mmxv: annus horribilis

These end-of-year annuals have become somewhat of a tradition here (here, here, here, and here too) at PfRC but never before in these annuls of time has one period been so stand-out negative and gloomy.  We tried to accentuate the positive but that was yeoman’s task, so this year-in-review is coming out a few days early in hopes that the holidays will be a time of lasting good cheer to cleanse the palette and that some last minute joys might befall us all.  There were a few bright points which mostly involved accomplishments in space exploration, but on balance, we are happy to be saying good riddance to bad rubbish.

january: Unpegging the Swiss franc from the euro unleashes more turmoil on financial markets and oversees the gradient of reserve currencies levelled out. With the situation in Ukraine still very tense, the Eurasian Economic Union comes into being. In Nigeria, Boko Haram’s brutality goes unrestrained. Elements of the Cosplay Caliphate in Paris assassinate cartoonists and satirists.

february: Faced with its own deck of sanctions, Russia drafts and submits to the United Nations for passage Resolution 2199 that provided for asset-freezing and curtailing financial resources for the Cosplay Caliphate, strongly condemning as well the group’s destruction of ancient archaeological sites in Syria. The Egyptian armed forces retaliate for the beheading of Copts in Libya by the Caliphate—with more atrocities broadcasted. Sadly, Leonard Nimoy passes away.

march: A space probe visits the Dwarf Planet Ceres. An unholy alliance forms between terror groups as al Qaeda tries to distance itself from these extremists. A suicidal pilot deliberately crashes an airplane full of passengers in the French Alps.

april: A massive earthquake causes destruction across south-east Asia.  Writer Günter Grass and performer Percy Sledge passed.

may: Ireland, by popular-vote, legalises same-sex marriage. Truer to the original, audiences began getting hints of the continuation of the Stars Wars saga to be screened later in the year.  We had to bid farewell to musician B. B. King.

june: Fédération Internationale de Football Association chief resigns pending an on-going criminal probe into corruption allegations championed by the American Federal Bureau of Investigation. A real estate magnate and beauty pageant judge announced his candidacy for president of the US.  The Caliphate perpetrates several horrific attacks during Ramadan. Actor Christopher Lee died.

july: Greece becomes the first country to miss a payment to the International Monetary Fund and political revolt is unable to extricate them from this web of debt. New Horizons visits the dwarf planet Pluto. Cuba and the USA normalise diplomatic relations after half a century of hostilities. Video game godfather Satoru Iwata passed away.

august: The march of refugees from war-torn Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan to Europe via the Balkans in unending.  We had to say goodbye to philosopher Oliver Sacks.

september: Liquid water is confirmed on Mars. A major German automaker was found to have doctored the cleanliness of their fleet of vehicles. The proxy war continues in Syria, with Russia launching air-strikes and powers are at odds with which party to back. Personality Jackie Collins died.

october: The Caliphate sabotages a jetliner of holiday-goers in the Sinai Peninsula. Maureen O’Hara departed.

november: Turkey destroys Russian fighter jets for violating a tip of its airspace, possibly setting off World War III. The Caliphate again attacks Paris with horrific and terrifying efficiency. Weeks later, the UN holds its climate change conference in the same venue. Former Chancellor of West Germany Helmut Schmidt passes away.

december: Tragically, yet another mass shooting takes place in California, inspired by religious fanaticism. A wayward Japanese space probe that over-shot its mark five years ago gets a second chance to rendezvous with Venus. Stone Temple Pilot Scott Weiland passed away.  Recognising what the world needs now, Pope Francis threw open the Mercy Gate at the Vatican.

attica or cultural studies

Though best remembered international for stellar performances of roles that were not able to contain her energy and talent, stock-characters in good but less acclaimed films like the happy hooker in Never on a Sunday, the good-time girl-type, naughty nun, or gal Friday in Topkapı, Greek singer and actress of the stage and screen, Melina Mercouri, had another equally impassioned calling as a politician. Finding herself exiled, stateless—her passport having been revoked for outspoken socialist sentiments against the junta government of a cadre of conservative colonels who overthrew the liberal government in 1967, while away on performing on Broadway, Mercouri—along with other prominent members of the Greek diaspora focused attention and shame on the military coup d’état.
Despite tepid support in Greece and an overall laughable platform that no one took seriously, the junta lingered on and on for seven unbearable years—not ousted until their adventures with a one-Greece-policy by invading the Cyprus that was so poorly executed and resulted in the partition of the island nation rather than its annexation. Once Mercouri could return to Athens, this “last Greek goddess,” as she was nicknamed, decided to focus her energies on rebuilding her homeland—which had suffered considerably in the intervening years with dismantling of cultural capital and censorship. When questioned on her credentials for entering politics as an actress, Mercouri retorted by questioning what qualified lawyers to represent the people. Mercouri went on to become the Minister of Culture, and lamenting that it was always just the chiefs of finance that met and that money was not certainly everything—a pretty bold truth to speak, especially in the present atmosphere where Greek financial ministers are characters people might actually recognise by name—and called together, for the first time, all the European ministers of culture and the arts. The legacy of this summit survives today in the rotating European Cultural Capital and the open dialogue it invites with a less rarefied form of diplomacy that everyone can appreciate. Mercouri was also the first voice in a growing choir of protests and calls of vandalism to have the so-called Elgin marbles returned to the Acropolis and for the protection, stopping trafficking and the repatriation of other national treasures.

