division of power between King and Parliament and the fact that Charles is a catholic while Cromwell and many others are Protestants. Following several notable defeats in battle Charles is captured and executed.

**1649.** Cromwell invades Ireland at the head of his troops in response to the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the fear that Ireland might be used as a base for the invasion of England by European countries. This is more a matter of Protestants against Catholics than English against Irish. He personally orders the massacre of the defenders of Wexford and Drogheda supposedly remembering similar behavior by the Irish during the Rebellion. Cromwell accepts the title of "Lord Protector of the Commonwealth" in 1651 and remains with this title (rather than king) until his death in 1658 at age 59.

**1643. North America.** In Massachusetts the population has grown to 16,000. The people are farmers and merchants.

**1644. China.** Manchus from the north east continuing their invasion have crossed the Great Wall and are taking control of the country. The Ming Emperor climbs a hill behind Beijing's "forbidden city" and hangs himself from a tree. The Manchus establish the Qing (pronounced ching) dynasty which endures into the nineteen hundreds.

**1645. England.** An obscure petty gentleman of Essex named Hopkins has become worried about witches in his neighborhood. He styles himself a "witch-finder" and soon 36 witches have been prosecuted and 19 executed. Over the next two years 184 people are tried, 87% being women. Witches are not burnt in England, they are hanged. The town hangman is also the torturer, and it is he who washes and shaves the female suspect and looks for the telltale diabolic marks on her naked body. These are "warts", assumed to be diabolic teats through which the devil sucks blood. They may be concealed in her genitals!

Many witches have "familiars" diabolical pets such as mice, dogs, chickens, rabbits, turkey-cocks, cats and rats. Most witches confess under torture that their familiars suck blood from the warts. Apparently Oliver Cromwell sanctions the torture and execution of witches.

**1647.** **India.** The Mughal ruler Shah Kahan is completing the Taj Mahal after fourteen years of building. Built in honor of his wife who died giving birth to their fifteenth child it has cost half a million (English) pounds and employed 20,000 men daily(?)

Kahan had other children before their long happy marriage, and more after, and also built many other fine structures across northern India.

**1657. Japan**. Edo is burning and 100,000 people are reported killed.

This is the same round figure quoted for the fire lit by American planes in 1945.

One of the casualties is Yoshiwara, the red light district that was constructed in 1617. The name means "happy fields" and it catered for all tastes and purses. It is one of the first places to be rebuilt after the fire.

Metal coins are replacing rice as a medium of exchange, and the mint, which is located between the palace and the bay is becoming the center of commerce. It is called the Ginza meaning silver place. In the absence of civil war there is more time for recreation and people are moving to the cities to sample the good life. Romantic novels are appearing and the seventeen syllable poem the _haiku_ evolves. So does a new form of drama – _kabuki –_ and that strange semi-courtesan the _geisha._

**1662. England.** The British crown charters the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge. This allows scientifically minded people to share ideas instead of working alone. It is usually the wealthy or those that can attract royal patrons, who have the time and money to experiment in private laboratories. However some scientifically talented people are attracted to the universities and one of these is Isaac Newton. He formulates laws of motion governing the relationship of mass and movement and shows that the force of "gravity" between two objects is proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. He invents mathematical calculus and in studying light, proves that white light is made up of a spectrum of individual colors.

Another of Newton's accomplishments is the construction of a reflecting telescope in 1671. This uses a concave mirror instead of lenses to collect light and focus it.

Modern telescopes for astronomical observations are all of this type. Newton never married and seems to have had no intimate personal relationships with anyone. He was also a secret alchemist and strangely, considering his acknowledged towering accomplishments, argued with other scientists about who discovered what first. He attacked Leibnitz for claiming to have invented calculus independently (which he had) and feuded with Hooke over the discovery of the inverse square law.

It is said that he accepted the dictum that the earth was created on October 22nd 4004 BCE. This fairly precise date had been calculated by an Irish bishop James Usher by working backwards through the bible. It was quoted in the famous Scopes trial (the USA "monkey trial" concerning Evolution) in 1925.

The aristocrat Robert Boyle, working with his assistant Robert Hooke, is able to state this year (1662) his discovery that the volume of a gas is proportional to its pressure.

**1665. France.** Francois La Rochefoucauld, perhaps anticipating certain ideas of the early nineteen hundreds, proposes that "Our virtues are mostly our vices in disguise".

**1666. London.** A bakery is on fire and the fire is spreading ahead of a steady easterly wind. Samuel Pepys is awakened at 3 a.m. to see it but returns to bed unimpressed, making only a brief diary entry. Others also see little danger until it becomes clear that the fire is out of control. Shops on London Bridge are catching fire and soon St. Paul's Cathedral is ablaze. After three days a firebreak created by demolishing houses in its path, brings the fire under control. More than a square kilometer of the city has been burnt and the displaced citizens are encamped in the surrounding countryside. Only eight people have died.

**1668. France.** Dom Perignon, a Benedictine monk invents champagne. He adds a little yeast and sugar to still white wine to produce a second fermentation in the bottle.

**1673. Holland.** Leeuwenhoek is beginning communications with the English Royal Society about his experiments with magnification. He uses a single lens with a focal length of less than a millimeter and achieves a magnification of better than 250 times.

**1682. North America.** Pennsylvania is founded by Quakers for the same reason that Massachusetts and Maryland were founded by others.

**1688. Australia.** William Dampier an English pirate, adventurer, and scientist has landed on the shore of northwestern Australia. He finds neither the land nor its inhabitants to his liking.

**1690. China.** The Manchus have completed their occupation. They wear their hair loose and force the Chinese to wear theirs in a pigtail and shave the front of the head. They do not intermarry with Chinese

India. The English trading company has been present for ninety years now and controls certain districts in place of the original rulers, as do the Portuguese. The French are now settling in Bengal.

**1692. North America** , Massachusetts. One hundred and fifty six people, mainly from Salem Village and Andover are tried as witches. Nineteen are executed.

**1694. Russia.** Peter the Great becomes Tsar and begins a modernization of his country by learning from the Europeans. He declares Tobolsk the capital of Siberia.

China. Maize and sweet potatoes, both originating in North America are now widely cultivated.

**1695. England.** The astronomer Edmund Halley having studied recorded comet sightings predicts that a comet will return in 1758.

It did, and took Halley's name.

