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whencyclopedia · 8 days

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Ptolemaic Navy

Ptolemaic Egypt was a naval power that exerted influence throughout the Eastern Mediterranean from its foundation in 330 BCE until Cleopatra's defeat by Augustus at the Battle of Actium in 30 BCE. The Ptolemaic Kingdom produced some of the largest human-powered ships of all time, and the largest and most advanced warships of the period.

The Ptolemaic navy was also used to patrol trade routes on the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Nile as a way to deter piracy. Ptolemaic exploratory expeditions helped to improve Greek and Roman geographical knowledge of Arabia and the Indian subcontinent. Despite the overall decline of its military might in land conflicts, it remained a relevant naval force until the end of the dynasty.

Origins

Alexander the Great (r. 336-323 BCE) conquered Egypt in 332 BCE, and after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, it was ruled by his general Ptolemy I (r. 305-282 BCE). The rest of Alexander's empire was divided between his other generals in the Wars of the Diadochi. The Diadochi and their successors waged constant wars against each other for territory and resources, which spurred on the development of the Ptolemaic navy.

Ptolemy I's navy originally consisted of the forces left behind by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE. 30 triremes were left in Egypt by Alexander under the command of the admiral Polemon. After defeating the Macedonian general Thibron in Cyrene in 324 BCE, Ptolemy probably absorbed what remained of Thibron's fleet. He also made alliances with the rulers of Cyprus, which enabled him to build additional warships.

By 306 BCE, Ptolemy I was able to muster 210 warships and 200 troop transport ships. Ptolemy's brother Menelaus led this fleet against the forces of Demetrius I (c. 336 to c. 282 BCE) at Salamis of Cyprus. Demetrius, whose fleet contained larger ships carrying artillery, annihilated the Ptolemaic fleet. 40 warships and 8,000 Ptolemaic marines were taken captive by Demetrius. This catastrophic defeat meant that Ptolemy I was unable to maintain control of Cyprus and Coele-Syria, which were lost to Antigonus I. Within a decade, Ptolemy I had rebuilt a fleet of 150 ships which he used to recapture Cyprus and take control of Lydia, Tyre, Sidon, and Pamphylia.

He takes slices of Phoenicia and Arabia and Syria and Libya and the dark-skinned Ethiopians; all the Pamphylians and the warriors of Cilicia he commands, and the Lycians and the Carians, who delight in war, and the islands of the Cyclades, for his are the finest ships sailing the ocean. All the sea and the land and the crashing rivers are subject to Ptolemy.

(Theocritus, Idylls, 17.86-95)

Under Ptolemy II (r. 282-286 BCE) and Ptolemy III (r. 246-222 BCE), the Ptolemaic navy rapidly expanded with new and more advanced warships to become the dominant naval power in the Mediterranean. This navy enabled the Ptolemaic dynasty to capture and defend islands and coastal territories that stretched from Egypt to the Aegean, making the Ptolemaic Kingdom into a thalassocracy. Later Ptolemaic rulers would continue to prioritize the maintenance of a large fleet, but by the end of the dynasty, its global power had disintegrated.

#History #PtolemaicNavy #PtolemaicDynasty #Egypt

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silvestromedia · 10 months

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Saint of the day August 19

ST. MAGNUS, MARTYR IN LATIUM-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_of_Anagni#:~:text=Magnus%20fled%20to%20Rome%20to,near%20Fabrateria%20Vetus%2C%20in%20Latium.

St. Andrew the Tribune, The "Great Martyr," and the leader of converts in the Roman army, his men faced a battle with a Persian host. Calling upon Christ for aid, the Romans were victorious. Andrew and some of his troops became Christians as a result and were discharged from military service. they were arrested by the military governor and executed in the Taurus Mountains of Cilicia. .Aug. 19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Stratelates#:~:text=Andrew%20Stratelates%2C%20also%20known%20as,Orthodox%20Church%20on%2019%20August.

Bl. Peter Zuniga, Roman Catholic Priest and Martyr of Japan. A Spaniard from Seville, he grew up in Mexico, where his father was the sixth Viceroy of the Spanish colony. Upon his return to Spain, he joined the Augustinians, and, after ordination, he requested to be sent to Japan and the missions there. Going first to the Philippines in 1610, he was later assigned to Japan, arriving there in 1620. Two years later, he was arrested and, with Blesseds Louis Flores, Joachim, Firayama, and the captain and crew which had transported them, was put to death. The crew was beheaded while the others were burned alive. Feastday Aug. 19 https://www.augustinian.org/saints-1/september-28

Bl. Bartholomew Monfiore, Bl. James Denshi, Bl. Paul Sanchiki, Roman Catholics and martyrs of Japan. Japanese crew members of Blessed Joachim Firayama's ship. Arrested for his Christian faith, he was beheaded at Nagasaki. Feastday Aug. 19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/205_Martyrs_of_Japan

Bl. John Foyamon, Roman Catholic Martyr of Japan. A scribe on the ship carrying Blessed Peter Zufliga, he was beheaded at Nagasaki with Blesseds John Yano and John Nangata. Feastday Aug. 19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/205_Martyrs_of_Japan Bl. Thomas Koyanangi, Roman Catholic Japanese martyr. Arrested as a passenger on the ship of Blessed Joachim Firayama-Diz, he was beheaded at Nagasaki, Feastday Aug. 19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/205_Martyrs_of_Japan

Bl. Michael Diaz, A martyr of Japan. He was a Spanish merchant on board the Japanese ship carrying Blessed Joachim Firayama. Michael and others were arrested by Protestant Europeans who turned them over to the Japanese authorities. Everyone on the ship was martyred at Nagasaki. Aug. 19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/205_Martyrs_of_Japan

St. Mochta, 535 A.D. Bishop of Ireland. He was born in Britain but was brought to Ireland as a child. There he became a disciple of St. Patrick. During a visit to Rome, Mochta was made a bishop by Pope St. Leo I. He founded Louth Monastery with twelve companions and was probably consecrated by St. Patrick. He died at the age of ninety, the last known disciple of St. Patrick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mochta

St. Sebald, 770 A.D. Patron Saint of Nuremberg. Hermit, missionary, and a patron saint of Nuremberg. Most likely an Anglo-Saxon from England, he arrived on the Continent and became a hermit near Vicenza, Italy, and then participated in the missionary enterprise of the times, assisting in the work. of St. Willibald in the Reichswald. Many miracles were attributed to him, including turning icicles into firewood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebaldus

St. Credan, 780 A.D. A Benedictine abbot of Evesham, England, in the reign of King Offa of Mercia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credan

ST. JOHN EUDES, PRIEST, FOUNDER OF THE EUDISTS, https://www.catholicapostolatecenterfeastdays.org/feast-days-and-solemnities/st-john-eudes#:~:text=Jesus%20and%20Mary-,St.,and%20the%20Blessed%20Virgin%20Mary.

ST. SIXTUS III, POPE, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Sixtus_III

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sfc-paulchambers · 1 year

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3 FEBRUARY 1943 - FOUR CHAPLAINS DAY AND THE SINKING OF THE USAT DORCHESTER #WWII On 3 FEB 1943, the troop transport ship USAT Dorchester was sailing from Canada to a U.S. base in Greenland, carrying 902 passengers. Shortly after midnight, the vessel was struck by a U-Boat torpedo just 150 miles from its destination. The initial explosion killed and wounded scores of men, causing widespread pandemonium. Through the chaos, four Army Chaplains spread out among the Soldiers, calming the frightened, tending the wounded and guiding the disoriented toward safety. Lt. George Fox, a Methodist minister; Lt. Alexander Goode (PhD), a Reform rabbi; Lt. John Washington, a Roman Catholic priest; and Lt. Clark Poling, a Dutch Reformed minister, worked to manage the crisis, distributing life jackets and selflessly giving their own to others. As the ship went down, survivors in nearby rafts could see the chaplains, arms linked and braced against the slanting deck, as they offered prayers and sang hymns. Of the 902 men aboard the Dorchester, only 230 survived. The chaplains were posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, Purple Heart, and Four Chaplains Medal (a special decoration for extraordinary heroism designated by Congress to recognize the chaplains, as they did not qualify for the Medal of Honor). #Armyhistory #USArmy #TRADOC #WorldWar2 #WW2 #WW2History #UBoat #Chaplain #MilitaryHistory #ChaplainCorps Posted @withregram • @armyhistory https://www.instagram.com/p/CoM4R24uYeR/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#wwii #armyhistory #usarmy #tradoc #worldwar2 #ww2 #ww2history #uboat #chaplain #militaryhistory #chaplaincorps