half a league, half a league, half a league onward

Though there are of course many historical pitched-battles and sieges that are received through careful scholarship that dissect the propaganda of the victors and the element of psychological warfare that’s always been upheld on the home-front, the first truly modern war in the way that we think of it, with embedded correspondence and mediated public sentiment was the international quagmire—from which we’ve never managed to extricate ourselves—that spanned from 1853 to 1856 called the Crimean War. For a war with so many modern elements, including explosives, rail-transportation and the concepts of triage and sanitation through hospital adminstratrix Florence Nightingale, it was very much rooted in religious contentions with the Russian Empire’s desire for crusade and recapturing the Holy Land from the Ottomans. Previous conflict, with collaboration among later belligerents, had established British protectorates for Christian enclaves, with the collateral control of the Suez shipping-lanes also under British mandate. Banking on continued support from the French and British (who had previously allied with them against French hegemony during the height of the Napoleonic Wars), Russia moved to attack the Ottoman territories and claim the Holy Land for the Orthodox Church, enraging Napoleon III, who felt he owed his legitimacy to papal allegiance—but the various controlling churches were pretty much pleased with the arrangements as they stood and had expressed no ambition to be liberated.
Despite confessional differences, France sided with Britain and the Ottoman Empire to rebuff the Russian advance. It strikes me as strange quirk of the march of history that Fredric Auguste Bartholdi’s work that would eventually become known as the Statue of Liberty was originally conceived to commemorate the to be dynamited Suez Canal, but due to the conflict she was sent to America instead. I wonder how that conversation went. As much as religious intrigues were brought down onto the mundane level and invoked as a casus belli and the home-front exposed to developments in real-time—something that the rear-detachment in England could really rally around, far greater than unmaterialised consequences and grand engineering projects. The immortal prosody by Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was interned in the public imagination nearly as quickly as the latest news dispatches and was an invocation, “Like Remember the Alamo,” that victory might be snatched from the hands of defeat—though the Franco-British powers had the upper-hand and were just ensuring that this advantage be retained. It is dangerous to second-guess the purity of one’s intent, but Russia—with access blocked to the Black Sea because of Ottoman control, had historically lacked routes for trade until the foundation of Saint Petersburg on the navigable Volga some one hundred and fifty years prior, the port built to better supply the British with raw materials, lumber, to build up their naval prowess. Having their export limited to this one centre of exchange, Imperial Russia embarked on a series of desperate but dogged overtures for the taking and keeping of the strategic stronghold of Sevastopol and thus access to the sea. The terms of surrender were rather humiliating for Russia in the end with all gains capitulated and Russia cut-off from international markets—at least to a large extent as only the inland routes of Saint Petersburg and the northern Baltic outpost of Archangelsk in the White Sea was not reachable in the Winter months and had been somewhat decomissioned in favour of promoting the city of spires and masts on the Volga—created to counter-balance the mercantile impositions. The Russian Empire was not allowed to keep a fleet in the Black Sea until the defeat of the Ottomans in War World I and the subsequent Bolshevik revolution that saw that Imperium reconstituted under new auspices. The immediate effects of this crushing commercial defeat further brokered the sale of Alaskan territory to the US—fearing that the lands would just be taken away as retribution by British-Canada, but if they sold, however unwillingly, at least Russia would get something out of the transaction.

queen of the palmyrenes

As if the destruction of of the ancient temples and yet to be fully studied and adjured archaeological sites by the keystone caliphate of Palmyra and other sites of historical significance were not already a great enough loss for our shared cultural heritage and the inscrutable past—purges and terrors always result in loss and revision, there is another personal legacy that I fear will fall into greater obscurity over the razing of her city, a historic character called Queen Zenobia (a somewhat strained Latinisation of the Aramaic name Beth Zaynab). Unlike her ancestor, Cleopatra of Egypt or warrior queen Boudica who’ve been celebrated for centuries for standing up to the Romans, Zenobia is mostly forgotten though her exploits.
Living during the latter half of the third century, the client province of Syria was experiencing a time of economic stability—removed from the political intrigues that were affecting the government of, a succession of weak rulers and the transition of the Empire’s capital to the East. The changing regimes did eventual visit Zenobia’s family with the usual paranoia of unproven power and assassinated the queen’s husband and heir-apparent. Instead of capitulating to the governor’s demands that the remaining royal family relinquish claims to the throne and devolve into direct Roman rule, Zenobia instead declared herself regent, ruling in the name of her infant son. Unprecedented in the potential for revolt among any of the peoples that the Roman Empire had subjugated, Zenobia socked them right in the bread-basket by conquering the province of Egypt, whose grain supplies were absolutely vital for feeding the populace, and when on taking large swaths of Anatolia (Asia Minor), crossing and controlling important trade routes, to constitute an empire that nearly rivalled that of the Sassanids on the periphery of Roman control and certainly with more strategic importance. The Palmyrene Empire was short-lived, just a mere three years but more than just a blip historically speaking as Rome had seen the year of three then four Emperors and that it survived politically in any form goes against reason, and Roman forces only were able to recapture Syria and Egypt by shifting troops out of its theatre in Gaul, effectively giving up those lands as unruly lost causes, and Zenobia was defeated on the fields of Antioch—taken to the capital in chains. Paradoxically, this revolution might have given the Western Empire the impetus to limp along a few years more. Perhaps Zenobia’s story can be a rallying point for good again. There are varying accounts as to what happened to her afterwards (Cleopatra rather dramatically avoided this humiliation—which is perhaps a reason why Shakespeare did not write a play about her) with the cheeriest accounts having the Emperor grant Zenobia clemency and she lived out her life happily in a villa in Tivoli—kept in the manner she was accustomed to and uncensored, playing a role in the community as a pre-eminent philosopher and active political advisor.

choose your poison or balance of trade

Not terribly keen on Western goods and for the most part self-sufficient, for European naval powers—especially the British with their particular weakness for Asian luxuries and tea—Imperial China from the early nineteenth century became known as the Silver Bone Yard. This comparison to a gilded grave was employed as the only enticement for the Chinese—the only reserve-currency that they’d accept, not wanting truck with pelts, flagons of beer, bales of wool, missionaries or whatever else was a typical European export at the time which was not derivative of what the Chinese culture had already perfected, like gunpowder and the printed word—was silver dollars minted from bouillon from the colonies in North and South America.
The discovery of New World silver had initially glutted the market and the commodity temporarily lost some of its shine. The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and British were willing to part with huge sums of specie in exchange for keeping up the trade in tea, silk and porcelain. As more and more silver went into China and none came out, however, a market-correction was due and again prices rose and the demand for precious metal grew, especially with wars to finance at home. In order to reverse the outflows of hard currency, merchants (with support of Parliament) plied the Chinese market with opium culled from poppy fields in Turkey and British-held India—which was an acceptable swap for a spot of tea, in lieu of coinage. Although used recreationally and for medicinal purposes—reintroduced to Western medicine as laudanum—use of opium as a war with drugs does strike me as rather unique, to flood one market to secure cheaper access to another, ostensibly equally habit-forming and ritualised item. Faced with a growing drug problem and traders flagrantly overstepping the bounds that had been proscribed for them, China capitulated (and the degree to which China was compromised is a matter of debate) by expanding access to British merchants that extended beyond a few select entrepôts and granting leases in perpetuity to foreign traders. Though of strategic importance and to modern eyes a serious territorial incursion, China had a standing practise of ceding land in the name of peace-keeping and appeasement, and in addition to the special administrative areas of Hong Kong (UK) and Macau (Portugal)—there was also Tsingtau (Prussia), Tianjin (Italy), Shanghai (Japan) and Shantou (jointly controlled by the English, French and Americans).