Suggested events to associate with the sixteen hundreds

1600 The "Peaceful Period" following the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan begins

1644 The Manchu Qing dynasty begins in China, replacing the Ming

1666 The Great Fire of London

~~~~

THE SEVENTEEN HUNDREDS

**1708. India.** The original East India Company is now The United Company of Merchants of England having amalgamated with a competitor.

**1712. Russia.** Peter the Great having divorced his wife last year is marrying his mistress Catherine. She is a bright woman who was originally a Lithuanian peasant and she accompanies Peter on his campaigns.

Russia is arguing with China about its border with Tibet, since China now controls that country.

**1714. England.** The "Elector" of Hanover in Lower Saxony, Germany, becomes George 1st of Great Britain and Ireland. George has an English connection as a great grandson of James 1st , but spends most of his reign in Hanover and never learns to speak English. This union between Hanover and England lasts until 1837. George's son, George 2nd becomes the last British king to command a battle (which he wins).

**1721. Germany.** Johann Sebastian Bach, later director of church music in Leipzig, publishes his six Brandenburg Concertos. He is one of the great masters of counterpoint. Although a deeply religious Lutheran, he also writes outstanding music for the Catholic church.

**1725. Russia.** Tsar Peter is organizing an expedition to discover where "Siberia joins North America". He dies of pneumonia a few days after announcing the project and his widow and successor, now empress Catherine 1st , confirms his orders. Vitus Bering, a Dane by birth, is put in charge of the expedition. He was born in 1681, perhaps on St. Vitus day June 15th . Catherine proves a capable ruler. She allies Russia with Austria and Spain against England.

**1728. Ireland.** Oliver Goldsmith is born. He becomes one of Ireland's notable poets, writers and playwrights.

**Siberia.** Bering is sailing through the strait that later bears his name but does not turn back west along the coast to actually prove that he has sailed between Asia and America because winter is setting in. He returns to the port of Okhotsk, south west of the Kamchatka peninsula, and treks back across country to St. Petersburg arriving in 1730. Apparently exhilarated by five years in temperatures ranging typically between fifty degrees Celsius below freezing in winter and thirty degrees Celsius above in summer, he is already drafting plans for a second expedition. These are accepted and actually expanded by the government.

**1733.** Vitus Bering is now in charge of the Great Northern Expedition to (among other things) survey the Arctic coast, search for America, prospect for ores, explore the route to Japan and provide a complete account of Siberia's physical, anthropological, linguistic and historical aspects. The Russian Academy of Sciences is involved, and its august members in the expedition are travelling in style with all sorts of assistants, a library of hundreds of books and loads of scientific instruments. In addition they have a military escort of fourteen musketeers, and their luggage includes kegs of their favorite wines. Bering and some others of the expedition have their wives with them. They have reached Tobolsk, the town that was founded on a tributary of the Ob a hundred and fifty years earlier.

They would not know that the estuary of the Ob is the world's longest, and also that it is the widest river that freezes solid. It is difficult to imagine a less appealing part of the earth than Siberia in winter.

**Paris.** F-M. Arouet better known by his pen name Voltaire the philosopher and author is threatened with arrest for publication of essays in favor of English ways. In 1759 he publishes the satire Candide, and Frederick the Great gives him refuge in his Sans Souci palace.

Candide is a parody of Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" a concept he deduced from the assumption that God made everything, and therefore everything including evil must be somehow good. Leibniz and Newton independently and concurrently developed mathematical calculus.

**America.** The state of Georgia is founded.

**1735. Siberia.** Bering is now as far east as Yakutsk on the Lena and is overseeing the construction of two ships intended for exploring the Arctic coast to the east and west of the mouth of the Lena. He is also setting up a foundry for the production of anchors and stockpiling goods and recruiting men and horses for the trip to Okhotsk on the Pacific Coast.

Following Bering's endeavors, exploration by sea from Okhotsk led to the charting of a route to Japan and the discovery of Alaska. Bering spent fifteen years pioneering in Siberia. and as a result of his activities a great deal of both coastal and inland Siberia was explored and charted. In 1791 a Russian trading company established itself in Alaska and installed one Baranov to manage it. However the Russian presence never amounted to much and Alaska was regarded as too far away from St. Petersburg to defend. In 1867, fearing it might be taken anyway, Russia was pleased to sell it to the United States for about seven million dollars. Siberia was a different matter, being geographically part of Russia. In spite of the climate a quarter of Russia's population now lives there, and the great natural wealth of coal, oil and minerals can be expected to ensure its chilly future.

**1740. Prussia.** Frederick 2nd _the great,_ becomes king of Prussia. During his reign Prussia becomes Germany's foremost state. He is an efficient and just ruler in the spirit of the Enlightenment and a patron of the arts. The so called Enlightenment is reaching its height, with people turning towards scientific knowledge and social reform and away from religious dogma.

**1748. India.** The French under Dupleix have been fighting the British for three years and succeeded in capturing Madras which the British had settled with the permission of the Mughal court. Now the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle restores Madras to the British in exchange for Louisbourg in North America.

**1751.** Robert Clive of the English trading company is restoring the power of Muhammad Ali, a local ruler in the south, by a series of clever military maneuvers against another local backed by the French. Both the British and French are involving local rulers in their own struggle for domination of India. The superior weaponry and tactics of the Europeans makes them valuable allies of any local chief, who then rewards them with land and political concessions that would otherwise require large armies and prolonged war to acquire . When this process is continued all over the country the locals wake up one day and find themselves dominated by foreigners.

**1752. The American Colonies.** Benjamin Franklin is flying a kite in a thunder storm. At the end of the string a non conducting silk cord is attached and held by his son. Also at the end of the string is a metal key from which Ben can draw sparks exactly like those he can make by rubbing things together. Having survived this hazardous experiment he argues that lightening has the same nature as the sparks that can be produced by – for example – combing hair in a dark room when the air is very dry.

**1755. Austria.** Maria Theresa the Hapsburg Empress, "Queen of Bohemia and Hungary" age 38 is giving birth to her fifteenth child, Marie Antonia who becomes known in France as Marie Antionette. At the beginning of labor, which interrupted her attention to affairs of state, the Empress takes the opportunity to have a tooth that had been bothering her extracted. Marie Theresa is the ruler of Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, parts of Italy and the Netherlands.

**1756. India.** Alivardi Khan who usurped the government of Bengal in 1740 has died and the British are taking advantage of the subsequent political instability to gain a firm foothold there. However they are antagonizing Sirajudduala who came to power after Khan's death. He marches on Calcutta and captures it, together with 146 British people that he locks up overnight in a small room. Only twenty three survive suffocation in what comes to be known as the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Next year a fleet under Captain Watson leaves Madras with troops under Clive's command and recaptures Calcutta, forcing Sirajudduala to return Britain's privileges there. Clive is now plotting with Mir Jafar, Sirajudduala's commander-in-chief. By the arrangement they make, Mir Jafar comes round to Clive's side at the battle of Palasi (Plassey) and gives Clive with a much smaller army an immediate victory. Mir Jafar is recognized by the British as Nawab of Bengal and he in return gives fine rewards to the Company and its officials. All this paves the way for the British conquest of northern India and in 1772 Warren Hastings is appointed governor of Bengal. During his period of office the foundations of the British Empire in India are laid.

**1758. England.** Pitt the Elder is determined to drive the French out of their North American settlements and to that end is sending a war fleet to the strategically critical St. Lawrence River. His Majesty's Ship _Pembroke_ is part of the fleet and on board as master (navigator and executive) is warrant officer James Cook aged twenty nine. James learnt about ships and sailing during his apprentice days in coal ships on England's east coast. The _Pembroke_ has 60 guns and weighs 1222 tons. By the time it gets to Halifax twenty six of the crew are dead, mainly from scurvy. This is taken as normal by the Navy, in spite of the fact that citrus fruits have long been known to prevent this horrible affliction and a few barrels of lemons could have saved these lives

**Canada.** By the time _Pembroke_ reaches the St. Lawrence estuary the winter has set in and this delays progress towards Quebec. However Cook is learning chart making from a fellow officer while the ship over-winters. The two of them are making a valuable contribution to the war effort by surveying the area and correcting and elaborating existing charts. With the end of winter, warships and transports with about 10,000 soldiers under General Wolfe are achieving a safe passage through the estuary as a result of this work.

**1759.** Quebec. In the battle for this town both the French General Montcalm and the British General Wolfe are killed, and Quebec is taken by the British forces.

**France.** Claude Helvetius, philosopher, proposes that self-interest, however disguised, is the basis of all human action. Correspondingly that since conceptions of good and evil vary according to period and locality there is no absolute good or evil.

**1762. Russia.** Tzar Peter 3rd is murdered in a coup and his wife Catherine goes on to rule Russia as Catherine 2nd . During her reign Russia gains territory from wars with the Turks and from partitions of Poland. She becomes known as Catherine the Great.

**1764. Corsica.** Carlo Buonaparte an eighteen year old law student in Corsica is marrying fourteen year old Letizia Ramolino. Their wealthy families are both descended from Italian mercenaries who settled in Corsica more than two hundred years ago. It is a marriage of convenience. Genoa still owns Corsica but France is trying to take it.

**1766. England.** Henry Cavendish is reporting to the Royal Society his discovery of a new lightweight gas. Years later he is able to show that this gas will form water when burnt in air. Cavendish inherited a fortune from a rich uncle and has the largest individual account at the Bank of England. It has built his private laboratory where he makes many other interesting discoveries, but being extremely shy, unwilling even to face his own servants, he communicates little. Only after his death is the extent of his research revealed.

**1768. Corsica.** Genoa hands Corsica over to the French. Carlo Buonoparte joins a futile attempt to keep the new owners out, but when this fails he gladly collaborates with the new masters, working for the military governor the Comte de Marbeuf.

**England.** First Lieutenant James Cook late of the war in Canada and recently returned from surveying the coast of Newfoundland, is being given command of His Majesty's bark _Endeavour._ His instructions are in two parts. The first to observe the time taken for the transit of Venus across the sun at Tahiti. This is part of a scheme to assist in the determination of longitude. The second (to be opened after he is at sea) reveals that he is to discover the continent _Terra Australis Incognita_ "believed to exist" south of the East Indies, and to explore and take possession "with the consent of the natives"(!) of convenient situations thereon.

This nice piece of gobbledygook can be paraphrased "take possession of Australia for England". Australia had already been circumnavigated by Abel Tasman who named it New Holland, and visited by William Dampier and others. Only the east coast had not been charted.

Of the provisions taken on board for the voyage is enough rum for a daily issue of one pint per day for men and half a pint for boys. It is diluted with two parts of water before serving. Half is served at noon and half at six p.m. This rum is ninety four proof and so a pint is equivalent to a modern 750 ml bottle with a 37% alcohol content.

Any volunteers to go around the world in a small sailing boat carrying a hundred people and many animals - some for eating, some as pets - and crewed by alcoholics who consume a bottle of rum each day?