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brookstonalmanac · 2 years

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Events 8.7

461 – Roman Emperor Majorian is beheaded near the river Iria in north-west Italy following his arrest and deposition by the magister militum Ricimer. 626 – The Avar and Slav armies leave the siege of Constantinople. 768 – Pope Stephen III is elected to office, and quickly seeks Frankish protection against the Lombard threat, since the Byzantine Empire is no longer able to help. 936 – Coronation of King Otto I of Germany. 1461 – The Ming dynasty Chinese military general Cao Qin stages a coup against the Tianshun Emperor. 1479 – Battle of Guinegate: French troops of King Louis XI were defeated by the Burgundians led by Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg. 1485 – Wars of the Roses: The army of the future King Henry VII of England lands at Mill Bay in Milford Haven, Wales to gather support for the Tudor cause before making its way to England and confronting the incumbent King, Richard III of England, at the Battle of Bosworth Field. It has been hypothesised that their arrival here introduced a hantavirus to the British Isles that would go on to cause the first confirmed outbreak of sweating sickness in England. 1679 – The brigantine Le Griffon, commissioned by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, is towed to the south-eastern end of the Niagara River, to become the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes of North America. 1714 – The Battle of Gangut: The first important victory of the Russian Navy. 1743 – The Treaty of Åbo ended the 1741–1743 Russo-Swedish War. 1782 – George Washington orders the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle.[13] It is later renamed to the more poetic Purple Heart. 1786 – The first federal Indian Reservation is created by the United States. 1789 – The United States Department of War is established. 1791 – American troops destroy the Miami town of Kenapacomaqua near the site of present-day Logansport, Indiana in the Northwest Indian War. 1794 – U.S. President George Washington invokes the Militia Acts of 1792 to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. 1819 – Simón Bolívar triumphs over Spain in the Battle of Boyacá. 1858 – The first Australian rules football match is played between Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College. 1890 – Anna Månsdotter, found guilty of the 1889 Yngsjö murder, became the last woman to be executed in Sweden. 1909 – Alice Huyler Ramsey and three friends become the first women to complete a transcontinental auto trip, taking 59 days to travel from New York, New York to San Francisco, California. 1927 – The Peace Bridge opens between Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo, New York. 1930 – The last confirmed lynching of black people in the Northern United States occurs in Marion, Indiana; two men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, are killed. 1933 – The Kingdom of Iraq slaughters over 3,000 Assyrians in the village of Simele. This date is recognized as Martyrs Day or National Day of Mourning by the Assyrian community in memory of the Simele massacre. 1942 – World War II: The Battle of Guadalcanal begins as the United States Marines initiate the first American offensive of the war with landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands. 1944 – IBM dedicates the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (known best as the Harvard Mark I). 1946 – The government of the Soviet Union presented a note to its Turkish counterparts which refuted the latter's sovereignty over the Turkish Straits, thus beginning the Turkish Straits crisis. 1947 – Thor Heyerdahl's balsa wood raft, the Kon-Tiki, smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day, 7,000 kilometres (4,300 mi) journey across the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to prove that pre-historic peoples could have traveled from South America. 1947 – The Bombay Municipal Corporation formally takes over the Bombay Electric Supply and Transport (BEST). 1959 – Explorer program: Explorer 6 launches from the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral, Florida. 1960 – Ivory Coast becomes independent from France. 1962 – Canadian-born American pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey is awarded the U.S. President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service for her refusal to authorize thalidomide. 1964 – Vietnam War: The U.S. Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson broad war powers to deal with North Vietnamese attacks on American forces. 1969 – Richard Nixon appoints Luis R. Bruce, a Mohawk-Oglala Sioux and co-founder of the National Congress of American Indians, as the new commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 1970 – California judge Harold Haley is taken hostage in his courtroom and killed during an effort to free George Jackson from police custody. 1974 – Philippe Petit performs a high wire act between the twin towers of the World Trade Center 1,368 feet (417 m) in the air. 1976 – Viking program: Viking 2 enters orbit around Mars. 1978 – U.S. President Jimmy Carter declares a federal emergency at Love Canal due to toxic waste that had been disposed of negligently. 1981 – The Washington Star ceases all operations after 128 years of publication. 1985 – Takao Doi, Mamoru Mohri and Chiaki Mukai are chosen to be Japan's first astronauts. 1987 – Cold War: Lynne Cox becomes the first person to swim from the United States to the Soviet Union, crossing the Bering Strait from Little Diomede Island in Alaska to Big Diomede in the Soviet Union. 1989 – U.S. Congressman Mickey Leland (D-TX) and 15 others die in a plane crash in Ethiopia. 1990 – First American soldiers arrive in Saudi Arabia as part of the Gulf War. 1993 – Ada Deer, a Menominee activist, is sworn in as the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 1995 – The Chilean government declares state of emergency in the southern half of the country in response to an event of intense, cold, wind, rain and snowfall known as the White Earthquake. 1997 – Space Shuttle Program: The Space Shuttle Discovery launches on STS-85 from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. 1997 – Fine Air Flight 101 crashes after takeoff from Miami International Airport, killing five people. 1998 – Bombings at United States embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya kill approximately 212 people. 1999 – The Chechnya-based Islamic International Brigade invades neighboring Dagestan. 2007 – At AT&T Park, Barry Bonds hits his 756th career home run to surpass Hank Aaron's 33-year-old record. 2008 – The start of the Russo-Georgian War over the territory of South Ossetia. 2020 – Air India Express Flight 1344 overshoots the runway at Calicut International Airport in the Malappuram district of Kerala, India, and crashes, killing 21 of the 190 people on board.

#Events

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fatehbaz · 2 years

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Entomology and empire in the 20th century. Imperial, colonial, fascist relationships with mosquitoes. “The history of the struggle against the female mosquito reads like the history of capitalism in the twentieth century: after imperial, colonial, and nationalistic periods of combatting mosquitoes, we are now in the NGO phase ...”

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Bees, mosquitoes, and termites were not only a part of historical and contemporary notions of space, but also instruments of political practice related to spaces. [...] No other animal accounts for as many human fatalities as this insect. [T]he often fatal fevers known as malaria were recognized as the greatest health hazard for Europeans in tropical areas, and considered a major obstacle to the further colonization [...]. [A]s the anthropologist Diane Nelson explains: The creation of transportation infrastructure such as canals and railroads, the deployment of armies, and the clearing of ground to plant tropical products all had to confront (in addition to uprisings, escape, work slowdowns, and other human-level obstacles) an invisible microbial resistance. The French, British, and US raced to find a cure for malaria in order to keep whites alive in their new milieux. [...]

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the discovery of mosquitoes as malaria and yellow fever carriers reawakened long-cherished plans such as the construction of the Panama Canal (1904–1914), which was to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Finally, a majority of the workers employed no longer constantly got sick or died. In 1916, the director of the US Bureau of Entomology and longtime general secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science rejoiced at this success as “an object lesson for the sanitarians of the world” -- it demonstrated “that it is possible for the white race to live healthfully in the tropics.”

As Timothy Mitchell writes: “In 1915, the year after the canal’s completion, the newly established Rockefeller Foundation took over the mosquito campaign from the U.S. Army and launched a worldwide program to study and control the two mosquito-borne diseases. Thus the global movements of the mosquito gave shape to a transnational corporate philanthropy.” [...] The urgency and severity of measures to combat dangerous diseases always had the collateral benefit of social pacification. In 1918, George Vincent, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, candidly declared: “For purposes of placating primitive and suspicious peoples, medicine has some decided advantages over machine guns.”

The construction of the Panama Canal, as one of the most important “transportation utopias” of the twentieth century, not only allowed commodities to be shipped more efficiently and quickly, but it also advanced the military expansion of the United States in the Caribbean. The US occupation of the Canal Zone had already brought racist Jim Crow laws, which had followed the abolition of slavery in the US, to the spatial structure around the canal. [...] Analogous to the stagnant waters where mosquito larvae develop, and to the mosquitoes themselves, the female body was now declared to be a reservoir of pathogens. Again and again, this body allegedly first infected US troops, only to spread to the white wives back home: “The spatial imaginary established through control of malarial mosquitoes deeply influenced cartographies” of sexually transmitted diseases like gonorrhea and syphilis, as well as the attempt to control them. [...]

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At the same time women in Panama were becoming objects of police surveillance by way of combatting malaria, Italian fascism was trying to defeat a nature imagined as female by declaring it a priority to civilize the marshes of the Pontine Plain. The ancient Roman rhetorician Cicero had already described this landscape southeast of Rome as “neither pleasant nor healthy.” This had hardly changed in two thousand years.

The swampland was still the habitat of the anopheles mosquito and the dominion of the “Goddess of Fever.” [...]

“The mosquito was taken by the fascists to exemplify the evil character of pre-fascist nature in the marshes.” The efforts to create “an idyllic rural area consonant with fascist ideals of productivity and activity within the state’s interests” included extensive electrification of the region, constructing thousands of kilometres of roads and canals and “large pumping and drainage plants called impianti idrovori (drainage pumping stations), in Italian literally ‘water-eating’ machinery plants,” founding an anti-malaria institute, having war veterans plant the region with water-absorbing eucalyptus trees (these plants performed their job too well, which is why they were later torn out again at great expense -- as a consequence, there are about four tornadoes annually in this area), stocking fish to eat mosquito larvae, establishing an anti-mosquito militia, and putting up children’s camps whose buildings were wrapped in ten layers of wire to protect them from mosquitoes. “The fascist emphasis on the technical and technological aspects of the land reclamation programme were also characteristic of a positivistic view of science and geographical knowledge, aimed at controlling, rationalizing and ultimately creating an imperium over a previously unknown or ‘untamed’ area.” [...]