e at delphi or the power is yours

According to legend, the location of panhellenic oracle at Delphi—sacred specifically Apollo but also the whole panoply of the gods—was fixed when Zeus dispatched two eagles in opposite directions to find the geographic centre of the Earth (the navel, ομφος of Gaia, Mother Earth—the name Delphi too is a near homonym for the Greek word for womb). Having circumnavigated the globe, the eagles collided above the slopes of Mount Parnassus and so by this unfortunate augury it was decided. The midair crash makes me think about the silly exchange between the uncatchable Teumessian Fox and the magical hound Laelaps who was destined to capture anything it chased—paradoxical nonsense that Zeus put to a stop by turning both beasts into stone, and setting them among the stars—Canæ Major and Minor. The sanctuary played host to sibilant soothsayers for centuries and attracted the patronage of the rich and powerful, whom for a donation, could entreat the Pythia for a suggested donation amount—all tributes and treasure artefacts of the wealthy trying to outdo one another.
Such gifts were left in hopes of currying favour with the gods and to gain some purchase on their prophesy—one which promised to be duplicitous and if the question was not framed careful, they risked an ironic demise. Not every donation was precious in the traditional or artistic sense, however, and probably the most enigmatic token was a simple letter E carved into a wall of a temple. No one really knows its meaning but Plutarch—a contemporary and friend of the high priestess, a retainer of the oracle—speculates in a rather in depth dialogue about what it could signify. Called E at Delphi (which always made me think of some diner, Eat at Delphi’s), Plutarch’s work underscores the singular nature of this inscription, which appears alongside two other famous dictums—Know Thy Self and Everything in Moderation. The intent already unknown and a bit of a mystery for visitors to guess about, Plutarch’s characters debate suggestions that the E could be the Greek numeral five—maybe a station of the tour and ritual, the verb form Thou Art, declined as an exclamation, or a hale and hearty greeting (pronounced like “aye”) from the god himself.
Despite the elite nature of the site—certainly not open to all seekers and the opening hours were rather restrictive, requiring a Delphic sponsor, a citizen of the settlement that grew up around the oracle, and sessions were only held on the seventh day of the month, Apollo’s day, and during long Greek summer—the nine months out of the year when snowbird Apollo dwelt in Greece before retiring to live among the Hyperborei (maybe the Britons) and Dionysus wintered in Greece—the panhellenic nature of the spot that opposed local patriotism and cults that was otherwise politically pervasive for the Greek people was really novel and Delphi and its traditions functioned in a sense like a central bank, a repository of wealth that was universally recognised. Those walls no longer stand, but other relics from that treasury have survived, scattered, like the bronze serpent column now in the hippodrome of Istanbul, brought from Delphi (in probably a bad choice of war trophies, in a karmic sense) to commemorate an ancient victory of the Greeks over the Persians. Perhaps, though, the E is enduring as well, abiding in a mystery that is as cryptic as the advice of the Sibyl.

wie ein wüstensohn

Happily after the absolutely brilliant regular podcast Futility Closet introduced a few weeks back to a large portion of its listening audience the German and Eastern European phenomenon bound up in the works and personality of the imaginative adventure writer Karl May—and re-introduced to others with the glad occasion to reflect and wonder a little bit how this author was no longer remembered in some of the exotic lands where his stories took place, the topic has become for the team and commentators a sustained and very productive one.
Branching off to a series of tales set in the Middle East, rendered all the more amazing since like his stories that took place in the American Old West came across as convincing and more culturally sympathetic than those who’d actually experienced those places first hand, another iconic character, akin to Old Shatterhand and Winnetou, comes on scene, in the faithful guide Hadschi Halef Omar Ben Hadschi Abul Abbas Ibn Hadschi Dawud al Gossarah. Notwithstanding that fictional character was the only naming-convention in the Muslim tradition studied and committed to memory by committed fans from a European background, the stories were a lens on the casbah and the souq, which all things considered was not a bad introduction for the 1890s. The German disco band Dschinghis (Genghis) Khan, EuroVision Song Contest contender probably most famous for their party hit Moscow, Moscow—celebrated this literary figure with a particularly catchy number in 1980 (or try here, depending on your location). I hope all the characters in this particular universe eventually get their own treatment and profiles.

hella throughput

One other state assess to undergo privatisation, despite protests and public sentiment is the historic and busy port Piræus in Attica, one of the largest in the world and fount of Greece’s thalassocracy—a sea-going empire and later shipping tycoons and trade magnates and island-hopping around the archipelago. Piræus also happens to be the name of our second favourite Greek restaurant—having been recently unseated by a new favourite called Athen, being the German form of the great city Αθηνα and it strikes me as curious how different name cases come across in different languages with different conjugations and declinations, Athens sounding something akin to, “Let’s go to Walmart’s.”
Having the public relinquish a controlling stake in this venture is really torturous and I wonder how the past and the future will judge this decision.  Piræus is also known as the Lion’s Port—referencing a monumental fountain that stood at the harbour’s entrance from the third century BC to the late seventeenth century, when it was looted along with other spoils by invading Venetians during the War of the Holy League, the belligerents being Western Europe and Balkan rebels against the Ottoman Empire of the east. This ancient lion, somewhat defaced by the graffiti Nordic mercenaries excited over their war trophies, was delivered to the Arsenal (shipyard) of Venice—where it still stands along with other captive lions. The sobriquet is also still in place, despite the lion’s three centuries of absence, and I wonder if Greece has asked for it to be returned.

