The Eldgja volcanic fissure, Iceland. Video from 2009.
"A team of scientists and medieval historians, led by the University of Cambridge, has used information contained within ice cores and tree rings to accurately date a massive volcanic eruption, which took place soon after the island was first settled." Source: Archaeology News Network (March 2018).
"Having dated the eruption, the researchers found that Iceland's most celebrated medieval poem, which describes the end of the pagan gods and the coming of a new, singular god, describes the eruption and uses memories of it to stimulate the Christianisation of Iceland. The results are reported in the journal Climatic Change."
Note: This was the Eldgja eruption of 939 AD, "the largest flood basalt in historic time," according to Wikipedia. As a result of the eruption, the summer of 940 was "one of the coolest summers in 1500 years." The eruption is apparently described in the "apocalyptic Vǫluspá (‘the prophecy of the seeress’)," the "first and best known poem in the Poetic Edda." (Wikipedia)
According to the Climactic Change paper (link above), the poem "contains literary references to the Eldgjá eruption and that these assume wider significance in the context of Iceland’s conversion to Christianity. The poem describes how the revered pagan god Odin raises a prophetess from the dead. She foretells the end of the pagan pantheon and the coming of a new (and singular) god in a series of portents, one being the rearing of a monstrous wolf that will swallow the Sun. The descriptions, found notably in stanzas 41 and 57, are strongly suggestive of an eruption of the magnitude, duration and likely impacts of the Eldgjá eruption..."
"An architecture firm has proposed replacing the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral with a swimming pool, as France prepares to launch an international competition to restore the fire-damaged gothic edifice to its former glory." Source: The Guardian.
"After the roof and spire of Notre Dame were damaged in a fire watched worldwide in April, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said he was open to a 'contemporary gesture' in rebuilding it 'more beautiful than before', and the prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, called for a new spire 'adapted to the techniques and the challenges of our era'".
Translation: Architecture firms trying to land a lucrative contract have submitted various proposals for ways to destroy what's left of Notre Dame Cathedral. The idiotic and hugely unpopular French president has said that he's open to turning this historical landmark into a postmodern monstrosity.
I have to admit that the trollish suggestion about turning the cathedral into a car park made me laugh out loud. Meanwhile, let's hope that the Yellow Vests can drive Macron and his flunkies out of power before they can do to France what these architecture firms want to do to the cathedral. Unfortunately, it looks like the protests are running out of steam:
"The now all-too-familiar figure of the ‘witch’ – that frightening old hag with warts on her nose and curses at her fingertips – didn’t appear until the 15th century. Despite being dubbed ‘The Renaissance’ and ‘The Age of Discovery’, the centuries that followed [the Renaissance lasted from the 14th to the 17th century] were witness not only to ruthless witch-hunts, but also to a new belief in the reality of magic." Source: The Conversation.
"In the Middle Ages[1], the practice of magic was not yet imagined to be essentially ‘female’. In fact, according to court records from the first half of the 14th century, the majority of those tried for maleficium (meaning sorcery, or dark magic) were men. [Emphasis added] That was because the most troubling form of magic – necromancy – required not only skill, learning and preparation, but above all education, which was less readily available to women. Necromancy involved conjuring the dead and making them perform feats of transportation or illusion, or asking them to reveal the secrets of the universe. Because many books describing necromancy were Latin translations, anyone wanting to practise the craft would need a good working knowledge of Latin.
"It wasn’t until the publication of Heinrich Kramer’sMalleus Maleficarum (or, Hammer of Witches) in 1487 that the specific connection between women and satanic magic became widespread. Kramer warned that 'women’s spiritual weakness' and 'natural proclivity for evil' made them particularly susceptible to the temptations of the devil. He believed that 'all witchcraft comes from carnal lust', and that women’s 'uncontrolled' sexuality made them the likely culprits of any sinister occurrence."
Comment: Heinrich Kramer (1430 - 1505 AD) was a German churchman and inquisitor. If he was alive today, the Catholic Church would defrock him for slut-shaming and general misogyny and he would be attacked by every paper and liberal group in the western world. Ironically, the medieval inquisitor would fall victim to modern inquisitors who would probably try to burn him at the stake.
Kramer's views seem to have been considered extreme, or at least doctrinally incorrect, even during his time. According to Wikipedia, "Kramer failed in his attempt to obtain endorsement for [the Malleus Maleficarum] from the top theologians of the Inquisition at the Faculty of Cologne, and they condemned the book as recommending unethical and illegal procedures, as well as being inconsistent with Catholic doctrines of demonology."
