Lite Strabo

Pennsylvania, land of sects

2008-05-21T16:22:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen "Witness"? Amish and Mennonites are Christian communities that reject certain aspects of modern society and, by own decision, do not follow its pace of life nor many of the habits related to technology and progressis ideas. But where did they come from, and how their particular way of understanding religion arose? And, why did they settle such deep roots in Pennsylvania (USA)?

Religious unrest in Europe

It all started in the Swiss city of Zurich, in January 1525. They were the years of the religious reformation started by Luther. In every European city, new Christian theologies, interpretations and trends arose that questioned the Roman doctrine. The priest Ulrich Zwingli, leader of the reformist movement in Zurich, had a quarrel with a group, led by Conrad Grebel, that wanted a faster, more radical reform. They called theirselves "anabptists" (re-baptizers), as they opposed children baptism for considering that unvolunteer, and claimed all baptism to be made during the adult life. However, they also defended the total separation between Church and State, and this led them to problems. The Zurich Council supported Zwingli and banished them from the city.

Faced with the bad welcome from the governors towards the new community, in 1527 the "Martyrs Synod" was held in Augsburg, where the main followers of the movement settled the theological bases for the Anabaptism. Little after its celebration, most of its participants were arrested and executed.

From this moment, Anabaptists (called thereafter Mennonites, on behalf of Menno Simons, one of its Dutch spiritual leaders) were persecuted as much by Catholics as by Lutherans, and murdered by thousands. This forced them to gather in secrecy at night, in caves or in their homes. Little by little, they closed their minds towards society, and changed their intention for evangelization to living in a humble way, "evangelizing with the example". One of its groups joined, during the 17th Century, the official Swiss State Church, and achieved a ceasement of prosecutions. Because of this, the rest of the Mennonites split. In 1693, the young Jacob Amman broke up with his community, accusing it of being tolerant with the Mennonites integrated in the Church. He eventually formed, together with some followers, the Amish community, representing since then the radical trend of Mennonite ideology.

America: freedom and fiscal exemptions? Let's go then!

During the 17th Century, the existence of Amish and Mennonites in Europe was more or less accepted, but never ceased to disturb the princes, and in fact, in some territories prosecutions lasted until 1710. These comunities roamed from country to country, subject to the tolerance of Gonvernments and the usefulness they could see in them. In effect, Mennonites were famous by their tenacity in work, their pacifism and lack of interest in politics. Thus, if they could be conveniently isolated from society, they would become useful to recover empoverished soil and plow wild lands. Governors just had to invent laws to force them not be seen from the public: they were forced to build their churches in the back streets, and were forbidden to toll the bells before the masses. Higher taxes than the rest of the population finished to cut off their influence power.

In the middle of the 17th Century, most Mennonites fled the Netherlands, were they had enjoyed a relative calm for years. Harder living conditions led them to move to Germany, in the regions of Westphalia, Saxony and Hamburg, where they joined a group of existing Quakers, also confined to those lands. Quakers were had recently appeared in puritan England, as a movement that defended a free, personal meditation about religion, and were appropiatedly persecuted by the Anglican Church.

It was among this group of discriminated Quakers and Mennonites that land owner William Penn (also a Quaker) asked for settlers for his new colony. Penn had received in 1681, thanks to his influential family, the lands of the region named Sylvania by him (later switched to Pennsylvania on his name), and he there created a territory with its own laws that guaranteed freedom of cult and an equitative tax fee. The first American colony of this kind was a Mennonite family and twelve Quaker ones, who founded Germantown, outside Philadelphia, in 1683. During the next years, 2500 Mennonites and 500 Amish reached the region, slowly moving to the western Lancaster County, of wilder and cheaper lands. A variant of Dutch and German was, and is still today in some groups, their official language.

Among these communities, new splits soon happened, contrary to their European analogues, who eventually merged into a single Mennonite Church. In America, the Old Order Mennonite eventually differentiated from other communities. Those became the typical, simple farms inhabited by long-bearded characters, reluctant to the use of technology, even using buttons, and the high education of their children. Their values have always been the feeling of belonging to a community, love for the land, and a religious education oriented to craft jobs.

Amish have been, since their appearing, exempt from military service and out of the social security system, as they believe themselves as the only ones with the right to take care of the community. This also happens in other services, almost every church has a life insurance for the community members. Mennonite Disaster Service is an American network of volunteers who act in national or local emergencies. The example of Amish Lancaster County is curious, as they created their own firemen brigade in 1885.

Dissident Mennonites

The rest of Mennonite groups (Hutterites, Mennonites of the Church of God in Christ, Brethren in Christ) , some more puritan and others more progressist, share most of their doctrine with th first, but varying some behaviours or interpretations from some Bible versicles. Probably, the oddest of these is the one that founded the Ephrata Cloister, in Lancaster County (Pennsylvania) in 1732. These descended from a pietistic branch of German Mennonites settled in Germantown, from which in 1728, the Seventh Day Dunkers had split. They only differentiated from the first in their use of Saturday as sacred rest day.

Among them, charismatic Conrad Beissel founded the hermit community of which he self-proclaimed the leader. This community tried to live as similarly as possible to the imagined life in Heaven. Living in the monastery was subject to a very harsh discipline, involving a six hour sleep per day in a wooden box, and eat a single vegetarian meal per day (although the Bible never mentions that in Heaven one must eat, it was thought that without that, the community would not last long). Life expectancy in the cloister was always quite low. Beissel was convinced that Christ would come back to the World while he would still be alive, and He would do it "as a robber in the night". So, every night, the whole monastery had to wake up from 0 AM to 2 AM to watch fir His arrival. At the leader's death in 1768, the community lost its meaning and most of its members were integrated into the Baptist Seventh Day Church, which actually was the closest to their doctrine.

Caporetto: The battle that changed Italy

2008-04-23T15:56:00.000-07:00

The dawn of October 24th, 1917, started with huge explosion sounds. A bombardment by the Austro-Hungarian artillery in the Caporetto area (Kobarid in Slovenian) starts the 12th Battle of Isonzo. The attack, lead by German special troops -"Sturmtruppen"- , quickly breaks the front and threatens to isolate the 3rd Italian Army defending it, forcing the enemy to withdraw in total disarray. The fleeing troops are overwhelmed with panic and they cannot hold a proper resistance anymore. Only at the Piave River, 100 km away from the place where the offensive started, and the last defense line before Venice, the front is finally established after the Germans and Austro-Hungarians have stretched their supply lines for too long. In only 15 days, German and Austro-Hungarian armies achieve one of the greatest victories in the war, causing more than 30,000 casualties to the Italians, and making 275,000 prisoners.

During the battle, a young German captain, Erwin Rommel, stands out when leading a 250 men company to the Mount Matajur, capturing more than 9,000 prisoners and thus receiving the greatest German medal, Pour le Mérite.

A demoralized army

The day before the battle, the Italian soldiers formed a tired, demoralized army. Since May 1915, Italy had launched up to eleven offensives at the Isonzo River (Soča in Slovenian), with minimal territorial gains at a terrible cost (around half of the 600,000 Italians fallen in combat during the Great War died at the Isonzo). The area is particularly easy to defend, because of its high cliffs and passes behind a wide water flow which usually floods.

Despite all that, the Italian High Command chose this place to launch their attacks, mainly because it offered the best chances for territorial expansion. The great losses, together with the harsh discipline imposed by the officers, the long duration of this endless war, and the unpopularity of an offensive war, made an antiwar national feeling arise in the country.

A victorious army

The Russian Revolution in February 1917, and the decision of the Russian provisional Government to continue the war with a catastrophic offensive during the summer eventually brought down the Russian army's ability to continue fighting. After that, mutinies, mass desertions and surrendering of whole units with no resistance become normal. In this context, Germany and Austria-Hungary decide moving a large amount of units to the Italian front for the great offensive.

Besides, Germans came from the Eastern front with new efficient combat techniques, called infiltration tactics. Conceived by general Oskar von Hutier to break the stalemate caused by the trench war, they pursued surprise and quickness in the attack. They started with brief, intense bombings, followed by an attack lead by "sturmtruppen", supported by aircraft, with the aim of trespassing and disorganizing the rearguard, suppressing artillery support and communication lines. Then, the bulk of the infantry forces would clean the remaining pockets of resistance. These tactics had been successfully tested in September ending the siege of Riga, but they were used in large scale for the first time in Caporetto.

After their success, they were further used in the Western front, where the Germans almost reached the total victory at the Ludendorff Offensive. These tactics eventually settled the base of the German doctrine developed during the inter-war period, resulting in the principles of the Blitzkrieg, the tactics that kept Nazi Germany undefeated during the first half of the Second World War.

Italy reacts

The first consequences of the battle of Caporetto in Italy were the replacement of field marshal Luiggi Cadorna by Armando Diaz as the army chief commander, and also the formation of a new Government, somehow unavoidable after the continues quarrels between the defenders of neutrality and those for intervention.

However, the most influent change during the following years was the transformation of public opinion about the war. Before that, the army had fought in foreign territory with the aim of obtaining territorial acquisitions. Caporetto, on the contrary, was almost completely fought inside Italian land, switching the war objective to a matter of patriotic defense. This fact, together with the extent of the Italian defeat were skilfully exploited by some public figures, such as nationalist poet Gabrielle d'Annunzio, precursor of ideals and techniques in Italian fascism, and specially Benito Mussolini, then editor in chief of Il Popolo d'Italia. They called for patriotic feelings, discipline and fight against invaders and managed to rise the spirits of more than half a million new recruits, who contributed with the necessary strength to hold Austro-Hungarian attacks at the Piave and save Italy from occupation.

One year later, taking advantage of the high visibility and leadership he had managed to reach, Mussolini founded the Fascist movement, starting the darkest stage of Italian modern History.

Artistic geniuses of Austria-Hungary

2008-04-10T13:47:00.000-07:00

Vienna, at the dawn of the 20th Century, was a huge city, capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the fourth World political and financial centre. It is the classical era of Franz Joseph and Sissi, valses and operas, and viennois luxurious palaces and eclectic buildings. However, near the antiquated atmosphere led by the decadent Habsburg aristocracy and the close-minded artistic rationalism, there was an avant-garde hive of artists in the shadows, bursting with intellectual and sensual energy. This "clandestine" generation's works, progressist and provocative, constantly clashed with the conservatism in Austro-Hungarian culture. Nowadays, our modern point of view considers this one of History's most creative movements.

Symbolism vs Realism

During the last years of the previous century, the influence of symbolist trend arrived in Austria. This style had arisen as opposition to the prevailing realism and naturalism, which had stopped making sense after the spreading of photography. Symbolism rejected the mere representation of apparency in favor of ideas, a neo-romantic, spiritual new way of thinking. Thoughts are depicted about life and death, love, divinity, nature, the seasons of the year, etc. Specially the woman's figure is generally painted, itself symbolizing both desire and death (Klimt), a sensual being that becomes nearly magic (Mucha) and finally, simply provoking (Schiele).

Surrounded by this atmosphere between academism and symbolism, by old and new generations of artists from the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, the young Gustav Klimt, son of a Bohemian immigrant, made his studies. He grew up in a poor, but close to art, family, and became an admirer of classicist painter Hans Makart. However, his experiments with allegoric motifs and his golden works in architectural decoration shaped his personal style, together with the search of the symbology transmitted by feminine sensuality.

In fact, he had trouble with the latter, when he performed the paintings called Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence for the University of Vienna in 1894. The conservative personalities in politics, arts and religion from the Empire were scandalized by the explicit sexual language in these works, openly considered as "pornographic". Klimt never accepted assignments from public institutions anymore.

The secession of Vienna

Meanwhile, in France and Britain, Art Nouveau appeared. Directly related with symbolism, but much more focused on aesthetics than concepts, one of its greatest representatives was the Czech painter and designer Alfons Mucha, born in Moravia. After his failure in Vienna, he moved to Paris, where he achieved great prestige and an unexpected commercial success, specially designing the posters for actress Sarah Bernhardt and in symbolist magazines (La plume, 1898). Even without being related to Klimt, he also pursued spirituality through sensually depicting the feminine body, while treating woman as an untouchable character from a fairy tale.

The Austrian version for this kind of arts was represented by the movement of the Sec ession of Vienna, founded by Klimt and other artists in 1897, as a copy of those in Munich and Berlin. Years later, this would eventually have more influence than the latter in Art Nouveau trends. The aim for this institution was opposing the insipid prevailing eclecticism and encourage experimentation in new materials and decorative forms that, again, broke the classic trends of that time. In fact, they built their own exhibition pavilion, designed by one of its members, architect Joseph Maria Olbrich. Other artists in the institution were architects Otto Wagner and Joseph Hoffman, and painter Koloman Moser.

For five years, the company effectively created a new style, seceded from anything else existing at that time, by using purer, more abstract shapes and motifs in their works. Besides, they managed to mix different decorative arts in a single one -architecture, painting, metal work, decoration- nearly reaching the pursued idea of "total work of art".

In 1903, three of the main artists of the movement, Klimt, Hoffman and Moser, could not coexist with a faction opposed to the fusion of decorative arts anymore -the so-called naturalists-, and founded the independent Wiener Werkstätte. This institution eventually created the most truly distinctive style of Art Nouveau, by applying beauty to practical objects, characterized by simple shapes, minimalist decoration and use of geometric patterns.

Some years before, in 1899, in his Nuda Verita, Klimt had introduced a quote from Schiller: "If you cannot please everybody with your facts and arts, then just please a few". In effect, the arts produced at the Werkstätte defended the value of being manual and unique, in opposition to industrialist tendencies from schools of Arts and Crafts all along Europe, progressively more oriented to mass production. This elitist spirit was confirmed by Hoffman, when quoting that "as it is not possible to work for all the market anymore, then let us concentrate in those that can afford it".

Clashing with the surrounding social trends had a price: Both Hoffman and Olbricht were banished, the first to Brussels, the latter to Darmstadt (Germany), where he continued taking an active part in the city's modernist school. Meanwhile, Hoffman went on pursuing the practical application of arts into everyday objects, eventually creating the bases for the future Art Deco.

New secessions. Expressionism

Together with his disciple, Egon Schiele, Klimt created the Vienna Kunsthalle (Arts Hall) in 1917, in order to attract local artists and prevent them from fleeing abroad. Klimt became very interested in the young painter, introduced him to the Wiener Werkstätte, and in 1908 he got his first exhibition. Together they experimented with new symbolist trends, more focused on dreams and darker aspects of human conscience, such as anger and loneliness. Schiele's style, however, got increasingly different from his master's, as he overlooked the aesthetics of his works in order to concentrate in the pure expression of the idea. Expressionism had arrived.

We should not forget, with more a personal style, the genial, eccentric Hungarian painter Csontváry, also in the middle between symbolism and expressionism, and his mysterious paintings full of metaphors and dramatic sentiments.

Schiele abandoned Klimt to completely focus on the new style. Same as his master, Schiele gained great reputation all over Europe despite disliking traveling, in fact he preferred installing in his studio, far from the noises of Vienna. However, he did not cease to observe the neurotic behaviors of the population in the city, decadent and closed on itself, which were described by Sigmund Freud and depicted by Schiele and his contemporaneous Oskar Kokoschka, also disciple of genial Klimt. The latter became, after the premature deaths of the master and Schiele in 1918, arguably the most intense expressionist painter during the 20th Century, whose works, declared "depraved" by the Nazis and persecuted, showed the darkest, most heart-rending aspects of the hard period he lived.

Intrigues of the Umayyad

2008-03-30T15:58:00.000-07:00

Under the rule of the Umayyad caliphs, the then young Muslim world reached its maximum expansion and the greatest levels of culture and creativity. However, it was a highly unstable empire, in which the caliph's power was continuously questioned by rebel factions. During about one hundred years, from 644 to 759, up to fifteen caliphs reigned, of which six were eventually murdered. There were three great civil wars and more than ten generalised revolts.

The family descended from Umayyad, who shared a great-great-grandfather with Muhammad, from the Hashemite family. As both families belonged to the same tribe -the Quraysh-, and close to power, they hated each other. In fact, the Umayyad were the main opposers to the new Muslim religion, until they were subdued by Muhammad and converted in 630.

The first Umayyad caliph was Uthman, elected in 644 by a community of tribal leaders (shura) according to the Quraysh tradition, as he was one of the first to be converted to Islam, with the opposition of his entire family. Nevertheless, when caliph, he started creating a dynasty, prioritizing Umayyad members to become governors. His prosperous and politically liberal reign gave place to the first intrigues, caused by tribal fights, personal enemies of the caliph and foreign powers afraid of the Islamic expansion -Uthman multiplied by three the Empire's territory-. But it was especially Ali, another disciple of the prophet, who denied the validity of shura decisions and defended Muhammad had personally designed him as successor before his death. A revolt appeared in Egypt eventually finished with the caliph's assassination in 656.

Sunnites, shiites and kharijites

Officially, Ali was proclaimed caliph by the families from Medina. However, Muawiyah, governor of Siria and Uthman's cousin, accused Ali of inspiring the murder and doing nothing to convict the murderers. After supporting, but not participating, in the rising led by Aisha, Muhammad's widow, which eventually failed, he organised his powerful Syrian army and confronted Ali in Siffin. The battle was a draw, and Ali finally bargained with Muawiyah a truce -Adroj arbitration (658)-, by which both kept their former positions. This caused a faction of Ali's followers, belonging to Hanifa and Tamin tribes, consider him a traitor and separate, named kharijites and under the motto "there is not rule but God's", defendind the caliph cannot decide the partition of power in the World. Ali could not crush all the rebels during the mutiny, and they eventually killed him three years later.

Muawiyah, already self-proclaimed caliph in 660, hurried to the capital, Kufa, with his reorganised army from Damascus, to get the throne. Ali's first-born son, Hasan, not counting with enough forces, fled to Medina and left free space to Muawiyah. His brother Husayn tried to get his rights back, but was defeated and killed in Karbala in 680. At his death in the beginning of that same year, the caliph Muawiyah had officially created the Umayyad dynasty, when forcing the noblemen to accept his son Yazid as his successor. This allowed him to consolidate caliphal power, but he also gained many enemies that continuously fought for the throne.