5x5

helm’s deep: South-westerns brace themselves for large-scale US military training exercise

jello submarine: iconic Beatles’ classic in gelatine form

freejack: via the mesmerising Mind Hacks, thieves come closer to prising open mental wallets

senor-shooter-interoperability: scary report about a German missile battery briefly commandeered

mappyland: a Swedish based service that renders stylish, sleek schematics of any place in the world

self-same or et in arcadia ego

Some seven centuries prior to the famous Cartesian maxim Cogito ergo sum (originally formulated with the French Je pense, donc je suis), another mathematician and philosopher—plus notably a physician, who attested that all medicine was guesswork and theoretical—from Persia (presently in part of Uzbekistan, those a creature of the courts through the realm) called Abu Ali al Hussein ibn al Sini (Latinised as Avicenna) prevision the philosophy of self as a first principle (or evidence thereof) by supposing a floating man—suspended in a sensory-deprivation tank as it were.

Heir to the grand translation movement, this floating man, blindfolded, and with his extremities stretched to the point, arms and fingers and other limbs, where he could not investigate his own identity and thus had no external confirmation of his body, would still nonetheless, that Avicenna posited, have a conception of his self, identity as separate from the universe at large that was buoying him up, insensibly. Whereas the assertion by René Decartes that I (ego) think therefore I am, which doubts away the whole cosmos, supposing by turns that his consciousness is a brain in a vat, feed deceptions by an Evil Genius (like the film saga of The Matrix) until there is only his doubt that he can be reliably certain of the fact that he—it is I, who is doing the doubting. After all this skepticism, Descartes seeks to rebuild the Universe as it is, only now more confident that his senses and reason is not deceiving him. It’s rather easy to intuit this after Avicenna and Descartes have done all the hard work, but both writers expect of their readership to try the thought experiment themselves (choosing the red-pill, again like Matrix) and to go through the same harrowing rigours of discovery. While Descartes was already hoping to establish the nature of the cosmos out of his Cogito, Avicenna may have had less ambitious goals (even though more conclusions fall out of his argument)—just demonstrating, no mean feat certainly, that one’s consciousness, mind or soul had an existence regardless of what outside impressions augmented it and therefore could be said to be immaterial and unperishingly incorruptible.
For Avicenna’s next trick, he deduced the argument of infinite regression and first-causes to prove the logical necessity of a creator to set everything in motion—whose reasoning and nomenclature influenced philosophers and theologians, many luminaries tilling the same ground, until the present day. Building off Aristotle’s taxonomy, Avicenna figured that there were three kinds of things in the Universe, putting them into sets like a good mathematician: one, those things which can not be, like a square-circle, an anti-whale or infinity plus one—though we might be able to imagine otherwise; two, that which exists in the physical world which are contingent on something else—that is everything with a parentage and a history, from a tablet computer to the Andromeda Galaxy, and up to a point, we are able to tell that story (for things that do not exist but could, there are the same antecedent causes that we might also account for, like there never having been a Persian Empire because Alexander the Great was never born); the third sort of thing exists without being contingent on any else—unmade and the creative impetus, the divine (Aristotle believed that the Universe had not origin and was eternal). That’s pretty tidy and has been championed by countless thinkers since. Avicenna’s statements, however, eventually fell out of favour with the theological establishment believing he was degenerating the faithful with his mathematical proofs, as I suppose that the same articles of faith are superfluous in a logical framework. The Cartesian Cogito also retains its relevance, influence and heritage (currency and cachet) but post modern thinkers introduced yet another element of doubt that creates a pretty big whole in Descartes’ regression and progression about what that I was that was doing the reflecting was. Was it really me or is it us, and since the present is the only thing one fancies himself positive of (since false memories could also be implanted) and that’s always slipping away (so we suppose)—is anything more possible than pre-reflection that doesn’t essay the heart of doubt? But that is for another post.

staatsbesuch oder order of precedence

When the Queen and her consort come on a state-visit to Germany next week, they’ll be thronged by some adoring fans and followers. I wonder what sort of gifts will be exchanged. These two powerful women have everything but surely it will be something a little more dear and thoughtful than a bundle of DVDs her Majesty got that one time.
In the history of diplomacy, a lot of treasure, tribute and artefacts have been presented on state receptions, pandas, china, but probably the most priceless present was given by a scholar and magistrate of Constantinople called Gemistus Plethon during a council (summit) in the city state of Florence in 1430 to Cosimo d’Medici in the form of the complete works of Plato. These dialogues had been lost to Western academics for over a thousand years, since the fall of the Roman Empire in Europe and theological, scientific and philosophic thought had been governed by the teachings of Aristotle, Plato’s student. Medici, patron of the arts and scholarship, however, recognised the value of this trove of forgotten knowledge and commissioned priest Marsilio Ficino to translate the whole parnassus and provide commentary. The undertaking took decades (during which time it is also rumoured that Ficino may have tweaked the notion of a Platonic-relationship in order to excuse his own proclivities, and by the way, probably invented tarot card divination out of an interest for numerology he discovered in these new dialogues) but was probably the singular gift-exchange that sparked and sustained the Renaissance by shifting one’s perception of classical thought first in Italy and then beyond. This might be a tough one to top but I bet the Chancellor will present something meaningful.

300 or hoplites and helots

Sparta-worship is nothing new and has gone through numerous and at times—maybe mostly, dangerous revivals. Revolutionaries as varied as those who fought for independence under the British Mandate of Palestine or under colonial Britain in North America based their extolling, exhortation and sometimes lament in failing to live up to that example on a long chain of praise that extended all the way back to times contemporaneous with the Spartan civilisation. This romancing of the austere and disciplined lifestyle practised goes by the name laconophilia (from Laconia where they lived and hence laconic or blunt) and while the course of history may have was neither steered solely by either admirers or detractors (who importantly saw the Spartans’ faults and warned that theirs was not a society to emulate) their battle-cry is heard sometimes in unexpected places. That Nazism was steeped in Nordic traditions and mythology (including fabricated volk-etymologies purely to forward their agenda) is patently well-known but I never knew that the Nazis had cast their maniacal nets further south as well and believed that the Spartans (as part of the larger “race” of Dorians) also embodied their ideal. 
Of course it was not their deportment as rational stoics or temperate individuals that held the appeal (then and now, and die neue Dorier did not go unheard) but rather the reputation of these hoplites (citizen-soldiers) on the battlefield, whose glory came at a high price—with most willing to dismiss this fascination as sophomoric, the Spartans excelling only at war through a regiment that left trainees little better than broken and brainwashed, a strict caste-system, peace untenable and dependent on a subjugated population of feudal farmers called the Helots (considered to be natural slaves).  The ability to achieve and sustain this proto-fascist state through eugenics (though without the nobles lies of The Republic) was aligned with what Nazi Germany hoped to emulate, but I am not sure what brought about that political syncretism that mingled the Norse gods with Mediterranean traditions, but perhaps it was how just a few decades prior, a German entrepreneur and amateur archaeologist was able to dynamite his way to Priam’s Treasure and significantly prove to the world that there was at least a kernel of historical fact behind the legends. Feats of renown are especially prone to misappropriation.

