I recently spent two weeks in Patrick County, Virginia.

The county is at the heart of Appalachia and part of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Appalachia means to me a very poor region, one of the areas LBJ wanted to fix with his Great Society policy. There has been progress since. The roads are in good shape and most people have internet connectivity. But most people, I hear, are still are poor.

Patrick County has interesting features. There are very few straight roads; most of the roads snake around between cliffs that rise up on one side and fall away on the other. Not too many fields, and few domesticated animals living in them.

Not too many houses!

The county, besides being isolated by topography, looks like a social island. There is perhaps one and only one fast-food outlet. Not that you will go hungry.There are what you might call mom and pop restaurants, But no McDonald’s, no Tim Horton's, no Wendy’s. There is good food in some of them. And some of the venues host music time and again.

What made the greatest impression on me was the Blue Ridge Mountains. On the way back to the North I was fascinated by the mountains to the point that I dreamed about them all night long.

IMAGE: one view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Some good stuff from the earlier days of this blog -- and other people's blogs

I spent much of a recent morning looking at earlier parts of this blog and I found myself surprised at the quality of the material. I don't say this to brag, but simply because I found lots of stuff that I had forgotten.

Good stuff.

Two instances:

I quoted George Orwell who argued in 1940 that people who wondered how Hitler had become so popular in Germany should contemplate the sacrifices Hitler demanded or offered his followers. This was, said Orwell, made Fascisim more attractive than Socialism or Capitalism which merely promised an easier life. I thought of current Fascism and wondered and how applicable this analysis might be.

Here's a little more detail (it's from Greaeme Wood in the Atlantic in early 2015):

In reviewing Mein Kampf in March 1940, George Orwell confessed that he had “never been able to dislike Hitler”; something about the man projected an underdog quality, even when his goals were cowardly or loathsome. “If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.” The Islamic State’s partisans have much the same allure. They believe that they are personally involved in struggles beyond their own lives, and that merely to be swept up in the drama, on the side of righteousness, is a privilege and a pleasure—especially when it is also a burden.

Fascism, Orwell continued, is psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life … Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger, and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet … We ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

Second, I rediscovered my old friend Will McLean. Will died all too young but not before making a significant contribution to the re-enactment of the Middle Ages. Will was a member of the SCA but not a typical one. He was more like a pioneer than the usual person who joins the SCA today, who learns the about the "Middle Ages as they should have been" as they become part of it. Will was always one to go back to the source material rather than follow some contemporary who had done a pretty good job. I reprinted a number of his more interesting posts from his blog A Commonplace Book in mine.

That's just two of the things you might stumble across looking at my blog. And that doesn't count original material by me -- for instance some of the insights I acquired while teaching Crusade and Jihad at Nipissing University. I had to think very intensely about what was important about these phenomena, and what my students could be expected to learn.

This process, familiar to all sorts of teachers taught me a lot.

For instance:

There were plenty of religious rivalries before 1096, and a great many were Christian v Christian and Muslim v Muslim. Like Syria or Iraq today.

Or

Crusader motivation

In a famous eyewitness account of the taking of Jerusalem in 1099, the crusading chaplain Raymond of Aguilers described a bloodbath at the Temple Mount (drawing, as has often been pointed out, on the Book of Revelations):

It was necessary to pick one's way over the bodies of men and horses. These are small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon, a place where religious services are ordinarily chanted. What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much, at least, that in the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to the knees and bridle reins.. Indeed it was a just and splendid judgment of God that in this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it suffered so long from their blasphemies. The city was filled with corpses and blood.... Now that the city was taken, it was well worth all of our previous labors and hardships to see the devotion of the pilgrims at the holy sepulcher. How they rejoiced and exulted and sang a new song to the Lord! For their hearts offered prayers of praise to God, victorious and triumphant, which cannot be told in words. A new day, new joy, me and perpetual gladness, the consummation of our labor and devotion, drew forth from all new words and new songs. This day, I say, will be famous in all future ages, for it turned our labors and sorrows into joy and exultation; this day, I say, marks the justification of all Christianity, the humiliation of paganism, and the renewal of our faith. "This is the day which the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it," for on this day the Lord revealed himself to his people and blessed them.