From this moment on, authority was always divided in the Islamic World. Opposing Muslim orthodoxy, or sunnism, the defeated followers of Husayn constituted the Shiite sect, that would be back to war several times, specially in Arabia and Irak, and was eventually a key element in the fall of the dynasty. Basically, shiites did not accept Umayyad authority, and created the Imam title instead, as spiritual leader -in order to differentiate it from the more terrenal caliph title- for Ali's heir. Centuries later, an imam died without any descendants, which made the Shiism break into several rival sub-sects.

Meanwhile, kharijites were a faction self-declared as the defender of Islamic purity. This sect, now practically disappeared, argued the caliph should not be designated in an hereditary way, but it should arise from the community. After killing Ali, they constituted an important opposition focus against the Umayyad, causing several local revolts specially among berbers of recently conquered Maghreb, in Mesopotamia, Irak and North Arabia, although Shiism became a larger problem.

Caliph at the caliph's place

Yazid died in 683 while besieging Mecca, trying to defeat Abdallah ibn Zubayr, who had supported Husayn and, at his death, proclaimed himself caliph in Arabia and Egypt. Abdallah caused great headaches to Damascus caliphs, as he had the main Islamic pilgrimage place under control. In order to compete with it, the Umayyad built the Mosque of the Rock in Jerusalem. The existence of two caliphs lasted for ten years, as one of the main Syrian tribes, the Qaysites, supported him against the Kalbites, allied to Damascus. The fight between these tribes was a long civil war, which a third faction joined, that of rebel al-Mukhtar, strong in Irak and defending the rights of another Ali's heir -Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya- without his permission.

The new Damascus caliph, al-Malik, chose to wait until both rebel factions destroyed each other, instead of attacking openly. Eventually, al-Mukhtar was defeated in Kufa by Abdallah in 687. That was the momento to attack his weakened army, that fell in Mecca five years later, after a harsh siege which destroyed the Holy Place of the Kaaba. Abdallah was beheaded, and his body exposed for potential rebels. The new sovereign of the whole Islamic world had a reign of centralization and internal peace. Thanks to the governor of Irak and personal lieutenant, al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, no revolt was succesful during those years. This allowed carrying on the conquests and reaching the maximum extension of the Empire, from Spain to India.

When great al-Malik's sons, less authoritary, reigned, rebels stroke back. When inheriting such a large and heterogeneous Empire, in which Arabs enjoyed privileges and tax exemptions over non-Arabs, union was progressively more difficult to keep. Although one of the sovereigns, Umar, tried to abolish this differentiation, the consequent tax income drop became impossible, and going back to tax raising led to general revolts, specially in Transoxiana in 734. To make things worse, the caliph Hisham was defeated all along the Empire borders (Tours, Samarkand, Akroinon, etc.) and more unhappiness caused new rebellions in a territory impossible to control: Zayd's shiites in Irak, Berbers in North Africa -Morocco and Spain were lost in 740-, kharijites in Iran, and the feuds of conflictive Syrian tribes bleeding each other. Meanwhile, decadence and palace intrigues were increasing: the family members, togethers with generals and governors, were fighting each other for the power -the drunkard, corrupt al-Walid II was murdered by his own cousin Yazid, who proved no more brilliant-.

The Abbasid executioners

The end of the Umayyad came from the hand of the Abbasids, descendants of Abbas and -far- political family of Muhammad. It is in fact believed that they were not Arabs, but converse Persians, which explains why they had the support of non-Arab citizens from Iran. Using the excuse that the Umayyad had betrayed the Islam spirit, they attracted shiites and kharijites, gathering all possible opposition -needless to say that, after the dynasty overthrown, they kept opposing the new caliphs-.

The Abbasids consolidated their power in Khurasan, North-eastern Iran, far from central power, and started an open revolt in 747. In 749, the Abbasid Abu proclaimed himself caliph in Kufa. Next year, they defeated the Umayyad in Zab, and the caliph Marwan II was persecuted and killed in Egypt. Liberating all the resentment of a century, the winners outraged the tombs of the Umayyad and killed the remaining members of the family. Only one saved, Abd al-Rahman, who fled to the border province of Cordoba, and there extended the dynasty, but that is a different story.

Science and technology in Nazi Germany

2008-03-11T08:18:00.000-07:00

That should be admitted. Germany during the years 1932 to 1945 became une of the main World centres, maybe even the main one, in scientific and technologic research. During that period, the bright German engineers created more than 300,000 patents, which, after the war, were appropiated by the Allies, who took advantage from them in further developments, that lead to many products we use nowadays.

This post is not at all a support or identification with National-socialist ideology or Hitler's regime. It just tries to show the technological advances achieved during this time and political context.

Military advances

Considering Hitler's military objective, there was a strong financial support to war oriented research. However, many of the achievements in weaponry were unused because of confrontations between different factions of the army, as well as Hitler's unstable planning abilities. Many resources were wasted in politically impressive but unrealistic projects, while little effort was made to make the new inventions practical. Despite all that, the Germans had technological advantages in the war, as they used inventions such as the first automatic rifle and the first railgun type guns.

The Messerschmitt Me 262 -called "Schwalbe", the swallow- was the first oprational jet plane in History. After a series of changes and failures, technically due to the lack of alloy able to resist the overheating due to high velocities, but also to Hitler's conviction in a quick victory and the unnecessarity of the new model, in May 1943 the prototype was ready. During the test flights, it reached nearly 900 kmph, what made Adolf Galland, chief of the Fighter Aviation, exclaim: "It looks like pushed by the angels!". However, Hitler's obsession for turning it into a bomber delayed its production in one year, and suppressing the great advantages it provided, speed and fire power against bombers. In the end, less than 300 units ever engaged in combat. Despite some punctual successes, such as the legendary actuation of the JV44 squadron, involving J. Steinhoff and Galland himself, which shot down more than one thousand planes, the jet fighter had no repercusion due to the general lack of fuel and expert pilots -it became a deadly trap for novices-. Besides, the confrontations of Göring with Galland caused it not to be built at the necessary scale. After the war, the Allies took possession of the remaining intact models, from which directly they developed the American F-86 Sabre and the Soviet MiG-1 5.

The U-boot, German submarines, were the most operative naval weapon they had during the whole war. Specially, the U-boot VII model was the most advanced model of the time, armed with five torpedo launchers while reaching 18 knots at surface. The tactics proposed by the Kriegsmarine commander Dönitz, the "wolf pack", was based in night group attacks to English convoys, which led to huge losses to the Royal Navy. Anyway, it took too long to the admiral to convince Hitler of the convenience of submarine war considerably decreased its scale. From 1943, the Allies learnt to face the U-boot by means of radar detection and torpedo launcher planes.

However, the major German innovation in submarine warfare was the U-boot XXI. This new-generation submarine, directly related to the design of the first American nuclear ones, combined novel technologies that could have made it into one of the greatest challenges for the Allied navy and decisively influence the war outcome. It included a new hydraulic reloading system, which granted a fire power six times larger than the VII type U-boot. On the other side, its sonar system allowed non-periscope-aided shooting, thus increasing its stealth. But mainly, the combination of its stylish hull design with the wide electric battery capacity, granted a higher speed when inmersed than on surface -17 knots vs 15- and a larger inmersion time, what made it specially difficult to hunt. From 1943 to 1945, 118 units were built. However, only two of them -U2511 and U3008- took part in combat missions before the end of the war, due to the large period needed to crew training in such a novel technology.

The first ballistic missile, the Vergeltungswaffe 2 ("Weapon of Revenge"), or V-2, was developed by a group of engineers led by Wernher von Braun in 1942, after a decade working on alcohol and liquid oxygen propulsion. But, even if it had all the support from Hitler, its mass production did not begin until the end of 1943. The rocket had its huge speed as an advantage, which made it virtually impossible to locate and destroy by the Allies. However, its short autonomy (little more than 300 km) and no precision, made it only useful for the indiscriminate bombings Hitler carried out in the English south coast. Until the beginning of 1945, almost 1500 rockets fell into British territory. Once the war was finished, both the USSR and the USA rushed to take the rocket specialists back to their countries. Among them, the team of Von Braun himself created the Saturn V rocket for the NASA, which -supposedly- took the man to the Moon in 1969.

V-1 should also be mentioned, developed in parallel to the V-2, and considered the first guided missile. Same as V-2, traditional defense measures used by the Allies -interceptor fighters, anti-aircraft guns, balloons, ...- proved uneffective for these new threats. The only adequate defenses were the destruction of launching bases and counterinformation activities (in which souble agent actions of the XX system, and specially the Spanish spy Juan Pujol, "Garbo", were of vital importance-.

It is also suspected that the Germans carried out nuclear tests in Thuringia in March 1945, two months earlier than the Americans. However, the classification of the documents that supposedly prove it has made it impossible to find out the degree of development they had.

Other inventions

In 1935, the engineer Fritz Pfleumer developed the K1, first magnetophonic recorder. This provided, the first concerts and political speeches in History were the German ones. Its military use was extensive, as a recording medium of both friend and intercepted transmissions. The Allies knew that the Nazis had such a device, but did not find it out until they invaded Germany in 1944. There, the American engineer Jack Mullin analyzed the device, a great invention for its time, which was commercialized by the firm Ampex and revolutionized the American media industry of the '40s and the '50s.

The first machine working with binary arithmetics, the Z3, including programming capacity, was developed in 1941 by the German engineer Konrad Zuse, and became in essence the first digital computer. Although it was destroyed in a bombing in 1944, it meant a step forward to the development, in 1948, of the famous American computer ENIAC, that added decimal arithmetics.

Infra-red devices were included in German interceptors that proved very usefil in night missions, while the Americans were starting to wonder if such a technology was possible.

In medicine, we will not point out the infamous pseudo-scientific experiments Dr Mengele carried out with concentration camp prisoners. From a more constructive side, German scientists of the time achieved the first direct relation of tobacco with lung cancer -and smoking was even banned in the Luftwaffe for several years-. They also were the inventors of methadone and modern pesticides.

4th Crusade: Christians vs Christians

2008-02-25T10:33:00.001-08:00

The Crusades, or the fact of giving a religious meaning to the fights that, all along the Middle Ages, happened between Christian and Muslim princes, led somehow to the internationalization of warfare. The first action related to the idea of Crusade was in the Spain of the "Reconquista". Alfonso VI of Castille, after his crushing defeat in Zalaca against the Almoravids, asks for help from foreign knights to defend Toledo and the Tajo basin against the continuous Muslim attacks.

The Crusades' origins come from an spontaneous feeling from pilgrims to Holy Places. They went there more and more often in armed groups, although the tolerant Arabs did not oppose any obstacle to them. This feeling was used by the pope Urban II, who preached for the first Crusade in 1095, with the aim to deviate the warlike actions of feudal lords. Besides, this way he would show a force exhibition to his weakened enemy, the Eastern Orthodox Church, as mercenaries went sent as aid for the Byzantine Empire. It had an extraordinary success, thousands of crusaders from all over Europe gathered in Constantinople and conquered Jerusalem, and military orders were found that maintained it for almost a hundred years.

However, during the following Crusades, kings played a progressively decreasing role, sometimes even opposing the pontifical rule. Italian businessmen financed the unsuccessful expeditions led by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, and later Richard Lionheart together with Frederick Barbarossa.

The 4th Crusade's financial problems

The Pope Innocent III tried to change this situation with the preaching of a 4th Crusade. While carefully avoiding the kings to assume its rule, he planeed a very organised attack into Egypt, the heart of Saladdin's empire. He hired the Venetians for the transport, logistics and reinforcement of troops, and designed the Italian Boniface of Montferrat, descendant of crusaders, as the army leader. In 1202, more than 30,000 crusaders, mostly French, promised to be ready to set sail to Cairo, something that however never happened.

Only a third of the promised soldiers appeared in Venice, and with her little more than half of the silver marks needed to pay. As the Venetians were demanding the payment for their accomplished building of the vessels, a mutual agreement had to be reached. Fainally, the doge Enrico Dandolo, a skillful diplomat and specially a very practical man, managed to attract the Crusade towards his own interests.

Despite the Pope's express ban to the crusaders to "cause atrocious acts against other Christian neighbors", the Venetians demanded as a payment to capture the city of Zara, rebel to Venice and protected by the king Emeric of Hungary and Croatia, who had previously supported the Crusade. Some of the crusaders, disappointed, returned home, while most of them faced a menace of excommunication after taking the city.

Meanwhile, the theoretical leader Boniface, aiming to take initiative back and save the Crusade, met Alexius Angelicus, brother-in-law of his cousin, and son of the Byzantine emperor Isaac, ovethrown some years before by his uncle -also Alexius- who now held the crown of Constantinople. Alexius promised financing and reinforcements for the expedition if they helped him to have the throne back. Most of the crusaders accepted, and specially did the Venetians, as the usurper had expelled their merchants when he came to power.

The nonsense

The city fell when the emperor quickly fleed, and Alexius IV was crowned in Constantinople. However, he soon found huge problems to find the gold and silver promised to his partners, despite melting large amounts of valuable objects in the city. This attack to the possessions of the population, together with the growing hate towards foreigners who occupied their city, caused many fights between Greeks and crusades in the streets and in the court.

In January 1204, a courtesan leader of the anti-Latin movement eventually strangled the emperor -the favorite manner to overthrown in Byzantium- and proclaimed himself emperor as Alexius V. The first thing he did was terminate the contract with the crusaders and expel them from the city. These assaulted it, but were driven back due to the fierce resistance of the Greek population.

The Christians' demoralization nearly made them retreat. However, the clergy that accompanied them used an effective speech, ignoring the continuous orders from the Pope Innocent to cancel that attack against Christians: this action was not God's punishment for their sins, but a test to their spirits. It was the Greeks, murderers and treacherous for killing their patron, and literally "worse than Jews", who deserved to die. The result of this was effectively the conquest of the city some days later, but followed from a sack that is considered as the History's most violent and humiliating one.

During three days, and despite the Venetians trying to keep calm, French knights went on killing the population, destroying art pieces, burned books, murdered priests and raped nuns. The Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates tells in his chronicle of the sack of Constantinople that the crusaders spent several days getting drunk in the throne room in the imperial palace, while a prostitute occupied the throne. The Pope Innocent, in his 1205 letters, writes about the shame he feels because of the crusaders' actions, and the ultimate schism between the Roman and Orthodox Churches takes place: "How could the Greek Church get back (...) to an ecclesiastic union and devotion to the Apostolic See, when it has been seen in the Latins only an example of perdition and darkness, and now, with reason, detests them more than dogs?"

After the end

The creation of the Eastern Latin Empire, divided in a series of states belonging to Venetian and French lords, was saluted as a decisive element to the success of future Crusades. Actually, treasons, banishments and murders followed one another during the half century the empire lasted, and the Latin emperor showed always unable to obtain the support of the Greek population, and resist the attacks from Turks and Bulgarians. It is, in fact, from a Greek territory, Nicaea, that Michael Paleologos eventually assures the reconquest of Constantinople in 1261 and restores the Byzantine Empire. However, the always great Eastern city never recovered, and the Empire became a degeneration of its ancient meaning until it fell in Turkish hands.

From the 13th Century, the idea of Crusade decays, as something old-fashioned. It is often used as an excuse to make war against heretics or enemies of Rome, so that its moral power finally runs out in Europe except in Cyprus, seat of the knights of Jerusalem, and Rhodes, base of the Hospitaller, who will still dream obsessed with the idea for two centuries.

The hell of Kursk

2008-02-11T11:03:00.000-08:00

The battle of Kursk was not only the greatest armored confrontation in History, but also the turning point at World War II. From this point, Hitler's Germany ceased to hold the initiative in the East and passed to defend, which would not change during the rest of the war.

Barbarossa

The invasion of Russia -operation Barbarossa, started on 22th June 1941 and planned to be a rapid conquest, before winter arrived- had gone well for the Germans in the first months of campaign. Despite the too late beginning of the campaign -Russian winter would arrive anyway- and underestimating the defensive power of the Soviet Union, the German army was far more ready and had better logistic support. The surprise factor, air support and Soviet lack of organization allowed an advance of 50 daily kilometers. In August, the Wehrmacht was almost 100 km from Leningrad, Kiev and Smolensk. But an unexpected planning changement altered the course of the invasion.

Hitler had always believed himself a militar genius, and some strategic achievements during the war -largely, taking big risks- convinced him to personally take the command of the Eastern front troops. The initial plans of the campaign were, besides conquering Leningrad, to send the Southern Army sector to take control of the rich Caucasus oil wells, and the Central one to Smolensk and directly towards Moscow, which should be occupied before the winter. However, Hitler took a dicsoncerting decision, against the opinion of the whole High Command: he made stop the advance to the capital to reinforce the Southern Army, fighting harshly in Kiev.

Hitler had in mind that the Ukrainian city had to be taken, but due to the rugged resistance from the population, the siege finally lasted until October, slowering the whole progress towards the Caucasus oil fields. The result was that, upon the winter arrival, the important access to the oil had not been achieved. At the same time, the bulk of the Central sector, the 4th Wehrmacht Army, was at the gates of Moscow, but weakened because of this unexpected reinforcement, had wasted too long time in Smolensk, and also lacking of supplies, could advance no more.

From attackers to attacked

After the Soviet re-organization, the expulsion of the nazis from Moscow, and relative stabilization of the front during the winter, in 1942 the Germans finally tried to occupy the Caucasus. However, new conflicts between Hitler and the High Command made the Operation Blue to become a clumsy advance that eventually trapped the Germans in the battle of Stalingrad, where they lost their major elite force, the 6th Army.

Field marshal Von Manstein managed though to counteract the counteroffensive from Stalingrad, and even advancing on Kharkov during March 1943. He then proposed the High Command to tend a trap that, attracting the Red Army to the rests of the German 6th Army, would make an evolving movement that would envelop the Russians at the Donets Basin. Hitler, reluctant to envolving attacks, did not approve the plan and centered in Kursk, an area entering in the straight Russian front.

The objective was too obvious: the Russians predicted the attack, and the delay to July gave them further advantage -Hitler wanted the new Panther tanks to arrive to the front-. Generals Rokossovsky and Vatutin had set up tens of deffensive belts, and had progressive retreat plans while the Germans would be advancing. The Russians knew the offensive would come from the huge amount of tanks there accumulated. When they started Operation Citadel on 5th July, more than one million antitank mines decimated the armored columns. Russian artillery and air force, after two years of campaign, were comparable in number and readiness to the German ones, and destroyed the German artillery support.