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At the same time in the Pacific, in spite of all countermeasures, malaria was inflicting more fatalities on the Allies than the Japanese forces were. But the discovery of a potent molecule brought new momentum to the anti-malaria campaigns: “From the perspective of medical entomology, the most exciting outcome of World War II was the discovery of DDT.” [...] Once again, the Rockefeller Foundation became active, and together with the World Health Organization, the US Agency for International Development, and the UN, it launched the Global Malaria Eradication Program, which coordinated the worldwide deployment of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s, with the goal of eliminating malaria. This deadly substance became part of a postwar order that organized war and agriculture as affiliated fields: “Tractors and tanks developed side by side. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers were manufactured cheaply in ammonia plants built mainly to produce nitrate explosives. Modern organic insecticides emerged from gas weapon research between the wars, while aerial spraying owes much to air combat methods and technology initially developed during World War I.”

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Fahim Amir. “Cloudy Swords.” e-flux. February 2021. [Italicized first line/heading added by me.]

#insects against empire #see also Rohan Deb Roys work on Indian termites resisting British empire #and literary conflation of Indigenous and Black women with tropical plants #ecology #abolition #landscape #caribbean #bugs #colonial #imperial #haunted #modernity #health #medical

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with-my-murder-flute · 4 years

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Initial sketch notes of my historical research on Islamic experiences of the Siege of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, posted August 6, 2020. This is the long version of “Why might Yusuf al-Kaysani, who is from the Maghreb, have been fighting at Jerusalem in 1099?”

Trigger Warning: Graphic violence, slavery, and genocide

Notes taken from reading Paul M. Cobb’s The Race for Paradise: An Isamic History of the Crusades and supplemented by Dr. Google. I’m reading Cobb’s book partly because it’s on audiobook (though it is a fricking Audible Exclusive) and partly because it’s written for Western non-Muslim audiences, which helps get me up to speed.

The Old Guard Through History video says Joe and Nicky met during the Siege of Jerusalem in 1099, so I’ve focused most of my research on that.

Historians generally agree that in the 11th century the Islamic* world did not have a “Muslims vs Christians” worldview like the one Christians were beginning to develop. Their experience led them to expect Christians to be allies as often as enemies. Around the 1060s Christians began a new paradigm of religious war against Muslims, which Muslims didn’t really realize at the time--they responded to times when Christians would choose religious affiliation over clear strategic gain as shocking and bizarre, a departure from the status quo

(*Islamic: Society predominantly defined by Muslim rule and culture, but containing people of many different religions)

The Islamic response to the First Crusade was decentralized and diverse. There were a lot of different groups in the Levant*, many of whom had deep divisions, rivalries, and feuds. They mostly saw the Crusaders as a new factor that might affect their existing rivalries with other Islamic states, and were used to being able to broker deals or treaties with Christian groups to turn local warfare to their advantage.

(*Levant: A term used to describe countries in the Eastern Mediterranean, especially those with traditional religious significance to the Abrahamic religions - modern-day Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and parts of Egypt and Turkey. Comes from the French word for “rising”, in the sense of “where the sun rises”)

Additional term I’m going to be using a lot: “Frank”. It’s the Islamic term for, basically, “Western European” (of both the pagan and Roman Catholic varieties). It’s easier than saying “the Roman Catholics” or “The Crusaders” (which is putting a later cultural construct on people who didn’t call themselves that)

The biggest division of Islamic society in this area is, roughly, the Seljuq Turks and the Fatimid Caliphate.

In the year 1000, the Fatimids were riding high: They ruled Egypt and North Africa stretching across to the Atlantic, much of the Levant, the island of Sicily, and bits of the Arabian Peninsula around the Red Sea.

Then in the mid-11th century the Seljuqs came BLASTING OUTTA NOWHERE like holy shit calm your jets and conquered a lot of Fatimid and Byzantine territory (we’re talking the yellow parts of the map, they’ll destroy the Byzantines entirely later)

In addition to losing land to the Seljuqs, the Fatimids also lost Sicily to the Normans (who don’t even GO THERE but anyway), and North Africa through?? Independence movements?? Sheer carelessness??? I’m not quite certain.

The Seljuqs were Sunni, the Fatimids were Shi’ite, I... am not gonna try to explain that whole thing. Here’s a video.

(Small note for Yusuf character reasons: A big motivation behind the move of Ifriqiya [modern Tunisia and parts of Algieria and Libya] out of Fatimid control was that most of their populations were also Sunni)

So the Franks left Constantinople and travelled through what is now Turkey but was at the time the Byzantine Empire, and then moved into Seljuq lands. Most of the fighting in the First Crusade was against Seljuqs--mostly against tribes who fought for themselves, I think? Although in Damascus (which was a huge city the Franks just breezed by in favour of historically significant ghost towns) there was a general jihad preached like “Hey somebody should do something about all these Europeans”, so some of the people fighting were like... random people from Damascus.

While the Seljuqs were distracted, the Fatimids thought they could win some land back from THOSE UPSTARTS, so they snuck in and grabbed Jerusalem. As Peter Konieczny reports, there are scholars who think the Fatimids thought, partly because they had a lot of experience ruling Egypt’s Coptic Christian population, that they could reach a mutually satisfactory alliance with the Franks, especially since it seemed like most of the Franks didn’t intend to settle in the area, but return to Europe once they ensured pilgrim access to Jerusalem, which had mostly been hindered by banditry in Seljuq-controlled areas.

When I read stuff just generally about the Fatimid army, it’s described as being composed of two groups:

Berber tribesmen (Kutama and Sanhaja) (I’m struggling to find more info about them)

Mamluks, who are... a cross between slaves and mercenaries? Basically, they were captives from non-Muslim territory (in the Fatimids’ case, mostly Circassia in central Asia) who were brought to Muslim lands and trained as soldiers, but once active as soldiers, were paid and hired by different groups, able to achieve freedom, often gained important government posts, and occasionally toppled the government they served and ruled the roost.

This next bit is based on fairly standard histories of the Siege of Jerusalem that rely a lot on Western sources, like this article by Michael D. Hull and this article by Michael Cartwright. Which... have to be taken with a grain of salt, because medieval military histories don’t tend to line up super well with archaeology or plain logistics. Generally, it isn’t wise to take medieval European sources at their word when they say “the army had 10,000 people” or “they killed every last person”. They’re often written after the fact and with clear biases, and, when it comes to the Crusades, with an imperfect understanding of the culture they’re describing. I’d like to have better sources, but this is where I’m starting from, especially since I have limited access to academic sources during the summer.

So, the standard history says that Jerusalem was taken in 1098 by Emir al-Afdal Shahinshah, but by 1099, governor Iftikhar al-Daula was in command of the defenses. and that he had a “garrison of Arab cavalry and Sudanese archers.” Cartwright reports it as “perhaps several thousand infantry and an elite cavalry corps of 400 Egyptians.” I currently have no way of knowing which of these troops were Mamluks and which weren’t.

According to Hull, when the Fatimids in Jerusalem realized they would have to face a siege, they expelled all Christians of any denomination from the city, as well as all Jews “except for those of a sect for whom it was mandatory to reside in the Holy City”. Cartwright reports it as “...all Christians were kicked out if the city. In contrast, the Jewish population were allowed to stay”. Cartwright reports that Jerusalem’s population, 70,000 at the beginning of the year, was lowered to 30,000 by the expulsions (though some people were also coming into the city to take refuge from the oncoming Frankish army). Additional preparations included poisoning wells outside of Jerusalem to deny the Frankish army water, and emptying the land around the city of livestock and people.

The Fatimids were also expecting the arrival of an army marching north from Egypt to help them out relatively soon, which explains why their strategy was mostly “hunker down and wait” with very limited attacks outside the city.

The Franks came southward down the coast to Jaffa, where they took the nearest port to Jerusalem, and then approached the city.

June 7, 1099: The Frankish army shows up at Jerusalem with about 15,000 people total and less than 1,500 armed knights. They split into two camps, one attacking from the south, one from the north. They were in rough shape and didn’t have any siege weapons, so the Fatimid defenders were able to sit up on the walls, taunt them, and shoot arrows. They enlivened the tedium by sending cavalry units outside the walls to harass Franks who were scavenging for food and water.

June 13, 1099: Some Franks on the north side of the city managed to scrabble together siege ladders and try to climb up and assault the walls; they were repelled pretty easily by the defenders.

June 17, 1099: English and Genoese ships land at Jaffa, carrying siege equipment and fresh supplies. Hull reports that the Fatimids dispatched troops, 400 Arabs and 200 Turks, to attack the supply chain between Jaffa and Jerusalem; Hull reports that the Franks only lost 5 of the force of maybe 150-200 knights, and “all of the archers” (about 50?)

It takes about three weeks to transport the supplies to Jerusalem and for the siege towers to be built; the Genoese played an especially large role in building the siege equipment, and their chief engineer is named as William Embriaco.