cat-burglar or level-boss

Though often subtly alluded to and perhaps the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty, nineteenth century gentleman burglar turned international criminal syndicate mastermind, Adam Worth, is virtually unknown. Celebrated in his day—albeit no one knew his true identity as he hob-knobbed with Europe’s elite and discreetly ran a network of underlings who committed the actual robberies, and always without violence—the cardinal code of his organisation being never to use firearms, Worth managed to elude capture by Scotland Yard and other national police forces, as well as the sleuths of Pinkerton’s Detective Agency.  Some one ought to make a movie about this original gangster.
Worth operated at a time when associates referred to “baby-face,” gums, sister, lumpy—or by some other physical attribute in case of any eavesdroppers, and though while based in Paris, Worth was faced with none of those stakes that fostered a criminal underworld in America with Prohibition, Worth did open and run the first Bar Americain in the city, which held on its upper-storey an illicit gambling hall that could be transformed in an instant into a sedate salon peopled by figures lounging and reading newspapers through some ingenious pneumatic works that hid the gaming tables when trouble approached. There was also a sense of respect above this honour among thieves displayed by Worth’s own arch-nemesis in the personage of Allen Pinkerton, who had spearheaded the hunt for Worth for decades in the US (where he regularly chanced to visit his parents, who knew nothing about his exploits), London, Paris, Greece and Constantinople, who was relentless like Inspector Javert’s relentless chase for fugitive Jean Valjean but ultimately held the outlaw in high esteem.

vanguard

Though it is no excuse for barbarous behaviour, the sacking of Constantinople occurred in part because of a populace complacent, as was Rome in its time, and unwilling to entertain the unthinkable—that these barbarians at the gates might ever breach their defenses and that the great Queen of Cities might be vulnerable.

As the Crusaders encamped at Galata and launched endless and seemingly futile forays against the outer most ring of fortifications from their galleons, lashing masts together to try to turn the boats into ladders and siege-engines, it did seem that the city was safe and secure and would just be able to wait these interlopers out. In fact, the regular army of the Byzantine Empire was never mobilised against this nuisance, with only the personal guard of the Emperor, the Varangians dispatched to monitor the perimeter, making occasional counter-attacks with a sweep of arrows or pouring boiling oil on Crusader undermining operations at the base of the city walls. The Crusaders never really breached those fortifications—that accomplishment was reserved for many centuries later, but one diligent and unnoticed Venetian did manage to prise away a small piece of masonry (not much bigger than a womp rat) and opened up a crawlspace inside. The gates were flung open and the Crusaders stormed in.

These Varangian body-guards, while ultimately ineffectual, were a pretty interesting retinue. Taking a lesson from history, knowing how fickle the loyalties Prætorian guard could be, recruited from native sources and subject to prevailing influences, Byzantine emperors had a long-standing tradition of importing personal protectors—much like the Swiss Guard of the papacy. The Varangians were originally Viking warriors who had expanded east to the Rus—westward expansion discouraged by Englanders who were willing to keep paying the Vikings tribute (called Danegeld) not to attack them. Eventually these Scandinavians encountered the Byzantines and after some initial clashes and subsequent conversion of the Kievian-Rus to the Orthodox faith, the leaders of the Varangians pledged a division of its fiercest, professional warriors as a sign of peace. As the displacing of populations was picking up, the Vangarian stock soon expanded to attract other landless individuals to join this foreign legion. Chiefly this army began to be staffed with ranks of men of Briton extraction, themselves having migrated from Germanic lands and settled in England, who in turn were dislodged by the Norman Conquest—the Normans being Norse mercenaries themselves. Having lost hearth and home, many Britons sought their fortunes in Byzantium. I do wish, however, this Varangian vanguard had been able to rebuff the Crusaders’ advances.

cowboys and indians: sacerdotal or the fifth crusade

I spoke ridiculously too soon when I claimed that the horrors of the misrouted Fourth Crusade which sacked Constantinople, ravaging the beautiful city, depleting its treasures and resulting in the very brief reign of a resented Latin emperor called Romania but failed to reunite the lands or the Church, had put Europe—or at least the guilty Church—off of crusading permanently. Far from it—in fact before the same Pope Innocent III rallied the European noble houses to again descend on the Holy Land—in keeping with his original vision of the campaign with a thrust through Egypt, there was a coordinated massacre of the Cathar gnostics at home, inspired in part by the papacy’s equivocal attitude when the Crusaders were attacking fellow Christians in Byzantium. Mainstream Christians had regarded this dualistic sect that believed in the transmigration of the soul and equality of the sexes with suspicion for some time and called them devil-worshippers and pagans for the tenet that God had a good and an evil aspect and were glad to have the excuse to be rid of them and take their lands in southern France.  The Reconquista heated up to drive the Moors from Spain and Portugal.