Although Panzers were still a formidable weapon supported by the Luftwaffe, they lacked the proper infantry support, and Russian soldiers were able to easily destroy them with antitank guns or simple molotov cocktails. Besides, the new models -Tiger and Panther- were very scarce and did not whos the expected results. More than half were out of operation the first day because of problems with their cooling system.

On 12th July, the Germans believed to be near the end of the Russian defensive belts. However, when entering Prokhorovka, the SS-Panzerkorps found itself in front of a whole armored division of Soviet T-34. The greatest armored combat in History (400 German tanks against 900 Soviet ones) ended up as a technical draw, but was a huge moral defeat for the Nazis, who thought to be close to victory. On 17th July, when the Wehrmacht soldiers saw all the Panzers being retired and moved to the new Sicily front, they realised that they would pass to a defensive role. Soviet counterattacks started immediately. The attackers became attacked.

History of Writing

2008-01-19T02:18:00.000-08:00

It is commonly said that the history of a civilization begins with the arrival of writing, as it is then allowed to have historical memories, communicate among population and ease the complex processes of administration and trade. Precursors of writing appeared in Prehistorical era as paintings and petroglyphs on wood and rock. Although they were used for religious rituals, some Neolithic petroglyphs were a communication tool, such as in Scandinavia, where they were used to delimit territories between tribes. Some supposedly cartographic and astronomic maps have benn found too.

Drawings, ideas and phonemes

A few millennia before Christ, the new needs of urban societies lead to the creation of writing systems more or less standardized. These systems appear independently in various places around the planet, but it is interesting to point out that all of them follow the logical evolution of human brain: starting with pictograms, or symbolic illustrations of objects as they are. These signs progressively move away from concretism and unicity typical of petroglyhps and derive in pure representations of concepts and ideas, called ideograms. Obviously, as they represent universal ideas, similar symbols are found in many non related ancient scripts -idea of man is the same everywhere, and symbols representing man do not differ much-.

Among the first logographic -i.e. composed by pictograms and ideograms- the most relevant ones are those developed in Middle East around fourth millennium before Christ. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, engraved clay tokens had always been used for accounting commercial products. This derived in Mesopotamia, around 3400 BC, to clay tablets on which numerals, and then pictograms, were engraved with triangular wedges. This is called as cuneiform script, where signs were drawings performed by complex combinations of notches. From 2900 BC, pictograms became increasingly simple and abstract, and eventually some lost their meaning and represented syllables of Sumerian language-what is called phonetic instead of logographic-. However, some writing systems as Hurrian and Hittite evolved from cuneiform in its purely logographic phase, that is why they have been very difficult, or impossible, to decipher by archaeologists. Progressively, from 6th century BC, cuneiform scripts were replaced by aramaic ones.

Egyptian writing system, dated from a similar time, was related with cuneiform, although commonly written on stone or plaster, and later on papyrus, with a more advanced and stylized technique. In Egype logogram systems are known since 3200 BS, from which appeared, one thousand years later, the famous hieroglyphs. These were systems composed by logograms, determinatives -that precised the contextual meaning- and phonemes, which were, effectively, the first alphabet in History, considering that alphabets use a sign for every sound or phoneme. Its use evolved to Meroitic, and expanded replacing logograms around Mesopotamia, where appeared during the last millennium before Christ, alphabets on cuneiform script, such as Ugaritic and Persian.

These writing systems were difficult to master, and during some centuries, only the elitist class of scribes had the knowledge to do it. All the literature in that period came out from different scribe schools, where people from high social classes entered at the service of temples or military authorities. In Mesopotamia, when cuneiform adapted to new dominant languages during Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian times, and in Egypt with the adoption of Demotic, writing was simplified and extended its use among most of the population, despite the efforts of scribes to keep their position by using cult and ancient scripts, Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyph, getting further from popular writing.

The Phoenician transcendence

Around the 11th century BC, an alphabetic form of hieroglyph, the hieratic, evolved. In Africa horn it became the Ge'ez or Ethiopic alphabet, and northwards it was adopted by Semitic language speakers to become the Phoenician alphabet, of abjad type -i.e. without specific phonemes for vowels-.

Later, together with Phoenician colonization, it turned into the main writing system in the Mediterranean, from which most current alphabets arose. In its Western variant, the Greeks adopted this alphabet and introduced vowels, from which Etruscan and Latin alphabets were directly developed. The latter only changed in format during the Middle Age -in the Carolingian Empire lower-case letters appeared-, and thanks to the spreading of Christianism and translation of the Bible, expanded around Occident. It had to compete in Eastern Europe, though, with Cyrillic, an evolution of Glagolitic, a variant of Greek established in the 9th Century by Saint Cyril. Cyrillic, invented in the 10th Century by Saint Clement of Ohrid, in Byzantium, was used in liturgies and the Bible all around the Orthodox Church territory -recently, in the 18th Century, Romania adopted back the Latin alphabet-.

In Egypt, Coptic appeared in the 1st Century BC as a transformation of ancient demotic on Greek alphabet and used by Christians in the country. Among Celtic and Germanic population, Ogham and Ru nic alphabets were spread and used before Christianization, sculpted on stone or wood, with ritual or magical aim. Other Greek derived alphabets appeared as practical solutions, to allow Bible translations adaptable to the phonetics of the language. In the 4th Century, the bishop Ulfilas created in Nicopolis the Gothic alphabet, that replaced Runic scripts and was used in Northern Europe for centuries. Armenian alphabet was invented in the beginning of the 5th century by Saint Mesrob with the same objective, similarly to the mysterious Georgian alphabet, supposedly related with Aramaic, too.

Eastern variant of Phoenician, the Aramaic, remained an abjad. From it, Hebrew directly arose in the 10th Century BC, and some centuries later, from a popular variation in lower-case letters, Arabic and Brahmi. Because of the expansion of Islam during the Middle Ages, Arabic became the official writing in the great muslim empires, from Al-Andalus to Persia. It progressively replaced other Aramaic alphabets, such as Orkhon and Sogdian in ancient Turkish territories, and Tifinagh, of Berber origin, currently used very seldom by Touaregs.

Aramaic writing arrived to India through Persian traders, and extended around the peninsula during the 3rd Century in the Asoka reign, who already used a form of Devanagari alphabet to write his edicts. Later, this family of alphabets sufferd many changes, in order to adapt the phonetics of Semitic languages to the different ones from India to Southeast of Asia -Devanagari, East Nagari, Oriya, Gujarati, Ranjana...-. Because of Buddhism, ancient Brahmi alphabet was used in practicing territories. Northwards, it derived towards Mongol, Tibetan and Phags-Pa alphabets. The latter, created at the time of Kublai Khan to adapt better to Chinese and Mongolian phonetics, eventually became a model for the king Sejong of Korea, in the 15th Century, to create a new alphabet that combined Brahmi syllabic blocks with ideograms and phonemes to replace the Chinese, not adecuate to Korean phonetics. After centuries of harsh resistance from Aristocratic classes and Confucian adepts, Hangul alphabet became official with the arrival of Korean nationalism later in the 19th Century.

Writings of the East

With a completely independent origin, Chinese calligraphy appeared. It is certainly known that around 1500 BS, during the Shang dynasty, a writing system already existed, although recent findings in central China discovered signs similar to modern Chinese in sculptures dated from the ninth millennium before Christ, which can become the World most ancient scripts. Chinese language, originally, was formed by monosyllabic words, so that every character could only define a concept -ideograms-. Currently, it is the only writing not based on a phonetical alphabet, although many of its characters show pronunciation indications. At the diversity of existing Chinese languages, during the Qin dynasty the same script was formalized for all of them, still in use nowadays.

In the 4th Century, Chinese arrived to Japan, but Chinese calligraphy was not used to write Japanese, used by illiterate, until the invention of man'yogana. This syllabic block based script, originally used to write poetry, gave phonetic value, instead of semantic, to Chinese characters, making it apt to the language. From man'yogana, current hiragana and katakana come. Ideograms or kanji are copies from Chinese, used in the beginning to define new concepts coming from China. In the Meiji era, efforts were driven to simplify the language and introduce Latin characters in imported words.

Forgotten signs

Of course, the success of these writing systems lead to the disappearance of other ones, appeared in parallel thousands of years ago, but replaced by these because of being less adecuate to language or sociopolitical reasons. Some examples are Harappan script in the Indus valley, not deciphered yet, or the Minoic-Mycenic linear system, disappeared upon the arrival of Greek alphabet.

The huge diffusion of Latin writing all around the World, after the colonization and use in Europe of better supports for it, especially paper and printing, lead to its adoption by most languages. This happened in places where there was no writing method, and also in others where some primitive sign systems existed, generally ideographic. They all were eventually displaced and disappeared. In precolonial America the most developed was Maya system, sculpted on stone or painted on ceramics, of laborious ideograms, lost after the fall of the culture. It is also believed that Incas had one, made from knotted streams, as these formed a symbol system with repetitions, not deciphered yet though. In Africa there also were indigenous writing systems, such as Nsibidi system used by the secret society of Efiks, who governed Nigeria.

Women of Africa

2007-12-30T12:12:00.000-08:00

In Sub-saharan Africa, women have always had an important role. Despite being, in general, a traditionally patriarchal society, an institutionalised part of power, that limited the king, was hold by a woman of his kin (mother, sister, aunt or cousin). The queen consort often had decision power at the same level as the king in most of the affairs, as happened in the Mali empire. Moreover, it was not rare that a woman became queen, even when there were male successors to the throne. It was characteristic that women participate in wars. In the Ashanti and Dahomey there was a corps of women that accompanied the king to military expeditions.

Anna Nzinga (1582-1663), queen of Matamba-Ndongo, dominated the history of current Angola during thirty years until her death at 82 years old, and opposed a fierce resistance to the Portuguese, who eventually respected the borders of her kingdom. The Portuguese had found in Angola an unusually fertile territory, occupied by a population highly productive and trading in agricultural products, furs and diamonds. After fighting for a century they conquered the coastal part of the country, establishing an important exporting centre of diamonds and slaves in Luanda. Being sister of the king Mani Ngola, Nzinga was sent to negotiate with the viceroy Joao Correia Da Souza, and proved so skillful that passed from a defeat situation to the achievement that Portuguese removed their troops from Matamba. In 1624 she succeeded her brother as a queen, and faced Portuguese offensives without losing any territory, she reorganized the army, formed alliances with neighboring countries (and also with Netherlands) and constituted an efficient secret police.

Amina, queen of Zazzua (1533-1610) is known as a great warrior queen from Nigeria. Amina's mother, Bakwa of Turunka, was already queen of Zazzua, a Hausa state-city, title already hold by her grandfather. Amina was educated in government and warfare skills, and fought in battles together with her brother Karama, who became king at his mother's death. When he died in 1576, Amina succeeded him when she was 43 years old. She used her strategic skills to expand the territory of Zazzua to the mouth of the Niger, and towards Kano and Katsina northwards. These conquests lead to a stage of wealth to the kingdom, with the opening of new trade routes and the arrival of new tributes. Mud walls were risen in all the cities, still known nowadays as "Amina's walls". The queen refused to marry and had no children.

In the kingdom of Waalo, in Senegal, next to the French colony of Saint-Louis, the queen Ndete Yalla managed to maintain her territory in peace during ten years and imposed a tax to French settlers when they used transport in the Senegal river, and when it ceased to be respected, immediately ordered in 1855 the expulsion of all strangers, which meant war. In the current Ivory Coast, a woman, Pokou, took the leadership of her tribe, known as Baoulé, to save them from extermination, when the Ashanti confederation of Ghana, founded by her great-uncle, broke up, in a tragic exile that later became a legend.

Some queens were not exempt from cruelty. In Madagascar, the queen Ranavalona took the power when her husband, the king Radama, died (murdered by her orders, as it is believed). She ordered Christian missionaries in the island to be executed, decreed the expulsion of all strangers in 1857, and formed a kingdom of terror in which thousands of executions were carried out per year. It is also told that, in the territory of the Dschaks, in the inner Congo, once arised a queen who, after overthrowing her mother and killing her son, formed a female kingdom in which men were enslaved, sacrificed or assassinated. Pregnant women had to flee from the land until they gave birth, only if they brought back a little girl. The subsistence of her kingdom, lacking agricultural activity, was possible for several years with the sacking of neighboring people and villages, with who they did not cease to fight.

There were prophet women, too, such as Kahina, a berber priestess from Mauritania, who became the leader of her country's army and caused the first major defeat to Arabs in 690. Kimpa Vita in Congo, in the 17th Century created a religion that mixed Catholic and African concepts, which attracted the support of a great part of Congolese aristocracy to expel strangers from the country. She was accused of sorcery when she was 24 years old and burn alive together with her child.

Apart from politics, African women have had and still have an important role in economy. African women have always been excellent in domestic resources organization, because of the traditional complete lack of interest from husbands. This has allowed women to eventually create trade networks in order to focus these organizational skills and communication talents. Nowadays, 80% of autonomous business in sub-saharan Africa are carried by women, and there exist important women trade networks such as those in Accra (Ghana) and Nairobi (Kenya). Historically, it should be noted about the life of Tinubu, in the 19th Century, a Yoruba woman who started selling corn mush and later, with the support of a group of wholesale traders, created a business of slave traffic, that she abandoned when abolition spread and started trading palm oil. She eventually became the main mediator of Euro-African trade of the area, and thanks to her growing influence, became the main advisor of the king of Lagos. After being banished from the kingdom by the British, she acquired wealth with the arms trade and became a heroine of her home city Abeokuta in the resistance against the Europeans and the neighboring kings of Dahomey.

History of a kiss

2007-12-18T07:43:00.000-08:00

One of the greatest kisses in History is the one that took place between communist leaders Erich Honecker, from East Germany, and Leonid Brezhnev, from Soviet Union, during the 30th Anniversary of the German Democratic Republic in June 1979. Despite the controversy and ridicule arisen in the West, this was actually a common sign of socialist solidarity, very used since Khrushchev era. It seems, moreover, that both leaders were very keen on kissing*. However, this kiss has a greater story.

The good kiss

Honecker had become the leader of German Socialist Party in 1971, after the fall of Walter Ulbricht in disgrace, thanks to Brezhnev support, and in 1976 had become president of the Counsel of State of the GDR, also aided by the latter.

In the new 70's spirit of the "détente", the Soviet Union achieved, in exchange of a relaxation of weapon tensions, that the United states recognised its influence area in Eastern Europe. In this political atmosphere appeared the "Brezhnev Doctrine", that imposed the right for Soviet military intervention in European socialist states. This happened, for instance, in the invasion of Prague by the Warsaw Pact in 1968, with the passivity of Western allies.

Honecker carried out a series of economic reforms in the GDR that lead the country to a so-called "consumption socialism", that resulted in an improvement of the population's standards of living. Apart from that, relationship with its Soviet colleague were a true love story. GDR and the USSR needed each other, the first became the greatest ideological defender of Communism in a time when this system was more than questioned. In turn, the Soviet Union guaranteed the Red Army intervention in case of a popular revolt similar to that in Prague, which was pretty probable considering the number of opponents to Honecker's regime. Finally, the GDR was interested in furthering all possibilities of German reunification, so the "détente" politics was very useful to follow.

Nowadays, a painted version of the "Fraternal Kiss" can be seen on the eastern side of Berlin Wall's ruins, performed by Dmitri Vrubel after the collapse. If one looks to it attentively, one can realise that this kiss is typical of a Greek tragedy, a suffocating kiss, in which lovers get too compromised on each other, despite of knowing that there is no future in that poisoned relationship. Actually, the painting is named "The Kiss of Death", and one can read under it "God, help me to survive this deadly love".

The bad kiss

Exactly, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, the romance was over. His only ambition was to save his country from economic ruin, after the disastrous conditions in which Brezhnev had left it. After presenting a series of reforms concerning restructuration (perestrokia) and openness (glasnost) he would carry out, Gorbachev announced the end of Brezhnev Doctrine: the Soviet Union had not the will to impose the political regime to any East European country anymore.

During Gorbachev's official visit to Eastern Germany, in October 1989, Honecker had the intention to ask the Soviet Union for a fundamental aid to keep order in the country, However, upon his arrival, the relationship had cooled down: the protocol kiss Gorbachev gave him was very different to that of ten years ago. This one actually meant "my friend, you are alone". Less than one year later, GDR had ceased to exist.

* A contemporaneous joke showed Brezhnev staring at the departing plane of a foreign leader, exclaiming: "As a politician, rubbish... but what a good kisser!".

The red explorer

2007-12-02T12:32:00.000-08:00

A medieval Saga tells the story of Erik, called "the Red", one of the greatest Viking explorers. The appelative "the Red" most likely refers to his hair color, and perhaps also his fiery temper. He was born in around 950 in the Jaeren district of Rogaland, Norway, but his family settled in western Iceland after his father, Thorvald Asvaldsson, was banished for murdering a man. Wandering would become a habit during his life. So, they occupied land in Hornstrandir, and dwelt at Drangar, where he became a Norse Chieftain.

Continuous banishment

After his father's death, he got married and moved south to Haukalar. There, when his servants were clearing land for farming, they accidentally started a landslide on his neighbour Valthjof's farm. A kinsman of his, called Eyjolf Saur, killed the servants for this misfortune, and in revenge, Erik killed Eyjolf. This caused him to be thrown out from the region and installed in Sudrey.

Around the year 982, tragedy accompanied him again in a quarrel with his neighbour Thorgest, because of some beams he had borrowed from Erik and was never given back. When Thorgest refused to return them, Erik stole the beams back. A great fight arose, where two sons of Thorgest died. Eventually, at the next Thorsnes Thing event, where judgments were carried out annually, the Icelanders decided to convict Erik of these murders and banished him from Iceland.

Erik the Red, considering that he was never welcomed in any land, decided to find one by himself. He had heard of a discovery of new lands in the West, around 50 years before, by the explorer Gunnbjorn, son of Ulf the Crow. He then prepared a ship and left from Snaefellsnes, promising to return if he found the land. His friends Thorbjorn, Eyjolf and Styr, and other crew, joined him in his banishment.

After three weeks, he eventually reached North American lands and rounded the southern tip of a great island, and sailed up the western coast. He found it unpeopled and, for the most part, ice-free and consequently with conditions that promised growth and future prosperity. According to the Saga, he spent his three years of exile exploring this land and naming its places.

