Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History
Page 57
Today there are Muslim communities throughout the world, forming the majority population in most of the Middle East and North Africa, and also in southeast Asian nations.
Nero couldn’t have fiddled while Rome burned. They hadn’t invented fiddles yet.
FINALLY, THE LAST CRUSADES
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Some people never learn.
After the mugging of Constantinople—also known as the Fourth Crusade—by so-called Christian armies, you’d think there’d be nowhere to go but up for the next round of Crusades. Let’s see:
THE FIFTH CRUSADE
By this time the concept of the Crusades—the fire in men’s bellies to do battle with the infidel—was starting to get old. Nonetheless, plans were drawn up for a return engagement. By the autumn of 1217 a large army of crusaders (about 15,000 knights and 50,000 foot soldiers) had gathered in Acre on the Palestinian coast. Too many, in fact: a poor harvest year had led to a famine, and there just wasn’t enough food to go around.
KEEPING THE CRUSADERS BUSY
Meanwhile, a council-of-war met and decided to invade Egypt. While they waited for additional forces to arrive, the leaders of the Crusade decided to launch a series of small-scale expeditions to keep the enemy—and doubtless the troops in Acre—occupied. One expedition of not more than 500 men was sent to attack Muslim outlaws in the countryside. The whole expedition—which set out just before Christmas—was ambushed and destroyed.
So between the stalemate on the battlefield, the shortage of food, and the presence of the so-called commander of the campaign (an incompetent by the name of Cardinal Pelagius), the Christian army was in a very lousy mood. Knights were continually abandoning the battlefield and returning home to manage their own affairs. Because they were free agents, no one could force them to stay, so they pretty much left when they felt like it.
WHO SAYS THERE’S NO FREE LUNCH?
Finally, in 1221, after a long-awaited showdown with the Muslim forces that produced a smattering of small wins for the crusaders, the cardinal was forced to ask for terms of surrender. The terms turned out to be surprisingly lenient: the army would be allowed to go free, and since most of the Christians’ supplies were gone, the Muslim commander offered to feed them. So the crusaders left the Holy Land, having accomplished nothing in their long months of fighting, unless you count that free meal, of course.
The Bank of England was founded by a Scotsman, and the Bank of Scotland by an Englishman.
THE SIXTH CRUSADE
On the very day in July 1215 that he was crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II announced his intention to lead Christendom on a new Crusade to rescue the Holy Land from the infidels. He was a man of great intelligence and imagination, a Renaissance man long before the Renaissance came into existence. But he was also cold, cruel, selfish, and unrelenting in the pursuit of those he regarded as his enemies. Although he claimed to be the viceroy of Christ, charged to bring heaven to Earth, he had very little genuine religious feeling. Just the guy, in other words, to lead the next crusade.
SO WHAT, YOUR HOLINESS
It took him 13 years to carry out his promise. He delayed and tarried until the pope, who was infuriated, accused Frederick—among a lot of other charges—of carrying on secret negotiations with the infidels (which happened to be true). The pope excommunicated Frederick, that is, kicked him out of the Church. The exalted emperor of the Romans couldn’t have cared less.
NOT ENOUGH KNIGHTS
At last, on September 3, 1228, Frederick set sail for the Holy Land. The emperor’s fleet, 70 ships strong, sailed into Acre on the Palestinian coast, where he put together an army of about 6,000 knights and 8,000 foot soldiers. This was a pathetically small force when compared with the army of al-Kamil, the Sultan of Egypt, with whom Fredrick had been conducting some negotiations.
WHO NEEDS KNIGHTS?
The two leaders signed an agreement in February 1229. It gave Frederick nearly everything he wanted: Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth, and a number of key villages were restored to the Christians. There would be a complete exchange of prisoners. And all Frederick had to do was renounce all efforts to conquer Egypt. The truce itself would last for 10 years, 5 months, and 40 days. So Frederick had managed to do what no other crusading prince or king had managed to do before him: conquer the Holy Land without firing a single shot—er, arrow.
Socrates never wrote down a single word of his teachings.
THE SEVENTH AND EIGHTH CRUSADES
King Louis IX of France, leader of both the Seventh (1248–1254) and Eighth (1270) Crusades, was a pious and dignified sovereign. But he also wanted to be remembered as a great warrior and liberator of the rest of the Holy Land. Unfortunately, neither Louis nor his brother Robert, the Count of Artois (who fancied himself the brilliant military strategist of the family), could figure out a decent strategy for reaching their military objectives. Oh, well.
Partly because they didn’t have an accurate map of the region they were invading, the brothers had no idea how to find the chief target of the Seventh Crusade: Cairo. And even worse, in their battle plans there was no element of surprise, no feints, no cunning. The army simply marched south through Egypt, while Egyptian spies reported their every movement. And as if Louis didn’t have enough problems, there was a bit of an obstacle between his forces and Cairo—the entire Egyptian army.