This passage relates to two questions that often come up in studying history, but particularly the history of the Crusades (or for that matter, jihad). The first might be the question of sincerity. Did so-and-so undertake this project, or conquer this country, or start this war because he sincerely believed in his stated ideals? I find this as a historical question somewhat uninteresting. Every observer has his or her views as to how human nature works in general and in particular cases, say for instance, how kings and emperors act. It is hard to convince people to change their mind on this issue. So arguments about sincerity don't go very far unless you clearly define what you are talking about -- and people generally don't. Part of the problem is terminology, especially the use of the word "religion." Often when people talk about "religion" they are talking about a creed or set of beliefs that someone else really (or doesn't really) believes in. Or they may mean a set of rules that members of a given religion are supposed to follow. But both beliefs and rules are usually discussed in terms of formal definitions laid down by higher authorities in well-defined religious organizations. If you look in detail about what individuals say they believe or how they actually act, you may well find that these individual "believers" or "followers" not to have the same "religion" as the great authorities. If a theologian says that Christianity believes thus, or a scholar says that Islam demands thus, it is trivially easy to find Christians or Muslims who do not believe or do those things. In any big-name religion, the greatest and most respected authorities only speak for one stream of a very diverse tradition. And if ordinary people attached to that tradition claim to be obedient followers, the outside observer may often find that they don't realize how far they are from literal adherence to proclamations of their leaders; or do realize, and have good reasons of their own for their particular interpretation of what the religion means.

Which brings us to the second question, which might be put this way: "Were the Crusades really about religion? What does holy war have to do with the teachings of Jesus?" My answer to these questions is, yes they were about religion (if you just want a war that were plenty closer to hand in 11th- century Europe) -- but what was that religion like? What was its actual content? Christianity in most varieties is a lot more than the teachings of Jesus. Put aside for the moment the vast diversity of the Bible, which makes it possible to find justification for almost anything in it, especially if you use sophisticated symbolic interpretation. More important, I think, is that even Christians with little or no firsthand knowledge of the Bible have strong opinions about what Christianity is. When we are talking about the motivations of Crusaders it is probably more useful to think about the individuals who trekked across the Balkans and Anatolia and how they acted, rather than what Pope Urban II said at Clermont (important as that might be in other contexts). When we are talking about the religion that led men to Jerusalem and helped produce the slaughter there, Raymond of Aguilers’s version of Christianity is as important as that of any Pope, or of Augustine of Hippo, if not more so.

So yes, this blog has hidden treasures. And some of those treasures are links to other blogs. Note that the most recent post in Will's Commonplace Book is ten years old, but there is plenty to learn from it, today or whatever day you are reading this.

Brad deLong on AI and H.P. Lovecraft

I am very impressed by Brad DeLong's essay Shoggoths among us. I've been going through my inbox, and except for all the great astrophysics material, this discussion of the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and the Singularity was by far the best. When I was in university (ca 1970), I like my fannish friends read H.P. Lovecraft. We all read as much SF and fantasy as we could get our hands on. Young readers today probably can't imagine how little of such material there was. I was not impressed by Lovecraft (except for At the Mountains of Madness .) Too creepy.

But Brad got more out of it. One result is this sensible (!) essay on AI, modernity, democracy, autocracy, and industrial revolutions.,

/p And monsters.

Highly recommended.

Good books

Brad deLong loves Peter S. Beagle's Folk of the AirFolk, which he called, back in 2021, "a fantasy novel of Berkeley and of the Society for Creative Anachronism."

Charlie Angus reflects on what he learned at a Juno Beach Commemoration some years ago

Here's what he said. This in particularly touched me:

At a beautiful ceremony in the vast Canadian cemetery at Bretteville-sur-Laize, young schoolchildren read out a poem in French to Canada's dead: "We are the children you never had. We are your children — the children of liberty." There wasn't a dry eye in the crowd as they read.

And here's the music. https://youtu.be/ii79Yoxf3Uw

Heaven

Is Canada heaven?

Not likely ... except some days I get a glimpse...

Take my recent visit to a medical laboratory for some blood-tests. The lab was clean; the staff was organized and polite; there was no traffic jam, inside or out.

And I didn't have to pay anything!