On board is young wealthy Joseph Banks (a knight by inheritance) with four servants and three assistants. Two of the servants are Negroes, and one of the assistants is the famous Swedish botanist Dr. Solander. Like many of the crew Banks has also brought pets, in his case a greyhound and some other sort of dog. Banks is a passionate botanist with powerful friends, one of whom is the fourth Earl of Sandwich, and that connection has secured his place on the _Endeavour._

The Earl was first Lord of the Admiralty. He was a controversial and colorful character with a passion for gambling. On one occasion he refused to leave the gaming table for twenty four hours, subsisting on pieces of beef placed between two slices of bread. Whatever the stake (steak?), he would hardly have expected to win immortality on that occasion. More than 200 years later as far away culturally as Japan, waitresses move through the Shinkansen trains inviting passengers to buy "sand-a-widgies".

Sandwich's name was also given to a group of Pacific islands by Cook during his third voyage, but it was subsequently dropped and replaced by Hawaii.

**1769. Corsica.** Letizia gives birth to her third son and names him after her uncle Napoleone.

**1770. Paris.** The Dauphin Louis and Marie Antonia, or Antoinette as the French call her, the fourteen year old daughter of the Hapsburg queen are marrying. This is a triumph for Marie Theresa who has been angling for this as a union between Austria and France. Louis, aged fifteen, does not look at the bride that has been arranged for him, and in spite of her youth and beauty acts as if he had no goodwill towards her at all. He is an unattractive glum and introverted youth who was ignored by his parents as a second son and despised by the courtiers. His elder brother was king material but died young, and his parents died of tuberculosis when Louis was six. It had also been impressed on him that an Austrian alliance was a bad thing. Perhaps all this has affected his emotional life profoundly because the marriage is not consummated this night, nor for some time into the future.

Louis' grandfather is the reigning King Louis 15th He has no problems with matters of the heart and openly keeps young Madame du Barry as his mistress at the Chateau of Versailles. This Palace is open to the public who are free to move about the grounds and also parts of the interior. The King lives here and is expected to be frequently visible to the visitors. There are likely to be up to ten thousand people a day at the palace including three or four thousand courtiers. The visitors can buy souvenirs and wares from the stalls in the courtyard. Cramped attic like rooms are provided for some hundreds of the courtiers who in many cases have mansions in Paris as well. There they spend more of their time, but the important thing is to be able to live at the Palace.

**Botany Bay, Australia.** Lieutenant James Cook having sailed from England via Cape Horn, has done his astronomical job in Tahiti and then "discovered" Terra Australis. He has charted the coastline from its southern tip, and this is his first landfall on the continent. Apart from the huge stingrays in the bay, he and Joseph Banks are finding the flora and fauna new to them. Joseph Banks is collecting specimens and delighting in their novelty, leading to a name change from Stingray Bay to Botany Bay. Cook goes on to chart the east coast to its northern tip where he formally plants the flag and takes possession of the east coast of Australia in the name of King George 3rd and his heirs.

**The Mediterranean Sea.** A Russian fleet commanded by British officers is destroying the Ottoman fleet at Chesme near Athens. It had sailed from the Baltic sea for the purpose. The Ottoman Empire is in terminal decline.

**1772. England.** James Cook, now Captain Cook is setting off on another voyage of exploration, this time towards the Antarctic with two ships. To simplify navigation he has with him Harrison's "watch machine". This device keeps time to better than a second per day when subject to all the tossing about that it gets on a ship at sea. It has only recently been perfected and promises Harrison a rich reward for a lifetime of work.

It enables a ship to travel for months carrying Greenwich time with it.

The principle is that, provided there is no cloud cover, noon each day can be observed, and that gives the local time (12 o'clock). This can be compared with the time at Greenwich, and hence the longitude of the location determined. For example if the time difference were twelve hours the mariner would be half way around a world which makes one rotation in twenty four hours. Noon is when the sun is at its highest point, and if its angle with the horizontal is then noted, the latitude can also be found. The angle and the day's date are simply applied to tables. Mariners at sea could thus find the coordinates of their position on the globe. The accuracy of the determination was limited by the accuracy of their clocks which had previously been inadequate.

This year the poet Coleridge is born. "His Rime of the Ancient Mariner" becomes widely known and appreciated.

These days, the famous couplet:

" **Water, water, everywhere,**

Nor any drop to drink."

is as often quoted as its neighboring one:

" **As idle as a painted ship**

Upon a painted ocean."

**1774. North America.** The English colonists have been enduring bad management from their masters in England and announce a Declaration of Human Rights. This leads to a Declaration of Independence in 1776 on July 4th .It contains a clause about all men being created equal with rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. The Declaration was drawn up by a slave owner called Jefferson who apparently does not regard Negroes as "men". Later on however the Negroes receive a rating of three fifths of a free man.

A prolonged war of independence from England was fought between 1775 and 1783, and with decisive help from France the English were driven out.

**Paris.** Louis 15th is dying of smallpox and Madame du Barry is by his side in spite of not having been inoculated against this major killer. The Dauphin becomes king and decides to be inoculated. Voltaire applauds this somewhat risky move as setting an example to the rest of the population.

Apparently Jenner's great contribution in 1796 was in discovering that cowpox could be used instead of the (unsafe) weakened smallpox virus to immunize against smallpox. He coined the name "vaccination" from the Latin for cowpox – vaccina.

**1775.** Louis is crowned and among other vows forming part of the ceremony he swears to exterminate heretics. After the coronation the new king and queen ride through Paris in a carriage and receive a warm welcome from the crowd. Perhaps the people hope for an improvement on the old king who was not admired. France's capital is the largest city in Europe with a population of 600,000.

Louis 16th manages to perform as a potential father three years after his marriage but the activity is not much to his liking. The royal couple spend little time together. She spends her time frantically pursuing pleasure in dancing, gambling and feasting while he hunts in the forest chasing deer every morning. Marie's lifestyle does not go down well with the starving populace.

The population of France is about 30 million and expanding. Farming is able to produce enough food only during years of good harvests. Country folk are typically barefooted and in the towns beggars are everywhere. Some population control is occurring because many people are moving from the country to the city to find work, and then dying because of the unsanitary conditions they have to live in. 40,000 children a year are being abandoned by poverty stricken mothers and most die before age five.

Crime and prostitution are becoming substitutes for work that cannot be found. It is interesting that the poor who become household servants and are therefore secure in food, clothing and shelter, nevertheless seem to find such personal subjection to others little more bearable than the poverty of the streets. The rich complain of the high turnover of servants.

About ten percent of the population belongs to a secure middle class (the bourgeoisie). Above the bourgeoisie are the nobles who own the most valuable of the public offices such as judicial appointments. These can be bought and passed on to the next generation or sold to others. The purchasers of such offices are "ennobled", and rich merchants despised for having become rich by trading, are becoming nobles by purchase. Unfortunately some find the cost of the purchase reduces them to poverty. All the king's ministers are normally nobles but a year after his coronation Louis 16th is giving office to Jacques Neckar, a Swiss Protestant commoner and rich banker. He has such a reputation in money matters that Louis is forced to employ him by those concerned with the dreadful state of the economy.

**China.** The Qing government has acquired some European artillery and is using it against tribes in Szechuan.

**1776. Glasgow.** Adam Smith publishes _The Wealth of Nations._ In this book he defines wealth in terms of labor and argues for "free trade". He argues that "Enlightened Self Interest" will promote the general good.

**England.** Gibbon is publishing his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Captain Cook, apparently addicted to fame and adventure, has volunteered to command yet another voyage of discovery, again with two ships. Among other things he is to sail from the Pacific Ocean through Bering Strait and look for a North West passage to the North Sea or a North East passage to the Atlantic Ocean. But it is a different Captain from the one who made the first two voyages. Probably already tired from years at sea, living with constant responsibility for his ship and crew, his personality has changed. Perhaps his addiction is taking control, and trying to satisfy it is wearing him out. He may also have become proud and desperate for success.

No longer the quietly confident leader he is subject to fits of rage and almost precipitates a mutiny on two occasions. No longer the careful navigator he nearly runs his ship aground twice, through almost suicidal carelessness. No longer concerned to treat natives in the most civilized and sympathetic way, he treats them with surprising cruelty. No longer decisive and conscientious he dallies among the islands and arrives in Bering Strait two months later than intended. Stopped by floating ice he heads back south to the "Sandwich Islands", which he discovered and named on the way up. Here his odd behavior leads to an uprising by the natives and he is killed – and apparently eaten, since when a demand is made for the return of his body only some charred flesh and a few bones are delivered up.

There is in any case no passage of value to be found through the ice floes.

It is interesting that one of Cook's officers was William Bligh, of "Mutiny on the Bounty" fame. Then twenty eight, he navigated the two ships back to England faultlessly, after first surveying the Sandwich Islands from end to end.

**1777. Corsica.** The sixty five year old Marbeuf becomes enamoured of Letizia and sends husband Carlo to Versailles for two years to represent the Corsican nobility there. It is highly likely that Marbeuf is the father of her fourth son Louis.

**1778. France.** Marbeuf is not only virile but generous, and secures a scholarship for little Napoleon now nine years old, at a French military academy. This academy at Brienne is the lowest ranked military college in France and is staffed by lazy and incompetent teachers. Napoleon's report cards show him to be outstanding at math but unmusical and without linguistic talent. He hates dancing and deportment lessons but has a flair for ancient history.

**Paris.** Marie Antoinette is about to give birth to a daughter. In a remarkable traditional ceremony the birth has to be witnessed by the public and a curious group are assembled outside the royal bedchamber. At the moment of birth the doors are thrown open and the mob surges through to be first at the end of the bed.

It is not easy to deduce the point in this. What value as witnesses would an unidentified group such as this be? It seems probable that the ceremony is a leftover from some primitive ritual.

On the political front, the King recognizes the newly created USA. France's helping the American colonies against the English has ensured their friendship, and England and France break off diplomatic relations. Louis receives Benjamin Franklin and others at Versailles.

**1781. England** William Herschel, a German born astronomer, discovers the planet Uranus. He is a skilled telescope maker and in his lifetime discovers more than 2,500 nebulae and establishes the basic form of our Galaxy the Milky Way.

**1784. Paris.** A committee that includes Lavoisier, Guillotin (yes) and Benjamin Franklin is reporting to Louis 16th that Mesmer's "animal magnetism" has no scientific basis and that Mesmer's effects can be ascribed to the power of the imagination. Mesmer has been using hypnotism (hence "mesmerized") to treat "hysterical" women and has had numerous apparent successes. Another report, the "Secret Report to the King" is submitted by a certain Bailly on the same subject. It contains the interesting statement that "women's nerves are more excitable.... In touching them in any place whatsoever, one may say that one has touched them all over".

This is according to Stone in "Healing the Mind".