Separately, two charismatic shepherd boys in Seine-Saint-Denis and Köln gathered thousands of children, the poor and disposed to march on the Holy Land and convert the Muslims—both promising that the Mediterranean at Marseilles or over the Alps and in Brindisi would part before them, like Moses crossing the Red Sea. Once the horde made its way to the shore, the Mediterranean did not comply and those who did not try to start their young lives anew at these endpoints or try their fortune at going home were caught by Saracen pirates and sold into slavery. It’s hard to say if the adult population of Europe felt obliged to complete the mission their children were willing to undertake unquestioningly or not (some question the accounts or if such travesties even happened at all), but in any case, Pope Innocent was able to marshal the support of armies that might be able to fulfill the task of recapturing the Holy Land without too much variance. This time, however, the leaders of the Crusader States would rather that Europe didn’t try to help out again. The past few years had ushered in a time of relative peace and great prosperity and Christian and Muslims coexisted due to a constellation of conditions, including the death of Saladin and crises of succession among his heirs, lack of Crusader aggression and very lucrative and mutually beneficial trading arrangements.
The last thing that the County of Acre, then the dominant Crusader State, wanted was to have a bunch of uncouth holy warriors despoiling the calm but they were not in a situation to disinvite the coming armada of ships. A sizable Crusader fighting force landed at Acre and King John of the realm tried his best to occupy the restless men, who were additionally an onerous task to quarter, and as more forces from Hungary, Germany, France and Flanders arrived, King John was helpless to prevent the march on Egypt. The Crusaders sought control of the city of Damietta (Dumyāt) at the mouth of the Nile, which protected the waterway to the capital of Cairo, some two hundred kilometers downstream. Maneuvers were indecisive and guarded, the force strong enough to besiege the fortification but not strong enough to take the city outright and the months before the Crusaders decamped, they found that they had starved the population into submission. Once Damietta had fallen, the way-forward remained unclear as they were awaiting the arrival of relief-forces from the armies of Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick II that would give them an unstoppable numerical advantage and could thus safely proceed. The armies of Sultan al-Adil, Saladin’s brother, were watching events unfold in a similarly vacillating manner, as internal strife prevented them from a certain counter-attack.
While at this impasse, the sultan ordered the destruction of the defensive fortifications that protected the city of Jerusalem, preemptively entertaining the idea that the Holy City might become an important bargaining token in the near future and if it was to fall to the Crusaders, the Muslims wanted them to have a city not easily defended, just as Saladin had directed for the town of Ascalon to be demolished to stop the earlier Crusaders’ advance from Jaffa to the Holy City, then resolved to negotiate with the Crusaders in order to end this stalemate and attend to its own affairs. The offer that the sultan’s ambassadors brought to the table was unbelievably favourable—concession of Jerusalem and return of the True Cross in exchange for leaving Egypt in peace, but what was even more unbelievable was how the Crusaders rejected the terms. Maybe they were sly to the dismantling of Jerusalem and did not want to take it just to see it lost again, but I think the only plausible logic behind their stance—which was not universal among the ranks, was that they were sure that they were going to triumph, with the wealthy and powerful Egypt and not just out of the way Jerusalem as the prize.
The papal legate, nominally in charge of military operations, was flattered with a prophesy that he fancied to be a sure sign that he’d personally led the Crusaders to victory—and besides, Egypt was apparently being attacked on its eastern border by the long awaited cavalry from the land of Prester John and so there was no way that absolute triumph could be denied them. Except that the papal legate had misinterpreted the augurs and having waited so long in Damietta, the Nile had again flooded and was no longer navigable and the fighting-force was bogged down once again. Frustrated, the separate divisions splintered and sailed back to Acre and then back home to Europe. One last exception was that Egypt was not under siege from a magnanimous Oriental Christian Magi, but rather these skirmishes with an unknown and fierce tribe marked the first encounter that the Western world had with Genghis Khan and the Mongol Hoard, but all that is for another story-line.

cowboys and indians: the fourth crusade or the tale of the two sicilies

The Latin Church, going into another apoplectic shock over the failure of the Third Crusade, with the failure to retake Jerusalem back from the forces of Saladin and what was seen as an unacceptable appeasement—bordering on tolerance—of the Muslims wherein the Crusaders only barely managed to cling to the coastline with the cities of Jaffa, Acre, Tripoli and Antioch, decided to once and for all settle matters by again taking the reins, as happened in the First Crusade, a century beforehand. Pope Innocent III dispatched legates and recruiters to all corners of Christendom, determined to carefully control the quality of holy warriors, skilled and pious knights only with no more of those roadies that the Pontiff blamed for past fiascoes or avarice souls only coming along for material gain. Owing to the untimely death of Richard Lionheart by a stray arrow that led to his little brother John taking the throne, whose sympathetic dealings with the French nobility and general lack of restraint incited a revolt among his own barons and a crisis of succession and civil war that ended with John persuaded to check his own power with by signing the Magna Carta in the field of Runnymede. All these events took far longer to play-out that the two year campaign of the Fourth Crusade to come, so enlistment efforts in England were fruitless. So too were they in neighbouring France, with Louis II unwilling to budge or part with his armies until this matter was resolved.
Even though relations with the Holy Roman Empire under the ambitions of Hohenstaufen Emperor Henry VI was strained, Germany was more responsive to the entreaties of the Pope. Henry VI was hoping to undo the embarrassment of the dissolution of the German contribution to the Third Crusade after order fell asunder when his father, Barbarossa, unceremoniously drowned en route, but this putting on a brave face also carried ulterior-motives. Henry was also a match-maker, tutored in building strategic alliances through matrimony by veteran Eleanor of Aquitaine, and secured loyalties at home before incorporating more and more lands into the empire.
Henry conquered the important naval power of Sicily and had many of the Papal States as well as the buffer kingdoms of Armenia and Cyprus in his corner, and hoped to established an universal empire that stretched throughout Europe and across the Mediterranean to rival Byzantium, if not entice it to merge into a single super-power. Perhaps Henry would have succeeded too and the world would be very different, had he not, like his father, died of malaria in transit. Like with the earlier, disastrous German campaign (whose only legacy was the creation of the imitative Order of the Teutonic Knights to protect the pilgrims who did not retreat), the Crusade careered off course shortly afterward, despite Pope Innocent’s efforts to wrest back control. The Church’s original plan would have the armies of Europe travel to Egypt by ship and launch a conquest on Jerusalem. Fatefully, Henry’s own Sicily was at war with Genoa and Pisa, leaving Venice as the only sea-going city state from which to depart—although some of the English and French volunteers left from Flanders and Marseilles.
Venice had been scheming against Byzantium from sometime and despite having been expelled from the capital of Constantinople along with the other Latin Christian population (depriving the merchants of lucrative trade opportunities) recently found themselves charged with naval protection of the empire’s flank along the Adriatic—the admiralty having dissolved and sold the Byzantine fleet for personal gain. It was this and other lapses of leadership that had caused the people of Byzantium to revolt against the Emperor Isaac II Angelos, who was forced to abdicate and blinded in a palace-coup, and surrender the throne to his brother, Alexios III. The defeated man began plotting against his brother and conspired with the Venetians, persuading them it was time to attack Byzantium and restore him to power. Conveniently, the Crusader armies were on their way, and a detour to Constantinople surely would be tolerated. The Germans acquiesced to the stop over, though presciently Pope Innocent admonished the Crusaders that they were entering fellow-Christian lands as visitors and on the pain of excommunication, forbid any one damaging or pilfering Byzantine property. This command was not well circulated and mostly ignored and the armies, beginning a series of atrocities that goes very nearly unmatched in recorded history, first sacked Zadar and Trieste on the Dalmatian coast, despite the cities both confessing the Roman Catholic rite. And spurred on by this conquest and the allure of even greater booty, the Crusader army put the ancient and wealthy city of Constantinople under siege and proceeded with raids once the port was taking, looting immeasurable wealth, defiling churches, taking holy relics as war-trophies, destroying libraries and other storehouses of knowledge and burning a fifth of the city.
The deposed, blind emperor was restored—as were the free-trade zones and consulates of the thalasso- cracies, but the city and the empire would never recover. Jesus wept.  The Great Schism occurred, the Eastern Orthodox Church splitting with the Latin Church over irreconcilable differences and disgust that been sorely sustained for centuries afterwards. The attack and following civil-unrest, the Greeks not at all pleased with being ruled by a puppet-emperor of Western Europe severely crippled their ability to defend themselves from Ottoman invaders and eventually Byzantium fell, with Turkish territory spanning at its apogee from the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to the suburbs of Vienna, from Baku to Algeria. Only a fraction of the Crusaders reached the Holy Land, those embarking from France and Belgium, and only helped maintain the status quo in the diminished Crusader holdings. Overcome with grief and guilt for the destruction that resulted from the venture, the Latin Church would never again sanction a crusade to the Holy Land—those to follow are the doing of secular powers, but did, after the fall of Byzantium, launch expeditions to beat back the Ottomans and restore the Eastern Empire.