The Dutch -- more interesting than you think

The Netherlands is a much-admired country, a modern success story. But the success story of today is based on a long history of prominence, remarkable for what is really a very small region.

In the 17th century the Netherlands had a competitive position in world trade, a healthy domestic environment in an era of plague, and some of the best painters of all time who served to document it all. Thus the painting above of a Dutch raid on England, one of their chief rivals.

Most of the famous and attractive paintings of this time are portraits of real people in their public settings. Can you say "Rembrant"? One of his most famous paintings is The Night Watch a group portrait of a civic militia. These were upper-class but not noble men who were a key part of the politics of the Netherlands (and especially Holland and the city of Amsterdam).

A modern take on the painting is the song "The Night Watch" by the eccentric progressive rock (?) group King Crimson. Another example of the public/personal element of the art of this era is this striking self-portrait by Artemisia Gentileschi. No, she's not Dutch, but I can't resist this assertion of her right as a woman not just to paint, but to represent, embody Painting.

Things were not always happy in the Netherlands. The best example of this is the death of Johan de Witt. He was the long-time leader of republicans who was opposed by a royal interest led by the House of Orange. After 20 years, his regime found itself at war with all its rivals, especially France and England. In this overheated atmosphere, De Witt was stabbed by a would-be assassin and his brother Cornelis was arrested, tortured and exiled. Johan had resigned and was planning to leave town with his brother when he was attacked by a mob that tore him apart -- and according to a famous story their livers were eaten. The mob attack illustrated by Pieter Frits: https://dutchreview.com/wp-content/uploads/Moord_op_de_gebroeders_De_Witt_door_Pieter_Frits_1627-1708-2.jpg

My reaction to this is not a dark day in Dutch history, though it is that. Rather HEY, IT'S THE 17TH CENTURY! A final point is that Johan was also an important mathematician in a century full of important mathematicians. a href="https://smarthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/593683-1458214692.jpg">

My review of Daniel Baloup's L’Homme armé from the Medieval Review

Baloup, Daniel. L’Homme armé: expériences de la guerre et du combat en Castille au XVe siècle. Madrid: Casa de Velaázquez, 2022. Pp. 309. €35.00 (pb). ISBN: 978-84-9096-361-6.

Reviewed by Steven Muhlberger

Nipissing University

steve.muhlberger@gmail.com

Daniel Baloup has written a massive book that seeks to reconstruct the place of warfare in the culture of Castile during the fifteenth century and to show how people of different types took part in it. His approach is more like a reference work than a monograph. The title is somewhat deceptive. Contemporary sources and modern scholars both have used “man-at-arms” to designate one type of warrior. Baloup is far more inclusive. He takes as his subject all types of warriors and others who were affected by war. Baloup does not neglect any of them. His self-set task is to create an “anthropology of the Castilian wars of the 15th century.”

L’Homme armé is divided into two parts, which are further divided into six substantial chapters.

Part one (two chapters) is “Thinking and writing on war” and is a survey of the literary sources and the writers and theoreticians who devoted themselves to the subject. B. places the writings of such people in their social and military contexts. Not many of these writers are well known but in some cases we have a rather full portrait. Chapter I, 1 is devoted to the case of Lope Garcia de Salazar, a prolific chronicler who has much to say about warriors, war and politics.

Most of the writers cited by B. do not provide us with as much material as Lope Garcia de Salazar, but the historians, clerical writers, and biographers, taken together, provide a more extensive picture of what warriors thought and shared with each other than one might have expected.

Chapter 2 is a detailed discussion of the historiographical characteristics of noble-written chronicles.

Chapter 3 explores, rather briefly, women's involvement in war. I was rather surprised that more was not said about the role of women in romance literature who might be relevant to the themes of the book.

Chapter 4 is concerned with the role of clergy (rather, of prelates) in war. B. begins with canonical legislation that restricted the participation of prelates and progresses to a long description of fifteenth-century prelates actually commanding troops and fighting. This is one of the longest and most interesting sections of the book.