The New World

When Erik returned to Iceland, he brought with him stories of the new land he called "Greenland". Although the high medieval climate was milder than it is today, Erik purposely gave the land a more appealing name than "Iceland" in order to lure potential settlers. He explained, "people would be attracted to go there if it had a favorable name". Ultimately he did this, though, to gain favor among people, as he knew full well that the success of any settlement in Greenland would need the support of as many people as possible.

His salesmanship proved successful, as around 600 people, especially among those living on poor land in Iceland, joined him to Greenland in the Spring of the year 985, in what was one of the greatest Arctic expeditions of all time. 25 ships left Iceland in that dangerous voyage, of which 14 arrived to Greenland. They established two colonies on the southwest coast: Vestribyggd (West, close to present-day Godthab), and Eystribyggd (East, in modern-day Julianhab). In the latter Erik built the estate Brattahlid, from where he ruled his colonies as Paramount Chieftain, a respectable title that practically gave him independence in his lands from Iceland. Although these facts are told as a legend, carbon tests performed on archeologic remains of what is thought to be Brattahlid give this date as accurate. There the first Greenlandinc Thing (parliament) was founded based on the Icelandic one. Laws were not centralized but decided by the people, and not written down, but memorized by an elected Lawspeaker. The first Christian church in the New World, Thjodhildakirkja, was also built in there by Erik's son Leif Eriksson.

In the next years more settlers arrived from Scandinavia and gradually occupied all the southwest coast of Greenland, which was actually the only area suitable for agriculture. There were around 400 farms in the territory, which reached 5000 people in its best time. During the summers, armies of men were sent to hunt above the Arctic Circle for food and other valuable commodities such as seals, ivory from tusks, and beached whales. In these expeditions they probably encountered the Inuit (Eskimo) people, who had not yet moved into eastern Greenland.

Commerce flourished with Iceland and Norway. Greenlanders exported ivory, ropes, sheep and furs. Iron and timber, not present in the island and necessary for building, were brought from Europe to chieftains, who distributed it among the surrounding farmers. Although the colonies' dependence on these goods was high, trade was very active since Greenland ivory was very appreciated in Europe, as the trade of elephant ivory had been blocked by conflicts with the Islamic world.

In 1002, a group of immigrants brought an epidemic that ravaged the colony, causing Erik's death. However, the colonies survived and rebounded again under the protection of the king of Norway. In 1126, Norvegian control grew by founding a diocese dependent on the archdiocese of Trondheim. In 1261 the population finally accepted the overlordship of the Norvegian King and started paying tributes, although it continued to have its own law.

Decline started in 1348, with the arrival of the Black Death and the Inuit attack to the Western Settlement. Since 1380, the trade with Europe gradually declined, stressed by the prohibition of all private commerce by the new Danish government of the Kalmar Union in 1397 and the loss of interest in the colonies. The population had to be excused several times from paying taxes, and archeologic findings show an increasingly empoverished diet for men and animals. In 1418, English pirates sacked the Eastern Settlement and by the end of the 15th Century, the Norse population of Greenland had disappeared. The most probable ultimate reason for the abandonment of the colonies was that climate became colder in what is called the "Little Ace Age". Moreover, the Norse never learned the Inuit techniques to adapt to cold winters, kayak navigation or ring seal hunting.

The sons of Erik

Erik's son, Leif Eriksson, also made History by becoming the first Viking to explore the lands of Vinland and Markland (present-day Newfoundland, in Canada) around the year 1000. Settlement there resulted a disaster, since the colony Leifbundir only lasted ten years. The reason was the continuous conflicts with what they called "skraelings" (literally, "ugly men"), who, in the first contact, killed Leif's brother Thorvald. Fights were usually won by Vikings, but they soon realised that establishment was impossible without a military support, and travelled back to Greenland. They returned periodically to gather timber for building, as the journey was far shorter than going to Iceland. The last known journey to Vinland dates from 1347.

Millet or silver cookies

2007-11-11T12:15:00.000-08:00

Amadou Hampâte Bâ tells in his book Mémoires that, in the French West Africa, the governor of Dakkar imposed a tax to the indigenous people in his territories, something ironically called "the price of the soul", because of being the tax to be paid for the right to life. It was through the circle commanders that taxes were collected.
"Silver cookies?"

One day in the year 1916, the governor had decided that, since then, the tax could not be paid in nature anymore, but in cash. The commander in the circle of Dori gathered the chiefs of tuareg tribes to let them know the new rule.

When the chief of Logomaten tribes was present, he told the interpreter: "Tell the chief that, by the governor's order, from now on the tax will not be collected in nature, but in currency."

The interpreter turned to the chief and expressed in the Fula language of Dori: "The commander has said that the great governor has said that from now on the tax must be paid in bouddi". It must be said that, in Fula, the word bouddi is used to designate coins of five francs, but also boiled millet cookies.

The tuareg chief, very happy, smiled and said: "Interpreter! Thank the commander, and tell him that I own a great amount of millet, and also servants that can prepare as many bouddi as he wants, enough to feed the population of Dori during months!".

The interpreter realised about the mistake: "He does not mean bouddi of millet flour, but bouddi in money." The chief, confused, asked to be shown a sample of the cookie he was demanded. The commander gave a five francs coin to the interpreter, who held it to the chief. He turned it, stared at it, weighed it, bite it... afterwards gave it back to the interpreter: "This silver cookie, where was it cooked?". After listening to the interpreter, the commander exploded: "In France! Where does he want it to come?".

"In France?", said the interpreter, surprised. "Interpreter, tell the commander to be reasonable. He is asking me to give him money cookies that have been cooked in France, being French himself. I am a tuareg from Dori, who can only make millet cookies. It should be me who asked him for money cookies from his home, and not the contrary! If the commander wants the tax to be paid in camels, oxes, lambs, goats, millet, rice, butter or slaves, then I can do it. But if he is demanding me to give him the cookies he is showing me, which are cooked in France, then he wants fight. I accept! But I warn him: the tuareg I am finds fight as one's element!".

Immediately after, he showed the right arm to the commander: "Interpreter! Tell the commander to look at my arm. It is not less white neither worse that his. Look at my nose: it is not less straight than his. I am as white as him. If we were alone, man to man, the commander would not dictate me his will, as he is not stronger neither braver than me. If he wanted, I would invite him for a personal duel at the dunes, and I would be sure to beat him. But no... the only advantage the commander has on me, which allows him to torment me with his "I want this" and "I do not want that", is because his country is stronger than mine."

Whitout saying farewell, the tuareg chief went out and jumped on his dromedary. There was never a duel between the commander and the chief, but a war between France and the tuaregs, specially the tribes of Logomaten and Oudalan. It was the great revolt of 1916.

A retirement that resulted expensive

2007-11-01T04:18:00.000-07:00

The reign of Philip IV of Spain, "the Planet King", witnessed one of the biggest urbanistic disasters in Modern History. It was the Palace of Buen Retiro ("Good Retirement"), that his minister the Count-Duke of Olivares planned in 1629 so that the decadent Court was entertained and therefore put aside of government responsibilities.

El Buen Retiro

The place started up being a terrain property of the Count-Duke close to the Monastery of Jerónimos in Madrid, later acquiring nearby lands from the marquises of Poyar and Tavera, besides donations of the city itself, becoming a terrain of 145 hectares.

The project was encharged to the architects Giovanni Battista Crescenzi and Alonso Carbonell, who designed large gardens with woodlands and entertainment areas, ponds, theatres, one colosseum, one lion's den and an exihbition of exotic birds. Since 1633 the greatest king partyies were celebrated in here, if they were dances, bullfightings, naumachias, and performance of the best playwrights of the Golden Century (Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega and Tirso de Mo lina acted there). During his reign, it was never open to the population.

But outside the reality was very different. The people of Madrid, overwhelmed with oppressive taxes to pay the endless Flanders wars and with an inflation caused by the gold from America, was in a precary situation. And the works carried out in El Retiro only caused a greater poverty, riots and critics.

Worsening the problem

The king's obsession for collecting artworks took him to buy large collections of pictures (more tan 800 in ten years) from painters in Madrid, Rome and Naples. In 1633, he asked for a palace-museum with luxury interiors able to store all these acquisitions. So it was imperative to plan a new great building, to which the king continously added endless annexes, and make it in a cheap and quick manner in order to silence critics. The palace was built in only seven years, leading the country to near economic collapse, and using low-quality materials (stone only in basements, the walls were made of bricks and forge was wooden).

Quevedo is attributed the verses "it is not a good occasion / that when so many disasters happen / you make water fountains spring / you are making retirements (Retiros) / and not loneliness". Matías de Novoa blamed Olivares for "making a ridiculous, non-profitable building and useless in all manners, of thin walls and weak basements, unfavoured by Nature and Heaven, sterile and sandy, wanting to force it to fecundity and decoration from plants helped by money, not from him or his possessions, but from the belongings of the city". The capital was full of rumours and jokes about the palace, that was called "the hen run", due to its exterior ugliness and the big bird store it housed.

From 1735 to 1764, when the new Royal Palace was built, the royal family had to live in the Palace of El Retiro, that hated it because of the walls' slimness and the low quality of the building. This was finally the cause of its end, a progressive degradation that, when the French installed there during the Independence War, provoked the complete ruin of the palace.

The palace was a good reflection of Philip IVth reign, a greatness built on mud feet. Its sad end came with its pulling down by order of Isabella II, and the requalification and sale of its lands, that had already become the centre of Madrid, in what became one of the great fishy urbanistic deals in Spain History. Today the majority of the gardens (completely reformed) remains, and also a salon for parties (Casón del Buen Retiro).

Forced labours

2007-10-21T23:45:00.000-07:00

All along History no government has ever ceased trying prisoners to generate wealth through forced labour. In fact, prisons have their origin in the accommodations for slaves, a compulsory labour force that existed since ancient times in

Egypt

, Assyria,

Greece

, Roma and Islamic caliphates. Slaves came from criminals, war prisoners and abandoned children, besides the slaves' children themselves.

In the Middle Age, the Carolingian Empire was supported by a 20% of slave population, but because of the Church's ban, this practice was abandoned between Christians. This relationship evolved from the 10th Century towards serfdom, in which the peasant was bounded to the land and the master. This system endured all around the World, with variations, from feudal lords in Europe to shogunates in Japan. In England it disappeared during the 17th Century and in France in 1789, but in Eastern Europe it remained until the mid-19th Century.

A modern serfdom form is the indenture, under which workers sign temporary contracts according to which they are only paid by accommodation and feeding. This labour practice was dominant in early colonial societies during the 17th and 18th Centuries, and is still common in developing countries, such as India and Bangladesh.

In 1452, the Pope Nicholas V issued the Bull "Dum Diversas", which allowed Christian kings to reduce Saracens, pagans and unbelievers to hereditary slavery. This fact started the massive traffic of black slaves, that remained until the abolition during the 19th Century. Thanks to the collaboration of most powerful African empires (Shongay, Benin), Europeans substituted Arabs as main African slave exporters. These slaves were mainly settled in American colonies, to work in large plantations. Even after the slavery abolition, southern states of the United States adopted the "Black Codes" that imposed forced labour and right to body punishment for blacks, remaining until 1866. Nowadays, slavery still exists in form of people traffic (specially women and children) kidnapped to practise sexual or labour slavery. There are currently more than 27 million slaves in the World.

Prisons and colonies

It is only with the appearance of the modern concept of punishment gradation that prisons are institutionalised. Before that, imprisonment was for political opponents, as common criminals were executed or sent to galleys (French king Louis XIV reduced death sentences so that he could build a well provisioned navy). With the capitalist and industrial economic development, and the consequent emigration to the cities, the authorities tried to convert the new masses of poor and unemployed in a profitable force, and buildings with penitentiary functions were made.

During the 18th Century, new humanist and utopic socialist ideas defined delinquent as a victim of the social order, and defended prisons as a means to correction with necessary long sentences, which lead to a massification of prisons. This way prisons were provided with complex vigilance systems, as these were supposed beneficial for the development of regret, same way that control over workers was an improvement in their work performance.

Because of the costly storage of so many prisoners, Britain was first to apply forced labour during the 19th Century (in mines or building of infrastructures), but not until 1853 was labour differentiated between different types of criminals depending on their crime seriousness. Colonial powers also encouraged criminals to join the army instead of being imprisoned (as Britain did during the Second World War). Or, in peace times, banishment to inhabited colonies was a frequent solution that, while colonizing new territories, moved undesirable people away from the metropolis.

Australia received 800 British prisoners as first habitants, in a date remembered today as National Day. Along the next decades, thousands of convicts moved to populate penitentiary and forced labour centres in the colonies. France created labour colonies in its South American possessions at French Guyana, infamous because of the brutal treatment to prisoners until their closure in the mid-20th Century.

Many colonies were initially conceived with production centres, during the 19th and 20th Centuries they were common in authoritarian governments that cruelly exploited the prisoners, as in Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, China, Romania and North Vietnam. Also victorious powers of the Second World War used Germans as compulsory labour force for reconstructions.

The first Nazi concentration camps were built in Germany to accommodate political opponents of the regime. Since 1942, camps were created close to factories in order to provide labour force. IG Farben established a synthetic rubber factory in Auschwitz III (Monowitz), and other camps were situated near plane and rocket factories, and coal mines. Prisoners were frequently sent in mass to the gas chambers when it was necessary to renew labour force.

Soviet Union created a huge network of Gulags (at least 476) to serve as a destination for the victims of Stalin purges. They were mainly ethnic minorities and, after the Second World War, Germans and even liberated soldiers of the Red Army. The most infamous of these camps were built in Siberia north of the Arctic Circle, in Kolyma, Norilsk and Vorkuta. In total, about 18 million people were in this type of camps, of which more than half died. Gulags were one of the pillars of Soviet industrial development, as they were assigned tasks of natural resource exploitation and infrastructure building in remote areas of the country.

A lucrative business

The United States have started to privatise imprisonment services (Wackenhut Corrections, Correctional Services Corporation and Corrections Corporation of America), adducing that the costs of private administration are much lower than public one. This kind of prison-companies offers convicts working for much lower incomes than common citizens, as the light cost of maintenance is included. As a consequence, prisons can make very advantageous contracts with big corporations, for tasks of product assembling.

Amazing Benin

2007-10-11T07:58:00.000-07:00

In 1602 the Dutch merchant Pieter de Marees described the city of Edo (now Benin City), capital of the Benin Empire, this way: "The walled city of Benin is composed by a system of huge straight streets. These streets, although not paved, are very wide and well maintained [...]. Fine and big wooden houses are based along the streets, provided with covered porchs [...]. The king's court is very big, with galleries as large as the largest in Amsterdam, constantly watched, and supported by wooden pillars encased with copper on which engravings with past battles were depicted. I went so deep inside this building that, wherever I looked around, I could see gate after gate that finished in other places" [de Marees, 1602].

In his work "Description of Guinea", where he compiled information about uses and habitudes of indigenous people of the Benin Coast, de Marees mainly described the people as "bellicose, promiscuous, savage and thiefs". However, he managed to capture many aspects of the advanced Bini culture.

Amazing Benin

In effect, Europeans there found an Empire with a complex administrative system. The king, the Oba, exercised a great religious power (in fact the country never converted to Christianism) and also political, although the latter was supervised by two councils, an hereditary one (the Uzama) and an elected one, composed by territory chiefs, and lot of influence over the Oba's decisions. Most of the kings in the nearby territories also had a non hereditary title elected by the people.

The Benin Empire culture was, contrary to the one of European colonizers, very social. As long as in Europe the land was seen as a property and an investment, in Africa it was a common property, in which each individual possessed the right to work parts of it, but never over the land itself, as it belonged to the clan or the community. The same way, the name of new born children was decided as common agreement of the people.

A tricky Golden Age

The arrival of the Portuguese meant a deep social change. The Bini did not have the habitude of making trade exchanges aiming luxury, but the behaviour of land possession eagerness, characteristic of Europeans, was finally imitated by the indigenous. "As time passed by, they earned so much knowledge about their products that they almost surpassed us" [de Marees, 1602]. In effect, after a time of trade agreements, Africans understood that Europeans did not have the gold from Benin neither the copper from Sahara, so they had the power of rising prices as there were more and more clients and it was an increasingly valuable business, to the extent that "they became so proud and anxious as greedy rich men. After realising it was good merchandise, they tried by all means to falsify gold itself, transforming 100 grams in 150 and this way cheating foreigners".

Benin people had a deep alcohol culture, as they constantly used it in celebrations of births, offerings, worship to the land and lots of social rites. They distilled it from honey, plants and millet, and produced a kind of low graduation rum, so that when they tried the strong liquor Europeans brought, alcoholism became a common illnes. De Marees said that "they were naturally great drinkers" and, because of the lack of habit to this drink, became easily aggressive. This circumstance was very used by Europeans, together with traffic of firearms, in order to promote tribal wars that became a source to start slave trade.

This way, the Benin Empire complemented gold trade with ivory, pepper, furs, and specially slaves obtained in wars. Along the 16th and 17th centuries, it became the richest and most powerful Empire in West Africa, and a trade class appeared with a desire for luxury comparable to the Western one. British explorers realised the Oba was able to rise an army of twenty thousand men in one single day, and up to one hundred thousand men if necessary.
The end of the Empire came with the abolishment of slavery, of which its wealth had become totally dependent, and Benin entered a period of decadence that meant a lowering of richness, territorial losses and migration. This way, in 1897, the British occupied and pillaged the city of Edo. The kingdom became the protectorate of Nigeria, and the magnificent Bini artworks are now kept in a room in the British Museum.

Holidays

2007-08-23T02:51:00.000-07:00

Just arrived from holidays, it seems to me appropriate to tell why we have leisure days, who decided when they would happen, and since when we do tourism at the seaside or the mountain.

Origins of holidays

Originally, resting days were given by religious festivities or natural cycles. While the population was mostly rural, the main resting period (that coincided generally with the celebration of festivals) was after the harvest time, in a period varying from August to December.
The first journeys due to celebrations were pilgrimages to religious centres (Oracle in Delphi, Mecca, Temple of Mahabodhi, Way of St James, etc), or cultural events, such as the Olympic Games, and were made very few times a life. It was already common in these journeys to bring "souvenirs" back home. In the end of the Middle Age the first establishments known as "hotels" appear, created to accommodate important people who traveled with their entourage. Rich classes, moreover, used to have a villa or palace as alternative residence, often near the sea, where climate was mild. Some places were starting to stand out such as Baiae (Italy) during the Roman Republic.