On July 10 the siege engines were finished and wheeled to the walls. That night everyone inside the city and out sat over campfires, showing each other pictures of their families and trying to humanize themselves for the audience to make their impending deaths more impactful

(I kid)

(mostly)

June 13-15: Almost continuous fighting between the Franks, who are trying to move their siege engines close enough to make it onto the walls of Jerusalem, and the Fatimid defenders, who were trying to fight them off and burn their towers down.

June 15: The Franks breach the walls and begin pouring inside, killing and looting its inhabitants. There is well-documented destruction of Muslim and Jewish holy places, where Muslims and Jews fled for refuge and were killed. This part is. Sickening. Tens of thousands of people dead; the streets running with blood.

The Fatimid governor and various others (possibly the remainders of the army? Possibly important citizens? Some Jews appear to be in this group?) took refuge in the Tower of David, and were able to negotiate to leave Jerusalem safely. The Fatimid soldiers who left the city that way joined the advancing Fatimid army at Ascalon, southwest of Jerusalem.

It’s unclear who the survivors were--the sources mention people left aside being made into slaves, being allowed to leave the city, or being ransomed by rich relatives outside the city. The fact that we have Jewish and Muslim accounts of what happened during this time means there were survivors

But let’s face it: The survivors were the minority. The majority of people, thousands of them, were slaughtered by the Franks as they took over the city.

Epilogue: The Fatimids tried to take Jerusalem back a month later, and failed. Jerusalem was in Crusader hands.

It’s taken me three days to write this up and I’m ending it feeling really blah and drained by the enormity of this shit. I...

The Race for Paradise has this bit that talks about two Western ways of talking about the Crusades:

The Traditional paradigm, where this was a great moment for Christianity, whew we kicked those guys’ BUTTS!

The Lachrymose (Latin for “full of tears”) paradigm, coming to popularity since the Enlightenment, where this was horrific mass slaughter caused by religious zealotry and it was bad and everything was bad

But the thing is, we can’t actually stop there. Or, that is: It’s not actually useful for our only narratives about the Crusades to be either “Christians kill everyone and it’s awesome” or “Christians kill everyone and it’s terrible”. It’s not true; it feeds into the overall false narrative of “European Christians only interacted with [Muslims/Middle Easterners/People of Colour] very rarely, and only when there was an atrocity happening.” It means we fail to acknowledge all the cross-cultural contacts that happened without an atrocity, and fail to realize that a lot of these atrocities came out of the context of incredibly warlike countries whose economies depended on warfare and conquest.

Another element is... during the 11th century, when all of this happened, the Normans also invaded England. Their conquest was absolutely brutal. England was ethnically and linguistically divided for centuries between a French-speaking colonial upper class, and the English-speaking peasantry. But over the centuries, these two groups came to live together peacefully and build a distinctly new society. Most peoples’ narratives of medieval England are not “a land of massacre, genocide, and ethnic strife”, even though those things definitely happened. We just have much stronger associations with medieval English art, literature, culture, fashion, and architecture than its slaughters.

So basically: The challenge for us in the 21st century is to develop a richer understanding of the past. We know a hell of a lot about battles and armies; we know way less about merchants and farmers, and about the long decades between battles and armies. Military history tells us about waging war, but if we can look past that, we can find out about waging peace.

Now I’m going to go collapse into my bed, and in a day or five I’ll write up a TL;DR version about what I think the likeliest backstories for Joe are (Briefly: probably a Fatimid cavalry soldier or an ordinary person who thought it was safe to be in Jerusalem at the time, and had to defend himself and his servants etc when the city fell)

#medievalism #my stuff #the old guard #nicky/joe #yusuf al-kaysani

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germanicseidr · 4 years

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Germanic Sea Raiders

Yes this post is about sea raiders, no this post isn't about vikings. The Germanic coastal tribes are in fact the earliest recorded sea raiders around the North Sea. Several accounts written by Romans, describe how Germanic warriors were a plague along the coasts of North Western europe, especially the coasts of Britannia and Gaul. The main target of these sea raiders? coastal Roman settlements.

Here is a small account described by Tacitus, the following event took place in 83AD in modern day Scotland:

"The same summer a Usipian cohort, which had been levied in Germania and transported into Britain, ventured on a great and memorable exploit. Having killed a centurion and some soldiers, who, to impart military discipline, had been incorporated with their ranks and were employed at once to instruct and command them, they embarked on board three swift galleys with pilots pressed into their service.

Under the direction of one of them ,for two of the three they suspected and consequently put to death, they sailed past the coast in the strangest way before any rumour about them was in circulation. After a while, dispersing in search of water and provisions, they encountered many of the Britons, who sought to defend their property. Often victorious though now and then beaten, they were at last reduced to such an extremity of want as to be compelled to eat, at first, the feeblest of their number, and then victims selected by lot.

Having sailed round Britain and lost their vessels from not knowing how to manage them, they were looked upon as pirates and were intercepted, first by the Suebi and then by the Frisii. Some who were sold as slaves in the way of trade, and were brought through the process of barter as far as our side of the Rhine, gained notoriety by the disclosure of this extraordinary adventure." - Tacitus, Agricola

Here it seems that a group of disgruntled Germanic auxiliary troops hijacked three galleys and went on a small tour of plunder before stranding on the coasts of the Frisii, modern day the Netherlands. But this is not the only account of piracy conducted by the Germanic people. One Germanic tribe in particular was quite infamous for raiding coastal settlements.

The Chauci tribe, who just like the Frisii lived on small terps right along the coast, mastered the concept of piracy. They were the neighbours of the Frisii, located to the east of them in modern day North-Western Germany. Just like the Frisii, it was for the Chauci absolutely essential that they knew how to sail/row, their landscape was one of water with virtually no trees or suitable ground for crops. Also unlike the Frisii, Batavi and Cananefates, their location was quite isolated, beyond the reach of the Romans.

The Chauci truly terrorised the coasts of Western Europe. Archeological research leads to the theory that raiding was pretty much essential for the development of the Chauci tribe and that they actually organized these raids quite carefully. The first wave of Chauci sea raids occured during the first century AD. Especially between 41-47AD, the Chauci plagued the coasts of Gallia Belgica, leading to much Roman frustration.

The second Chauci wave of raids is even more interesting. This time the Chauci raiders were led by a Cananefates man called Ganascus, the Cananefates were a Germanic tribe located in modern day Zuid-Holland, the Netherlands. Ganascus served as an auxiliary soldier in the Roman army but he deserted. This is the reason why the second wave was so succesful for the Chauci. Ganascus, as ex-Roman soldier, held a lot of knowledge about the structure of the Roman army, their defences, interesting targets and their strength.

The Chauci, under Ganascus, even managed to set a Roman fort on fire, Praetorium Agrippinae, which was located in modern day Valkenburg, the Netherlands. Their luck didn't last and eventually Ganascus was captured and executed.

Besides the Chauci, Usipeti and Cananefates, there was another tribe who took their ships to the sea and rivers to terrorize Roman forts/settlements along the borders of Germania, the Batavi. In 69AD the Batavi people revolted against the Romans, together with the support of neighbouring tribes like the Cananefates and the Frisii, the Batavi raided forts along the river Rhine and managed to capture an entire Roman fleet. The Batavi were even daring enough to engage in an open sea battle with the Romans near the mouth of the river Rhine.

After the Batavi revolt, a short time of relative peace returned to the rivers and coasts of Western Europe but the Chauci raids started to intensify again in 170AD. This time the Chauci raids were larger and more violent than ever. The Roman governor of Gallia Belgica was even forced to recruit more auxiliary troops in order to deal with these raiding Chauci pirates. The Chauci continued to raid the coasts for a few decades, their trail of destruction is still visible for archeologists until this very day.

Two villas in Armorica, modern day Bretagne, were destroyed. Several hidden coin treasures were found as well in Bretagne which shows that the Romans feared these Chauci raiders and tried to hide their valuables underneath the ground. Also modern day England wasn't spared. Several Roman settlements in modern day Essex were destroyed by the Chauci. The Romans desperately tried to defend themselves against these agressive sea raiders by building even more forts and by intensifying their patrols on the sea.

A small geographical change in the coastline of the North sea, from modern day Denmark to Flanders around 230AD, caused the sealevel to rise between 0,9-2,4 meters. This was of course a disaster for the coastal people who by then were part of the Saxon and/or Frankish confederation. Also the Romans were concerned about the rising waters and they began to pull back from the Rhine until around the location of the modern day city of Nijmegen. Together with the political struggles inside the Roman empire, this left the borders severely weakened and the Frankish saw their chance.

Yes even the Franks were known to have conducted sea raids and some of these Frankish sea raids didn't even occur in Western Europe. Around the year 260AD and the year 278AD, the Franks undertook two major sea raids along the coasts of modern day Spain and Morocco. They raided and terrorized settlements for about a decade before they were defeated by the Romans.

Ironically enough, a few captured Frankish pirates were send to the black sea to defeat raiding Goths. You can of course expect this to happen but the Franks stole a Roman galley and turned to piracy again. This was an incredibly dumb idea by the Roman emperor who gave this order, emperor Probus. Now the Franks were raiding settlements along the coasts of Greece, Libia, Sicilia and even Tunesia, until the Romans finally managed to beat them.