Part two has four chapters on “The Culture of war and warlike practice.” I was particularly impressed by Chapter 5, “The Army in the shadows,” which gives a rather full survey of the communal militias that took on a particular importance because of their participation in the many wars foreign and domestic in and around Castile. The activities of the “commons” are often underrated by military historians. B. does better than most in bringing them out of the shadows. Similarly B. gives us a good amount of attention to clerics who not only preached and theorized about war but fought on the battlefield. I noticed too that B. seldom uses the word “chivalry.“ This a defensible position since chivalry means so many things that one can get lost in its complexities. More relevant to his subject are such characterizations of how nobles were motivated and gained renown: by service (to the land and the king) or by noble descent or personal reputation. These values could easily come into conflict, and such conflicts shaped life in fifteenth-century Castile.

Various readers will come to this book for different reasons. Specialists in the history of the fifteenth century may find it to be a useful reference tool; beside the analytical material in the body of the text, there is a very large bibliography and indices of personal and place-names. Researchers whose main interest is not warfare in Castile but other topics such as chivalry, the literature of war, or the evolution of nobility, who wish to make wide comparative studies and include Castilian manifestations of their subjects, may find Baloup a valuable guide. Certainly the “anthropological” approach adopted by Baloup gives readers the opportunity to construct a fuller picture of war in Castile and warfare in general during the fifteenth century.

More Spectacular Astronomy from Phil Plait

Read about it here.

Remember Ukraine?

When Trump is destroying the American Constitution and the world economy, it's all too easy to forget Ukraine and its vital place in the current moment. Catherine Merridale has not forgotten and >has written an essay on Ukraine past and Ukraine now. Her historical survey ends rather optomistically:

It is all the more impressive, then, that Ukraine’s citizens, knowing their past, should seek and find paths out of it. This outcome was not guaranteed in 1991, the time of the country’s independence. The young state was divided along multiple deep faults. In some regions — the Donbas in particular — allegiance to Russia remained high, Russian-speakers dominated (resenting the imposition of the Ukrainian language in schools), and Soviet political traditions endured. Ukrainian-speaking cities like Lviv might have seemed foreign, even sinister, if you came from the East. A political culture steeped in corruption — again inherited from Soviet times — brought Kyiv into disrepute. But all that changed in 2014. The loss of Crimea played a part, uniting people in outrage, but the mass of citizens had made their choice already months before. Whatever their land used to be (and whatever their own ethnic origins), the Maidan protesters agreed. They wanted a new country and they’d all call it Ukraine. Their novel form of nationhood demands no mist-wreathed past. To focus on pre-history is to sink into a trance. Since Putin’s long essay appeared, I have caught myself checking the dates of the medieval Grand Duchy of Volhynia and laughed at the absurdity. Independence and democracy are concepts that address the present, not the legacies of hate. Kyiv has asked for patriotic service, true, but only on behalf of a free, confident community. Addressing the liberal West, President Zelensky’s call is for democracies to think and act; the courage that Ukraine has shown has put NATO to shame. But Ukraine is bilingual so it speaks to Russia, too. Though Putin’s clique blocks out the sound, one day it will get through. A peaceful state, and democratic, sworn to heal old wounds? ‘Everything is Ukraine.’ It shouldn’t need another war for that to resonate.

IMAGE: St Vladimir's Ortthodox Cathedral, Windsor, Ontario ;

The single scariest thing I have read on the Internet

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQZTzgqNPJhnFntClMkXlnQgCQc

Two thoughtful posts about the current crisis

Let mw recommend Timothy Burke's Academia: No Lessons From History and Umair Haque's Trump Just Nuked the Economy, or, America is a Submerging Market Now.

Not the saame old stuff.

Lumberjacks

A fascinating topic and a fascinating story.

Two statistics: 1,000,000,000/8,000,000,000

I drew attention last year to the fact that 1,000,000,000 Indians were eligible to vote in the recent elections in that country. (And it seems to have been a reasonably honest election as things go these days.) It is generally accepted that the human population is about 8 billion.

I don't quite know what to think about this, but it seems to be worth thinking about.

IMAGE: If your serious about democracy, you have to work hard to make it real.

Happy Election!

That is what a CBC radio host said to a political guest the other day at the end of an excerpt on the upcoming Canadian election.

And you know I think that Canadians are genuinely happy to have an opportunity to have this election.

A medieval sketch from Novgorod

The usual writing medium in the Russian North during the 13th century was birch bark. One of the most important centers of the "Rus" people in that period was Novgorod, and the inhabitants generated a lot of commercial, religious, and perhaps personal documents.