To reach Cairo, Louis’ forces would first have to take the Muslim stronghold of Mansourah, where most of the Egyptians were garrisoned. At Mansourah, Louis was completely outmaneuvered and his army suffered a terrible defeat. Almost 50,000 of his troops were either butchered on the battlefield or died of famine and disease (everything from typhoid and dysentery to scurvy).
AN ANTI-HERO’S WELCOME
Louis went home, but he’d left nearly all his popularity points back in Mansourah. Most of Europe was beginning to think the whole business of the Crusades was senseless and futile. And most of France had developed a strong dislike for their king. But Louis wasn’t about to let a little grumbling keep him from launching another Holy War. By early spring of 1270, everything was ready. After a riot among the troops (who probably knew that they were marching to their deaths anyway), the crusaders finally set sail.
SICK OF THE CRUSADES
But instead of heading for the Holy Land, the leaders of the Crusade decided to attack Tunis in North Africa. On the way, Louis’ 10,000-man army was incapacitated by an epidemic. Louis himself caught a serious case of dysentery, so the task of leading the army fell to his son, Philippe le Hardi. Philippe was anything but hardy: he got sick, too. So the task fell to King Louis’ younger brother, Charles of Anjou.
Sir Francis Drake first landed in California on June 17, 1579.
CROCODILE TEARS
Charles was a violently ambitious man who had the ability to fake deep religious emotion. After hurrying to the bedside of the now-deceased King Louis, he fell to his knees, prayed, wept, and then started giving orders. His first order was to fake an attack on Carthage, which put him in a nice position to negotiate with the Muslims. They paid Charles 210,000 ounces of gold to call off the siege.
Charles also signed a treaty in October 1270 by which Christians were permitted to live, work, trade, and worship in Tunis. If you can’t beat em. . . don’t join em, just cut a deal.
EPILOGUE
The crusades fizzled out over the next two decades. When the year 1291 dawned, only Jerusalem and Acre (and a few minor towns and villages along the Palestinian coast) remained in Christian hands. Muslim forces overran the key stronghold of Acre in May of that year. All the remaining Christian cities and fortresses along the seacoast surrendered without a fight.
Quite a few Christians managed to escape to Cyprus, but a lot more were captured, killed, or sold into slavery. One hundred and ninety-five years after the First Crusade, the dream of a Christian kingdom in the East had evaporated. And good riddance.
ST. LOUIS IN THE NEW WORLD
Besides
leading the Seventh and Eighth Crusades, King Louis IX was well known for protecting the French clergy from secular leaders and for strictly enforcing laws against blasphemy. After going to war against England in 1242, he actually made restitution to the innocent people whose property had been destroyed. He established the Sorbonne University and three monasteries. Pope Boniface VIII canonized him in 1297, and he became the patron saint of France. Little-known fact: he’s the Louis in St. Louis, Missouri. That city on the Mississippi was founded by the French.
Despite their good-guy image, Canada’s Mounties were caught illegally spying on people.
BEFORE THEY WERE NAZIS
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When Hitler assembled henchmen to help him run the Third Reich, he picked an assortment of losers and failures who represented the bottom rungs of German society.
JOSEF PAUL GOEBBELS Propaganda Master Although Goebbels’ propaganda machine praised the perfect Nordic physique, Goebbels himself had a physical disability, a clubfoot so badly twisted that it kept him out of World War I. Goebbels’ Nazi career can be seen as desperate overcompensation for this physical shortcoming. Yet, in university, Goebbels’ favorite professors were Jews and he was once engaged to a Jewish woman. After graduating he tried (unsuccessfully) to make a living as a writer before drifting into the Nazi party’s left wing.
HEINRICH HIMMLER Head of Nazi Police
After serving at the tail end of World War I, Himmler got a diploma in agriculture and tried his hand at chicken farming. He was a total failure. Chinless and bespectacled, he worked as a salesman for a fertilizer manufacturer, but it wasn’t until he joined the Nazis that he found his true calling in life as a thug. In 1929, he became head of Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the SS, which he turned from a 200-man body into a 52,000-strong army by 1933.
ADOLF EICHMANN Chief Executioner
As a boy, Eichmann’s complexion earned him the nickname “Little Jew.” Unable to finish his engineering studies, he worked as an ordinary laborer in a mining company run by his father. He was later a salesman for an electrical construction company before becoming a traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company. He became a Nazi filing clerk, specializing in Freemasons.
HERMANN GOERING Hitler’s #2
As a well-bred war hero, Goering was the closest the Nazis came to respectability. He once even succeeded the Red Baron as leader of his squadron of flying aces. Nevertheless, his personal life was marred by scandal; he lured a Swedish baroness to divorce her husband and marry him instead. And after the Munich Putsch, Goering was badly injured in “the groin” and became addicted to the morphine he used to relieve the pain. He eventually became monstrously obese, too.
The winged hat worn by the Greek god Hermes is called a “pelasos.”