**Corsica.** Marbeuf ceases to be Carlo's generous patron after dropping Letizia and marrying an eighteen year old (one quarter of his age). However Napoleon is accepted at the elite Paris military school principally because of his mathematical ability which is important in artillery. The rich cadets look down on poor scholarship boys and create in Napoleon a hatred of aristocrats. Next year, aged sixteen, he heads south to join the La Fere regiment as second lieutenant and receives basic training in the field. He has lots of free time and secures long leave passes during which he returns to Corsica and gets involved in local politics. Meanwhile riots and unrest in France are leading to civil war. The poor are starving and the middle classes are resenting the power and wealth of the nobility. The monarchy is under threat. As time goes by a "National Assembly" is formed to usurp some of the powers of the King and nobility. Army officers are obliged to swear new oaths to the National Assembly and the new Constitution. As a result many royalist officers are resigning, leaving plenty of openings for new young men uninhibited by the military dogma of the old school. The revolution is creating some social mobility.

A left wing group called Jacobins (not to be confused with the Scotch Jacobites) is stirring up violence and overthrowing a more moderate group known as Girondins. Mobs are taking over Paris encouraged by Jacobin leaders such as Danton, Robespierre and Marat. A Reign of Terror is beginning, aimed at anyone likely to oppose the revolution. Land owned by the Church and the wealthy is being appropriated and sold off to others. The nobility of other European kingdoms are becoming nervous, and there is thought of going to the aid of the French Monarchy.

**1788. Australia.** A fleet of ships from England is unloading its human cargo where the city of Sydney appears later on the east coast. A new location has been found for England's convicted criminals now that America is not available. The fleet's Captain Phillip becomes governor of England's latest colony. The settlement slowly becomes self-supporting and free settlers arrive over the years gradually spreading across the whole continent. They displace, by force when opposed, the scattered tribes of perhaps 750,000 natives, whose ancestors arrived around 40,000 years earlier.

**England.** Lord Byron is born. He becomes one of the few English poets with a European reputation. After leaving England socially ruined by a scandal, he lives in Italy before joining the Greek Army in the struggle to win independence from Turkey. He soon becomes ill and is treated by the current method of bleeding. This is repeated frequently without effect, until as he writes to a friend "the doctors have done for me". He dies at age thirty six.

Greece became independent from Turkey in 1829.

**1789. North America.** George Washington a war hero and commander becomes first president of the recently formed United States of America. He proves to be wise, honest and effective and contributes greatly to the establishment and world recognition of the new nation. Here is a republic in a world of monarchies. Its population is four million plus seven hundred thousand slaves.

**Germany.** Martin Klaproth discovers Uranium in the ore pitchblende.

Pitchblende is a brownish-black mineral which is mainly uranium oxide, and contains most of the naturally occurring radioactive substances. It is 50 to 80 percent uranium.

**1791. St Dominique, West Indies.** A slave uprising in this French colony is the greatest in history and the only successful one. A thousand whites are massacred and 200 sugar and 1200 coffee plantations destroyed. 15,000 slaves are missing. The price of sugar in France triples.

**France.** The English poet Wordsworth is visiting here, apparently undeterred by the upheaval of the revolution. Perhaps any inconvenience is offset by his happy dalliance with a French woman with whom he produces a daughter. He stays in France for a year.

The aristocratic Lavoisier, experimenting with combustion, discovers that when substances such as sulphur and phosphorus are burnt in air, their residues weigh more than the original substance, and therefore something from the air must have been added. He names this part of the air "oxygen". He also makes other fundamental discoveries and in effect lays the foundations of chemistry.

**Vienna.** Mozart completes his last opera the "Magic Flute" and dies later in the year aged thirty six. He was melancholic and probably weakened by childhood rheumatic fever and a kidney disorder. The civil authorities bury his body wrapped in cloth and covered with lime in a communal grave. Such graves are dug up and cleaned out every seven years. He is survived by his estranged wife and two children.

Mozart left nothing financially except debts. His widow made enough money from performances of his works to repay the creditors and live comfortably herself.

**1792. Paris.** After deciding where his best opportunities lie, and not being fond of aristocrats anyway, Napoleon is now a committed Jacobin, and returns to Paris. He learns that Prussia is attacking France He also witnesses an armed mob attack on the Tuileries Palace where revolutionaries have forced the royal family to live. The palace is defended by about a thousand members of the Swiss Guard, and other troops. Soon six hundred of the defenders are lying dead and women are stripping the corpses of the Swiss naked, and castrating and otherwise mutilating their bodies. Is it the colorful uniforms that have excited them?

Years later Napoleon says the event gave him an idea of the meaning of death such as he never had afterwards on any of his battlefields.

Early next year the Royal Family is guillotined and Danton declares the doctrine of France's "natural frontiers" – the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Sea and the Rhine. The revolutionary executive then declares war on England and Spain. The new armies of the revolution are defeating the Prussian and Austrian armies and invading the Rhineland and Austrian Netherlands They claim to be exporting the ideology of the revolution but are also interested in looting, since France's economy has been in bad shape ever since helping the American states in their struggle against England.

The townsfolk of Toulon are rising against the Reign of Terror and letting in the British fleet under Admiral Hood to assist them. The revolutionary army is therefore putting the town under siege. Napoleon is a member of the besieging force and believes he has worked out how to handle the job. His superiors have other ideas, so Napoleon is sending messages to his friends in high places that the commanders are incompetent. After much political maneuvering (he is particularly good at that) he is effectively given control of the siege. Now he is launching a cannonade against what he correctly assesses to be the key strategic point of the defenses. Having been unable to convince the previous commanders that this was the way to proceed he must now prove his point. After the artillery barrage he is leading an infantry attack on the fort and is injured in the thigh by an English pike. The whole operation is successful and next day Toulon is his.

Napoleon's outstanding performance leads to his promotion to brigadier-general at the age of twenty four. Astonishingly fast promotion even for these days.

**1794.** The right wing of the revolution is overthrowing the left, and Robespierre (who came from a family that had practiced law for five generations) and other leaders are now on the receiving end of the guillotine. This is effectively the end of the revolution. Napoleon as a Jacobin is clearly in danger, particularly since he was a friend of Robespierre. However, as usual, he manages to wriggle out of trouble and doesn't mind hinting that Robespierre deserved what he got.

Those who acquired wealth and power during the confusion of recent years and bought up land and other appropriated assets, are now the entrenched beneficiaries of the revolution. The lot of the poor is improving slowly and some progress has been made towards democracy.

**England.** Erasmus Darwin is publishing _Zoonomia_ a wide ranging treatise on medicine, biology, religion, physics and philosophy. He is a famous country doctor, a poet and an inventor of mechanical gadgets, and with other intellectuals of his time, believes in the general principles of biological evolution. These he also writes about and illustrates by referring to the artificial evolution of domestic animals by human selection.

Erasmus was Charles Darwin's grandfather, and must have had a profound influence on Charles' thinking. Interestingly Charles gives him little credit for the idea of evolution, perhaps because it was already generally accepted by many at the time. The great contribution that Charles made was the meticulous collection of evidence to support the theory.

**1795. Paris.** The city is now a place of fun and frolic for those with wealth, but another threat to peace has arisen. A royalist group is threatening the Assembly and its "new property" members. Napoleon's current patron is forty year old Paul Barras, the Commander in Chief of the Interior who had been a commissar at Toulon, and he calls on Napoleon for help. The call is heeded and at midnight on October 4th Napoleon is commandeering the National Guard's artillery, just ahead of the opposition. He uses it to good effect and the royalists are beaten off. Napoleon's patron decides to resign from his office and recommends Napoleon as his replacement. Napoleon is now effectively the Governor of Paris with control of the police and the secret service. He has always been a work addict and now spends up to twenty hours a day devising new laws and maintaining order in the city. He also finds time to indulge in the pleasures available to a person in his position.

Napoleon happens to be engaged to a sixteen-year-old girl, his brother Joseph's sister in law, Desiree, in Marseilles. Now he lets her know that he no longer holds her to her promise and finally takes steps that finish the engagement. He has met Rose de Beauharnais a widow of the revolution and knows her as Josephine. They marry in 1796.

Josephine was born in the French colony of Martinique in June 1763 and after a series of adventures was imprisoned in 1794 in the notorious Le Carmes prison awaiting execution. After Robespierre's downfall she was released and became Barras' mistress.

The life in Les Carmes prison where imminent death was expected, followed a well established pattern. In such situations the victims copulate freely and often. Similarly, according to Sylvia Anthony, during outbreaks of plague which could halve the population of a town very quickly, strangers copulated in the streets, presumably for the reason that trees flower when the roots are damaged and death is likely. Quoting from Shakespeare's twelfth sonnet Anthony points out that:

" **Nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence,**

Save breed, and brave him when he takes thee hence".

As Dawkin's theory elucidates, this is a good strategy for the genes which as usual are in control of their survival machines.

From the evidence available it seems that Josephine habitually reacted to life's stress in the Les Carmes way. After her marriage to Napoleon she spent more time with lovers than with him.

**1796.** Marquis Pierre Laplace the great mathematician suggests that the solar system originated from a cloud of gas. He is also developing mathematical probability theory.

The Revolutionary army is attacking Austria on three fronts and Napoleon is put in charge of the Italian one. This puts a twenty six year old above seasoned generals who can be expected to make life difficult for him. Perhaps it is his charm, perhaps their awareness of his competence that soon wins the generals over, and Napoleon's Italian campaign against the Austrians begins. It is characterized by ruthless looting of Italy's assets to enable the war to be conducted without cost to France. The rich republic of Venice which hates the French Revolution and is sympathetic to Austria, suffers particularly. Advancing on Vienna Napoleon offers the Austrians peace terms which are accepted, and include ceding Belgium to France and allowing France to occupy the left bank of the Rhine.

Napoleon's military genius combined with France's technological advantage in cannon at the time and the high morale of the troops, made winning easy. Following a leader who usually wins, and in addition permits unlimited looting, comes naturally to soldiers who often have no other means of earning a living anyway.

**1798.** Flushed with success France is now considering the prospect of new colonies, and looks towards Egypt. Napoleon is put in charge of subduing the Turks and Mamelukes who control the country.

Shadowing Napoleon in our space station is becoming a little tedious. We get a few glimpses of his activities however: He installs a host of scientists in Cairo to bring culture to Egypt. He executes 3000 defenders of Jaffa who surrendered on condition that their lives would be spared. To save powder and ball he orders the massacre carried out with bayonets. This matches Richard's performance at Acre six hundred years earlier.

The Egyptian campaign fails and Napoleon slips through an English blockade and returns to Paris leaving his army to fend for itself. It is two more years before what is left of it returns to France.

**1799. Egypt.** A slab of basalt is discovered near Rosetta with inscriptions in Greek, hieroglyphic and demotic script. Since the text is the same in each script it enables the hieroglyphs to be deciphered. This piece of rock eventually finds its way to the British Museum.

Suggested events to associate with the seventeen hundreds

1721 Bach publishing his Brandenburg Concertos

1770 James Cook claiming the east coast of Australia for England

1792 The French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon

~~~~

THE EIGHTEEN HUNDREDS

**1800. China.** The population is now probably 300 million. The secret society White Lotus is in revolt against the Manchu Qing government.

**Paris.** France Phillipe Pinel is ordering the removal of chains from the insane at the asylum Salpetriere. He writes descriptions of various disorders he observes and these include anorexia and bulimia.

Anorexia and bulimia are apparently not modern disorders, and fashion magazines extolling the virtues of slimness might be less culpable than some have claimed. While Pinel usually gets the credit for chain removal, Spanish physicians in Valencia in the early 1400s also removed chains from the insane. Presumably it was then an idea ahead of its time, and did not catch on.

**1803. North America.** President Jefferson of the USA buys Louisiana from Napoleon for fifteen million dollars. This territory extends from the Mississippi to the Rockies and has an area of 2.5 million square kilometers.

It was originally French, then in 1763 France turned it over to Spain which handed it back to France for some reason in 1800. Jefferson was outstanding in many ways – astute politician, and also talented architect, zoologist and linguist.

**1804. Paris.** following years of political and military maneuvering, Napoleon gets himself crowned Emperor of France. Among those dismayed by this are Byron and Beethoven. It is likely that members of the Bourbon dynasty of which King Louis 16th was a member, are finding it ironic also.

**1805. Trafalgar.** October. The French admiral Villeneuve, knowing Napoleon is about to sack him for incompetence, is sailing his Franco-Spanish armada out of Cadiz in a desperate assault on an English fleet under the command of Horatio Nelson. Nelson's flagship "Victory" is the biggest warship ever ordered by the English navy. It cost 63,000 pounds sterling in 1765 and has 104 guns of which thirty are capable of hurling a 32 pound cannonball a mile. Under full sail it has four acres of canvas and it carries 850 men and boys. The youngest boy is ten years old and there are four others of twelve, the age Nelson was when he first went to sea.

Napoleon has a huge invasion army ready to sail to England and needs to control the seas for long enough to enable it to get across safely. Unfortunately for him the English navy is not removed by Villeneuve who suffers a devastating defeat. Nelson is killed by a sniper during the action, having probably drawn attention to himself by standing on deck wearing his admiral's insignia. It may be relevant that just before the engagement he told the captain of one of his ships that he would never see him again. Napoleon gives up hope of invading England, and pays attention to events elsewhere.

**Bohemia, (later Czechoslovakia) November.** Austria thinks it is now able to beat Napoleon and has found allies in Russia and England and the combined Russian and Austrian armies are meeting the French at Austerlitz. Old General Kutusov is commanding the Russians, but both the Austrian and Russian monarchs are present. No doubt to the irritation of the generals they are putting forth their ideas on how the battle should be fought. Napoleon has been feigning indecision and confusion while in fact working out the details of a strategy, and selecting his battle ground. He baits a trap and the enemy walks into it. The battle is won and his opponents retreat in disarray, some taking with them the notion that Napoleon is invincible.

**1806.** **Germany.** Prussia declares war on France. Once again Napoleon wins, occupies Berlin and extracts huge indemnities from Prussia. In later years we see the Prussians are also forced to supply soldiers for Napoleon's army.

**1807. India.** Lord Minto becomes governor-general of British India and makes a treaty with the Sikh monarchies fixing the river Sutlej as the boundary of their territory. This is the region that is now Pakistan.

England. William Wilberforce presents a bill in parliament for the abolition of the slave trade. Slavery is the enforced servitude of one person to another or one group to another. A slave has no personal rights and is the property of another person through birth, purchase or capture. Wilberforce's bill passes, but slavery throughout the British Empire is finally abolished only in 1833.

In some other parts of the world for example in Sudan, slavery still exists in the 2000's.

**1808. Spain.** French troops are occupying the country that was their ally in 1805. Napoleon arrives in Madrid and issues a decree abolishing the Inquisition and confiscating all of its property. But a popular opposition to the French occupation is developing and continues for years. It is marked by barbaric atrocities on both sides. The Spanish guerrillas are noted for never taking prisoners.

England. is sending millions of pounds worth of arms and money to assist the Spanish, and in addition Wellington is sent with an army. One of Wellington's French opponents is Massena the one-eyed marshal who owes his condition to a hunting accident. Napoleon, aiming at a bird, hit him in the face.

**1809. Bavaria.** Once more the Austrian military decide to attack Napoleon, this time through Bavaria. After three months the Austrians again concede defeat and again pay millions in indemnities. Later they are forced to provide fighting men for the Russian front.

**Paris.** Napoleon divorces Josephine and in the next year marries the daughter of the Austrian Emperor, nineteen-year-old Marie-Louise. Apparently the new father-in-law holds no grudge against the man who slaughtered thousands of his subjects and robbed his country of money and pride. Or perhaps he has no choice. Thirteen cardinals feel strongly enough about the wedding to oppose it, and are later imprisoned for their views.

**Savona, Italy.** Pope Pius 7th has refused to implement Napoleon's Continental Blockade of England in the Papal territories and Napoleon has him arrested. He is held here under house arrest for two years and apparently is unable to contest this.

**1812. Russia.** Napoleon is invading Russia with 675,000 troops including vast numbers of Germans, Italians, Poles, Swiss, Dutch, Spanish and others. Many of his officers have brought servants and luxuries with them. Napoleon himself has brought a carriage for his wardrobe, two butlers, two valets and fifteen other servants. He personally travels in a six horse coach and his imperial staff take up 52 carriages 650 horses and many carts.

Crossing rivers with pontoon bridges the army makes its way towards Moscow. Around 5000 men per day are being lost to sickness and desertion and horses are dying of starvation and misuse. Napoleon is unable to meet the Russians in a decisive battle of the sort he assumes will bring them to the peace table. Finally the Russians make a stand at Borodino under sixty seven year old Kutusov who lost to Napoleon at Austerlitz. Having left garrisons along the way, and with the losses we have already seen, the French army is now reduced to 130,000 effective troops and communication lines are over-stretched. The battle is a head-on fight in which both sides come out about even, but the Russian army leaves the field by night and the 95,000 remaining French army soldiers press on to a practically deserted Moscow.

Czar Alexander in St Petersburg is allowing Napoleon to sit in Moscow and wonder what to do next. After a month Napoleon decides the best thing to do is to go home. The return journey is a horror trek. In icy weather the grand army is harassed by the Cossacks and local peasants who torture to death both stragglers and prisoners. The atrocities we saw in Spain are being repeated.

Napoleon leads the retreat, and with his entourage reaches safety ahead of the rest of the army and eventually arrives in Paris.

**America.** The USA declares war on Britain. This arises out of the US's desire to capture Canada and its annoyance at the British fleet's interference with American shipping.

The war was not popular with all Americans and the outcome at the end in 1814 was indecisive. The opponents of US policy nicknamed the government Uncle Sam, probably from the initials US placed on government property.

**1814. Paris.** Allied troops from the rest of Europe are entering the city and Napoleon is forced to abdicate. Bourbon Louis 18th, younger brother of Louis 16th, replaces him. Louis 17th, (son of Louis 16th) was nominally king after his father's death and probably died in prison. Napoleon is given sovereignty over Elba, a small island between Corsica and Italy. Here he plays king for a while but hears that many people back in France are missing him, and these include soldiers returning from garrisons abroad and finding nothing awaiting them at home. He escapes from Elba, returns to France and heads for Paris, gathering followers on the way. Soon the entire army goes over to the Emperor and he is in control of France once more! Louis 18th flees.

**1815. Waterloo.** The combined British and Prussian armies under Wellington and Blucher defeat Napoleon's new army. He is despondent and decides to give up, considering making his home in the U.S.A.

He was eventually captured by the British who imprisoned him on small rocky St. Helena island in the Atlantic Ocean at latitude 16° south. Here he wrote his memoirs and was perhaps deliberately poisoned to death, maybe at the instigation of the Bourbons, by repeated applications of arsenic. In any case he died in 1820. A number of people including his family, had lobbied for his release without success. Even Pius 7th wrote a bizarre letter stating that he pardoned Napoleon for everything. One might have expected Pius to leave such a huge job to his superior.

Following Napoleon's defeat, Louis re-entered Paris after an absence of one hundred days and secured his position by guaranteeing the property of those who had benefited from the revolution.

**1819. North America.** The USA purchases Florida from Spain for five million dollars.

**1828. S.E. Africa.** Shaka (or Chaka) is being assassinated by his two half-brothers. This famous chief who united Zulu clans is noted for his brutality. He occasionally marched some of his troops over cliffs to demonstrate his control over them.

**1830. France.** August Comte coins the name _sociology_. He wants to establish it as an intellectual discipline using scientific methods.

**1834. Spain.** A formal "decree of suppression" brings the Spanish Inquisition to an end. Apparently Napoleon's abolition of the Inquisition in 1808 did not last.

**1836. North America.** A mission fortress in Texas, "The Alamo" is besieged by Mexicans under the command of Santa Anna. The fortress is taken and the defenders killed. Among these are the frontier men Davy Crockett, famous for his hat, and Jim Bowie, famous for his knife.

**1837. Paris.** Amandine Dupin, having left her husband and taken various lovers is now Fred Chopin's lover, and remains so for eight years. Her dress is cross – trousers waistcoat and tie – and she smokes cigars. She becomes a bestselling author under the pen name of George Sand. Dostoevsky believes she is even more popular than Dickens.

**1839. Afghanistan.** To counter expanding Russian influence in the country, British forces are intermittently fighting Afghans. The British garrison in Kabul is wiped out, but forty years later General Roberts recaptures Kabul and relieves Kandahar.

**1840. Italy.** Nicolo Paganini dies. It is believed by some that his violin playing brilliance was possible only because he was in league with the devil.

He invented all of the virtuoso techniques included in violin composition since his time.

**England.** David Livingstone, a Scottish missionary, heads for South Africa to convert the heathen. He stays for sixteen years and explores vast tracts of the country before returning to England for two years. After this sojourn he visits Africa again with the intention of opening a path for commerce and Christianity along the Zambesi. He becomes a hero at home, perhaps partly because he survives for so long the dangers and diseases of Africa, "the white man's grave".

**China.** There are millions of opium addicts in the land. The British have been exploiting this by bringing in opium from India, and are now using warships to force the Chinese to accept opium as payment for goods received in trading. In a desperate move against this the Chinese destroy a large quantity of opium in a British store. Within two years, British warships are sailing up the Yangtse toward Nanjing. The Qing military technology belongs to the sixteen hundreds and is no match for the British. So the Qing give in and sign a treaty by which they pay huge compensation for the cost of the war and the destroyed opium, cede Hong Kong to Britain, and open five ports to trade.

**1843. Canton. (Guangzhou).** A woman who murdered her husband is being publicly executed by slicing. There is much crime and punishment in China, and the spiritual life is diverse:

Animals such as dragons , tigers and cocks have a godlike significance and in routine practice are propitiated or sacrificed. Buildings must be oriented in particular ways to avoid bad influences by spirits of some sort.

