by Adrian Berry
When the Mongols besieged a Genoese fortress in the Crimea in 1345, they used the deadliest weapon in history: it killed 75 million people, more than half the human race at the time.
The weapon was the ‘trebuchet’, the giant siege catapult and the most efficient of all strategic devices until it was superseded by the cannon in the sixteenth century. On this occasion the besiegers fired debris over the town walls which, unknown to them, contained the bubonic plague virus. The disease was then spread to the Mediterranean ports by Genoese sailors.
A fascinating article in Scientific American describes the trebuchet’s history since its invention in China in the fifth or sixth century bc and the part it played in the expansion of the Islamic and Mongol empires.
The trebuchet was unknown to the Romans, who despised military science, regarding it as an unworthy activity akin to philosophy. , Rome’s leading military engineer in the second century, wrote: ‘I will ignore all ideas for new works and new engines of war, whose invention has reached its limits and for whose improvement I see no further hope.’
Even if his attitude had not been confounded a few centuries later by the superior mounted-archers of the Huns, it would not have survived the trebuchet. Although of little use in a pitched battle on a plain, it was to prove extraordinarily effective in smashing the defences of even the most strongly fortified castles.
At the siege of Acre in 1291, the Mameluke Sultan Al-Ashraf Khalil had as many as 72 trebuchets in action at the same time. One of the Scientific American article’s authors, , a military historian at Salem State College in Massachusetts, wrote: ‘Witnesses described his projectiles -great lumps of rock - as flying hills and mountains .’
According to experiments carried out by Hew Kennedy, formerly an officer in the British Army, trebuchets could hurl a ton of rock 150 metres at speeds greater than 140 kilometres per hour. He has built three replicas of thirteenth-century trebuchets and fired a dead pig, a car and a piano across the English countryside, afterwards selling his machines to the Saudi Government for an exhibition on military history.
The use of trebuchets also had a remarkable effect on the evolution of castles. Walls were made thicker to resist their missiles, and fortifications were strengthened so that defenders could mount their own trebuchets on top of them. In the thirteenth century, the Citadel in Cairo became the medieval equivalent of a nuclear blast shelter. Strengthened roofs defended the interior against incoming missiles. The Citadel’s outer wall was augmented by huge towers supporting trebuchets to prevent the enemy from even bringing his ‘artillery’ within range.
Not all missiles were intended to kill or destroy. It was common to try to lower the morale of the besieged by firing the severed heads of prisoners at them. There is a horrible scene of this character during the siege of Gondor in ’s novel The Lord of the Rings.
The earliest trebuchets were powered by human muscles. The missile was suspended from one end of a swinging beam, and soldiers pulled down the other end so that the missile flew up at an angle of about 45 degrees, to give it the longest trajectory. Later machines had more efficient mechanical counterweights, nicknamed ‘testicles’ by contemporaries because of their appearance.
Trebuchets unleashed tremendous power, and Chevedden warns those who do not know what they are doing against trying to construct them. and his Conquistadors tried to use one when besieging the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1521.
The first stone shot vertically up in the air, only to crash down on the heads of its own builders. ‘Would-be replicators should take careful note.’
Explosion of Ancestors
We can all now boast of a pedigree very much higher - or at least very much more distant. Biologists at Berkeley, California, have concluded that all human beings now alive are descended from one female who lived in Africa some 200,000 years ago.
Many people have found this assertion hard to believe. It might seem at first sight to be arithmetical nonsense. The number of one’s ancestors increases as we go back in time. How, then, can we presume to trace our lineage to a single individual who lived nearly 7,000 generations ago?
Consider this argument closely. As everyone has two parents, we can, by allowing about 30 years for a generation, calculate the number of ancestors we had in any given year. We simply divide the number of intervening years by 30, and raise 2 to the power of the answer to that sum. For example, the accession of Queen in 1837 was about five generations ago. The number of great-great-great grandparents of each of us alive today was thus 2 raised to the fifth power, or 32.
The calculation continues to work reasonably well as we go back in history. At the time of King ’s accession in 1760, each of us had some 256 living ancestors, and back in 1588, when the Spanish Armada was defeated, there were a full 8,192 of them. All well so far, but at a certain point the calculation breaks down.
At the time of the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, each of us ought to have had more than half a million ancestors – more than 10 per cent of the British population - and at the Norman Conquest in 1066 no less than 2,000 million each, which would have vastly exceeded the population of the world at that time!
How could this be? I would suggest that most of these far-off ancestors were the same person. In the early fifteenth century people started almost inevitably to marry their cousins, simply because social strictures and high mortality rates meant that there was no one else to marry.
Even allowing for the terrible ravages of the Black Death, as we look backwards in time our lines of ancestry start to merge. The result is that a full family tree of the human race would be shaped like a tadpole with an exceedingly long tail.
The number of descendants of that remote African ancestor at the tip of the tail who lived 200,000 years ago would at first have grown exceedingly slowly, because of their precarious existence. Hence the long tail.
Then, at the beginning of the Roman Empire, 2,000 years ago, the tail would have greatly thickened. Protected within empires, most people had the prospect of living out their natural lifespans. In later centuries, the multiplication of descendants was as great as that of our own immediate ancestors. Thus the bulging head of the tadpole.