Modern Age: English-like tourism

It is during the 16th Century that the interest of travelling and exploring new places. In England it becomes fashionable among the aristocracy to send the young men for a "Grand Tour" (from there came the word "tourist") during several years in order to complete their studies and have new experiences. At this time also baths are reborn (now as bath centres far from cities) and beaches, where first the English Royal Family moved (Weymouth, Brighton, etc.) and then spread among rich people, just for imitating. The renewed interest in topics such as Botanics, Archeology or Paleontology gave way to interest of hiking during the months in Spring and Summer.
The 19th Century witnesses the revolution in transports and the apparing of railway lines and transoceanic boats that make long journeys easy and cheap for the new burgeoisie, less elitist than ancient aristocracy, and also with time and money to spend. Health tourism is generalised, and beaches are joined by mountain: it is the time of mountaineering and sanatoria. The first entrepreneur iniciatives. mostly English, related to tourism appear: the first travel company "Cox & Kings" (1758), the first transoceanic company "Black Ball Line" (1818), the first organised trip by Thomas Cook (1841), the first travelers' cheques by "American Express" (1891) and the first comfort hotels by Cesar Ritz (1898).
It was also the English who, looking for a new leisure season, started Winter tourism in the Swiss villages of Zermatt and St Moritz in 1864, where the first ski resorts. This fact coincides (not by chance) with the invention of modern skiing by Sad re Norhein (1825) and his technique of "telemark".

Modern Tourism

Since the 1950s the "boom" of tourism in Western World takes place, thanks to political stability, elevation of standards of living, generalisation of cheap automobiles and urbanisation of society (that generates a new culture of leisure based in fleeing from stress of daily life). It is also then when tourism becomes massified: first the vehicle trip to the seaside, and then, when the reaction airplane appears, tourism packs to exotic destinations. During the 1960s all the aspects of tourism are legislated (insurances, rights of passengers, paid holidays).
Modern tourism dates from the 1980s, when it becomes diversified in many different types (cultural, rural, health, risk tourism), characterised by the liberalisation and internationalisation of the big tourism companies and the free exchange of people inside the European Union. Also recently appears the backpacker, a kind of independent tourist with few resources, and also low-cost flight companies. These are lately generating a new conception of tourism based on do-it-yurself and freedom, in a World where individuals have already enough education and power to do so.

Two Germanies

2007-06-21T17:10:00.000-07:00

A brief timeline of the process that meant the division of Germany after the Second World War.

12 - 16 September 1944: During the Quebec Conference, the Morgenthau Plan for the occupation of Germany is approved. This plan aimed to dismantle the whole German heavy industry and transform the country into two independent "agricultural States", in order to avoid future rearmaments. The Plan was finally rejected, but was a guide for the later process.

8th May 1945: Inconditional surrender of Germany, carried out by marshal Doenitz. 15 days later, the German General Staff is arrested.

5th June 1945: Establishment of the Allied Control Council, based in Berlin, for the government of the occupied Germany, with shared powers among USA, Soviet Union, United Kingdom and France.

End of May 1945: Brno Death March. 24000 Germans from the Sudetes are forced to walk towards the Austrian border, expelled from Checoslovaquia. Nearly 1000 die of violent treatment and disease.

17th July - 2nd August 1945: Potsdam Conference. Division of Germany and Berlin in 4 territories administered by USA, Soviet Union, United Kingdom and France. The Soviet Union unilaterally modifies the German border with Poland to the Oder-Neisse line. Forced expulsion of the German and mixed population from all the Eastern Europe countries is agreed. This will mean more than 14 million migrations during the next 4 years. According to the Morgenthau Plan, the reduction of the German heavy industry is agreed, as well as a control to its Foreign Trade. However, no agrement is reached about occupation, as the Soviet Union claims a single demilitarized state under its rule.

January 1946: Beginning of the "denazification" process.

5th March 1946: Benes Treaties are ratified, which state that all property belonging to German residents in the Sudetes and expelled from Checoslovaquia are expropiated by the State as war payments. Germany starts becoming a country without practically any resource to fee an excessive and poor population.

29th March 1946: First Desindustrialization Plan for Germany begins, which aims to reduce heavy industry to 50% of the pre-war levels. Steel and automobile production is stricted, and the one for drinks, domestic goods, timber and Coke is promoted.

March 1947: The "Truman Doctrine" is made public, that defends contention towards emerging Communism. The Cold War begins.

Winter 1946-1947: A specially harsh winter, the situation of German population becomes unsustainable due to lack of food and fuel. Infant mortality in the country is double than that of Western Europe.

12th July 1947: Marshall Plan is proposed. The Soviet Union rejects it and forces all the States in Eastern Europe to do so, as a first relevant distancing between Allied powers.

July 1947: American occupation in Germny is more and more impopular. USA decides to cancel the current occupation directive, and substitutes it by another that aims the re-industrialization of Germany. The president Truman wants to recover an economically strong ally in Europe, over which to develop the damaged continental economy, and avoid that the low standard of living in the country leads to a Communist coup. France prefers keeping the hard directive. The Soviet Union is frontally opposed to the change, and goes on with desindustrialization (in its case, movement of German industry to Russia) in its zone.

January 1948: USA extends the Marshall Plan to Germany, and promotes the currency reform by introducing the German Mark in its occupation zone in June.

March 1948: The Soviet Union retires from the Allied Control Council, as a response to the economical measures taken by Western powers in their zones. A Communist system starts to be installed in its occupation zone and Eastern Berlin.

24th June 1948: The Soviet Union imposes the terrestrial Blockade to the three Western zones of Berlin through its occupation zone, alleging that the guarantee of this communication had never been signed. General Clay proposes the advance of an armored column towards Berlin, with orders to open fire if attacked. The Truman government rejects the proposal as "too close to a war". It is agreed instead to supply the city with three air corridors (one managed by each Western ally) using civil and military aircraft.

4th April 1949: NATO is created as a pressure means to the Soviet Union.

11th May 1949: The Soviet Union ceases the Berlin Blockade, due to its ineffectiveness and international pressure. 65 Germans, Americans and British have died during the supply operations, specially difficult due to obstructions imposed by Soviets.

23rd may 1949: The government of the Federal Republic of Germany is established in the territories occupied by USA, France and United Kingdom, with capital in Bonn. Western Berlin remains under the status of American military occupation, although its residents are granted German citizenship.

7th October 1949: The USSR creates the Democratic Republic of Germany, with capital in Berlin. The country, not internationally recognised, remains under Sovietic occupation.

1952: Due to the flow of Eastern Germans towards the West, the USSR closes the borders and establishes controls.

May 1955: Eastern Germany's status is switched from occupied territory to Soviet Union allied.

14th May 1955: The Warsaw Pact is created. Eastern Germany joins it in 1960.

13th August 1961: Thousands of Eastern Germans still trespass daily the border through Berlin. The government of East Germany, under the approval of the Soviet Union, starts boulding the Berlin Wall in order to close this hole, alleging the needs to raise an "anti-fascist protection barrier".

July 1962: The "Death Strip" is created, a fully watched space close to the Wall by its Eastern part. House suburbs are pulled down in order to leave an open space that eases shooting from watch towers. Until its destruction in 1989, it is calculated that around 200 people died tryin to jump the Wall.

21st October 1969: Willy Brandt becomes chancellor of Federal Germany. Under his rule, the Ostpolitik is promoted as a process of rapprochement and diplomatic normalization between the two Germanies. At a long term, this will mean the international recognition of the existence of two independent sovereign States, and the inmobility of their borders (after the Moscow Treaty in 1970).

Europe of the Regions

2007-06-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

The 1986 Single European Act was the first major revision of the Treaty of Rome that created the European Economic Community in 1957. The Act meant a commitment of joint progress, and a new manner of coordinating economic activities, after the failure of semi-plannified economy and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system (dependent on the dollar) that happened during the 70's.
The result of the Act was the creation of the European Monetary System (called "of the European snake in the tunnel", as European currencies were floating in group against the rest). This was the first step to the arrival of the euro economy.
Another wanted step was the administrative reform of the recently named European Union, which was becoming more and more complex when taking joint decisiones (the system of national vetoes made agreements very long or impossible).
However, no political topics were treated (the absence of a common Defense and Foreign Affairs) nor many economical (such as the aberrant agricultural budget applied since the entrance of Spain and Portugal). But the countries agreed on one thing: reaching a free market of goods and work.
So, the decision-taking system was almost only economic. In order to ease it, the national agreement system was switched into another one in which regions had direct access to the European Council in Brussels and could act independently from their corresponding national entity. The Europe of the Regions started existing.

A new imbalance

The result was a modification of budget decisiones taken by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), which identified backward European regions and distributed investments in order to estimulate their economies. Now regions avoided their Governments, not generally very willing to cooperate in regional investments. Some of them, generally the richest (such as Catalonia and Baden-Württemberg), established their own offices in Brussels to constitute true lobbies.
Consequence? The richness desequilibrium was not reduced (rather the contrary), but it was redistributed by regiones instead of countries. Now, a group of first order regions existed (Lombardy, Catalonia, Flemish Region, Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Rhône-Alpes...), and another group of poor ones (Andalusia, Scotland, Wallonia, Algarve...). A new, costly bureaucracy, that did not doubt when manipulating subsidy data, intensified the problem.
In conclusion, Europe, without solving its old defects of clientelism and corruption, just diluted them into a new structure where abuses still often happened. Economic rforms based in the 50's and 60's way of thinking (already shown inefficient) unlegitimated a bit more a Union that, nowadays, is clunking and needs real measures.
Definitely, it was successful in one thing: the appearance of a new way of regional sub-nationalism. It is not a coincidence that in the most subsidied European regions, this regionalism passed from a traditional reactionary folklorism to a conscience, sometimes independentist, in which a disdain towards governmental identity, but also an Europeist supra-national thinking has invaded their inhabitants.

Why did Descartes die?

2007-04-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

René Descartes, the man considered as precursor of Scientific Method and author of revolutionary books such as his Discourse on Method, died in obscure circunstances that were not cleared out until recently.

In 1646, the impulsive Queen Kristina of Sweden, ethusiast of Arts and Philosophy (although not with deep thoughts, as Descartes himself admitted), started to write letters with the philosopher, who was at that time retired in Nederlands. Impressed by his teachings, she invited him to the Swedish Court as a guest to give her lessons on Mathematics and Philosophy. This was part of her plan to be surrounded by great European thinkers and transform Stockholm into a cultural centre.

After some forceful "invitations", for which the queen sent one of her admirals, and later even a warship, in 1649 Descartes reluctantly accepted her proposal. In Stockholm he was received with high honours, incorporated to the Swedish aristocracy, and granted conquered lands in Germany.

Death at the Court

He did not enjoy life in the court, however. Apart from some punctual jobs (such as some lines in French for a ballet, or plans for the Swedish Academy) he only had to teach the queen during the mornings. The problem is that Kristina got up extremely early, and scheduled their lessons at 5 in the morning in the middle of Swedish winter. This was very hard for Descartes, who was used to stay in bed reading and thinking until noon. He usually said, "men's thoughts freeze here in winter, same as water". Five months after his arrival, the 11th February 1650, he died.

The official version of the time was that he died of pneumonia. After treating the French ambassador in Stockholm, who had contracted this contagious illness, Descartes got also ill and died one week later. Considering he was not used to nordic cold, this seems plausible. He was buried in a cemetery for unbaptised kids (because he was a catholic in a protestant country), and some years later his remains were moved back to France. Closed case.

However, the French ambassador, Hector P. Chanut, graved this quote in his headstone: "he expiated his rivals' attacks with the innocency of his life". So, he could have been murdered. There was enough reasons actually, as he was a catholic with more influence than most nobles. He could have been considered dangerous and cause of the Queen's catholicist trends (who, four years later, abdicated, converted, and moved to Rome).

Proof of the lie

In 1980, by complete chance, the prove was found. The German scientific Eike Pies, reviewing letters from his ancestor Willem Piso at Leyden University (Nederlands), saw a letter sent to him by Johann van Wullen, personal doctor of Queen Kristina and witness of Descartes' agony. In that letter, the details on the symptoms are described day by day: weakening, vomits, diarrhoea, dizziness, skin's pigmentation, cutaneous damages, entheritis... symptoms commonly found in an Arsenic intoxication.

So, Descartes was almost certainly poisoned. How was the truth hidden? In the letter, Wullen points out that the Queen asked to read it before being sent, and ordered that it never fell in strange hands. Kristina probably wanted to save the prestige of Swedish monarchy, already target of rumours and palace intrigues because of the Queen's excentricities. This way, the murder was never investigated. And History books still tell the "official" version of the facts.

History of chopsticks

2007-04-09T03:05:00.000-07:00

Following a good comment from K-dreaming about the History of the fork, I have searched about History of chopsticks.

It is commonly admitted that chopsticks appeared in China around 5000 years ago. Before that date, food was taken from big pots in the fire pricked in long sticks directly cut from trees. Later on, with the increasing population, fuel resources became scarce. This slowly lead to a new way of cooking that required less wood, for which food was cut in small pieces so that it took less time to cook. Then food could be eaten directly from the pot, eliminating the need of knives, and tree branches gradually became chopsticks.

Although the most ancient existing pair of chopsticks dates from the Tang dynasty (7th-10th centuries), it is written in the Liji (Book of Rites) that chopsticks were used already during the Shang dynasty (16th-12th centuries BC). Sima Qian stated in his History book, that the last king of the dynasty used ivory chopsticks. According to experts, bamboo and wooden chopsticks should date at least from 1000 years earlier. In the following centuries, bronze, golden and silver chopsticks became fashionable. Specially the latter were popular among aristocracy, as it was thought that silver became black when it was in contact with poison. This belief is exaggerated (actually silver does not react to arsenic neither to cyanide), but there is something true: rotten eggs, onions and garlic expell hydrogen sulphyde, which does change the colour of silver.

Probably, Confucius' teachings contributed to promote the use of chopsticks at the table. He said, literally: "the honorable and correct man is well aware of the differences between slaughterhouse and table. And does not allow the use of knives at his table." Because of Confucius' popularity, who was by the way a vegetarian, this sentence eliminated the Western habit to use knives at the table.

Around the 6th century, the use of chopsticks spread to other countries such as Korea, Vietnam and Japan. Although in Japan it was first used only for religious ceremonies, it soon acquired culinary popularity, and the Japanese even created a new kind of chopsticks typical of their country: with a more sharpened point than Chinese ones, and attached at the base. From the 10th century this attachment disappeared and the became the Japanese chopsticks we know nowadays. They were also spread in Thailand, but in the 19th century the king Rama V introduced Western table utensils, limiting the use of chopsticks only to noodles.

Tools similar to chopsticks were found in the archeological findings in Meggido (Israel), belonging to Scythian invaders of Canaan, and contemporary of Moses and Josuah. This discovery reveals the extension of trade between Middle East and Far East in ancient times. Chopsticks were also common tools used by the Uyghurs in the steppes of Mongolia during the 6th-8th centuries.

Blue blood

2007-03-24T16:08:00.000-07:00

It is interesting to see how nobility titles in Western Europe have changed their meaning along History. Some of them dating back as long as the Roman Empire, during the Middle Ages acquired their meaning related to land ownership. Currently, titles are merely honorific.

Duke

The title of duke is traditionally the one of highest rank. he word comes from Latin "du x", meaning "military commander", and was employed by both Romans and Germans to refer their warrior leaders. In the Roman army, a dux was a general in charge of two or more legions, who normally managed the government of a province (both civil and military). In the Roman Empire, the powers of the dux were limited to strictly military, depending on the governor (normally a "comes") to make use of them. In Byzantium, "dux" became viceroys at the head of every administrative and military service.

During the Middle Ages, dukes became the closest nobility title to the king, and their function was essentially military, with a territorial aspect though, as they ruled in a set of countships. Of course, there exist variations in the meaning of dukes in every kingdom. Frankish dukes were the nobles of highest rank, from where province governors came out, although they also appear leading military expeditions away from their duchies. Later, Charlemagne restructured administratively the kingdom, multiplying the number of counts and reducing that of dukes, limiting it to the nobles closest to him. In Spain and Italy, Visigoth and Lombard dukes, respectively, were the greatest land owners and, together with bishops, they elected the king among them. Although the were nominally loyal to the king, the concept of monarchy was new for them and dukes acted independently from royal authority, specially in central and south Italy, where the duke of Spoleto and the duke of Benevento were sovereigns de facto. Also in Germany, duchies were independent kingdoms inside the Holy Empire, and in Italy, "doges" were the heads of state in some of the Republics in the peninsula (Genoa, Venice). In modern times, variants from this title ("Conde-duque" in Spain, Archduke in Austria) to refer the head of state.

Count

Etimologically from the Latin "comes", which means companion or delegate of the emperor during the Roman Empire. Its origin is in the people surrounding Augustus ("amici Augusti"), normally selected from senators, who when travelling became "comites Augusti", being their role just that of personal advisors. They disappeared with Alexander Severus and created again under Constantine, when they designated the most loyal to the emperor, being a hierarchy over regular officials. They had a political and administrative role, with military functions specially when defending borders.

During the Germanic kings, counts were designated by a dux or the king. The title of count was indistintively given to every official around him, one of which, the count palatine ("comes palatii"), was in charge of rendering justice inside the palace. Some arms companions of Frankish merovingian princes received the title for city administration. At these times they start to have fiscal, military and judiciary functions. Military power only never depended on a moving army, but settled on a territory (countship). In the countship, he rivalised mainly with the bishop (in his corresponding diocese) for the use of power. Under Charlemagne, counts were given a specific mission (military or administrative) with temporal character, and never hereditary. It is only after the 9th century that counts start to form a land owner class, usurpating royal rights over their countship land. The title was also often given by the monarch as gratitude for a special service, without necessary being accompanied of a feudal territory. In England, there exists the equivalent "Earl", term originated in Scandinavia.

Marquess

The original title comes from German "markgraf" (literally "count of the mark"). During the High Middle Ages, and specially in the Carolingian Empire, it was a count who administered a border territory (mark). In order to allow him a quick reaction to potential attacks, special military powers were given to him to raise up the army without the express permission of the king. This authority has later conferred it a higher rank than the count, but lower than the duke, as the latter has a military and judiciary power over several countships. After the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, the marquis title fell into disuse, except certain counts who proclaimed themselves marquis to acquire greater importance (that is the case of the count of Barcelona, who justified this action for being situated in the border with hispanic Muslim kingdoms). In modern times it resurected as an honorific title.