Concurrently, there are religious books in circulation known as the _Jade Record,_ believed to have been sent down from "the highest god" or "Celestial Jade Great Ruler of Heaven" after having been submitted to him by the king of hell. They describe the progress of souls through hell and how good deeds on earth can reduce suffering in that after-life. Such messages conflict with the teachings of Confucius for whom an after-life was unknowable. The hell concept with its various gods is linked to Buddha although there are no gods in Buddha's teaching. It appears that some Christian ideas have been absorbed by the Chinese.

It is instructive to look at the comprehensive list of offences that can lead to punishment in hell according to the _Jade Record_. Note that mixed among the mostly trivial ones are the poisoning of water, the drowning of baby girls and the killing of slaves. This list is taken from Spence's book _God's Chinese Son._

" **Thither go the quack doctors who in search of profit harm their patients, the priests who deceive children of either sex to be their acolytes, people who sequester others' scrolls or pictures. marriage go-betweens who lie about their clients' charms. Hither come shop clerks who deceive their customers, prisoners rightfully condemned who escape from jail or exile, grave robbers, tax evaders, posters of abusive bills, and negotiators of divorce. Hither come those who won't yield the right-of-way to those who are crippled, who steal flagstones from the road and tiles from public buildings, who refuse to help the sick, who sell fake medicines or debase the quality of silver, who foul the streets with filth. The rich who forcibly build on the land of the poor, the careless or mischievous who set fire to hillsides or to property, the killers of birds, the poisoners of water, the destroyers of religious images, the defacers of books, the writers and readers of obscene literature, the hoarders of grain, the heavy drinkers, spend-thrifts, thieves, bullies, the drowners of baby girls, the killers of slaves, gamblers, lazy teachers, neglectors of parents – all, all, all shall suffer the penalties due them. The _Jade Record_ lists every punishment for every category, the suffocating and the lacerating, the slicing and the burning, the breaking of bones and the yanking of teeth, snakes in the nostrils and worms in the brain, severing the penis, smashing the knees, pulling the tongue, tearing out nails, scratching out eyes – until the mind staggers under the horror of it all".**

As in many religions suicide is taboo. But not every suicide. Those who are suffering "unbearable hardship or humiliation" are excused but those who suicide "out of petty spite or sputtering anger have betrayed both the gods of the land and the parents who spawned and raised them; for this ingratitude they must once in every twelve day cycle, endlessly re-live the exact suffering that led them to the act of suicide itself".

It is strange that depression is not specified rather than petty spite or sputtering anger. Was the condition not recognized, or was anger sensed as being behind depression?

Superimposed on this spiritual diversity comes a Chinese translation of the Christian Bible, done by Protestant missionaries in the country. It captures the imagination of Hong Xinquan, an educated and intelligent man from a province north of Canton, and following an illness, he comes to believe he is God's second son – the younger brother of Jesus. He travels the country preaching and converting and soon has a following which starts to attract the attention of the Manchu rulers, the Qing dynasty. Various secret society members such as the Triads become involved with the "Taipings" as Hong's lot call themselves, and by 1850 a "Taiping Heavenly Army" is on the move towards Nanjing, fighting the Qing army as it goes. Hong is about thirty nine by the time they capture Nanjing in 1853. He settles here in what he regards as his provisional "Earthly Paradise" and holds on to it for ten years, before being driven out and killed.

**1845. North America.** The USA annexes Texas.

**India.** A Sikh army crosses the Sutlej in contravention of the 1807 treaty, but is defeated.

**Ireland.** The potato harvest is poor and the next one even worse. By 1849 the situation is desperate and two million people have died either of starvation or fevers that have run through the weakened population. People who can afford the fare are emigrating in great numbers, particularly to the United States.

Some wit remarked that the potato famine put a policeman on every corner in New York.

**1848. India.** Lord Dalhousie, a Scottish peer, becomes governor-general and soon has to deal with another Sikh revolt. The Sikhs are defeated again and the Punjab is annexed to British India. Dalhousie goes on annexing Indian states on one pretext or another for eight years. He is motivated by the desire to run India efficiently, and is indeed a great administrator. He improves the Grand Trunk Road and the Ganges Canal and opens the first railway line in India.

**California.** In the same year that Spain cedes the territory to the USA gold is discovered in the Sierra Nevada. A gold rush starts in 1849 and continues until 1856, a very convenient event for some of the Irish emigrants fleeing from starvation at home. The miners who arrive first become known as forty-niners.

**1850. China.** Foreign countries, which now include France Russia and the USA, have practically divided China up between them with each controlling large sectors. The success of the British in 1842 has reduced the Manchu court to ineffectiveness against the foreign threat.

**1853. Japan.** Commodore Perry from the USA is sailing into Edo Bay (Tokyo Bay) with four warships and a letter from his president demanding the opening of two ports to trade and the establishment of a US consulate . This is granted some time later when Perry returns with nine warships, and soon Britain, Holland and Russia make similar arrangements.

**1856. Austria.** An Augustinian monk named Gregor Mendel is growing peas in a monastery garden. They are the species _sativum_ which normally self-pollinates and hence the offspring always resemble the parents in a given trait. However cross-fertilization is possible if first the pollen holding anthers are removed from one flower, a recipient, to avoid self-pollination. The pollen from another flower is then applied to the female part, the carpel of the recipient flower. Mendel has selected plants that differ in clear cut ways, for example the seeds are either smooth or wrinkled, and have either white or grey seed coats. The plants are either tall or dwarf, the flowers white or purple and so on.

By crossing plants with these alternative characteristics Mendel finds that one alternative trait is dominant over the other, for example a cross between a tall and a dwarf plant always produces a tall hybrid plant. However when these tall hybrids are allowed to self-fertilize, one in four is dwarf, and if these dwarf plants are back crossed with the tall hybrid, then half the plants are tall and half dwarf. Mendel hypothesizes that independent "factors" are responsible for the various traits and that these occur in pairs. His deductions from the hypothesis allow him to predict how many plants of what type will be produced from various crossings. Since the mixing of the factors in the breeding process is assumed to be random, a great many cases have to be bred to obtain the average. In the experiment where the tall hybrids were allowed to self-fertilize, 1064 plants were grown of which 277 were dwarfs. This is very close to the one in four predicted and it demonstrates the enormous amount of work Mendel is doing to deal with all the other traits and multiple back-crosses.

Mendel's work was of the highest scientific standard, but no one took much notice when it was published in 1866 in "Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brunn". In 1900 three scientists who had independently obtained similar results discovered Mendel's remarkable paper. It contains the basic laws of heredity, his "factors" are the modern "genes".

**1857. India.** The people have had enough of British domination and are beginning to revolt. Brutal murders are being committed by both sides. At Lucknow all Europeans and a few pro-British Indian soldiers are besieged in the residency. It is five months before Sir Colin Campbell comes to the rescue and "relieves" Lucknow. The revolting peters out over the next two years and the British parliament becomes directly responsible for Indian administration. The trading Company is no longer involved.

After World War 2 the British withdrew from India altogether. Winston Churchill was surprised and offended that the Indians were not appreciative of the British occupation. Certainly it had developed the country's infrastructure and put in place an effective administrative system.

**1858. Moluccas, the Spice Islands.** From his hut in the jungle here, Alfred Wallace has sent to England an essay entitled "Evolution by Natural Selection" with a covering note to Charles Darwin. The note asks him to show it to Sir Charles Lyell the scientist who has become famous as a geologist. Darwin wrote on the subject in 1842 and is currently preparing a great work "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection", so Wallace's succinct essay comes to him as something of a shock. From his wanderings and collecting of specimens in the Spice Islands, Wallace has arrived at the same conclusions as Darwin. Wallace has been noticing how plant and animal species vary from island to island and has identified an imaginary line between the many islands, on one side of which the flora and fauna are typically Asian and on the other side typically Australian.

This so-called "Wallace's Line" was an exciting concept, but on closer inspection admits of so much overlapping of species that it is now more of historical than scientific interest

**1859. England.** Charles Darwin publishes "the book that shook the world" claiming that all living creatures evolved slowly over time by natural selection, to produce the different species that exist today. His book describes the evidence he gathered to support his theory. It is in conflict with the current religious belief that God created all animals just as they are now, and ever will be.

The concept of evolution was new only to the world in general. Charles' grandfather Erasmus wrote about it in the late 1700s in _Zoonomia_ and _The Botanic Garden_ and it was a familiar idea among many of his contemporaries. Indeed the ancient Greeks already had the idea, and also a notion that life began in water and humanity descended from fish. It was Charles who gathered and collated the evidence and formally stated the theory.

**USA.** John Brown, a slavery abolitionist is trying to stir up a slave revolution in the South. He is one of the abolitionists who smuggles escaped slaves to Canada and has devised a wild scheme to seize the US arsenal at Harper's Ferry. He and his followers are besieged there and most are killed or wounded. Brown is compelled to surrender by a commander of the Federal forces – one Robert E Lee! At his trial Brown is found guilty of treason, murder and criminal conspiracy and is executed. The bizarre affair inflames hatred in both the North and South, convincing the Southerners that the North is determined to abolish slavery and perhaps foment a black revolution.

**1860. USA.** Abraham Lincoln is elected president of the USA but the southern states have already threatened secession if that happened, convinced that Lincoln is anti-slavery. Next year the seven chief cotton states form the "Confederate States of America" and elect as their President, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. Lincoln believes that splitting the Union would be disastrous and lead North America into a European type of country where competing states go to war with one-another.

This sounds like a rationalization since the situation in Europe in which countries spoke different languages and had been at war for centuries was clearly different from the situation in America. His motivation was more likely the standard historical one, in which for some reason secession from a group is intolerable to the remainder. The current attitude of China to Taiwan is an example, and the reported attack by chimpanzees on a seceding minority in the jungle of Africa, shows how fundamental the emotion is.