The Franks also raided the coasts of modern day England like the Saxons did. Archeological research shows that the Romans suddenly intensified the construction of forts between 250-280AD in Britannia. Eutropius, a Roman historian, described how the Saxons raided along the waters of Gallia Belgica, Armorica and Britannia. These raids eventually resulted in the invasion of Britannia by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians.

The last Germanic folk, who sometimes made themselves guilty of piracy, were the Frisians. The Frisians flourished after the fall of the Roman empire. They were incredible traders and they were responsible for the creation of a huge trade netwerk and the growth of several trade settlements, which grew into modern day cities like: Dorestad, Medemblik, Ipswich, Norwich, Schleswig, Quentovic, Southampton and London.

Just like the earlier Chauci and Frisii, the Frisians lived, and still live, on terps. They were and still are surrounded by water so their ships were absolutely essential for their survival. They weren't agressive raiders like the Chauci but decided to focus more on trade instead. This rich trade network turned Frisia into a powerful kingdom and trade continued to grow even after their forceful conversion to Christianity. Unfortunately this all changed when the most famous Germanic people started to raid, the so called vikings.

Here are a few pictures of: A ship type (Roman galley) that could have been used by the Chauci, Romans intercepting Saxon raiders by an unknown artist, Early Frisian trade ship (dry kogge), art made by Arne Zuidhoek, Reconstructed Roman galley on a river,

#Germanic #Sea Raiders #Piracy #Chauci #Frisii #Cananefates #Frisians

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nasreenroja · 4 years

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1453 – Mehmed II begins his siege of Constantinople. (Turkey is celebrating 567th Victory Day Today.)

Mehmed II or Mohammed II (30 March 1432 – 3 May 1481), best known as Mehmed the Conqueror, was an Ottoman sultan who ruled first for a short time from August 1444 to September 1446, and later from February 1451 to May 1481. At the age of 21, he conquered Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) and brought an end to the Eastern Roman Empire. Mehmed continued his conquests in Anatolia with its reunification and in Southeast Europe as far west as Bosnia. Mehmed is considered a hero in modern-day Turkey and parts of the wider Muslim world. Among other things, Istanbul’s Fatih district, Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge and Fatih Mosque are named after him.

When Mehmed II ascended the throne again in 1451 he devoted himself to strengthening the Ottoman Navy, and made preparations for the taking of Constantinople. In the narrow Bosporus Straits, the fortress Anadoluhisarı had been built by his great-grandfather Bayezid I on the Asian side; Mehmed erected an even stronger fortress called Rumelihisarı on the European side, and thus gained complete control of the strait. Having completed his fortresses, Mehmed proceeded to levy a toll on ships passing within reach of their cannon. A Venetian vessel ignoring signals to stop was sunk with a single shot and all the surviving sailors beheaded, except for the captain, who was impaled and mounted as a human scarecrow as a warning to further sailors on the strait.

Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, the companion and standard bearer of Muhammad, had died during the first Siege of Constantinople (674–78). As Mehmed II’s army approached Constantinople, Mehmed’s sheikh Akşemseddin discovered the tomb of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari. After the conquest, Mehmed built Eyüp Sultan Mosque at the site, to emphasize the importance of the conquest to the Islamic world and highlight his role as ghazi.

In 1453 Mehmed commenced the siege of Constantinople with an army between 80,000 to 200,000 troops and a navy of 320 vessels, the bulk of them transports and storeships. The city was surrounded by sea and land; the fleet at the entrance of the Bosphorus stretched from shore to shore in the form of a crescent, to intercept or repel any assistance for Constantinople from the sea. In early April, the Siege of Constantinople began. At first, the city’s walls held off the Turks, even though Mehmed’s army used the new Orban’s bombard, a giant cannon similar to the Dardanelles Gun. The harbor of the Golden Horn was blocked by a boom chain and defended by twenty-eight warships.

On 22 April, Mehmed transported his lighter warships overland, around the Genoese colony of Galata, and into the Golden Horn’s northern shore; eighty galleys were transported from the Bosphorus after paving a route, little over one mile, with wood. Thus the Byzantines stretched their troops over a longer portion of the walls. About a month later, Constantinople fell, on 29 May, following a fifty-seven day siege. After this conquest, Mehmed moved the Ottoman capital from Adrianople to Constantinople. Turkey is celebrating 567th Victory Day Today. On May 29, 1453 Sultan Muhammad Fateh the conqueror conquered Istunbul. It was dream of Muslims as Holy Prophet given many good news about Istunbul Today Al-Fatiha will be recited in Hagia Sophia. #islam #muslim #turkey #istanbul #alfatihah #dream #sultanmuhammadalfatih #happiness #pakistan @cengizcoskunnn @cavitcetinguner

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ltwilliammowett · 3 years

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The remains of a Roman ship at the edge of a quarry in eastern Serbia (c) Institute of Archaeology

It was only in the spring of last year that the Roman ship found in Serbia was recovered. The large ship of the 3rd century AD, originally measured 19 metres in length and a maximum of 2.70 metres in width. Today, only 9.50 metres remain in one piece. However, since almost all of the dredged timbers could be collected, archaeologists will be able to reconstruct the ship as a whole in the future. It had a flat bottom, six pairs of oars and fittings for a triangular sail. Right next to it were two dugout canoes, which is due to the long settlement period.

In front of the site, near the town of Kostolac, about 70 km east of Belgrade, the Roman town of Viminacium extends over an area of about 450 hectares. It was built on top of an older city. Vimunacium dates back to the 1st century AD and was the capital of the Roman province of Moesia Superior. The ship belonged to a river fleet stationed there which, in addition to the large military camp, served to defend this region against barbarian invasions.

The city has been known since 1882 and excavations have been going on there ever since. This has led to numerous finds. Among them are golden tiles, jade sculptures, mosaics and frescoes, 14,000 graves and the remains of three mammoths. The ship will soon be exhibited together with these finds in the local archaeological park.

#naval history #roman ship #river fleet #troop transport #patrol ship #3 century ad #my thanks go to my colleague who kept me on track #ancient seafaring #archeology

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always-hope-laurel-blog · 2 years

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Is Patriotism Lost?

Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” ‭‭John‬ ‭15:13‬ ‭NIV‬‬

This Memorial Day remember ALL who gave their lives for Our FREEDOM!

Men and Women died Believing Freedom should be fought for no matter the cost. Has patriotism been LOST?

There is #AlwaysHope #NeverGiveUp #ActivistGranny #StandFastAndPrayForTheUSA #AmericanFreedomsLost

Four Men laid Down Their Life for their Friends!!

“Shortly before 1 A.M. on February 2, 1943, the American transport ship Dorchester was steaming through the icy North Atlantic from Newfoundland toward an American base in Greenland, carrying 902 servicemen, merchant seamen, and civilian workers, when a German torpedo struck the starboard side, amid ship, far below the waterline.

The blast killed scores of men, and many more were seriously wounded. Others, stunned by the explosion, groped in the darkness.

Through the pandemonium, according to eyewitnesses, four Army chaplains brought hope in despair and light in the darkness to the men who struggled to find their way out.

Those army chaplains were Lt. George L. Fox, Methodist; Lt. Alexander D. Goode, Jewish; Lt. John P. Washington, Roman Catholic; and Lt. Clark V. Poling, Dutch Reformed. Above the din, the four chaplains could be heard urging the frightened to be brave, praying for the dying, and guiding the disoriented toward the lifeboats.

Men jumped from the ship into lifeboats, overcrowding them to the point of capsizing. Other rafts, tossed into the Atlantic, drifted away before soldiers could get in them. As most of the men reached topside, the chaplains opened a storage locker and began distributing life jackets. When there were no more lifejackets available, the chaplains astonished onlookers, taking off theirs and giving them to four frightened young men.

“It was the finest thing I have seen or hope to see this side of heaven,” said John Ladd, one of the survivors.

Then in the darkness, the four chaplains linked arms, grasped the railing of the ship together as it began to slip into the ocean, and began singing and shouting biblical encouragement in English, Hebrew, and Latin to the men in the sea. William Bednar, floating among his dead comrades, later said, “Their voices were the only thing that kept me going.”

Of the men aboard the Dorchester, 672 died, including the chaplains. Their sacrificial action constitutes one of the purest spiritual and ethical acts a person can make.

In their devotion to their troops, these men of God captured the best of what a military chaplain strives to be. Their heroic conduct set a vision of greatness that stunned America as did the magnitude of the tragedy.”

Taken from The American Patriot’s Bible

“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” ‭‭John‬ ‭15:13‬ ‭NIV‬‬

#memorial day #needprayer alwayshope #hope miracles #sharinghopeandhealthyliving#hopeforthehurting2017.wordpress.com #alwayshope #alwayshope joycomesafterthemourning friendinjesus #patriotism #younglivingessentialoilhope #StandFastAndPrayForTheUSA #RememberSoldiers

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silvestromedia · 2 years

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Saint of the day August 19

St. Credan, 780 A.D. A Benedictine abbot of Evesham, England, in the reign of King Offa of Mercia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credan

ST. SIXTUS III, POPE, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Sixtus_III

ST. MAGNUS, MARTYR IN LATIUM-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_of_Anagni#:~:text=Magnus%20fled%20to%20Rome%20to,near%20Fabrateria%20Vetus%2C%20in%20Latium.