Baron

Etimologically coming from a mixture between the Frankish word "baro" ("warrior") and the Angle "beorn" ("noble"). Since the Middle Ages, it refered those who had obtained privileges directly from the king because of a military service, situated just over the title of knight. Acording to the country, the meaning was different: In France, for being baron, it was required to possess at least two castles. In Spain barons were the rich and magnates who participated in political sessions. In the Holy Empire, every family in the low nobility were granted the title of baron (distinguished with the prefix "von"). The English king Henry II made a distintion between greater and lesser barons. Since the 16th century, baronship looses its relation with land ownership, becoming a nominal title.

Shadow plays

2007-03-12T10:08:00.000-07:00

Shadow play is perhaps the most ancient scenic art in History. It is based in the projection of articulated puppets in front of an illuminated background, causing sensation of movement. During thousands of years, it has entertained and taught both humble and aristocratic classes, specially in Asia, where it was originated.

China: Poems and romances

According to the legend, Chinese shadow play dates back to the Han dynasty (3rd BC-3rd AD centuries), when an emperor lost his favorite concubine. A taoist monk used a shadow to evoke a feminine shape, which the Emperor believed was his reborn lover. What is certain, is that in the time of the Ta ng dinasty (7th-10th centuries), it was a popular entertainment very spread in the provinces of Shanxi, Shaanxi and Hebei, which later passed to Beijing. During the Ming period (XIV-XVII centuries) it was not exclusive of the lower classes anymore, and passed to the aristocracy and imperial family.

In China, puppets were small and made of paper or leather. A puppeter handled them with three sticks (one for the head, one for each arm), and made the voice of every character, while a small orchestra accompanied dramatic scenes (specially many "gongs"). There were four defined types of characters: men (sheng), women (dan), painted faces (jing) and clowns (chou), each of them with a specific symbolism and function.

Although this genre gave way to many regional styles, thematic was essentially the same: Buddhist teachings in the beginning, romances and epic lyrics later (the one referring to Liu Bang and Xian Yu was very popular, see previous post).

India: Mediator between men and gods

It is not known with certainty whether the shadow theatre appeared in India, Thailand and Indonesia originating from China or had an independent evolution. There are major differences, such as the puppet size (it was normally human in India, its size showing the character social rank though), and its lower articulating ability. Used matierals were coloured and translucent, leading to a much colour and surreal aspect.

This oniric effect has perhaps influenced its final significance. In the Indian region, shadow theatre was the main medium to express the supernatural, very used for the spreading of mythical Hinduist literature, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Performances even became rites with the powers of bringing rain and healing the sick and possessed.

In India, the puppeteer job was something hereditary, and almost sacred. Entire wandering families were in charge of building puppets and performing, being considered as some kind of priests. Nowadays, Indian shadow play is in decadence, except for the Wayang Kulit in Java, which enjoys an official protected status.

Turkey: Political satire

Maybe brought to Persia and Middle East by Gengis Khan's conquests, Turkish shadow theatre has Chinese influences. However, due to its colourful aspect, it is widely accepted that it comes from Ancient Egypt and Java, with influences from Greek phylosophy.

Featured characters evolve to the point of having a very defined symbolism, and the same appear in every performance. Most important are Karagoz an d Hacivat (the first, showing his common sense, the latter his education), the courtesan Sitt al Husyn (who represents Love), and the doctor Mustapha (who symbolises power and corruption). The meaning was essentially satirical and didactical.

First described by Ibn Danyal in Cairo, during the 16th Century is spread in the Ottoman Empire. There it acquired great popularity, specially in Turkish cafes during the month of Ramadan and in Muslim feasts. However, it seldom had a religious significance, but instead it reflected social problems of the time, always from a humorous perspective. It was, say, the daily newspaper at that time.

Human sacrifices to Huitzilopochtli

2007-02-25T13:32:00.000-08:00

In summer 1521, the small army of the conquistador Hernán Cortés had been expelled from Tenochtitlan by the Aztecs, 62 of his soldiers taken prisoners during the fight. From outside the lake of the mexica capital, Cortés saw, powerless, the Aztec priests dispose these prisoners on the pyramid-temple altars, opened their chests and offered their beating hearts to the god Huitzilopochtli.

The chronicle of the swordsman Bernal Díaz tells these facts. Ritual sacrifice was perceived by Cortés as a threat and intimidation from the Aztecs. It probably arised a feeling of rejection and revenge in him, that influenced the later extermination of Aztec culture. However, the ritual sacrifice had a very different meaning.

In Aztec culture, human sacrifices were common during celebrations or natural disasters. Spilling human blood was a means to be humilliated in order to express gratitude and pay the debt towards the gods, for the sacrifice they did themselves in the creation of the world. Auto-sacrifice was the most widespread way, being common the fact of perforating sometimes several parts of the body with obsidian (especially ear, tongue and penis).

When the sacrifice involved offering the life of another person, this was rarely a slave (as the sacrifice became less valuable). It was usually a free person voluntarily offered or a war prisoner. The latter type of sacrifice, in which a jaguar warrior offered his prisoner to Huitzilopotchli, god of Sun and War, was the most widespread among Aztecs. The rite usually consisted in a ritual dance performed by both victim and warrior, and later the priest took the heart out from the victim's chest on the sacrifice altar. Right afterwards, the victim's body was offered to the warrior's family. They then ate his flesh and carried his skin for several days. What explanation has such an extravagant rite?

A complex meaning

In Meso-American cultures, the concept of the individual is relative. The nature of the "me" does not exist as itself, but as other individuals see it. This way, a jaguar sees other jaguars the same way a human sees other humans. The sacrifice rite is, in this context, a ceremony of assimilation, of an attempt to become the other. By eating his flesh, and carrying his skin, the warrior and his family personify their enemy, who defines who are themselves. In this manner, the sacrifier becomes, momentaneously, a singular individual, not relative but absolute.

For the better quality of the rite, the victim must be as similar as possible as the sacrifier, that is, from a near origin. That is why, the sacrified that came from the nearby city of Tlaxcala were more ppreciated than those come from further. Spanish were, thus, a second-class type of victim.

An interesting aspect in the ritual sacrifice, is that the sacrifier assumes also the role of the victim (result of the assimilation of the other). When the family ate the victim's flesh, they were in mourning, and it was frequent to cry during the ceremony, same as if it were their relative who was dead.

So, although difficult to understand by the Western invaders, the true reason of the sacrifice was much more complex than they thought.

History of the fork

2007-02-11T02:31:00.000-08:00

The fork, unlike knife and spoon, has not always been part of table settings. In fact, its history is relatively very recent. Although it appeared in Greece as early as the 4th century, it did not start to be generally used until the Modern Ages. Before the fork was introduced, people would largely eat food with their hands, calling for a common spoon when required. For aristocrats, though, table manners appointed that only three fingers should be used to touch the food, leaving the little and ring fingers unused.

First attempts in Italy

From the 7th through the 13th Centuries, forks were fairly common among the wealthy in the Middle East and Byzantium. In the year 1005, the byzantine aristocrat Maria Argyropoulina married the future Doge of Venice, Domenico Selvo. During their wedding celebrations she dared to refuse to eat with her hands. Instead, she had one of her eunuchs cut her food into little pieces she was able to eat with a golden fork she carried with her, fact that was considered decadent by everybody. The princess died shortly after of some disease, and this was perceived as divine punishment. The cardinal bishop of Ostia, St Peter Damian, spoke "of the Venetian Doge's wife, whose body, after her excessive delicacy, entirely rotted away." He preached extensively against this extravagant instrument, calling it both diabolic (probably due to its Devil's trident-like form) and useless, as spaghetti and macaroni were so hard to eat with it. It must be noted that forks at that time were flat and two-pointed, thus much more difficult to handle.

Hence, fork disappeared for 300 years from Italian table, until the 16th century, when it was rediscovered thanks to a renewed social interest in cleanliness. In 1533, another royal marriage, that of Catherine de Medicis with the king Henry II of France, spread the use of the fork. The Italian princess made it fashionable in the French court. She introduced the usage of each guest arriving at a dinner with their own fork and spoon enclosed in a box called a "cadena".
Use in Europe

England saw its first fork when a traveller called Thomas Coryate described its using as good manners, after one of his journeys to Italy in 1608. In the beginning, he was ridiculised and mocked, and fork seen as an affectation. "Furcifer" he was called, which means "pitchfork handler" in Latin. The clergy perceived its use as an ungodlt act, by saying that "God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks - his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to Him to substitute artificial metallic forks for them." However, in 1633, Charles I of England declared that "it is decent to use a fork", a statement that heralded the beginning of civilised table manners. After some years, every member of the British royal family and the court possessed a fork. Its use was slowly spread among the wealthy in England, as imitating Italian habits was seen as sign of culture and refinement.

However, the way to use the fork remained a mystery revealed to only a few, well into the 18th century. Joseph Brasbridge, an English retail silversmith, wrote of his confusion in a customer's home, "I know how to sell these articles, but not how to use them." The king Louis XIV of France continued to eat with fingers or a knife for many years. Once he discovered its usefulness, though, he became the first host in Europe to provide complete sets of dinnerware for his guests, suppressing the necessity of the "cadena". He also ordered shape changes in dinner knives, such as rounding its point, as their pricking task was not needed anymore. In the 19th century, mass production and the invention of the electroplating process made metallic forks affordable to a rising middle class who wished to emulate the nobility.

The fork shape has been subject to several changes. By the end of the 1600's, manufacturers were adding a third tine to denote the old custom of eating with just the first three fingers. In Italy, Gennaro Spadaccini was the first to add a fourth tine and round its sharp points, under the order of king Ferdinand to adapt it for the eating of spaghetti. Finally, in the beginning of the 18th century, the curved fork was developed in Germany, coming out in the tool we know today. The additional tines made diners less likely to drop food, and the curved tines served as a scoop so people did not have to constantly switch to a spoon while eating.

Gustaf's military revolution

2007-02-03T13:31:00.001-08:00

The first example of combined arms can be seen in the Swedish army during the 30 years war. The unprecedented interaction between infantry, musketeers, cavalry and artillery that king Gustaf Adolf of Sweden introduced, supposed the beginning of the modern warfare.

Until the 17th century, tactis were still much alike in the late middle ages. Blocks of infantry and cavalry acted separately, while artillery remained an inmobile, heavy unit for support or siege. The cavalry itself had lost the role of stormtroop it had before, as it relyed on heavily armored horsemen that performed shy movements of pistol attack and retreat, called "caraco le". The infantry formation was the "tercio", a bulk group of pikemen surrounded by arquebusiers, where the long spears of the first provided protection to the latter. As early firearms were short-ranged and slow to charge, this conservative structure showed a good performance to the Spanish Empire at the time, in spite of confering warfare a complete lack of offensive. With the introduction of the field artillery, it became a very vulnerable target.

The Gustaf revolution

Gustaf had developed a new army, where mobility became the strongest feature. As a first measure, the arms and armors of the soldiers were significantly reduced, even to just light harnesses in the case of cavalry. Pikes were reduced to 3 metres (instead of 6), and muskets were made lighter, so that "fork" was not needed anymore.

The tercios of the Spanish tactical school were abolished. Gustaf's infantry instead used linear formations, much more mobile by the quick ordering from line to column. Musketeers could all fire at the same target and quickly alternate different lines of fire. Their tactics also changed: they usually shooted in salvos, instead of individually, provoking a psychological effect on the enemy. Right after the shot, a charge of pikemen (with their new maneuvrable pikes) crushed the weakened enemy. This combination gave back the infantry the offensive role it had lost.

The Swedish cavalry also favored the shocking effect of the charge. The caracolle was ineffective since the lethality of the pistol was low. Gustaf's horsemen instead advanced on the trot firing their pistols and then charged at full speed with drawn swords, especially vulenrable targest such as enemy cavalry in caracolle retreat or field artillery. The cavalry was also supported by units of musketeers granting it more deffensive capability.

The greatest improvement was that of the artillery, though. Gustaf and his artillery chief, Lennart Torstensson, decided to create a type of light artillery, of pieces of "only" 150 kg (while 1500 kg of the traditional cannons). This new artillery could perfectly follow infantry and even cavalry displacements, thus acting as a short-range, effective support at all time. These units of light artillery, moreover, were not assigned in an exclusive regiment. Instead, each infantry or cavalry regiment was provided with several pieces of artillery to the order of the same commander. This apparently simple issue proved to be essential, as this case of splitting had never been the case before.

The result? The German Catholic League was massacred at the battle of Breitenfeld, and the time of the Swedish Empire started. The old military tactics were suddenly abandoned and remplaced by Gustaf's ones. Napoleon itself considered Gustaf as one of his military inspirators.

The end of the samurai

2007-01-27T17:08:00.000-08:00

In the 19th century, Japan was far from the economic and political power we know nowadays. The Tokugawa system, feudal in most aspects, was based on the strict class hierarchy originally established by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The warrior-caste of samurai were at the top, followed by farmers, artisans, and traders.

The samurai, traditionally a warrior class that was at the service of a lord, had increased their political and social influence during the Tokugawa period, by becoming landowners, courtiers, bureaucrats, and administrators rather than warriors. However their aristocratic status still kept the same warrior meaning influenced by the teachings of Confucius and Mencius. They were an educated class, had a complex code of obligations towards their lord (usually a daimyo), and a formalized chivalry code (called "Bushido"). They had the legal right to wear weapons (they actually were the only granted that privilege) and to cut down any commoner who did not show proper respect, although to what extent this right was used is unknown.

As a consequence of the rigid structure that composed the social system, Japan was a backward country when compared to the overwhelming power of the European and American empires of the time. Like other subjugated Asian nations, the Japanese were forced to sign unequal treaties with Western powers, which granted them one-sided economical and legal advantages in Japan. The very inflexibility of the caste system, lacking all forms of economic dynamism and neglecting inflation effects, unleashed huge economic crisis and general empoverishment.

The Meiji Restoration

En 1867, an alliance of several of the most powerful daimyo (Satsuma and Kido) with the titular Emperor finally succeeded in the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate after the Boshin War, culminating in the Meiji Restoration. The power of the Emperor became increasingly stronger, and after a series of confrontations against his former allies, he gained all the lands under his own control. The result of this deep change in the political system was the establishment of a centralised power supported by a completely new oligarchy that undertook a series of reforms in the country.

The Emperor was convinced that Japan needed to become a World power by following the model of the Western empires. This way, the four-caste division of the society was abolished and freedom of social and occupational mobility was guaranteed. The education became compulsory, and the education system reformed after the French and German ones. Freedom of worship was also established, a constitution was edited and several forms of democratic participation of the citizens founded. Agrarian reforms and massive industrial development were succesfully undertaken, the concept of a market economy and the adoption of British and North American forms of free enterprise capitalism were welcomed by a country that soon showed its abundance of aggressive entrepreneurs. As a consequence, Japan emerged as the first Asian industrialised nation and one of the new great World powers.

What happened to the samurai?

All this logically meant the end for the samurai. As they received fixed revenues from the government, their upkeep was a tremendous financial limit for a nation in development (there were 1.9 million samurais at the time), so the Meiji government started a slow process to progressively abolish this social class. Most of their salaries were diminished or cancelled, and the ones that remained had to convert them into government bonds (which, of course, had no guarantee of being valid if the central government failed). A Western-like nobility classification was established among the remaining samurai and courtiers: prince, marquis, count, viscount, and baron were new conceded entitlements.

The reform of the military was the real end of the samurai privileges. In 1873, nation-wide conscription was established, and the right to bear arms was extended to every male in the nation. In this manner, the samurai lost their right to be the only armed force in favor of a modern, Western-like army. Moreover, their honorific right to wear a katana in public was eventually abolished along with the right to cut down commoners who paid them disrespect.

Although many samurai became wandering warriors and some riots arose (such as the major Satsuma rebellion, lead by the samurai Saigo Takamori), most samurai adapted easily to their new condition. Many found employment as policemen or in the government bureaucracy, which resembled an elite class in its own right. The samurai, being better educated than most of the population, became teachers, government officials or military officers. However, the ideal of samurai military spirit lived on in romanticised form and was often used as nationalistic propaganda during the 20th century.

The Army of Freedom

2007-01-22T15:09:00.000-08:00

During the Pacific War, the so called "Army of Freedom" of the United States showed enormous racial prejudices among its soldiers, as a direct consequence of the segregationism in the American society. Black soldiers were denied basic services, given not enough or null ammonition in the battlefield, or were even murdered by white military.

In 1941, the army of general McArthur established its headquarters in Queensland (Australia), where more than 50,000 soldiers arrived. And also in Australia, while white soldiers were received in open arms, the laborist Government of John Curtin did not allow to entry (aprox.) 12,000 black soldiers, strictly following an ancient Australian law for the white conservation of the continent (The White Australia Policy). Thousands of soldiers had to stay in their boats for weeks until the pressures of the American Government convinced Curtin. However, black soldiers were confined in the degradated suburb in the South of Brisbane, at the other side of the river. They were not allowed to cross to the North suburb and neither to go in dance places such as Trocadero Dance, under very hard punishments.

Australian population, however, never rejected these exotic soldiers, but on the contrary. They had specially success with Australian girls, so much that in the end, white American soldiers felt envious (never did Australian soldiers, their eternal party fellows). The American Military Police, formed by white men, made use of their power by putting lot of pressure on black soldiers, blaming them on false crimes, applying specially severe punishments and murdering several persons.

In March 1942, fights between these two groups made black soldiers to be moved out of the city, and installed in the forest near Townsville, living in subhuman conditions. In November the same year, serious confrontations arose again in Brisbane between the remaining white American soldiers and the Australian ones, which shows what was the source of the problem. However, black soldiers were not better treated from them on, and no war report ever mentioned the very serious facts that had happened.

Domes

2007-01-13T08:34:00.000-08:00

Dome is a particular type of vault, with a semispheric form, without angles or corners, which allows huge spaces in buildings, as well as the possibility of a powerful lighting. Despite they are thin, domes are the strongest architectural element, thanks to compressive and frictional forces the create.