[1] Despite popular misconceptions, the church didn't conduct witch hunts during most of the medieval period. According to Wikipedia, "[t]hroughout the medieval era mainstream Christian teaching had denied the existence of witches and witchcraft, condemning it as pagan superstition." The persecution of witches didn't really start until the Reformation and Renaissance periods:
"The prosecution of witchcraft generally became more prominent throughout the late medieval and Renaissance era, perhaps driven partly by the upheavals of the era – the Black Death, Hundred Years' War, and a gradual cooling of the climate that modern scientists call the Little Ice Age (between about the 15th and 19th centuries). Witches were sometimes blamed. Since the years of most intense witch-hunting largely coincide with the age of the Reformation [emphasis added], some historians point to the influence of the Reformation on the European witch-hunt." (Wikipedia)
According to History of York, "Eric was the son of Norwegian King Harald Fairhair [first king of Norway]. According to the colourful Icelandic sagas he began his Viking career aged 12. On one expedition he met and married a witch called Gunnhild, the daughter of the king of Denmark."
Note: "Gunnhild was widely reputed to be a völva, or witch. Prior to the death of Harald Fairhair, Erik's popular half-brother Halfdan Haraldsson the Black died mysteriously, and Gunnhild was suspected of having 'bribed a witch to give him a death-drink.'" (Wikipedia)
"The sagas paint Eric Bloodaxe as a barbarian, a murderous tyrant whose savagery was shocking even by Viking standards. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is less vivid on Eric, and records the Northumbrians selecting Eric Bloodaxe as their king in 947. " Source: English Monarchs.
"A Viking metal rod which left experts baffled for more than a century has finally been identified as a 'magic wand' used by a witch to cast spells." Source: Daily Mail (2013).
"The staff, which was found in a ninth-century grave, is curved at the end - causing it to be misidentified as a fishing hook or a spit for roasting food.
"However, archaeologists have now concluded that it was in fact a magical item belonging to a sorceress who was 'on the margins of society'."
Note: Archaeologists believe that the wand (if that's what it really is) was buried in order to "remove its magical properties-possibly to prevent the witch coming back from the dead," but this is just speculation as far as I can tell. Likewise for the idea that this woman was some kind of outsider. Maybe she came from a village that hadn't been thoroughly Christianized. Who knows? If so, she could have been an important member of a group that still followed the old ways.
"In around 1285, the Count of Holland Floris V (1254 – 1296) ordered the construction of a stone keep at a strategic location at the mouth of the river Vecht, the most important waterway to the diocese of Utrecht. In 1296, Floris V was kidnapped during a falcon hunt and later murdered by his own nobles and his castle was destroyed. From 1370, the original Muiderslot was restored and expanded with a residential wing facing the Zuiderzee. The castle was strengthened with earthen walls and bastions in 1576." Source: The Muiderslot official website (English version available - click on the tiny Union Jack flag on the top right of the page)
The original Muiderslot has a dark and violent history. Floris V apparently built the castle in order to tax, i.e., shakedown, all the trade passing through the region on the River Vecht. "In 1296," according to Castles of Medieval Times, "he was imprisoned in his own castle by Geeraerdt van Velsen because Floris V had ordered the execution of Van Velsen's brother on false charges. Floris V managed to escape from the castle but was killed while fleeing."
The English sources I've found are sketchy and contradictory, but the real story of Muiderslot seems to be a lot more convoluted and bloody than suggested above. According to Wikipedia, for instance, van Velsen killed Floris because he raped van Velsen's wife, who then committed suicide. It also sounds like van Velsen was involved in a plot to overthrow the king. The sequence of events is obscure, but at some point the king apparently executed van Velsen's brother for treason. Whatever happened, van Velsen had Floris imprisoned, but the king managed to escape -- temporarily. Van Velsen is said to have stabbed the king to death personally, only to be captured later, tortured for a couple of days, then hanged, drawn and quartered.
And so it goes: A fairly typical example of royal mayhem.
Medieval kings had more in common with Tony Soprano than with the monarchs of chivalric legend. And their nobles weren't any different. Their "authority" was based on physical violence, so it's not surprising that their lives were chronicles of blood, betrayal, intrigue and vicious crimes. The violent careers of statesmen is a natural consequence of the fact that the State is the monopoly on violence over a given territory. Nothing has really changed since then, but ancient and medieval history gives us a look at the State in its most basic form, undiluted by the myths and self-serving propaganda of modern political machines. History is made by killers. That's the bottom line.
Note: Some of the castles in Game of Thrones are more realistic than others, but the series has also used various real castles for some of its locations. According to ScreenPrism, for instance, "King’s Landing has been represented by the walled city of Dubrovnik since the show’s second season (season one utilized Malta, but King’s Landing needed to be located to a coastal city for the Blackwater battle in season two). Located on the Adriatic sea in Croatia, Dubrovnik is actually one of the Mediterranean’s most popular tourist destinations, and not just because of the series. Covered in walls and castle-like stone architecture, and full of lush natural surroundings, the city fits perfectly with the image of King’s Landing. Dubrovnik, as well as nearby island Lokrum (10 minutes off Dubrovnik’s coast by boat) also stood as the primary filming location the series’ scenes in Qarth."