MARTIN BORMANN Hitler’s secretary
Bormann has one of the flimsiest resumes of any of the Nazis. A school dropout who worked briefly as a farm laborer, Bormann very briefly served in an artillery regiment during World War I, then went straight into far-right politics. Or, more exactly, far-right violence. He joined a group of disgruntled former soldiers who spent their time attacking Communists. He even helped murder his former elementary school teacher and served a year in prison. Ultimately, though, Bormann was a born master of office politics, scheming his way to the top of the Nazi pile.
RUDOLF HESS Deputy Fuhrer
Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Hess didn’t actually live in Germany until he was 14. Whereas most Nazis started their careers as losers and achieved some sort of career satisfaction by successfully wreaking havoc, Hess’s career went the other way. His reputation was cemented when he went to prison, voluntarily, to be with his Führer. As Hess’s largely ceremonial powers began to recede, he hoped to curry favor with a strange peace mission to Scotland that ended with his being locked in the Tower of London.
REINHARD HEYDRICH Final Solutionist
Despite rumors of Jewish ancestry, Heydrich epitomized the blond-and-blue-eyed Nordic ideal. He was also handsome enough to attract a string of sexual partners, for one of whom he seems to have thrown away a naval career. Although he was an award-winning fencer, he was also tall and gangly, and fellow Navy comrades teased him over his high, bleating voice and musical affectations. Heydrich’s career came to an abrupt end when he walked into a Czechoslovakian ambush in 1942.
“Evil is unspectacular and always human
And shares our bed and eats at our own table.”
W. H. Auden
The shortest war in American history was the Spanish-American war. It lasted 5 months.
DEAR DEPARTED: BURIAL CUSTOMS AND CURIOSITIES
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Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
If the coyotes don’t get you, the worms must.—Anonymous
From the moment we’re born, we begin the journey toward death. With luck, the period in between is long and prosperous. But down through the years, some cultures developed downright odd ways to dispose of the deceased.
NO FRILLS FUNERAL RITES
Burial, along with entombment was, and still is, the most common practice. It costs a bit more than when the Neanderthals painted their dead with red ocher, stuck ‘em in the ground, and tossed-some flowers and animal bits on top. It was pretty pricey for the Egyptians, if you look at the size of those pyramids. Of course, the catacombs under Rome were gratis; all you had to do was weep, gnash your teeth, and leave the dead in some hole in the wall.
LAYERING THE DEAD TO REST
In more civilized times, multiple burials were allowed in a single or double plot, providing the first occupants were not only kept deep in their loved one’s hearts, but very deep in the ground. The next one to be added was often placed a few inches above the first coffin/casket, and the layering continued as long as the last man in was six feet under.
THE GREAT OUTDOORS
Some cultures chose exposure over burial, sometimes by necessity. (It would be hard to dig six feet down into the Artic tundra.) Remains were often left in, or on, trees or platforms. Vultures or other scavenging birds took care of the rest. It was simple, and nobody made any “bones” about the arrangements. Native Americans practiced it, and the Parsis of India still raise their dead on “towers of silence” to avoid contaminating earth, water, or fire.
There are 56 signatures on the Declaration of Independence.
UPS AND DOWNS
The ancient civilization at Catal Huyuk (circa 4,000 B.C.), in what’s now southern Turkey, took the practice to new heights. . . and depths. When only the bones were left, they were buried without exceptional fanfare, a foot deep under the floors of the houses where the dead had lived, accompanied occasionally by a favorite tool or bit of jewelry.
MAKING ASHES OF THEMSELVES
The home fires were burning, quite literally, thousands of years ago. Between 1400 B.C. and A.D. 200, cremation was the preferred method of disposal, with Romans among others.
Depending on the country of “departure,” the ashes have been scattered in a river, buried sedately in an urn. . . or used to fill an hourglass (as one person requested, “So he might still be of some use.”).
A variation on the “up in smoke” theme, the Indian practice of “suttee,” where wives ritually threw themselves on their hubby’s funeral flames, was thankfully abolished by the British in 1829.
SERVING MAN FOR CENTURIES
Less known and least talked about (especially when you’re having your mother-in-law for dinner) was the practice of cannibalism, reported as early as Neolithic times, and on into the era of Greek historian Herodotus, and Venetian man of the world, Marco Polo. Sometimes it was disposal of the naturally dead, while at others it was the result of tribal squabbles, whereby the loser was lunch, in the hopes that the victor would then consume. . . er, assume the departed’s strengths and powers.
GOING OUT IN STYLE
Although generally credited to the upstart Egyptians, embalming the dead was practiced long before their time. As much as 5,000 years before
, the Chinchoros, a fishing tribe from the north coast of Chile, were disassembling corpses, treating internal organs to prevent decay, then reassembling the body, filling it with fiber or feathers, and sometimes using wooden rods to support the spine and limbs. The reconstructed body was then coated in clay on which they painted or carved designs.
There have been 262 Popes since St. Peter.
TUT, TUT
But the Egyptians really knew how to throw a party for the departed. Anyone who’s seen accounts of the opening of King Tut’s tomb in 1923, knows that when the boy king died in 1349 B.C. at age 19, he was buried with treasures beyond imagination. All for his use in the afterlife.