Thanks to the vast supplies of birch trees there is a lot of work for archaeologists. I've never heard how this trove compares to the Cairo Geniza, but perhaps I'll look.

The image above comes from Live Science which often includes neat stuff.

The explanation of this document is that it was written by a 13th-century boy named Onfim who got bored with his schoolwork and started drawing on some. See Wikipedia for more on Onfrim.

Authoritarianism watch -- USA

In the last few months people have been debating with themselves whether the United States has lost its constitutional orderand is now in the hands of an authoritarian regime, a police state instead of a democracy. Lots of the discussion focuses on details of Trump and Musk's arbitrary and illegal actions and efforts to use the courts to restrain him.

Most people, I'd guess, have a hard time evaluating the significance of the various conflicts. I recommend two posts. First , from Talking Points Memo, a post by David Kurtz, one of the best people at this sterling source:

Columbia University Is Ground Zero For Trump Extortion

If you still harbored any doubt that President Trump’s ongoing attack on Columbia University – a private institution – is drawn straight from the authoritarian playbook, then the latest development should be clarifying. The Trump administration – specifically the Department of Education, HHS, and GSA – sent a letter yesterday to Columbia attempting to extort an array of concessions in how the university is run before it may consider restoring some $400 million in frozen federal funding. Imposing an arbitrary March 20 deadline, the Trump administration demanded that Columbia complete a laundry list of internal restructurings, policy changes, and submissions to federal authority. Among the most alarming demands: put the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department in what it calls “academic receivership” for at least five years. If Columbia complies by the deadline, then and only then will the Trump administration “open a conversation about immediate and long-term structural reforms” at the university. If it’s not clear, it sure should be: Even if Columbia submits to this extortion letter, it doesn’t get federal funding restored. It merely sets itself up for a later round of bullying, exorbitant demands, and more extortion. The extortion letter came the same day DHS agents executed search warrants at the residences of two Columbia students. “According to the sources, it was part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on individuals it has described as espousing the views of Hamas and threatening the safety of Jewish students,” ABC News reported. This all transpired as Columbia graduate and pro-Palestinian protest leader Mahmoud Khalil remained in federal detention as the Trump administration attempts to deport him even though he’s a legal permanent resident. His lawyers amended their filings as they obtained new information about his detainment. In an interview with NPR, a top DHS official could not articulate what wrongdoing Khalil was being accused of.

The second post is from Brad DeLong, on the attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil

: Extending the penumbra of some political rights to non-citizens, extending the umbra of full civil rights to non-citizens, tolerating assemblies that turn into disruptions, and siding with causes that wish they were a threat to national security—those are things that a confident nation proud of itself and its liberties is willing to

support. But that is not us now. And that is certainly not the Republican half of us now.

We see here the intention of the Trump Regime to shut down free speech and free thought, especially at universities. Their ambitions are vast.

Vikings and Vikings Valhalla

I am currently watching the Vikings and Vikings Valhalla, and I am enjoying them immensely. I don't know if I can rate them with the Korean series Mr. Sunshine an ironic title for a story about a radicalized young woman resisting the establishment in the period of the Russian-Japanese War, and her lover, a Korean emigrant to the United States who comes back to Korea as a US Marine and finds himself conflicted as to his identity: Korean or American?

Mr. Sunshine is so wonderful that even though I started out talking about Vikings etc. I find myself swept away by my memories of this wonderful Korean saga...

Well, I think the viking saga is very satisfying. Professional medievalists who are experts in 9th century Northern Europe and especially Scandinavian culture will no doubt find lots of things to criticize, but I must say that the producers and writers have made a serious effort to recreate an interesting story about an interesting period: the building of viking kingdoms, and at the same time the conversion of the Scandinavians to Christianity. Here's what I liked: The beautiful cinematography, especially the dramatic land- and seascapes.

Horses and boats.

All the tools, costumes, furniture, buildings, etc. They were convincing

The great amount of care to create and develop characters who evolved over both series. This was quite an acccomplishment, given that IMDB lists for the first series 250 actors who had speaking roles and portrayed named characters.

The acting! The serious effsort to show what the conflict between Christians and Pagans might have been like. And more!