Before domes, buildings were very space unefficient, as big columns were necessary to support the roof. Although the first examples of wooden spherical structures appear as soon as 6000 BC in Cyprus, they are not big enough to be considered true domes. The first big stone domes are built for tombs such as the tholos of the Treasure of Atreus (Mycenae, 13th century BC) and the Stupa in Sanchi (India, 3rd century BC). These structures are not high since they lie directly on the ground, being he dome subterraneous.

From the Pantheon to Hagia Sofia

It was the Roman civilisation the first to construct buildings with semispheric domes. Examples are known since times of Nero, achieving the culminating point with the Pantheon of Hadrianus, built in 125 AD, and still standing. Due to its huge weigth, engineers had to carve hollows inside the dome, and besides build very thick walls able to support it.

Paralelly, in Persia appeared the first domes in which pendentives were used from the beginning. This new element provided a strong support to domes, allowing them to become higher and the walls to become progressively thinner. First examplesare found in the Sassanid palaces of Firuzabad and Fars, erected around 240 and 430, respectively. The technique spread to other areas of Central Asia, being most importants the mausoleums of Bokhara (943) and Tim (978), but it did not evolve dramatically.

The idea of the pendentive arrived in Byzantium, and there it was very used and improved. The maximum achievement of this technique was Hagia Sofia in Constantinople (537), a true architectural wonder of the era, which was the largest dome in the world for almost one thousand years. The lighting provided is particularly good, thanks to the possibility it left to unload the building walls with weight, and inserting windows instead. It was also Byzantine engineers who designed the Mosque of the Rock (691) in Jerusalem and the Great Mosque of Damascus (715). Soon the Islamic style adopted the so-called onion dome, which later passed to Russia in the XIII century.

Meanwhile, in Western Europe, domes disappeared from architecture after the fall of the Roman Empire. There were several good attempts, such as half domes (apses), rib vaults or troncoconic domes such as the one in the Baptistry of Pisa, finished in 1363 (the current one is more recent, though), but the technique of the semispheric dome had disappeared.

The reinvention of the dome

Then, Brunelleschi reinvented it with much style. He built the great dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence (finished in 1418), winning his design proposal among others, even if he presented his project uncomplete to avoid being copied. He took inspiration from the circular dome in the Rome Pantheon, and designed his with double shell and octogonal shape. The dome lied on a drum, instead of directly on the roof, thus avoiding scaffolds from the ground level. In this manner he built the highest dome at the time, and a true architectonic model, since it was copied in Saint Peter of Rome by Giacomo della Porta (not Michelangelo) in 1593. The later domes of Saint Paul in London (1708) and the Capitol in Washington (1850) use the same technique.

Still paralelly, in Persia, the dome of the Oljeitu Mausoleum (Soltaniyeh, 1312) was built. This was, in fact, the first double-shell dome, and was additionaly reinforced with arches between both shells, which was an architectural revolution in the Muslim world, comparable to that of Brunelleschi. It started an architectural trend that designed domes as big as the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasavi (Kazakhstan, 1405) and the Taj Mahal (India, 1653).

One of the most characteristic elements of the Baroc architecture was the oval dome, invented by Giacom o da Vignola (chapel of Saint Andreas, Rome, 1553) and especially developed in the churches of Bernini and Borromini. This kind of dome gave a dramatic dynamism to Baroc churches. The biggest of this kind was built by Francesco Gallo in the Basilica of Vicoforte (Italia, 1773).

In modern times, one of the greatest improvements has been the invention of the geodesic dome by R. Buckminster Fuller in the 1950's. This technique, based on the utilisation of triangular elements that distribute the forces in the structure itself, allow the construction of huge domes with great stability. Currently, the biggest semispheric dome in the world is the Globe Arena in Stockholm, finished in 1989.

Christmas and its pagan symbols

2006-12-29T05:18:00.000-08:00

Despite of its oficially religious meaning, the Christian celebration of Christmas comes from pagan rites almost totally. A recent study from Manuel Mandianes shows it.

The dates

From the IV century, Christians started to celebrate this new festivity (only Easter was celebrated until this date), and, from the V century, because of the progressive division between the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, it was also divided in two: Christmas, celebrated in the Western, and Epiphany in the Eastern.
The date of birth of Jesus is not known exactly. An old oriental myth tells that Mythreas, god that protects the cosmic order and human justice, and guaranteed peace treaties, came out from a rock a 25th of December, with the aim of liberate men from the Evil. Some shepherds attended his birth. Later on, under the influence of Babylon, the same god appears as an envoy of the Sun with the mission of creating life on Earth.
Christian tradition added the date of 25th December in order to move people far from pagan traditions of Natalis Solis Invicti in a period of decadent paganism, in which the Sun worship was very used. The Church placed the birth of Jesus in the moment of solar re-birth, in the winter solstice.
In 1582, the Gregorian calendar corrected the Julian one in some days, a change Orthodoxs refused to accept. That is why they celebrate their Epiphany the 7th January. Later on, maybe due to habits or to try to attract the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church adopted the 6th January as the Epiphany, a festivity additional to Christmas (even if their significance is, theoretically, exactly the same).

Tree vs Nativity scene

The rivality between the Christmas tree and the nativity scene started in the XVI century, as a result of the fight between protestants and anti-reformists. The Church had been reoresenting the birth of the Messiah and the adoration of the Wise Men for centuries, while the first known Christmas tree is located in Alsatia, XV century, although they have very ancient pagan and druidic antecedents.
The Lutheran reform, in the XVI century, was against the scenes, trying to avoid any form of idolatry, and imposed the tree in Protestant countries. The tree, without the fact of idolatring figures, still had a religious symbology. The Caholic reaction was to modernise them; scenes progressively showed a more realistic representation of people and facts. They were soon full of non-religious figures, shepherds, that represented every kind of job and work.

Santa Claus

The current figure of Santa Claus is inspired in a Christian priest of Greek origin called Nicholas, who lived during the IV century in Anatolia and, while coming from a rich family, shared his belongings with the poors.
The transformation of Saint Nicholas in Santa Claus happened around 1624. Dutch immigrants in America took their habits and traditions with them, among them Sinterklaas, their saint patron. In 1809 the writer Washington Irving wrote a satire in which he changed the name of this Dutch saint according to the English prononciation: Santa Claus.
In the middle of the XIX century, the American figure of Santa Claus was exported to England, and later to France, where it was unified with Bonhomme Noel, a bearded character who dressed in white with bright decorations. From this union comes the current figure of Santa Claus, whose definitive appearance was designed in 1931 by Coca-Cola.
The habit of giving gifts to children in Christmas appears in the Ancient Era. Rome dedicated a festivity in December to Saturn (Chronos for the Greeks), in the end of which gifts were received by children. European children received them in later times, coming from very different characters, both religious (Wise Men in Spain) or pagans (the witch Befana in Italy).
Later on, Saint Nicholas replaced most of these characters. Since 1822, the Santa Claus visit is represented on Christmas Eve. Its adoption was very successful in the US because it satisfied a needs of the American society, as gifts were equally given to protestant, jewish, orthodox or lay children. Currently it is a pagan symbol accepted all around the world.

Pirates (2/2)

2006-12-21T13:36:00.000-08:00

It is in the territories far away from the "civilized" Occident that piracy gets to its greatest extempt. From the colonial era, with the introduction of quick, manoeuverable vessels built by States, the pirates cross the seas of West Indies and Orient, so large and far from the metropole that they become impossible to be controlled by the Europeans.

Skulls, filibusters and rhum

All started with the great demographic expansion in Europe at the 15th Century. Poor peasants and fishermen massively join up pirate vessels, which watch the trade routes followed by Spanish boats in the Atlantic and steal their gold booty.
From 1566, with the war between Spain and the United Provinces, England supports the latter by hiring privateers and equipping them with high quality vessels, able to fight openly to Spanish frigates.
During the 17th centur, however, the English government progressively retires its support. Privateers not enjoying its favour anymore became pure pirates again and even formed a confederation against the Navy. They progressively moved their activity to Iceland, Africa, Canada, and finally cocentrated in the West Indies.
The first pirates of the Caribbean (called filibusters, from Dutch vrijbuiter) established acting as traders of slaves, so did for instance the famous Hawkins and Drake (in fact, they usually "acquired" their slaves from Spanish and then legally sold them). In the 17th century, the Caribbean islands, emptied of indigenes thanks to the exterminating labour of the Spanish, were perfect hide-outs for them. The island of Tortuga is especially famous, it received several bands of pirates between 1630 and 1670.
Generally, piracy activities were done against Spanish vessels, as their cargoes were more promising, and this way, a little privateering was done against the common enemy. A very famous story tells that Cornelis Jol, "Pie de palo", and his band, entered Santiago de Cuba in 1635 dressed up as franciscan monks, and pillaged the city. In order to protect his galleons, Phillip II of Spain created light squadrons called "armadillas", which resulted very effective.
In parallel, another kind of dealers appear, the buccaneers, who are not pirates themselves. These Europeans settled in several islands, in groups of 15 to 20 men, where they learned from the natives the technique of meat conservation by smoking (or bucán). They established supplying posts, not officials but well known by merchants and pirates, and were generally respected by both.
Although filibusters were rougher pirates than the Mediterranean ones, they were certainly not sadic, as they are so often shown. In fact, they avoided violence unless it were necessary, except rare cases. They rather made psychological war, frightening and threatening their victims. One of their techniques was the use of the mythical skull and bones flag, the "Jolly Roger", although it was not started to be used until the end of 17th century. Before, national flags or monochromatic ones (red or black) were used.
From 1650, Nederlands, France and England use pirates, prisoners and soldiers to colonize several islands (Curaçao, Jamaica, Martinique). This way, some of the greatest pirates in History arise among them, such as Morgan, De Graaf, Nau "l'Olonnais" and Teach "Blackbeard". However, the States did not support them anymore, and a general repression was carried out. These last pirates ended up changing their activity (Morgan became governor of Jamaica and De Graaf made some business in Missouri), or dying tragically. In the middle of the 18th century, piracy had practically ceased to exist.

Pirates in Orient

In the Far East piracy was also a popular activity. Since the first trading exchanges, the cities of Canton and Macau were the richest in the area thanks to their situation in the middle of the routes. It was also the reason why the main attacks and pirate nests were concentrated in that zone, the most important being the Chinese Tanka, but also foreigners such as Philippines, Vietnamese and Japanese (called Wokou).
At the beginning of the 19th century a Pirate Confederation was formed, mainly by Chinese autochtone pirates, whose activity was focused to the attack to European ships. It was a well-organised confederation, which, even if granted action autonomy to every pirate, had a reglamentation on conflict solving, tactics, behaviour and booty share. It even had a Public Fund to which all the pirates contributed with a part of its booties.
However, after the Opium War, English, American and French carried out a campaign that eventually crushed the confederation, as the inferiority of the latter was huge against steam ships. From this moment, Western powers took over the trade and smuggling of spices, opium and slaves.

Pirates (1/2)

2006-12-10T14:09:00.000-08:00

Piracy exists since the first mariners sailed the seas, as it was a way to look for economic benefits for the people living at the coasts, generally poor. At the beginning it was not a condemned activity, if it was not done to fellow citizens. It was actually licit, and even praised, when the victim was a foreign. Homer wrote in his works about the adventures of Achilles and Menelaus, who did not hesitate to do lucrative pillages in enemy territoty, and Ulysses, who established his hide-out in the island of Itaca.

The Ancient Mediterranean

After the disappearing of the Minoian civilization, there is not a clear ruler of the Mediterranean anymore. Since the city-states start to arise, this sea becomes a busy trade route, and unsafe at the same time. Etrurian and Thracian pirates attack periodically the Greek and southern Italian coasts. Phoenicians associate the concepts of piracy and trade, and feed their slave trade this way. The island of Crete becomes the greatest pirate nest in the Mediterranean. It was not until the VI century BC that Athens carried out the first campaign against the pirates in order to have peace for its trade routes. At that time, the fact of being a pirate starts to be disapproved, as this activity looks for an individual benefit instead that for the community.
Rome had serious problems with Cilician pirates, who assaulted Sicily and reached as far as Ostia. It even seems that Julius Caesar himself was kidnapped by the pirates when he was young (although immediately afterwards he looked for help, reached them and made them crucify). In the I century BC, Pompeius conquers Cilicy, and offers the pirates a smart choice: to join the Roman navy, or to be enslaved. During centuries, the "Mare Nostrum" was a safe place for Romand transport and trade, not being so though in the Atlantic coasts.
Medieval piracy

After Rome, Byzantium became the greatest Mediterranean power, but as it did not control the whole of the coasts, it had to face continuous attacks from Narentine, Cilician and North African pirates. In 1204 Constantinople is taken by the crusaders, who start making piracy activities in the Eastern coastlines and establish a lucrative trade of Arab and Turkish slaves. Genovese and Venetian trade routes were also watched and assaulted by Catalonians, Sicilians and Maltese. At this time appears the expression "far il corso", literally make his own way, used by mariners that join pirate vessels to leave their poverty situation. From there came the latin word "corsario", for "privateer".
In the North Sea, the seasons of Spring and Autumn, with its dense fogs, were an ideal place for piracy. First Vikings in the coastlines, and then Bretons, Irish and Bordolese in the trade routes of English, Dutch and Baltic ships. In the XIV century the Hansa appears, as a trade association between septentrional cities, with the aim of offering mutual protection. However the agreements were rarely accomplished, and while every lord had pirates at his service for acting against other cities.

Golden Age and decadence

From the XVI century, the piracy becomes a politic matter. Great States start to influence in it, by financing pirate vessels or signing anti-piracy agreements with other States. As a consequence of this influence, the new privateers have more modern and sofisticated ships, giving place to a true Golden Age of piracy. Most important were port cities of Argelia (Bejaia, Oran, Algiers), that were protected and financed by Muslim kingdoms, specially the Ottoman and the nasri of Granada, by using these privateers to weaken the influence of Christian kingdoms. It is the time of the Barbarossa brothers (Baba Aruj and Khaid ar Din) who, associeted to the Ottoman Empire, caused great losses to the Spanish fleet.
From the XVII century, the troubles caused by privateers to their own protectors make these retire progressively their support. At the XVIII century the fleets of England, France and the United Provinces were powerful enough to control the decadent pirate activity, that disappeared one century later.

A noble eagle or a scavenger ugly bird?

2006-12-06T16:09:00.000-08:00

After the American Independence War, the Continental Congress of the recently created United States decided it was imperative to create a set of symbols to represent the new nation. Among them, a committee was designated to ellaborate the design of the future American Great Seal, since used for representation of the coat of arms and the president, as well as other institutions. This committee was composed by three men: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
One of the hottest arguments between the two latter was about choosing a bird to be included in the symbol, so that it represented the spirit and the moral of the new nation. Jefferson proposed the bald eagle as such, an endemic bird in North America, with an arrogant, vigilant look. A bird with this appearance, he thought, cannot be but a noble and brave one.

A bird with not much of a noble behaviour

However, if we observe the citations made by biologists and naturalists about the behaviour of this bird, such as the works of Mark Catesby and Meriwether Lewis, we can realie that this bird is actually all except noble and brave.
The bald eagle is a carnivore, not a good hunter though. It nearly always feeds of carrion from dead animals or rests abandoned by an imperial eagle. When it eats fish, it usually gets close to the tracks of migration for salmons, and catches those dead on their way. Or it just waits patiently that an osprey, very skilful in catching fishes on the fly but smaller than the bald eagle, fetches a fish, and then steal its food. However, it never dares to fight an imperial eagle, while they are the same size.

Analogies

Benjamin Franklin never supported the bald eagle for the United States symbol. He said about it, in a letter to his daughter, that "it is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him." Franklin proposed the turkey as the symbol, a truly brave and arrogant bird according to him.
The 20th June 1784, the Congress supported Jefferson and approved the bald eagle as part of the Seal. Did Jefferson suspect what would the American relations be like towards politically weaker countries, and in the contrary, in situations in which it would compete with someone with its same size? The extermination wars against American natives, economic fagocitation of South America, predation with oil resources, sale of weapons to countries in civil war... and at the same time, negation of inconditional help to Europe during the Nazi invasion, the political game played with the Soviet Union (another bald eagle, but a bit more foolish), or the likely little heroic retreat from Irak... Actually, the bald eagle is perfect for this symbol. What a black humour, Jefferson.

Xian Yu, the general that almost got China

2006-11-25T17:06:00.000-08:00

The year 210 BC, the emperor that established the Qin dynasty in China dies. His son, a complete idiot, could not avoid a general uprising in the empire, that would lead to his fall.

In the south, in the rural region of Chu, a coalition of rebel armies advanced towars the Qin capital, Guanzhong. It was agreed that the first general that conquered the city would be the heir to the throne. Of the candidates, Xian Yu was the most admired, but also the most feared.

A doubted reputation

Xian Yu was nephew of Xian Liang, the soldier that had started the revolt. After his death in battle, Xian Yu took it over from him, and he unstoppably fighted and defeated the imperial armies. His cruelty, however, was not less known. He razed entire cities, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and murdered members of his own coalition. In the battle of Julu, having been put under command of the general Song Yi, he did not hesitate to killing him when he had shown indecision, and commanding his army, risked it and produced an enormous defeat to the iperial troops, despite of huge losses of his part too. He was awarded a doubted reputation of brave and militarily skilful man, but also arrogant and tyrannic.

Xian Yu forgot the agreement that had been made. While he was fiercely fighting in Jusu, a small army led by the unknown Liu Bang entered the weakened empire and conquered the capital, being thus appointed future heir of it. When Xian Yu arrived there and noticed it had already been conquered, he got furious and razed it.

A violent five-year civil war happened between the two factions. Xian Yu had more support, more territory and a better equipped army. However, after some defeats, Liu Bang began winning. Despite of his less military experience, because of his humble origins, he carried out a successful diplomacy. He got surrounded by good military advisers, attracted of the more noble and calm personality of Liu Bang than the one from his adversary. Meanwhile, Xian Yu never accepted a single advise from his lieutenants and only trusted the bravery of his soldiers.

In the end, the better strategy, and especially the management of supplies, gave victory to Liu Bang, who became the first emperor of the Han dynasty. Xian Yu cut his throat on the side of the river Yangtse, abandoned by all his lieutenants.