"In 1997, a crypt of skeletons was unearthed during an excavation of Stirling Castle in Scotland. What was originally believed to have been part of the Governor’s Kitchens was revealed to be the ‘lost’ private chapel believed to have been built in the early 1100s. The little chapel of St. Michael fell into disuse after the grander Chapel Royal was built by James IV, perhaps as penance for plotting his father’s death. The crypt contained the skeletons of at least six males, one female, and two infants, all of whom received Christian burials." Source: Ancient Origins.
According to the BBC (2011), "[t]ests on the medieval skeletons of five people found buried at Stirling Castle have suggested they suffered 'brutally violent' deaths." Dated to "between the 13th and 15th Centuries [AD]," the people "probably died in sieges, skirmishes or battles during the Wars of [Scottish] Independence."
"There is no denying that the world Bosch shows us is a world of dreams. Can these strange visions have been due to drug-taking? Dare we assume that the painter resorted to some [phantasmagoric] drug so as to give free rein to his subconscious self and attain one of those 'abysses of the psyche' to which Henri Michaux had access under the influence of mescaline?" Source: The Alchemy Website.
The Alchemy Website suggests that Bosch may have used a "stimulant named 'witches' pomatum,' the recipe for which was apparently discovered in a "16th century book' by Professor Will Erich Peuckert of Gottingen University, who "made some, and tested it on several persons. All, after a deep sleep of twenty hours, had the same tale to tell; all had dreamed of flying, of orgies in the company of satanic creatures, of visits to the netherworld."
As far as I know there's no evidence to support this theory, but Bosch's paintings are all the evidence I need that he had personal experience with hallucinogens of some kind. Ergot is a good candidate, but so are the gruit beers of the time (1). Before hops came along, these beverages were made with a variety of herbs, some of which had psychoactive properties. Just looking at Bosch's work, I'd guess that he had tried mescaline at some point, but peyote is apparently only found in North America, primarily Mexico. A more likely candidate is the amanita muscaria mushroom (2), but this is all speculation. It's possible that Bosch just had a particularly strange imagination.
(1) I'm not sure if gruit beer was still common during Bosch's lifetime (1450-1516 AD). According to Wikipedia, "The exclusive use of gruit was gradually phased out in favor of the use of hops alone in a slow sweep across Europe occurring between the 11th century (in the south and east of the Holy Roman Empire) and the late 16th century (Great Britain)."
HBO's Game of Thrones has turned into a mind-boggling crapfest. The show was great for four or five seasons, then it caught up with the books and started to go downhill and season 7 was so execrable that I lost all interest in seeing how the series concluded. I've got to admit, though, that I haven't been able to resist following the reactions to season 8 and I might end up watching it after all, just out of morbid curiosity. After season 7, I didn't think it was possible for the show to get any worse but judging by the reviews and the clips I've seen, it looks like the showrunners have managed to reach a new low.
Season 8, Episode 3 -- the long-anticipated Battle of Winterfell - is a case in point. I haven't seen the whole episode, but what I have seen of it makes me wonder if the writers even bothered to do any research when they were planning this thing. TV and movies have budget and time constraints, granted, but there's no excuse for the stupidity on display in this horrendous battle sequence. Considering the fact that this confrontation is the culmination of eight seasons of buildup, arguably the biggest payoff in the entire series, you'd think that the showrunners might have tried to ensure that the battle actually made sense.
For example, I'm no military historian but even I know that you don't position trebuchets out in the open in front of your troops. According to Wired, just one of many sources which have pointed this out, "any able field artillery officer could tell you that heavy-caliber indirect-fire weapons need to be positioned such that they’re both protected and mutually supportive of surrounding units. But the allies [in Game of Thrones] placed their batteries of trebuchets all along the lines, between the cav squadron and the infantry units. After a single initial barrage in support of the cav attack, they abandoned those mass-casualty producing weapons entirely."
The trebuchets should have been positioned inside the castle itself. Even if I hadn't known that already, it would have taken maybe a minute or two to look it up, but apparently doing this extremely basic research was too much for the writers. Maybe there was some technical or budgetary reason why they didn't want to include a couple of scenes of trebuchets firing from inside the castle. Who knows? Even one brief scene would have done the trick, but no, they positioned them outside in front of their infantry and as a result the trebuchets only managed to get off a couple of shots before they were, predictably, overrun.
Even worse, the trebuchets weren't used at all until the Dothraki cavalry had charged straight at the enemy, an army of the undead who presumably wouldn't break in the face of a cavalry charge. Never mind that trebuchets wouldn't have the range shown in the battle -- most movies and TV shows exaggerate the effects of medieval weapons. That's forgivable, but what isn't forgivable is that the trebuchets should have been used first to break up the mass of the advancing wights before the cavalry was sent in. Shell them first, then attack. That's Basic Warfare 101.