Napoleon as Archaeologist
n campaigns of conquest, the minds of most armies have been on two things - looting and rape. But one exception was Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt. As his soldiers rounded a bend in the Nile and saw the temples of Karnak and Luxor amid the ruins of Thebes, a witness tells us, ‘the whole army, suddenly and with one accord, stood in amazement and clapped their hands with delight.’
The Egyptian campaign, which began when Napoleon routed the country’s despotic Mameluke rulers at the Battle of the Pyramids in 1798, was one of the most important events in the history of science, according to an article in Scientific American. The 151 scientists, engineers, doctors and scholars that he brought with him to Egypt - but whom he left behind the following year when he hurried back to Paris to seize power and become First Consul - compiled a mass of information about that country which, for an occupying power, has never been surpassed, says its author, Charles Gillispie, of Princeton University.
Their combined findings, printed between 1809 and 1828 under the title The Description of Egypt, were so detailed that they needed a specially designed piece of mahogany furniture to house them (a copy may be seen at the British Library).
They comprised more than 7,000 pages of memoirs, commentaries and maps - and 3 accompanying atlases with records of structures and inscriptions that no longer exist -in 10 folio volumes of plates and 2 atlases containing 837 copper engravings, of which 50 are in colour.
Until Napoleon’s arrival, almost nothing was known of Upper Egypt beyond the odd traveller’s tale. Its mighty monuments had been abandoned to the sands since the Roman conquest two millennia before. But the French brought Egypt back to life. An example of their work is a magnificent drawing of the south gate of Karnak, drawn as they imagined it originally stood. Resembling a se
t from ’s opera , with a victorious Theban king passing through the triumphal arch preceded by his soldiers and followed by his prisoners, it was to inspire Napoleon to build the Arc de Triomphe in .
His scientists were the founders of the science of ‘Egyptology’. The language of ancient Egypt used on pharaonic structures was at that time indecipherable. One way to crack a code is to find the same word encrypted in different parts of it. By 1822, had identified the word ‘’ in the three scripts -hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek - that appear on the Rosetta Stone.
A few decades later, this breakthrough enabled scholars to translate entire texts. The French had meanwhile reluctantly handed over the Stone to the British in 1803, after copying the inscriptions. Ironically, the British had spurred the French cultural mission when destroyed their fleet in the Battle of the Nile, isolating their army in Egypt.
The French scholars made many other important discoveries. After the army had been tormented during a gruelling desert march by the sight of non-existent lakes, identified the true nature of mirages. Jules-Cesar Lelorgne de Savigny disposed of the Biblically inspired myth that Egypt was in constant danger of invasion by venomous flying snakes, symbols of evil, that were kept in check by white ibis birds who preyed on them. The truth, declared in his 1805 Natural and Mythological History of the Ibis, was that the ibis does not eat flying snakes, which did not exist anyway.
Egypt had long been popularly considered the domain of peculiar animals. An example is ’s use of the obscure word ‘asp’ to describe the snake that killed , when he could just as accurately have said ‘cobra’.
collected more than 1,500 specimens of Egyptian animals and, in doing so, invented the science of ‘homology’. This was to be a vital plank in ’s theory of evolution, which shows that animals can have organs with the same origin but not necessarily the same function, like the arms of a human and the wings of a bat.
None of this was accidental. Napoleon, uniquely in this campaign, deliberately set out to extend European science to Egypt. He was obsessed by the importance of the East.
The physicist , who accompanied him to Egypt, said: ‘He was aware of the influence that the conquest would have on the future relationship between Europe and Asia. His objectives would have been unattainable without the application of science and the technical arts.’
Napoleon’s conduct on this occasion was in stark contrast to that of other colonial powers - an extreme example of which was the Belgians’ neglect of their African territories which collapsed into ruin when their masters abandoned them.
The Gerontocrats
The rev’rend grey-beards rav’d and storm’d,
That beardless ladies
Should think they better were inform’d
Than their auld daddies.
, Epistle to
Constant medical improvements are threatening to bring about a crisis that may impoverish us all. People are living to much greater ages. But while their bodies are less affected by time, nothing has yet been invented that will prevent the decay of their minds.
We seem increasingly destined, like China today and the Soviet Union under , to be governed by what called ‘gerontocracies’, the rule of the old and mentally infirm. The statistics are explicit. The number of Europeans aged 65 and over has nearly doubled in the last three decades, from 47 million to 93 million. By 2025, according to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), a quarter of all Europeans could be above 65, and in Japan, where people live longer than anywhere else (men to 75.6 years and women to 81.4), new records are continually being set. Even in the United States, the average age has risen to a record: 32.3.
Decades of propaganda against the imagined perils of overpopulation have produced a growing demographic disaster. Birth rates have fallen - as the propagandists wanted them to fall - but this fall is combining with better medicine for the old to produce a population increasingly dominated by physically healthy but mentally deficient old people.
The worst prospect is that they will increasingly predominate in governments. Judging from past precedents, this trend could prove catastrophic. Thousands of years before ’s warning that ‘old men are testy, and will have their way’, people were falling into the dangerous habit of submitting themselves to Councils of Elders and similarly named gerontocrats.