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gomfamli · 3 years

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Battle of Culloden = Highland Clearances

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A Jacobite was a supporter of the exiled Stuart king James II and his descendants. The political importance of the Jacobite movement extended from 1688 until at least the 1750s.

Several risings in support of the exiled Stuarts occurred, most notably in the years 1715 and 1719. Jacobites craved the reinstatement of the Stuart male line. They championed the claim of the exiled James Francis Edward Stuart, son of the deposed James II and VII, the man after whom the movement was named.

The later Stuarts were not especially well loved, but the union of Scotland and England in 1707 was repulsive. Anti-unionism – and Scottish independence – was a strong component of support for Jacobitism in Scotland in the early 18th century.

The Jacobites were around 6,000 strong whereas the British army numbered around 9,000. Of the 6,000 Jacobites, 1,000 are thought to have died, although the exact number is unknown. Many of those who died were clansmen; some tried to escape but were hunted through the countryside and slaughtered. Some prisoners were taken to London where around 80 were executed, including the last man to be beheaded in Britain, Lord Lovat, Clan Chief of Fraser. He was beheaded at the Tower of London in 1747 for high treason for his part in supporting the Jacobite rebellion.

The defeat of the Jacobite army at Culloden on 16 April 1746, the last battle fought on the British mainland, led to the rolling out of a new British government policy: the attempted extinction of core Stuart support in the Highlands via the systematic dismantling of the ancient social and military culture of the Highland clans, regardless of whether they had joined the rebellion.

The wearing of Highland garb, particularly tartan plaid, was banned, and the semi-feudal bond of military service, coupled with the power of the chiefs over their clans, was removed.

Charles, meanwhile, had left the field, believing his swift return to France would hurry the long-promised French battalions he needed to resurrect the campaign. Others, however, believed he had abandoned his troops to their terrible fate and even abandoned the Stuart cause in order to save his own skin. In the event, Charles spent five months as a fugitive in the western Highlands and islands with Cumberland’s men in relentless pursuit. He eventually escaped to France. He died in Rome in 1788 by all accounts a drink-befuddled and bitter man.

On Charles’s death in 1788, his brother, Henry Benedict, became the Jacobite Henry IX of England and I of Scotland. But, as a Roman Catholic cardinal, it was with him that the direct, legitimate line ended on his death in 1807.

The Highland Clearances remain a controversial period in Scotland’s history and are still talked of with great bitterness, particularly by those families who were dispossessed of their land and even, to a large extent, of their culture, over the period of around 100 years between the mid 18th to 19th centuries. It is still considered a stain on the history of the Scottish people and is also a main contributing factor for the relatively enormous world-wide Scottish diaspora.

From 1725 onwards, garrisons manned by English soldiers or ‘redcoats’ sprung up all over the Scottish Highlands, notably at Fort William and Inverness. These were to suppress Scottish opposition to the King and to remind the highland clans that they were subject to English rule.

In order to better maintain control of the North and to prevent the clan chiefs from superseding his power with their people, James kept the chiefs away from their clans for extended periods, requiring them to do duties that kept them away from their people. This was to ensure that the peoples’ allegiance remained to their King and not to their clan Chief.

In 1707 Scotland lost the right to self-rule, so what followed was an organized and intentional removal of the population from the area. In 1747, another Act was passed, the ‘Heritable Jurisdictions Act’, which stated that anyone who did not submit to English rule automatically forfeited their land: bend the knee or surrender your birth right.

Some highlander clans and families had lived in the same cottages for 500 years and then, just like that, they were gone. People were literally turned out of their cottages into the surrounding countryside. Many were relocated to the coast where they would subsist farm almost cultivatable land, supplementing themselves by smelting kelp and fishing. However the kelp industry also began to decline. Some were put on to different land to farm crops, but they had no legal rights to the land. It was a very feudal arrangement. Many highlanders chose to emigrate but some were actually sold as indentured slaves.

Things began to deteriorate even further in the 1840s. The potato blight and the subsequent potato famine rendered the already difficult lives of these resettled crofters almost untenable. It has been said that at the height of the clearances as many as 2,000 crofter cottages were burned each day, although exact figures are hard to come by. Cottages were burned to make them uninhabitable, to ensure the people never tried to return once the sheep had been moved in.

Between 1811 and 1821, around 15,000 people were removed from land owned by the Duchess of Sutherland and her husband the Marquis of Stafford to make room for 200,000 sheep. Some of those turned out had literally nowhere else to go; many were old and infirm and so starved or froze to death, left to the mercy of the elements. In 1814 two elderly people who did not get out of their cottage in time were burned alive in Strathnaver. In 1826, the Isle of Rum was cleared of its tenants who were paid to go to Canada, travelling on the ship ‘James’ to dock at Halifax. Unfortunately, every one of the passengers had contracted typhus by the time they arrived in Canada. This ‘transportation’ was not that uncommon, as it was often cheaper for landowners to pay for passage to the New World than to try and find their tenants other land or keep them from starvation. However, it was not always voluntary. In 1851, 1500 tenants in Barra were tricked to a meeting about land rents; they were then overpowered, tied up and forced onto a ship to America.

This clearing of the population is a main contributor to the massive world-wide Scottish diaspora and why so many Americans and Canadians can trace their ancestry to the proud, ancient clans of Scotland. It is not known exactly how many highlanders emigrated, voluntarily or otherwise, at this time but estimates put it at about 70,000. Whatever the exact figure, it was enough to change the character and culture of the Scottish Highlands forever.

#france #omaha beach #normandy #d day #germany #scotland #robertson clan #jacobite #Battle of Culloden #prince charles

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brookstonalmanac · 3 years

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Events 8.22

392 – Arbogast has Eugenius elected Western Roman Emperor. 851 – Battle of Jengland: Erispoe defeats Charles the Bald near the Breton town of Jengland. 1138 – Battle of the Standard between Scotland and England. 1485 – The Battle of Bosworth Field, the death of Richard III and the end of the House of Plantagenet. 1559 – Bartolomé Carranza, Spanish archbishop, is arrested for heresy. 1614 – Fettmilch Uprising: Jews are expelled from Frankfurt, Holy Roman Empire, following the plundering of the Judengasse. 1639 – Madras (now Chennai), India, is founded by the British East India Company on a sliver of land bought from local Nayak rulers. 1642 – Charles I raises his standard in Nottingham, which marks the beginning of the English Civil War. 1654 – Jacob Barsimson arrives in New Amsterdam. He is the first known Jewish immigrant to America. 1711 – Britain's Quebec Expedition loses eight ships and almost nine hundred soldiers, sailors and women to rocks at Pointe-aux-Anglais. 1717 – Spanish troops land on Sardinia. 1770 – James Cook names and lands on Possession Island, and claims the east coast of Australia for Britain as New South Wales. 1777 – British forces abandon the Siege of Fort Stanwix after hearing rumors of Continental Army reinforcements. 1780 – James Cook's ship HMS Resolution returns to England (Cook having been killed on Hawaii during the voyage). 1791 – Beginning of the Haitian Slave Revolution in Saint-Domingue, Haiti. 1798 – French troops land at Kilcummin, County Mayo, Ireland to aid the rebellion. 1827 – José de la Mar becomes President of Peru. 1846 – The Second Federal Republic of Mexico is established. 1849 – The first air raid in history. Austria launches pilotless balloons against the city of Venice. 1851 – The first America's Cup is won by the yacht America. 1864 – Twelve nations sign the First Geneva Convention, establishing the rules of protection of the victims of armed conflicts. 1875 – The Treaty of Saint Petersburg between Japan and Russia is ratified, providing for the exchange of Sakhalin for the Kuril Islands. 1894 – Mahatma Gandhi forms the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in order to fight discrimination against Indian traders in Natal. 1902 – Cadillac Motor Company is founded. 1902 – Theodore Roosevelt becomes the first President of the United States to make a public appearance in an automobile. 1902 – At least 4,000 people are killed by the 1902 Turkestan earthquake in the Tien Shan mountains. 1922 – Michael Collins, Commander-in-chief of the Irish Free State Army, is shot dead in an ambush during the Irish Civil War. 1934 – Bill Woodfull of Australia becomes the only test cricket captain to twice regain The Ashes. 1941 – World War II: German troops begin the Siege of Leningrad. 1942 – Brazil declares war on Germany, Japan and Italy. 1944 – World War II: Holocaust of Kedros in Crete by German forces. 1949 – The Queen Charlotte earthquake is Canada's strongest since the 1700 Cascadia earthquake. 1953 – The penal colony on Devil's Island is permanently closed. 1962 – The OAS attempts to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle. 1963 – X-15 Flight 91 reaches the highest altitude of the X-15 program (107.96 km (67.08 mi) (354,200 feet)). 1966 – Labor movements NFWA and AWOC merge to become the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC), predecessor of the United Farm Workers. 1968 – Pope Paul VI arrives in Bogotá, Colombia. It is the first visit of a pope to Latin America. 1971 – J. Edgar Hoover and John Mitchell announce the arrest of 20 of the Camden 28. 1972 – Rhodesia is expelled by the IOC for its racist policies. 1973 – The Congress of Chile votes in favour of a resolution condemning President Salvador Allende's government and demands that he resign or else be unseated through force and new elections. 1978 – Nicaraguan Revolution: The FLSN seizes the National Congress of Nicaragua, along with over a thousand hostages. 1978 – The District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment is passed by the U.S. Congress, although it is never ratified by a sufficient number of states. 1981 – Far Eastern Air Transport Flight 103 disintegrates in mid-air and crashes in Sanyi Township, Miaoli County, Taiwan. All 110 people on board are killed. 1985 – British Airtours Flight 28M suffers an engine fire during takeoff at Manchester Airport. The pilots abort but due to inefficient evacuation procedures 55 people are killed, mostly from smoke inhalation. 1989 – Nolan Ryan strikes out Rickey Henderson to become the first Major League Baseball pitcher to record 5,000 strikeouts. 1991 – Iceland is the first nation in the world to recognize the independence of the Baltic states. 1992 – FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shoots and kills Vicki Weaver during an 11-day siege at her home at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. 2003 – Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore is suspended after refusing to comply with a federal court order to remove a rock inscribed with the Ten Commandments from the lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court building. 2004 – Versions of The Scream and Madonna, two paintings by Edvard Munch, are stolen at gunpoint from a museum in Oslo, Norway. 2006 – Pulkovo Aviation Enterprise Flight 612 crashes near the Russian border over eastern Ukraine, killing all 170 people on board. 2006 – Grigori Perelman is awarded the Fields Medal for his proof of the Poincaré conjecture in mathematics but refuses to accept the medal. 2007 – The Texas Rangers defeat the Baltimore Orioles 30–3, the most runs scored by a team in modern Major League Baseball history. 2012 – Ethnic clashes over grazing rights for cattle in Kenya's Tana River District result in more than 52 deaths.