The cavalry charge itself doesn't make any sense. The Dothraki weren't heavy cavalry anyway, so they wouldn't have been all that effective as shock troops, especially against an army of the undead, and their total annihilation in a matter of minutes was probably the only realistic thing about this moronic battle. I could go on and on about the absurdities on display here. For instance, the defenders, supposedly the greatest military minds in Westeros, left their flanks and rear completely exposed. They stationed their infantry outside the castle, in front of their fire trenches. They didn't bother to man the walls with any sizeable force until they were about to be overrun. They didn't bring in their most effective weapons, the dragons, until after the engagement had started. Etc. Etc.
Even in a fantasy world, defenders as dumb as this should have been annihilated and that's almost what happened in the episode. They would have been completely wiped out if the writers hadn't brought in a Mary Sue to save the day. The scene where Arya appears out of nowhere and kills the Night King, ending the battle, makes no sense, but in a show that now makes no sense at all that's irrelevant. The disregard for logic and even a semblance of historical accuracy in movies and TV shows has always bugged me, but the thing that really drives me crazy about this particular battle is that the showrunners spent so much time, effort and money putting it all together. Even worse, they actually seem to think that they created a masterpiece:
"[The Battle of Winterfell] took 25 days to film, requiring 500 extras, 600 crew members and 70 horses. Benioff described the difficulty of coordinating horses in battle scenes, which is why they are rarely used except in 'big budget war films'. Weiss added, 'Miguel's really outdone himself. Fully fleshed out medieval battles require a tremendous amount of resources and choreography to get them right. It feels like we're doing something fresh that you don't see on TV and movies very often.'" (Wikipedia)
That's hilarious. To be fair to director Miguel Sapochnik, he did manage to create some good (if not particularly logical or historically accurate) battle scenes in earlier episodes, but the Battle of Winterfell is an abomination even as mindless entertainment. Its only saving grace, probably, is that the episode is so dark it's hard to tell what's actually going on.
Ultimately, I don't really care. I'm not one of these fanboys who gets all wrapped up and "emotionally invested" in a TV series, so I can more or less shrug off this insipid battle in particular and the decline of Game of Thrones in general as just another example of how the corporate entertainment industry destroys everything it gets its hands on. The Battle of Winterfell really upset some fans, though. See the next video for one reaction. Warning: nonstop F-bombs.
The Dark History Of Castle Muiderslot
"In around 1285, the Count of Holland Floris V (1254 – 1296) ordered the construction of a stone keep at a strategic location at the mouth of the river Vecht, the most important waterway to the diocese of Utrecht. In 1296, Floris V was kidnapped during a falcon hunt and later murdered by his own nobles and his castle was destroyed. From 1370, the original Muiderslot was restored and expanded with a residential wing facing the Zuiderzee. The castle was strengthened with earthen walls and bastions in 1576." Source: The Muiderslot official website (English version available - click on the tiny Union Jack flag on the top right of the page)
The original Muiderslot has a dark and violent history. Floris V apparently built the castle in order to tax, i.e., shakedown, all the trade passing through the region on the River Vecht. "In 1296," according to Castles of Medieval Times, "he was imprisoned in his own castle by Geeraerdt van Velsen because Floris V had ordered the execution of Van Velsen's brother on false charges. Floris V managed to escape from the castle but was killed while fleeing."
The English sources I've found are sketchy and contradictory, but the real story of Muiderslot seems to be a lot more convoluted and bloody than suggested above. According to Wikipedia, for instance, van Velsen killed Floris because he raped van Velsen's wife, who then committed suicide. It also sounds like van Velsen was involved in a plot to overthrow the king. The sequence of events is obscure, but at some point the king apparently executed van Velsen's brother for treason. Whatever happened, van Velsen had Floris imprisoned, but the king managed to escape -- temporarily. Van Velsen is said to have stabbed the king to death personally, only to be captured later, tortured for a couple of days, then hanged, drawn and quartered.
And so it goes: A fairly typical example of royal mayhem.
Medieval kings had more in common with Tony Soprano than with the monarchs of chivalric legend. And their nobles weren't any different. Their "authority" was based on physical violence, so it's not surprising that their lives were chronicles of blood, betrayal, intrigue and vicious crimes. The violent careers of statesmen is a natural consequence of the fact that the State is the monopoly on violence over a given territory. Nothing has really changed since then, but ancient and medieval history gives us a look at the State in its most basic form, undiluted by the myths and self-serving propaganda of modern political machines. History is made by killers. That's the bottom line.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Architecture, Commentary, Culture, Medieval, Scandinavia, Videos | Permalink