**China.** The foreign powers are now allies of the weak and subservient Qing government against the popular Taiping revolutionaries. Foreign military support in the Yangtse region is a rabble of low life mercenaries both Chinese and European, brought together by an American adventurer named Ward. It is the so-called Ever Victorious Army. By 1862 its members are mainly Qing conscripts and the British appoint General George Gordon as commander, supplying him with all necessary arms, ships and money. By 1864 the Taiping movement has been suppressed, Nanjing is under foreign backed government control, and any hindrance to further foreign activity has been removed. The British acquire more Chinese land including "The New Territories" but in 1898 sign a ninety nine year lease for it.

The indefatigable Gordon appears again in Africa in 1884. The Ming dynasty began with the overthrow of the Mongol invaders in 1368 and lasted until 1644 when the Manchu Qing dynasty began. 1911 saw the end of dynasties. For reference:

Song 960 – 1279

Yuan (Mongol) 1271 – 1368

Ming 1368 – 1644

Qing 1644 – 1911

**France.** Louis Pasteur a tanners son, having made contributions to chemistry, has now turned his attention to fermentation and disease, showing that "germs" are involved in both. He also finds that heat can kill some germs, in particular typhoid and tuberculosis germs in milk. The process of routinely heating milk to kill germs, gains immediate acceptance and is saving people's lives. It acquires the name pasteurization.

In 1865 Simpson carries out surgery in England using carbolic acid (phenol) to kill germs that might otherwise cause infection. But although the idea follows on from Pasteur's work it is limited by the fact that phenol is also toxic to human tissue.

**1861.** Carrying out its threat of secession, the South begins to take over government buildings and forts and then fires on Fort Sumter in south Carolina. This act sparks a civil war between the Union states in the north and the Confederate states in the south. By the time the war is under-way the Confederate states comprise Virginia, Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas and their total population is nine million plus three and a half million slaves. The union has more than twenty million people and is industrialized, which gives it the advantage of being able to keep up the supply of clothing and weapons as the war progresses. With little manufacturing capability behind them, the armies of the south become progressively ragged and ill equipped.

Two extraordinary Confederates, General Gabriel Rains and his brother George are serving the South in technical ways. Gabriel makes mines which in due course sink fifty eight Federal ships. He also makes land mines. George provides much of the gun powder for the mines and for other Confederate munitions. When he was a professor of chemistry and geology he would have been familiar with the formula for gunpowder but to make tons of it at short notice is another matter. He finds calcium nitrate in limestone caves and mixes it with lye from ashes to produce potassium nitrate. But most of the potassium nitrate he needs is smuggled in from Europe, and paid for with cotton. It needs purifying as does the sulfur he gets from sugar farmers. The charcoal he makes himself, by heating wood in iron retorts. He designs factories for the purifying processes and for the mixing and milling of the gunpowder ingredients. From 1861 onwards he turns out more than a thousand tonnes of first class product, transported in specially designed boxes to avoid explosions.

**1864.** Grant is appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Union armies and in May the next year the war is over.

William Tecumseh Sherman, marching to Georgia, noted that "war is hell" and ensured that where he was operating, it was. His father had some difficulty in finding a minister of religion who would christen his son with the name of a notable Indian chief, but persevered.

Tecumseh was the Shawnee chief who united many Indian tribes against the encroaching white invaders. The British made use of him in the war with America and commissioned him a brigadier general. Apparently he could not see that the British were tarred with the same brush as the Americans. He was killed in action in 1813. Tecumseh Sherman became US Army chief of staff a few years after the war was over.

Robert E. Lee and 'Stonewall' Jackson, both Virginians, were the South's great generals and Ulysses S. Grant the North's. Grant distinguished himself in the war against Mexico but was thrown out of the army for drunkenness. He was taken on again as a brigadier when the civil war began. His strategy in battle was to throw enough soldiers at the enemy to overcome it by sheer strength of numbers rather than tactics, and this tended to result in more casualties on his side – and more wins.

Like many Americans in later wars, Jackson was killed accidentally by "friendly fire". 600,000 combatants, more on the Union side than the Confederate, lost their lives in the four years of the war.

**1864. Italy.** Pope Pius 1X declares his own war against "progress, liberalism and modern civilization". He also deems wrong and heretical the belief that every individual "is free to embrace and profess that religion.....he shall consider true".

**England**. David Livingstone is preparing yet another expedition to Africa, this time to find the source of the Nile. He sets off in the next year and is not heard of again for so long that an American newspaper sends an explorer-journalist named Stanley to look for him, believing correctly that the story will have news value. In 1871, after an arduous and dangerous trek through the jungle, Stanley reaches an encampment where he has heard a white man is living, and advances to the man uttering the famous words "Dr Livingstone I presume".

**1867. Europe.** Hapsburg Franz Joseph establishes the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It includes Austria Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and parts of Poland, the Ukraine, Romania, Yugoslavia and Italy. The Empire lasts until 1918.

**Japan.** The internal strife generated by Perry's invasion is causing the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the reinstatement of the emperor as the country's leader. The royal capital and the emperor are moving from Kyoto to Edo for which a new name is contrived – Tokyo. In a verbal interpretation of the kanji characters or ideographs, this is Kyo-to backwards. Kyoto means "splendid metropolis". In Tokyo the "to" also takes the meaning of "eastern" so that Tokyo logically completed would be tokyo-to – eastern splendid metropolis. The emperor is moving into the palace previously occupied by the shoguns and also acquires a new name – Meiji Tenno (enlightened sovereign) instead of Mikado. This name recalls the name of the first ruler of Japan – Jimmu Tenno – the grandson of Amaterasu the sun goddess.

**London.** Karl Marx has finished his researches in the local library and is ready to publish _Das Kapital_ ( _Capital_ ). Marx and his friend Engels are known on account of the _Communist Manifesto_ published in 1848, and that should generate some sales. But Marx's writing is exceedingly tedious and repetitive. Here are the essentials in one page instead of five hundred and fifty:

Marx tries to establish the "value" of a commodity in terms of the labor that went into producing it – not the actual labor but the "socially necessary" labor. Plowing through this socialist economic text the reader eventually reaches the point where Marx defines _capital_ : He sets out the progression C-M-C which symbolizes someone producing a commodity C, selling it for money M and using the money to buy another commodity. The two Cs are equivalent, and this is the normal process of production and consumption. It contrasts with M-C-M where money is used to buy a commodity for resale at a higher price. In that case the two Ms are not equivalent or there would be no point in the transaction. The second M is greater than the first by an amount that Marx calls _surplus value_. The money expands itself he says, and in the process is converted into _capital._ This is the money-lender's and the capitalist's way. Marx claims no originality for this idea, explaining in a long footnote that Aristotle had already worked it out.

The best bit is not only more readable, but an almost jovial passage in which he says "This urge towards absolute enrichment, this passionate hunt for value, is shared by the capitalist with the miser; but whereas a miser is only a capitalist gone mad, a capitalist is a miser who has come to his senses. The unceasing increment of value at which the miser aims in his endeavor to save his money from circulation is attained by the shrewder capitalist by again and ever again handing over his money to circulation".

The remainder of the book is devoted to trade statistics and a description of the appalling conditions of industrial labor at the time.

It is difficult to see how such an unoriginal and uninspiring book as "Das Kapital" achieved such notoriety. One might doubt many people have read his heavy prose beyond page three. A movement such as Communism probably requires a literary rallying point and perhaps the more obscure and remote the better.

Two further volumes were published after Marx's death from notes he left, collected and edited by Fred Engels. These are also heavy going.

**1868. Japan.** A useful English-Japanese dictionary is published, probably designed to help the many Japanese travellers that can now be seen. The Japanese having finally decided they can no longer ignore the rest of the world, are sending people abroad to see what is going on and to learn.

**1873. Ireland.** Isaac Butt is founding the _Home Rule League_ which seeks an Irish parliament for Irish affairs independent of England. This follows years of fighting against an oppressive English government. Unfortunately the people of Ireland are divided among themselves. There are the basic Celtic Irish, the "old" English whose ancestors settled in the country many generations before and became Irish in spirit, and the "new" English who are recent arrivals. Superimposed on all this, some are Catholics and some are Protestants.

Isaac Butt is followed by Parnell. Gladstone as Prime Minister in England supports Home Rule, but is blocked by factions in the English parliament. The matter drags on getting more and more complicated in both countries and culminating in the division of Ireland into North and South, which is the beginning of more troubles.

**1874. Africa.** Henry Stanley, the adopted name of a Welsh born US citizen John Rowlands, found David Livingstone at Ujiji three years ago. Now, following Livingstone's death last year, Stanley traces the (Zaire) Congo River to the sea and establishes the Congo Free State. He goes on to chart much of the country's interior.

**Japan.** The old Samurai order as a military caste is coming to an end. Ten thousand samurai have found themselves displaced from the new social structure and are soon rebelling – unsuccessfully

**1882.** **Germany.** Robert Koch identifies the tuberculosis bacterium and is awarded a Nobel prize.

**1883. Indonesia,** August 27, 10 am. Krakatoa, an island in the Sunda strait between Sumatra and Java is exploding with the power of twenty six hydrogen bombs of the largest size tested by the USSR. The noise is heard four hours later nearly 5000 kilometers away, and altogether over an area of one thirteenth of the world. It wipes out 163 villages and the wave it causes kills more than 36,000 people.

**1884. Africa, Sudan.** In this desert country south of Egypt, an Arab man claims to be the Mahdi, the second coming of the Muslim prophet. He is uniting most of the Arab tribes including dervishes – members of an Islamic brotherhood, some of which whirl and some of which howl – and is leading them against Egyptian oppressors. Egyptian soldiers have been extracting taxes by force from both the Arabs and the black population of Sudan. An interesting complication is that Britain is currently running Egypt as a protectorate and could be seen as conniving at the tax collection and the oppression.

The Suez canal had opened in 1869, and Egypt became strategically important to those using it, particularly the British on their way to India. Excessive borrowing from European countries led to economic difficulties in Egypt by 1881, and an army colonel had a mind to overthrow his country's weakened government. An attempted coup was prevented by the British navy and 17,000 troops. These launched a decisive night attack after the British commander Sir Garnet Wolseley discovered that Egyptians did not post sentries after dark! The convenient "protectorate" status of Egypt was the outcome of these events.