#Events

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themaninthegreenshirt · 6 years

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Coco Schumann RIP

Coco Schumann was a jazz musician who was forced to play the guitar in Auschwitz as victims were selected for the gas chamber

Coco Schumann, who has died aged 93, was always at pains to stress that he was, as he put it, “a musician who spent time in a concentration camp, not a concentration camp prisoner who made music”. He said that music had defined his life, and he was convinced it was music that had been responsible for his survival.

Partly out of a wish not to allow the Nazis a prominent place in his biography, and because he thought no one would believe his story, and partly because of the horrors he had witnessed during the more than two years he spent incarcerated, it took him more than half a century to talk about the experience. “For years I didn’t speak about it, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Dachau, I thought no one would believe I had been in those places,” he said in 2014.

But one day, at an event for concentration camp survivors in the mid-1980s, someone challenged him. “He said to me, if you don’t speak about it, who will tell people what really happened there? And in that moment a switch turned on in me, and I thought he was right,” Schumann said. He became increasingly aware of the importance of his role as one of the last remaining “first voice” eye-witnesses of the Holocaust.

Schumann was infected by the jazz bug at the age of 13, when a friend played him Ella Fitzgerald’s new record A-Tisket A-Tasket, at a time when people held secret gramophone sessions with their friends to savour a music genre that had been officially classed as Negermusik (literally nigger music) and therefore “degenerate” by the Nazis. He taught himself the guitar and went on to make his name in Berlin’s underground jazz scene, where he regularly performed as a minor in a Gypsy swing band.

Owing to his father’s conversion to Judaism out of love for his mother, Schumann was classified as a Geltungsjude, or a person considered a Jew by law, and lived in permanent fear of being deported.

His first close shave came in 1942 when a group of SS officers entered the Berlin bar where he was playing, to arrest a Jewish member of the audience. Convinced of his own imminent capture, Schumann recalled approaching one of the officers and saying: “If you’re going to arrest him, you might as well arrest me too.” When asked why, he replied: “First of all I’m Jewish, secondly, I’m underage, and thirdly, I’m playing jazz.” He was ignored until a year later, after – so he always suspected – a romantic rival and a regular in the Rosita bar, where he often played, informed on him.

Schumann was transported in 1943 to Theresienstadt, in what is now Terezin, Czech Republic. There, aged 19, he began playing in a band called the Ghetto Swingers, founded by the Czech trumpeter Eric Vogel. In September 1944, they were given clean white shirts to perform in a propaganda film – an extension of a hoax played on the Red Cross the previous summer pretending that Jews had a decent life in the camp – to show the breadth of cultural activities on offer in the so-called “settlement”. The 20 minutes of the film that survives includes footage of the band leader, Martin Roman, and his elegant Ghetto Swingers performing in a bucolic scene in a pavilion in the park.

Immediately after, Schumann was deported to Auschwitz, along with other cast members and the director, Kurt Gerron, and his wife. There, thanks to a musician friend who recognised him, he was commandeered into a swing band that had the job of accompanying the tattooing of new arrivals and the selection process for the gas chambers, both to ease the SS guards’ boredom and to prevent panic among those who should not know they were going to their deaths. On a guitar that had belonged to a murdered Romani musician, Schumann was forced to play requests from the soldiers for hours at a time, everything from La Paloma to Alexander’s Ragtime Band. He later said he had always avoided the gazes of the children.

Born Heinz Schumann in Berlin, to Alfred, a decorator, and Hedwig (nee Rothholz), a hairdresser, he inherited a drum kit from his Uncle Arthur who was emigrating to Bolivia, and a six-string guitar from a cousin called up to the Wehrmacht. Heinz got his nickname, Coco, from a French girlfriend.

Having survived Auschwitz, where he nearly died from spotted fever, and then Dachau, Schumann was liberated by American troops in Bavaria while on a death march towards Innsbruck, and returned to his home city. His autobiography, The Ghetto Swinger: A Berlin Jazz-Legend Remembers (1997), which was turned into a musical in 2012, described being received back in the bars and clubs he had previously played in, as if he were a ghost appearing. “Everyone was surprised I’d survived,” he said.

It was while wandering down the bombed-out Kurfürstendamm boulevard in 1945 that Schumann met his future wife, Gertraud Goldschmidt, who approached him after recognising him as a member of the Ghetto Swingers from the time she herself had spent in Theresienstadt.

In 1950 he emigrated with Gertraud and her son to Australia, returning, homesick, in 1954, and subsequently spent years performing as a musician on cruise ships or playing with dance bands and radio ensembles and accompanying among others, Marlene Dietrich, Ella Fitzgerald and Helmut Zacharias. But he rarely revealed much about his past, saying: “I didn’t want to think people were applauding me out of sympathy.” In the 1990s, buoyed by the nostalgic comeback of swing, he formed the Coco Schumann Quartet, which enjoyed success and earned him considerable attention.

He was quick-witted, warm and charming, with a string of homemade bons mots always to hand, which one friend habitually recorded in a notebook that was published as a book, Coco, in 2015. In recent years, he suffered a brain tumour and that, and an injury to his finger following a fall in the summer of 2014, more or less put paid to performing in public. But he never stopped his daily habit of plucking at one of the many electric guitars he kept around his Berlin bungalow.

His 90th birthday was marked by a tribute gala put on by Germany’s cultural and political elite. Asked once how he managed to continue performing the very melodies he was forced to play in Auschwitz, that accompanied people to their deaths, Schumann replied: “Why should the music be tainted for the fact it was violated by the Nazis?” He added: “The pictures that burned themselves into my memory in Auschwitz are something I am forced to endure the whole time, regardless of whether I’m playing the tunes or not.”

#Coco Schumann #JAZZ #auschwitz #Holocaust

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aamilkeeyankhan · 6 years

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STORY STRUCTURE: The 5 Key Turning Points of All Successful Screenplays

Hollywood movies are simple.

Though writing a successful Hollywood movie is certainly not easy, the stories for mainstream Hollywood films are all built on only three basic components: character, desire and conflict.

Film stories portray heroes who face seemingly insurmountable obstacles as they pursue compelling objectives. Whether it’s Clarice Starling trying to stop Hannibal, Captain Miller Saving Private Ryan, or Billy Elliott trying to gain admission to a ballet school, all these protagonists confront overwhelming conflict in their pursuit of some visible goal.

Plot structure simply determines the sequence of events that lead the hero toward this objective. And here’s the good news: whether you’re writing romantic comedies, suspense thrillers, historical dramas or big budget science fiction, all successful Hollywood movies follow the same basic structure.

Even if you are a novelist, speaker, marketer or attorney, understanding these turning points, and incorporating them into your stories, will strengthen your ability to enthrall your reader or audience.

In a properly structured movie, the story consists of six basic stages, which are defined by five key turning points in the plot. Not only are these turning points always the same; they always occupy the same positions in the story. So what happens at the 25% point of a 90-minute comedy will be identical to what happens at the same percentage of a three-hour epic. (These percentages apply both to the running time of the film and the pages of your screenplay.)