Sparta, once the most vigorous and promising civilization of the ancient world, was ruined by its Gerousia, its governing body of 23 members, none of whom was permitted to be younger than 60. The Gerousia enjoyed absolute power, even over their own kings. They could condemn anyone to death without trial, and they boasted of their power to veto all ‘crooked’ decisions of the people. had this to say of Sparta after it had won the Peloponnesian War, only to let itself be destroyed by the corruption and senile petulance of the Gerousia:
‘Suppose the city of Sparta to be deserted and nothing left but the temples and the ground plan. Distant ages would be very unwilling to believe that its power was at all equal to its fame. Their city has no splendid temples or other edifices. It rather resembles a group of villages and would therefore make a poor show.’
It was shortly before this that the ancient world was besieged by a dynasty of aged tyrants, the Persian kings. The last of these, Xerxes, ordered the sea to be given a thousand lashes as a punishment for drowning his soldiers. ‘Treacherous water!’ he exclaimed. ‘Xerxes the king will cross you, with or without your permission!’ - for age and despotism combined find it hard to endure opposition from any source, even an inanimate object.
One is similarly reminded of King of Prussia in his dotage, of whom says:
‘The habit of exercising arbitrary power had made him frightfully savage. His rage constantly vented itself in curses and blows. When His Majesty took a walk, every human being fled before him as if a wild beast had broken loose from a menagerie. If he met a lady in the street, he gave her a kick, and told her to go home and mind her brats. If he saw a clergyman, he admonished the reverend gentleman to betake himself to study and prayer, and he enforced this pious advice with a sound caning.’
The deterioration of the mind in old age may be likened to a computer whose chips are continually failing and not being replaced. At the prime of life, all parts of the brain are interconnected by about 10,000 million neurons, or nerve cells. The electronic pathways of a computer are sequential, which explains both its lightning speed and dumb stupidity. But the brain’s equivalents, neurons, being interconnected, give it far more brilliance and versatility although with much slower reasoning power. In old age, as the neurons die, the brain functions with progressively reduced efficiency. Steps in reasoning are omitted because the necessary neurons are no longer alive.
Thus, in the words of the Encyclopedia Britannica, old people ‘may become self-centred, emotionally unstable, set in their ways, and suspicious of friends and family’. This has nothing to do with disease (although disease or debauchery will aggravate the condition), but results from the natural decay of tissue with time.
The loss of mental vigour can have spectacular consequences. One of the least expected was Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz in 1805, fighting an allied army nearly a third larger than his own. Few historians have come up with the simplest explanation of this brilliant exploit: the average age of Napoleon and his eight subordinate commanders was 39, while their principal opponent, the Russian general Kutusov, was 60.
Many works of creative genius are thus accomplished in early youth. was only 23 when he discovered the 3 laws of gravitation. The Black Prince won the Battle of Crecy at the age of 16. had mastered Greek by the time he was 5, and wrote his first symphony at the age of 8.
By contrast, , aged 84 and in a state of mind which Queen called ‘wild and incomprehensible’, mishandled the Irish Question with consequences that linger to this day. The Ayatollah Khomeini reduced his country from prosperity to ruin. ruled Russia for 6 years after a stroke at the age of 70 which rendered him ‘clinically dead’. ‘Mani
pulated by his corrupt entourage,’ said a historian, ‘he could no longer understand what was going on.’
But there are noble exceptions. It will never be forgotten how Ronald Reagan, at the age of 72, in a few semi-coherent remarks known as the ‘Star Wars speech’, helped to bring about the collapse of the communist empire.
Gerontocracy is the commonest form of government in history. For tens of thousands of years before there were monarchies and republics, it is believed that our ancestors were invariably governed by the elders of the tribe. They stood as guardians of tradition, and their years commanded prestige and authority - from which it was often falsely concluded that their wisdom could be equally relied on.
The slowness of technological progress in the 100,000 years between the coming of Homo Sapiens and the start of civilization may have been partly caused by gerontocracy. Today, it seems a greater threat even than overpopulation. It can be fought only by opposing foolish measures aimed at reducing birth rates.
Nostradamus was a Journalist - not a Prophet
As the millennium approaches, there will be an ever-increasing number of baseless panics. ‘From now on, every time there is an earthquake, a flood or a war, mystical scare-mongers will attribute it to the approach of the Second Coming or some supernatural catastrophe,’ said James ‘the Amazing’ Randi, the conjuror and debunker of mysticism.*
*See his excellent book, The Mask of Nostradamus (1995)
‘Let us hope that none of the panic takes the form of mass destruction of property, like the neglecting and burning of crops which in preceded the first millennium in ad 1000.’
The man who was unwittingly most responsible for this hysteria was the sixteenth-century physician, astrologer and gossip , more generally known as . He spent much of his life writing down large numbers of ‘centuries’, or mysterious verses which, it is now claimed, predicted in detail such events as the Great Fire of London, the French Revolution, the rise of , Watergate, the destruction wreaked by the latest hurricane, and now the imminent end of the world.