The British government is sending currently unemployed general George "China" Gordon to consider the evacuation of those in danger from the Mahdi's activities. His brief is unclear and becomes increasingly so after he talks with various officials in Egypt. Eventually he reaches Khartoum, the Sudanese capital near the confluence of the Blue Nile and White Nile, and sets about fortifying it. Gordon is a maverick who has his own ideas about how the situation should be handled, and is causing the British prime minister Gladstone, concern and annoyance.

Gorden was familiar with Sudan, having once actually been its governor-general. During his tenure he abolished torture in prisons and had some success in stopping the slave trade, but he became discouraged and returned to England where he discovered the meaning of Holy Communion. "Through the working of Christ in my body by His Body and Blood, the medicine worked" he wrote to his sister.

Gordon like his sister has never married and is apparently unmoved by sexual matters. He is a troubled soul and writes to his sister that "....Earth's joys grow very dim, its glories have faded". He seems to have gone to Sudan with the idea of martyrdom. He repeatedly calls London for help but the government wants him to evacuate Khartoum rather than defend it. Gladstone sends three British battalions to protect Suakin on the Red Sea coast not far from Khartoum from an attack by dervishes. When that is accomplished with the deaths of thousands of the locals, the battalions are sent back to Cairo, because Gladstone says that sending a relief army to Khartoum would amount to "a war of conquest against a people struggling to be free". Apparently he sees the Suakin campaign in a different light.

Finally parliament decides to send relief forces by river and land but eventually only a handful of soldiers arrives, and they find Khartoum has already fallen to the dervishes and Gordon has been killed. Gladstone as prime minister, is forced to stand down.

Apparently the Mahdi's religious fervor fails to assuage the stresses of life, and he takes to food for relief, becoming grossly obese and dying in 1885. In 1897 an army under Kitchener returns to Sudan to avenge Gordon.

The quotations are from Perry's "Arrogant Armies".

**1886. USA.** The Statue of Liberty, a gift from the French people, is dedicated, and the message on its plaque welcomes immigrants in unlimited numbers.

They had been pouring in anyway for the last forty years and more, but in 1929 an Act of Congress limited immigration to 150,000 that year.

**1889. France.** The Eiffel Tower appears on the Paris skyline rising three hundred meters above the ground. A "World Fair" to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Revolution is beginning, and Gustaf Eiffel won the competition for an entrance arch.

Eiffel's Company agreed to pay eighty percent of the cost of construction and in return the tower belongs to the Company. One of the Eiffel Construction Company's first jobs was to design the framework for the Statue of Liberty, and the company specializes in steel construction jobs all over the world.

So excellent was the engineering of the tower that not a single piece of the prefabricated sections had to be returned to the factory for remaking. The feet of the tower are mounted on hydraulic jacks to permit it to move in the wind and it is possible to get "seasick" while at the uppermost level. The Company's safety record on the job was also remarkable, and during the two years of construction no lives were lost on the job.

The public loves the tower and the arty types loathe it. Guy de Maupassant hates it so much he goes there for lunch every day because, he says, it's the only place in Paris he can't see it from. It makes so much money from visitors that admission fees pay for the construction in its first year. Eiffel becomes very wealthy but is later involved in a scandal concerning the Panama Canal, and although exonerated, loses interest in construction jobs and devotes his remaining years to scientific research.

When the Nazis marched into Paris they found the lifts were not working because some part that was made in another country was missing. As a result not many of the occupying forces reached the top of this symbol of France's pride. On the day the occupation ended the missing part reappeared and the lifts ran again.

**1894. Japan.** A Japanese cruiser captain named Togo sinks a Chinese troopship in a conflict involving Korea. Next year China, weakened by the European occupation, accepts defeat and gives Japan a huge indemnity, possession of Taiwan and a free hand in Korea.

**1895. Germany.** Wilhelm Rontgen discovers X-rays.

**Turkey.** Turkish troops massacre Armenian Christians.

In an early example of "ethnic cleansing" more than a million Armenians were killed in the following years up to 1915, and perhaps as many others died after deportation into the Syrian desert. Only a hundred thousand were left.

**1896. Austria**. A Viennese physician Sigmund Freud publishes papers and gives lectures in which he uses the term " Psycho-analysis". It refers to a technique he has developed for exploring the minds of patients suffering from hysteria or from anxiety neurosis. The technique requires the patient to say anything he or she thinks of, without regard for apparent irrelevance, unpleasantness or embarrassment. In this way "unconscious" emotions are slowly revealed, and the patient can then deal with them consciously instead of "repressing" them into "the unconscious". Freud says the symptoms that brought the patient to the analyst are the result of certain emotions that cannot be faced by the patient, finding an alternative outlet, and when these emotions are acknowledged the symptoms disappear. Unfortunately this does not always happen, perhaps because the emotions remain unfaceable. Freud continues to revise and elaborate his theories as time goes by.

There is much opposition to Freud's theories which assert the existence of infantile sexuality and unconscious motivation. The idea that people might be motivated by wishes they are unaware of is beyond the imagination or acceptance of many. At the end of 1899 he publishes a book "The Interpretation of Dreams" in which he advances the theory that unconscious wishes tend to emerge during sleep. Since these wishes are intolerable they would awaken the sleeper if not disguised to the point of being unrecognizable. A dream then is a disguised wish, and it allows the dreamer to go on sleeping.

Almost up until his death from oral cancer in 1939 – Freud typically smoked twenty cigars a day – he extended his ideas and applied them to the general questions of everyday life. His revisions did not improve the therapeutic effectiveness of psychoanalysis which remains low, but added to sociology and psychology. Best known contributions are his explanation of slips of the tongue and symbolism.

**1898. France.** Marie and Pierre Curie discover and name a new element "Radium" while searching for the source of a strong radioactivity in a uranium ore. Radium is the most radioactive substance known and ultimately kills Marie Curie. A hundred years later her notebooks remain too dangerous to handle.

**China.** The secret society "Righteous Harmony Fists" has a clear aim – to rid China of foreigners by killing them all. In view of the effect the foreigners are having on China's security this seems a very reasonable if extreme aim. The English language North China Daily News learning of the society's existence, has dubbed them the Boxers. They are peasants from the areas south and east of Beijing who have been led to believe they are invulnerable to foreigner's weapons. They are reputed to specialize in prolonged and hideous tortures, which if true, makes the nickname Boxers inappropriate and misleading. Their anger is directed particularly at missionaries and extends to their Christian converts – the "secondary devils".

The Dowager Empress connived at the Boxers' activities which got so out of hand that in May 1900 detachments of marines from ships anchored off-shore arrived in Beijing. They were from the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Japan and Russia. By early June they were joined by sailors from Germany and Austria, so that all the countries with ongoing activities in China were represented – if only to the total number of 426 men. Admiral Seymour, commander in chief of the (British) Royal Navy's China Station approached the Capital with another 2,000 sailors and marines but these would-be reinforcements were driven back by a combined force of Boxers and the Chinese army which joined them. The legation quarter in Beijing fortified itself with sandbags in the hope of holding out until help arrived. In August 20,000 men from seven nations led by British General Gaselee fought their way through the streets of the Capital to lift the siege of the legation quarter. Half of the relief force was Japanese, 4,000 were Russians and 3,000 British.

The Empress Dowager Ci Xi and her nephew the Emperor fled the city and the Boxers and the Chinese army suddenly disappeared. This was a disappointment for a large German force on its way to assist, because they expected to become actively involved in routing the Chinese. The Kaiser had indeed exhorted them to write their name in history in the same way as the Huns did "when they invaded Germany a thousand years before". Also arriving too late to relieve the legations was a force of volunteers from the British colonies in Australia.

The occupying armies in China did some police work in the Capital and roamed the country in search of Boxers, but mainly (as armies do) they looted, raped and murdered at will. An interesting dispatch to an Australian newspaper quoted by Nicholls in "Bluejackets and Boxers" read: "We are growing callous – that is part of the Eastern education. Until you can bring yourself to regard the Chinaman as something less than human, considerably less, you are at a disadvantage". It would be interesting to know what the Chinese newspapers of the day said about the Westerners. Also it would be strange if that foreign invasion of China did not influence the thinking of Chinese today.

**USA.** War is declared on Spain because of events in Cuba and in a short time (with the loss of less than 300 US soldiers in combat) Spain hands over to the USA the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam. Cuba becomes independent.

**1899. South Africa.** The Boer War is in progress and although initially victorious, the descendants of the original Dutch settlers, the Boers, are now losing. Guerrilla tactics are successful but the British are burning their farm houses and putting the Boer women and children into concentration camps. These are poorly prepared and thousands are dying. Germany is sympathetic with the Boers, and so are most of the powers.

**USA.** The population has risen from thirty one million in 1860 to seventy six million, partly due to the arrival of fourteen million immigrants. Over this period eleven new states have been admitted to the United States and the call of the West is still strong. The grassy plains from the Mississippi to the Rockies are being turned into a huge grain-producing region by the new settlers. Wyoming is the center of cattle raising and the land of the cowboy. Railroads now link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and there are 300,000 kilometers of track throughout the USA .

Suggested events to associate with the eighteen hundreds

1803 Jefferson purchases Louisiana from France

1859 Charles Darwin publishes "The Origin of Species"

1895 William Rontgen discovers X-rays

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

After retiring from a scientific and management career in industry, George Cole began formally setting down ideas that had been in his mind for many years. These are published on the Smashwords site. George J. Cole on Smashwords

Cole's first book, That's Funny: A Theory of Humor, was a result of research and pondering inspired by curiosity about why we find things funny and why we laugh. His second, Around the World for 900 Years: Watching History Happen, was inspired by what he saw as a need for an historical overview that meaningfully linked actions, places and times. Cole's third book, Fear Psychology, advances a theory of human behaviour based on the concept that a primal fear of 'not surviving' exists within all humans.