In the explanation that follows, I want to take two recent blockbusters through this entire structural process: Susannah Grant’s screenplay for Erin Brockovich; and Gladiator, written by David H. Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson. As different as these two films are in style, genre, length and subject matter, both have made more than a hundred million dollars at the box office, both were among the most critically acclaimed films of 2000, and both employ the same basic plot structure.

STAGE I: The Setup

Erin Brockovich: Erin is a broke, unemployed single mother who can’t find a job, gets hit by a car, and loses her lawsuit.

Gladiator: Maximus, Rome’s most powerful, and most popular, general, leads his troops to victory in their final battle.

The opening 10% of your screenplay must draw the reader, and the audience, into the initial setting of the story, must reveal the everyday life your hero has been living, and must establish identification with your hero by making her sympathetic, threatened, likable, funny and/or powerful.

Cast Away transports us into the world of a FedEx executive, shows him as likable and good at his job, and creates sympathy and worry when he must leave the woman he loves at Christmas to fly off in dangerous weather. Or think of Lowell Bergman’s mysterious, threatening pursuit of a story at the beginning of The Insider. These setups pull us out of our own existence and into the captivating world the screenwriter has created.

TURNING POINT #1: The Opportunity (10%)

Erin Brockovich: Erin forces Ed Masry to give her a job.  

Gladiator: Maximus is offered a reward by Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and he says he wants to go home.

Ten percent of the way into your screenplay, your hero must be presented with an opportunity, which will create a new, visible desire, and will start the character on her journey. This is the point where Neo is taken to meet Morpheus and wants to learn about The Matrix, or where Ike gets fired and wants to go meet the Runaway Bride.

Notice that the desire created by the opportunity is not the specific goal that defines your story concept, but rather a desire to move into…

STAGE 2: The New Situation

Erin Brockovich: Erin begins working for Ed Masry’s law firm, meets her neighbor George, and starts investigating a case in Hinkley, California, but then gets fired

Gladiator: Maximus is asked by the dying Emperor to take control of Rome and give it back to the people, in spite of the ambition of his son Commodus.

For the next 15% of the story, your hero will react to the new situation that resulted from the opportunity. He gets acclimated to the new surroundings, tries to figure out what’s going on, or formulates a specific plan for accomplishing his overall goal: Fletcher has to figure out that he’s been cursed to tell the truth in Liar, Liar; and Mrs. Doubtfire devises a plan for seeing (his) children.

Very often story structure follows geography, as the opportunity takes your hero to a new location: boarding the cruise ships in Titanic and The Talented Mr. Ripley; going to Cincinnati to bury his father in Rain Man; the President taking off on Air Force One.

In most movies, the hero enters this new situation willingly, often with a feeling of excitement and anticipation, or at least believing that the new problem he faces can be easily solved. But as the conflict starts to build, he begins to realize he’s up against far greater obstacles than he realized, until finally he comes to…

TURNING POINT #2: The Change of Plans (25%)

Erin Brockovich: Erin gets rehired to help win a suit against PG&E.

Gladiator: Maximus, after learning that Commodus has murdered his father, vows to stop the new emperor and carry out Marcus Aurelius’ wishes.

Something must happen to your hero one-fourth of the way through your screenplay that will transform the original desire into a specific, visible goal with a clearly defined end point. This is the scene where your story concept is defined, and your hero’s outer motivation is revealed.

Outer motivation is my term for the visible finish line the audience is rooting for your hero to achieve by the end of the film. It is here that Tess discovers that Katherine has stolen her idea in Working Girl, and now wants to close the deal herself by posing as a broker. This is what we’re rooting for Tess to do, and we know that when she’s accomplished this goal (or failed to), the movie will be over.

Please don’t confuse outer motivation with the inner journey your hero takes. Because much of what we respond to emotionally grows out of the hero’s longings, wounds, fears, courage and growth, we often focus on these elements as we develop our stories. But these invisible character components can emerge effectively only if they grow out of a simple, visible desire.

STAGE III: Progress

Erin Brockovich: Erin gets some Hinkley residents to hire Ed to represent them, and gets romantically involved with George.

Gladiator: Maximus is taken to be killed, escapes to find his family murdered, and is captured and sold to Proximo, who makes him a powerful gladiator.

For the next 25% of your story, your hero’s plan seems to be working as he takes action to achieve his goal: Ethan Hunt begins closing in on the villain in Mission: Impossible 2; Pat gets involved with the woman of his dreams in There’s Something About Mary.

This is not to say that this stage is without conflict. But whatever obstacles your hero faces, he is able to avoid or overcome them as he approaches…

TURNING POINT #3: The Point of No Return (50%)

Erin Brockovich: Erin and Ed file the lawsuit, risking dismissal by the judge, which would destroy any hope of a settlement.

Gladiator: Maximus arrives in Rome, determined to win the crowd as a Gladiator so he can destroy Commodus.

At the exact midpoint of your screenplay, your hero must fully commit to her goal. Up to this point, she had the option of turning back, giving up on her plan, and returning to the life she was living at the beginning of the film. But now your hero must burn her bridges behind her and put both feet in. (And never let it be said that I can’t work two hackneyed metaphors into the same sentence).

It is at precisely this moment that Truman crosses the bridge in The Truman Show, and that Rose makes love with Jack in Titanic. They are taking a much bigger risk than at any previous time in these films. And as a result of passing this point of no return, they must now face…

STAGE IV: Complications and Higher Stakes

Erin Brockovich: Erin sees less of George and her kids, while Ed brings in a big firm that alienates the Hinkley plaintiffs.

Gladiator: Maximus becomes a hero to the Roman people and reveals his true identity to Commodus.

For the next 25% of your story, achieving the visible goal becomes far more difficult, and your hero has much more to lose if he fails. After Mitch McDeere begins collecting evidence against The Firm at that movie’s midpoint, he now must hide what he’s doing from both the mob and the FBI (complications), and failure will result in either prison or death (higher stakes).

This conflict continues to build until, just as it seems that success is within your hero’s grasp, he suffers…

TURNING POINT #4: The Major Setback (75%)

Erin Brockovich: Most of the plaintiffs withdraw due to the bungled efforts of the new lawyers, and George leaves Erin.

Gladiator: Maximus refuses to help the leader of the Senate, and Commodus plots to destroy both Maximus and the Senate.

Around page 90 of your screenplay, something must happen to your hero that makes it seem to the audience that all is lost: Carol dumps Melvin in As Good As It Gets; Morpheus is captured in The Matrix. If you’re writing a romantic comedy like Working Girl or What Women Want, this is the point where your hero’s deception is revealed and the lovers break up.

These disastrous events leave your hero with only one option: he must make one, last, all-or-nothing, do-or-die effort as he enters…

STAGE V: The Final Push

Erin Brockovich: Erin must rally the Hinkley families to agree to binding arbitration, and find evidence incriminating the PG&E corporate office.

Gladiator: Maximus conspires to escape from Proximo and lead his former troops against Commodus.

Beaten and battered, your hero must now risk everything she has, and give every ounce of strength and courage she possesses, to achieve her ultimate goal: Thelma & Louise must outrun the FBI to reach the border; and the Kennedy’s must attempt one final negotiation with the Soviets in 13 Days.

During this stage of your script, the conflict is overwhelming, the pace has accelerated, and everything works against your hero, until she reaches…

TURNING POINT #5: The Climax (90-99%)

Erin Brockovich: Erin and Ed win a $330 million dollar settlement, and George returns.

Gladiator: Maximus has his final battle with Commodus in the arena.

Several things must occur at the climax of the film: the hero must face the biggest obstacle of the entire story; she must determine her own fate; and the outer motivation must be resolved once and for all. This is the big moment where our heroes go into the Twister and the Jewish factory workers make their escape in Schindler’s List.

Notice that the climax can occur anywhere from the 90% point to the last couple minutes of the movie. The exact placement will be determined by the amount of time you need for…

STAGE VI: The Aftermath

Erin Brockovich: Erin gets a $2 million bonus, and continues working with Ed.

Gladiator: Maximus is united with his family in death, and his body carried away in honor by the new leaders of the Roman republic.

No movie ends precisely with the resolution of the hero’s objective. You have to reveal the new life your hero is living now that he’s completed his journey.

In movies like Rocky, Thelma & Louise and The Truman Show, there is little to show or explain, and the writer’s goal is to leave the audience stunned or elated. So the climax occurs near the very end of the film. But in most romantic comedies, mysteries and dramas, the aftermath will include the final five or ten pages of the script.

Understanding these stages and turning points provides you with a powerful tool for developing and writing your screenplay. Is your story concept defined at the one-quarter mark? Is your hero’s goal truly visible, with a clearly implied outcome and not just an inner desire for success, acceptance or self worth? Have you fully introduced your hero before presenting her with an opportunity around page 10? Does she suffer a major setback 75% of the way into your script?

But a word of caution: don’t let all these percentages block your creativity. Structure is an effective template for rewriting and strengthening the emotional impact of your story. But you don’t want to be imprisoned by it. Come up with characters you love and a story that ignites your passion. Then apply these structural principles, to ensure that your screenplay will powerfully touch the widest possible audience.

#writing #michael hauge #scriptwriting

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