cowboys and indians: acre and ascalon or mesuline and maid marion

With the True Cross lost to the Muslims and Saladin having recaptured much of the Holy Lands, the mission that became known as the Third Crusade, embellished with a stamp of romance and authority that has grown in the imagination over the years—of course, dependent on the current geopolitical fabulists—might be the adventure that many envision when thinking of Europe’s forays into the Middle East.

Latin Christian communities had been entrenched in a handful of major cities for some three generations at this point, in the late twelve century, several monumental crusader castles had been constructed as anchors, there was a professional fighting-force in the orders of the Templars and Hospitallers, the former regional power of Byzantium was on the wane, and though the same problems with infighting amongst the European leadership, the monarchs—not the princes, mercenaries or other understudies, the Crusaders marched to battle under such luminaries as King Richard Lionheart of England, King Philip II of France and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Though there was an appeal from the papacy to rally the population, though somewhat fatigued already with the idea and none too impressed with the previous performance, dashing Richard Lionheart’s eagerness to volunteer spurred others to follow suite.

There was not only the desire not to look like cowards or non-believers, there was moreover the matter that the European heads of state were rather natural enemies back at home, and it would be disastrous to dislodge any part of this precariously balanced system of oaths and allegiances without upsetting the whole order and making all lands vulnerable to attack. England and France decided to sail to the Holy Land, an expensive but seemingly prudent and expedient decision, with a large armada across the Mediterranean. Eager to arrive first in the Holy Land, the German armies took the overland route through Anatolia. Although the prospect of a huge German army sweeping through the lands of the Seljuk Turks and onto Syria and the Levant was a terrifying thought and the psychological effects far outlasted the campaign itself (much like the later-day Operation Barbarossa), the aging Emperor chose to try to ford the River Saleph (Göksu) on the Anatolian Peninsula instead of crossing at a perfectly good but overcrowded bridge and drowned, never reaching the Holy Land and never finding the legendary Prester John. After this untimely accident, the armies of the Holy Roman Empire splintered and many divisions returned home. England and France got off to a much later start and the passage via Sicily dragged on for some three years. Richard Lionheart pushed on ahead of the French forces and took Cyprus en route to the port city of Acre.
The city was firmly under Muslim control, but the dethroned and feckless King of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan, having been released from prison in Damascus, along with his morganatic wife and children, who were the legitimate heirs to the captured kingdom, and King Guy was only elevated by marriage, had a bold plan to lay siege to the city as a way of solidifying his claim. That claim became even more specious in short order when his wife, Isabella of Jerusalem and their children, died while escaping back into Syria from the lands where Saladin had exiled them to, in exchange for his release. Guy’s apparent lack of leadership ability had of course made him unpopular with his former subjects and their was another pretender, cousin Conrad of Montferrat, whom was favoured by the French contingent. Consequently, the French forces did not really care to put themselves out to help Guy of Lusignan with his prestige project. Owing to the fact that the deposed king was not favoured by the French and that they shared a common-ancestor, a certain water-sprite named Melusine (whom according to popular legend was herself the product of a union between a mortal man and the Lady of the Lake, whose Exalibur Richard had reportedly brought into battle but traded to Sicilian merchants in exchange for more ships an loyalty; a later liaison with King Raymond of Poitou had produced ten children who would come to be the lines of the noble families of Europe, but as mortals can never witness the true form of sprites, taken to becoming a mermaid on Saturdays and Raymond’s curiosity finally got the better of him and spied on her alone-time rituals, Melusine transformed into a winged dragon and left Raymond to raise his royal brood by himself), Richard was willing to champion Guy’s cause.

Taking the port of Acre and building a huge encampment outside the city walls, the Crusading army was eventually, against the odds, to capture the stronghold, due to regular supplies and reinforcements that could be safely brought by sea. Victory in the siege was a huge morale-booster for the Crusaders—even the French, who as a concession to Guy’s plan, agreed that he could live out his days as regent of Jerusalem, never mind that it was yet to be conquered, with the kingdom reverting to their candidate, Conrad of Montferrat upon his death, but was not one of particular strategic importance. In fact, as Richard Lionheart realised, now the troops were forced more or less to keep to the coast and captialise on their naval power, rather than venturing inland—where Jerusalem lie.