Xian Yu is still a very popular character in the Chinese culture. The sentence "being surrounded by Chu music" means being without allies or support. It comes from the moment when Liu Bang's army surrounded Xian Yu, after conquering the region of Chu, from where he was. Liu Bang odered his soldiers to sing typical songs from the region, so that they showed him that they were on his side there too.

Looks

2006-11-19T15:35:00.000-08:00

Western civilization, since the end of Middle Ages, expanded progressively out of its environment, exploring new territories and discovering strange cultures, very different from its own. Towards them, the discoverer imposed a dominating attitude in the beginning. However, the perception on new civilizations and its population has hugely changed, along with the way of thinking and social changes in Occident.

XV to XVII centuries: The "savage"

Since XV century, Portuguese naos and Spanish caravels, to which other European empires joined later, explored the coasts of unknown continents, establishing colonies and forcing natives to assimilate their culture or exterminating them.
The conception of these new cultures is represented by the way to denominate them: "savages". This automatically puts them in a culturally inferior degree. Colonizers do not respect their customs, destroy their systems. As best, they experiment a simple curiosity for the rare items they contain. It is not rare to see an aristochrat that acquires an elephant tusk, an exotic music instrument or a mummified native, to show to his friends.
Representations of savages usually show their bodies as hairy and monstrous shape, and almost always in a wild and cannibal scene. Western mentality of that moment, very influenced by religion and superstitions, and reluctant to new points of view, naturally led to this monstruous concept of the new and unknown.

XVIII and XIX centuries: The scientific, artistic and social interest

With the arrival of the Enlightment and the use of reason, there starts to be a more constructive curiosity towards exotic cultures. Firstly, a purely scientific interest made antropologists and doctors from Occident study the differences and similarities of these "new people" to the known ones, as well as their way of living.
XIX century is the period of romantics, of explorers and adventurers. This is a perfect scenario for people like them. New territories are charted, scenes of tribal life are painted, and travel books that tell about rites and customs of these civilizations are written. It is the century of people like Livingstone, Stanley and Burton.
At the end of the century and beginning of next one, the positivist movement motivates to classify everything in the World. Naturalists and botanists travel around the Earth classifying new species, taking photos of animals and plants, and take information on non-civilized tribes that exist on the World.
From XX century: Integration

It is only in the past century that a value starts to be given to these cultures, that Western civilization assimilates their cultural contributions and artistic shapes. Modern painters, such as Pablo Picasso and André Breton, among others, among many others, integrate forms and aesthetics directly copied from African and South-american symbolic sculpture.
Globalized World is becoming a mix of trends that lead to a kind of world art. Cultural integration is greater, different lifestyles are adopted. Oriental philosophy and African music get mixed with western customs in an armonic way. Finally, we got to the product of several centuries of human evolution.

The Nile and the Euphrates

2006-11-14T14:09:00.000-08:00

Around the year 4000 BC, a civilization appears on the side of the Nile river. The Egyptian Empire lasted more than 3000 years and was the first civilization in History that built great architectural and artistic works, also to create an organized central administration.
In parallel, in the area between the courses of the rivers Tigris and Eu phrates, in Mesopotamia, state-cities arise (Sumer, Akkad, Susa, Ur, Babylon) that will compete on each other and develop an equally important cultural identity. To them we owe the first aphabet and the code of laws.
However, the development in both of them was very different. While in Egypt a great politic entity appear and was stable for thousands of years, Mesopotamia saw endless confrontations between its small state-cities, none of which managed to impose its hegemony permanently. What is the reason of this difference?

Two basins, two civilizations

Certainly, both river sides were very fertile. However, they were in a different manner.
The river Nile suffers periodic floods. It is necessary just a minimum human effort to take the maximum profit, guaranteeing also rich harvests with a great stability. The sides of the Tigris and the Euphrates, to begin with, are more mountainous and less favourable to agriculture. Moreover, harvests are not necessarily always good, but droughts and floods can sometimes happen. Thus, in order to take the maximum benefit of its potential, it was necessary for its population to build great dams and complex irrigation systems. Exactly, archaeological findings in Ancient Mesopotamie show the existence of this kind of works, while they are rare in Egypt.

Social consequences

In Egypt, food stability allowed a long prosperity and the establishment of an empire in which citizen miscontent was not frequent. This Empire was relatively stable for thousands of years, until its inactivity finally provoked its decadency. In Mesopotamia, on the contrary, the support of the community was necessary for the good operation of irrigation systems in difficult conditions, and in this context, the role of the city was fundamental to establish guarantees. Moreover, when bad harvests happened, was was frequent, usually provoked by disputes on territories or resources.

It is interesting how similar cases have repeated along History. Stability makes people open-minded, risking sometimes to lead to cultural sleeping. In difficult periods survivance instincts are more important, the people get isolated in their community, and show aggresive to external identities.

The slap of Anagni

2006-11-05T13:06:00.000-08:00

The pope Boniface VIII (satirized in an ancient drawing, on the right) is one of the most infamous of the Roman Church. With him, the figure of the pope suffered the biggest humilliation of his history. A slap on the face is not easy to be forgotten.

Power conflicts

At the end of the XIII century, Italy is divided in hundreds of small States governed by powerful families, which also try to achieve power in Rome by placing a pope with their own surname. Let us imagine an Italian-like war, in which small treasons are as frequent as open field battles.

In 1297 the pope Boniface VIII, from the Caetani family, rules Rome. A small terrain dispute took him as an excuse to a total war with the Colonna family, also with pretensions to place a pope in Rome. The war ended with the total destruction of the Colonna capital, Palestrina, and the banishment of the family to France.

Meanwhile, the king Philip IV the Fair had been taking a pulse with the pope since several years before, as the pretensions of the latter to expand his power were extreme ("It is necessary for the salvation that every human creature subjects to the Roman pontificate", Unam Sanctam, 1302). In 1303 the French king broke the pulso by deciding to collect taxes from the clergy in the country. Boniface responded to this as a pope, by redacting a bule to excommunicate the king.

The slap of Anagni

However, the skilful ministre of the king, Guillaume de Nogaret, proposed him a simple plan before the war would be declared: Go to Italy by surprise, arrest the Pope and destitute him back in France. First rejected by the king, few days later Nogaret received a letter from him with orders to "go to such a place, and make such treaties with such persons as seems appropiate".

Sciarra Colonna, eager of revenge, joined Nogaret's expedition, which in the Apennines recruited 1600 men, enemies of Caetani, and managed to get to the Pope's residence in Anagni without being noticed. In the palace, Sciarra humilliated Boniface by slapping him to the floor. The pope, still down, shouted "Guillaume, son of cathares! Here is my head, here my neck. I will die, but I will die as a Pope". Nogaret convinced Sciarra not to cut his head at the place.

The Pope was in prison only three days, as many of his supporters raised in arms in Rome and freed him, and the attackers fled. However, the Pope was very weakened by this fact (he could have suffered too much moral and physical damage for being 68 years old), and died a month later. After one year, the Pope's residence was moved to Avignon, and so was under absolute control of the king of France. The Popes have hardly recovered from that slap.

The Iberian falcata

2006-10-31T10:47:00.000-08:00

"It cuts off arms from the shoulder, heads from necks with a single hit, leaves the entrails out and produces all kinds of horrible wounds".

So told Pliny the Elder, in his Naturalis Historia, about the charms of the most feared weapon in the pre-Roman era. In the 2nd century BC, after the Second Punic War, the Roman Empire had expelled Carthage from the Iberian Peninsula. Now this territory was on a plate, and with it, its iron and copper mines, the richest of the Known World. However, a general uprising of Iberian and Celtiberian tribes against the invaders prolonged their conquest for almost two hundred years, and became hell for the Roman Legions.

The fierce resistence the natives opposed was influenced by their better knowledge of the terrain and their guerrilla war, but the use of the falcata, a sword clearly superior to Roman weapons, hit hard in the legions' moral. Augustus even orderd to renforce with iron the shields of the armies that left for Hispania, to try to mitigate its cutting effect.

The falcata's probable origin is the Greek kopis, a type of saber that Greek merchants brought in their colonial missions. From 5th century BC, Iberians gradually transformed it, decreased its curvature, added a double edge at the end (so that it could also operate as a thrust weapon, and especially improved its method of fabrication by using very pure iron and a three-plates structure. This lead to a very flexible weapon which was virtually impossible to break by other weapons of the time.

Its cutting power was most effective when used from high, such as in cavalries or at the defense of city walls. That is why, because of its characteristic shape, the hit came in a direction tangent to the target, and not perpendicular such as in the Roman gladius, so the cut was deeper. This technique has been later used, drom the scimitars to the modern sabers that Napolean dragoons used.

The true Robespierre

2006-10-24T11:06:00.000-07:00

Robespierre is one of the main characteres in the French Revolution, but also that sanguinary tyrant who sent thousands of people to guillotine during the Terror era. However, the ones who write History are usually the winners of the moment, which in this particular moment were the enemies that provoked his downfall. Let's try to be more critical.

A respectable citizen

Maximilien Robespierre was born in Arras, in the French Picardie. From a middle-class family, he could follow Law courses as his grandfather, where he stood out as a particularly brilliant student. While working as a lawyer, he wrote several law books that gave him a good reputation in the town. Being known as an inconditional supporter of Rousseau's revolutionary theories, he was one of the most respectable citizens of the region, being especially known for his correction, honesty and absolute sincerity.
In 1788 revolutionary ideas became more popular, and Robespierre started influencing political ambiances in the town, where he was chosen for several political jobs in Arras and later in Paris, where his position in defense of poor peasants granted him the support of the people while his brilliant speeches. He entered the Jacobins Club, the radical left-wing group, of which he eventually became the spiritual leader after the disappearing of its founding leaders (Barnave, Mirabeau). The attitude Robespierre took during the events that followed, and especially the speeches in which he exposed it, gave him an increasing popularity within the Revolutionary Government, which eventually lead him to be elected as a member of the Public Security Commitee. He had opposed the war with Austria, and had supported the execution of King Louis XVI, by pronouncing his popular sentence "Louis must die, so that the country can live". The failure that the contrary position Girondins took meant their destruction, and the consolidation of Robespierre as the leader of the National Convention, new era of the Revolution.
From 1792 to his downfall two years later, more than 30000 people were guilotined in Paris, denounced by the Convention as traitors to the Revolution. Robespierre and his little buddies increased progressively repressive actions, also among the members of the Government. Danton and Hébert, supporters of Robespierre but from different factions, were executed, and the Government was increasingly pointed out as a dictatorship. Finally, a raising of the people provoked the Convention overthrown and the execution of its tyrant, in July 1794.

A cruel tyrant?

It is uncontested that Robespierre created an authoritary and repressive state, almost a dictatorship in the middle of the Revolution. However, which were the reasons for his actions? Actually, a personal dictatorship does not match with the ideas he defended, and maybe he never really liked sending citizens to the guillotine (he dismissed from a judge job at Criminal Court of Arras to avoid pronouncing death sentences). It is imaginable that after the overthrown of the Convention, many members of the Commitee blamed Robespierre, already dead, for all the atrocities that happened, and so saved their lives.
Robespierre was a theorist and a philosopher. During his political career, he formulated laws, wrote essays and gave speeches. The ideas from his idol Rousseau, which defended the people's power especially over individual freedom, were the defining ideas of his Government, that he described as "the despotism of freedom against tyranny". As a theorist, he tried to apply his ideas in an inflexible way, to the point that he did not hesitate to eliminate his detractors. As a politician without pragmatic sense, he never betrayed his ideas, and was "incorruptible" until his death.

Postmodernism

2006-10-16T13:33:00.001-07:00

We have all learned at school quite well (or not) the History until what is called "nowadays". How ambiguous... What does "nowadays" mean? We cannot stop wondering how will this age be called in the future, when it will not be the Contemporaneous Age anymore, when it will become History.
"Postmodernism" is the term to usually call this age. Not a great name, undoubtely, which just comes from being the successing age to Modernism. Anyway, neither Modernism was so called at its time, so let us hope a better name someday.
But, what are its values of thinking? Is it true that, as our parents say, "current society has not values"? Well, according to the Modernist point of view, maybe yes. But a Postmodernist will answer: "it depends on what you consider a value", leaving the hearer confused and a bit dizzy.

How it happened

Let us see how this mess came out. Year 1945: The World has just realised of the result of Progress, so idealized by Modernist and Positivist philosophies of the last hundred years. This way of thinking believed infinitely in the power of Technology and Reason which, through Scientific method and Experimentation, would eventually lead the Man to absolute Good and Truth, to dominate its surroundings and make him owner of his destiny. But after the Second World War and all the horrors and social injustices it created, all this was seriously argued and, except neo-modernist attempts such as the Structuralist school, progressively unbelieved.
New relativist ways of thinking arise. Sartre, Derrida and Foucault surprise thinkers with their "Existentialist", "Decontructionist" and "Post-structuralist" proposals. The idea of "one way, one truth", is substituted by "everything goes". Communication media carry information to the masses, which start to be critical and create opinion. New generations break down ethic values never argued before.
This trend, however, is ralentised by the Cold War and the division of the World in two oposing blocks, with consequent politizacion of media, which become a tool of mass opinion domination. Finally, at the end of the 80s happens the great victory of Postmodernism, communist regimes in Eastern Europe are progressively overthrown by the growing power of public opinion. The global conception of the World and Relativism compose the thought of our society. The concept of "value", as an idea whose definition exists and is commonly accepted, has disappeared.

What is a postmodernist

All of us who live in this age have postmodern lifestyles. We all are, in a greater or less extent, a product of this trend.
- A postmodern does not believe in doctrines. Knows that thinking, opinion and truth are relative. Utopy does not exist, and Progress is not more than an illusion built by the mistaken idea of "Truth". As it is a relative idea, everything else is.
- Postmoderns believe in Imagination and Creativity. They know that Reason alone is a limited tool, and besides, inhumane.
- A postmodern, however, knows that even if he is creative, he is not original. No idea that comes from his mind has been generated in there, as every idea is a copy, version or mixture of other existing ones. He/she knows, besides, that this idea is not static but fluid, its meaning changes greatly according to the time and place.
- Postmoderns are not humanists. They do not wonder about "why" or "what for" of the Being. Instead, they are humanitarian. They believe that personal experience and friendship are the ways to make individuals more compltee.
- A postmodern being is a product of Globalization. He feels as a member of the World. Has interest and admiration to different cultures, even more than the own.
- Postmoderns communicate in a non-conventional manner, they experiment. Reinvent the language. They also change their concept of art and beauty, they change all the time. They will never achieve to define themselves because they are change indeed.

The Queen of Sabah

2006-10-03T15:15:00.001-07:00

The story of the Queen of Sabah is one of those cases where true is marred by legends. Despite of being mentioned in many ancient writings, the authentic identity of this woman is still unknown.

The story

Several Holy books, such as Judaic Bible, Islamic Quran and Ethiopian Kebra Nagast tell about a queen who ruled in the southern Kingdom of Sabah (or Sheba in Hebraic) with great kill, as she was loved and feared by her people. It is told that "she lived with luxury, and she had a magnificent throne" (Coran, 27). Personally she was very brune, and beautiful, but also with a strong will.
Even when no name is ever given to her (although Ethiopian tradition calls her Makeda, and Arab calls her Bilqis), Judaic texts mention that the queen heard from the greatness of King Solomon and decided to visit him, carrying with her big amounts of spices, gems and gold as a gift. She could even have been invited by Solomon himself.
Different versions agree that during her 6-months stay in Israel, Solomon made use of his seduction arts towards her, by which he was well known (this charming sir had more than 700 wifes and concubines). According to the Judaic Bible, she was so impressed by his culture that in the end she converted to Judaism and set this religion in her homeland when she returned. Ethiopian tradition affirms that from the union of both a child was born, whose name Menelik, who, at his mother's death, was the first of an extraordinary long dinasty that ruled Ethiopia, lasting to the popular emperor Halie Selassie and his descendents.
However, scarce archaeological evidences make it very hard to know the true story of this queen. How could someone, who takes such an important role in legends and Holy writings, leave so few traces of her existence?

The History

Let us see. What does seem certain is that in the X century BC, as Israel reached the maximum of its cultural and political power under Solomon's rule, there was a kingdom at the gates of the Red Sea which occupied a great part of current Yemen, and probably coastal regions of the Horn of Africa.
Sources different from the already mentioned say that the city of Tyre "traded with the merchants of Sabah and Ramah: first quality spices and every kind of gems and gold they gave for their goods" (Ezechiel, 27), agreeing in what the Bible mentions. Also Assyrian and Persian writings testify its existence. It seems that, despite being a much less refined culture than the Israeli one, its privileged situation confered it quite a great importance at this time.
Recent archaeological findings have shown an urban centre in Marib, currently Yemen, at what is supposedly the heart of the ancient kingdom of Sabah. Findings in Ethiopia have not been so revealing, although the presence of semitic origin languages concentrated in the coastal zones of Ethiopia, Egypt and Somalia suggest that at least these areas probably belonged to this culture.
About the existence of the queen, the absence of a name to give her is something awful (in the historical sense). But actually, it is not really known whether she existed or not. Holy writings, so prone to allegories and myths, could perfectly have told about the queen in a symbolic meaning.
In the findings at Marib there is a temple known as Temple of Bilqis (the name given to the queen by the Arabs). Hence, maybe the queen, as it was a civilization mainly matriarchal, became a godness. It could even be, why not, that writings do not tell about the Queen of Sheba but on the Godness itself, in a symbolic meaning. However, pagan religion in this kingdom was polytheistic, so we could be just reducing the legendary queen to a simple local divinity from the supposedly capital Marib.
The fact of the visit to Solomon is not generally seen as a legendary tale, but it could also admit several meanings. The most widely accepted is the sign of a commercial treaty between the kingdoms of Israel and Sabah. Trading goods carried by the Sabaeans to Israel seem to prove it. However, it is possible instead that the king Solomon, seeing a kingdom with great commercial power but militarly inferior, would have forced a submission treaty by which Sabah would have become a mere vassal of Israel. This could give an explanation to the fact that Judaism expanded over southern Arabia and Ethiopia.
The switch of reality into legend could have happened in a natural way. King Solomon liked to be surrounded by a court of poets and singers that told the deeds of his king. These heroic songs could have become tradition, which 400 years later would have been impressed in Judaic writings, from there passed to Quran, and from there to Legend. Et voilà, the myth is over :)