Disheartened and overshadowed by Richard’s showmanship, Philip II decided to return to France to tend to his own kingdom, leaving the majority of his armies at Richard’s disposal. This proved to be somewhat of a liability, however, as it was difficult to persuade the armies that forging on to Jerusalem directly would be suicidal. The army captured Jaffa, remaining there for months while abortive negotiations took place between the Crusaders and a representative of Saladin, his brother Al-Adil, as Saladin refused to meet with Richard directly for his brutal slaughter of Muslim prisoners after the fall of Acre, and deciding just where to go next. During this long period of hesitation, Saladin ordered the demolition of the port city of Ascalon, wagering it was Richard’s next goal, reasoning that without control of the coast, no attempt on Jerusalem would be made. Winning support back from the French by conceding the throne to the pretender Conrad of Montferrat—who was incidentally murdered by Assassins before the investment ceremony could take place in the single instance of the sect taking any part in Crusader politics, the Crusader army left Jaffa and re-fortified a line of abandoned outposts between Jaffa and Ascalon and began rebuilding that fortress as well.  The rival contender for the crown, Guy of Lusignan, had already been sent off to the island of Cyprus to rule as a consolation prize.  Battle ensued for Jerusalem, and while the Crusaders retreated at the walls of the Holy City, knowing that even if they could breach them, they could not hope to hold Jerusalem without a leader, the armies of Saladin were routed as they attempted to capture the intervening chain of Crusader bases behind the lines and both sides reached a stalemate.

Negotiations were formalised that preserved Muslim control of Jerusalem, while allowing Christian pilgrims and merchants access to the city. Although the goal was not realised, the Crusader forces held control of the seas in the region. Richard Lionheart returned to Europe to try to sort out the mess his little brother John Lackland (ever spurned for being given no significant dukedom by his father Henry II—Ireland apparently did not count) was making in England with his allegiances with the French king. Upon arrival, Richard was imprisoned under suspicion of contracting the killing of his cousin, Conrad of Montferrat (in Austria by a duke that Richard had offended for not recognising his part in the taking of Acre), beginning the intrigues that are the background of Robin Hood and setting the stage for the Fourth Crusade and a Byzantium Renaissance.

cowboys and indians: siege perilous or high turn-over rate

The siege of Damascus, ill-chosen to begin with, by the Crusaders was not a plummeting defeat but rather a weary retreat that marked the end of the second adventure. It had simply fizzled out and for a second time, disappointment visited Byzantium and the now dissolved County of Edessa and all parties concluded that it was not pragmatic to rely on a saving cavalry-charge from Europe to extricate the Crusaders in the Holy Land from their diminishing lot.

Rather than focusing on strengthening the position of the remaining lands or forging a mutual alliance, the Crusaders provoked more strife, internal and external. The nearly four decade long lull in active campaigning was not a time of peace and civility but rather beset by transitions and political intrigues—which certainly could have had different outcomes, studied or no, among all the regional powers. The Byzantine Empire, already having found the armies of Latin Christendom to be ineffectual if not a liability, regularly breaking truce negotiate between the Empire and powers that antagonized the Seljuk Turks, raiding Greek villages and appropriating for their own Crusader States the few lands that had been taken back from the Islamic forces, plus threatening the balance of trade between the Middle East and Europe, which the Byzantines had controlled for centuries.

The Empire’s subjects were already fatigued with John II Comnenos westward-lending sympathies, they found much of the same tendencies in his son, Manuel—which they endured for decades more. Emperor Manuel’s rather sudden death saw his infant son, Alexios II, elevated to the purple, with his widow, Impress Mary, a European princess, ruling in his stead. When the Roman Catholic Mary suggested that Constantinople be rejoined with the metropolitan West, a shadow of its former glory and authority in the Holy and Roman Empire of the Germans (an idea that Manuel had already tried to champion and failed to bring about), they had had enough and sought to depose these pretenders. The people entreated a veteran hero and cousin of the deceased emperor Andronicus Comnenos out of retirement, who took the capital and began a purge not seen since the last days of the Roman Empire.
 Comnenos began well but that old spectre of great power’s price of great paranoia emerged, and sensing vulnerability the Italo-Normans of Sicily marched towards Byzantium. The Byzantine Empire certainly had the resources to raise a formidable, even invincible army at a moment’s notice, but fearing vesting too much power in one general who might incite a military coup against the popular emperor, Comnenos split his fighting-force into five armies, powerless divided against the Sicilians, and the empire’s second city, the great port of Thessaloníki was captured and picked clean. Though the Italo-Norman march on Constantinople was eventually rebuffed, Byzantium never recovered from the loss of Thessaloníki and began its long decline and capitulation to the Turks. Political purges were standard operating procedure for Fatimid Egypt, a bastion for the Shia confession independent of the Sunni caliphate based in Baghdad, once a vizier fell out of favour with the hereditary caliph, and often Egypt found itself wanting for a government with administrative experience to hold it all together. With the unexpected but welcome military exploits against the Crusaders, however, of a brilliant strategist of Sunni Kurdish extraction, known to history as Saladin (introduced to battle rather relunctantly by his uncle Shirkuh, who had nearly taken Antioch) that saw this foreigner elevated to vizier and the death of a frail, teenaged caliph, against all odds Saladin was able to remain in office and eventually stitch together a kingdom as sultan that stretched from Syria to Palestine.

A determined campaign to retake Crusader lands followed and saw many of the occupiers graciously allowed to return with their lives and whatever treasure they could carry with safe passage either back to Europe or as refugees to the few remaining strongholds in the County of Trans-Jordan, Tripoli or in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The vestiges of the Crusader conquests were also suffering from that plague of child rulers with the untimely death of King Amalric of Jerusalem, who departed without an adequate succession-plan. Amalric had an heir, but his mother and sister were to act as regent until he came of age—burdened with ambitions and intrigues of their own that made cooperation and coordination impossible and there were also plenty of examples of sabotage among factions. The nobility did not have very Christian tolerance for the young king, who was struck down with leprosy, and were blunderous in their choices, which saw the inevitable but orderly and humane fall of Jerusalem. This loss prompted the European powers to in earnest launch the Third Crusade.