Eilean Donan Castle

Eilean Donan Castle

Wikipedia:

The island's original castle was built in the thirteenth century; it became a stronghold of the Clan Mackenzie and their allies, the Clan MacRae. In response to the Mackenzies' involvement in the Jacobite rebellions against the newly United Kingdom, Royal Naval ships destroyed the castle in 1719. The present-day castle is Lieutenant-Colonel John Macrae-Gilstrap's 20th-century reconstruction of the old castle.

Eilean Donan Castle, top

The three placemarks at the bottom of the map are for other island castles previously posted.

Castle Jindřichův Hradec

Castle Jindřichův Hradec

An old building 

Interior of the Rotunda in Adam's Building

with a fancy interior.

Under Wikipedia's list of notable people from the town of Jindřichův Hradec I found:

Stanislaus von Prowazek (1875 – 1915) was a Czech biologist, zoologist and parasitologist, who along with pathologist Henrique da Rocha Lima (1879-1956) discovered the pathogen of epidemic typhus.

Castle Jindřichův Hradec

The jigsaw puzzle page incorrectly identifies this building complex as Castle Český Krumlov. Castle Český Krumlov is 40 miles  southwest of Castle Jindřichův Hradec. 3D map of Castle Jindřichův Hradec is not available, all you get is the 2D satellite image.

Injustice Is Britain’s Operating Principle

Unite The Kingdom supporters gather at Trafalgar Square after the rally. ©  Andy Barton / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

Curious take on Britain from Timofey Bordachev on RT:

The demonstrations in London earlier this month – up to 150,000 people protesting immigration and government incompetence – drew attention in Russia and abroad. Some observers even wondered if Britain might finally be approaching a breaking point. Perhaps, like Nepal or France in past years, mass anger could reshape politics.

But such hopes are misplaced. Britain will never experience revolutionary upheaval. Its culture is not one of defiance but of endurance. The United Kingdom has, over centuries, become a bastion of injustice disguised as stability, where ordinary people are conditioned to accept their powerlessness. This cultural inheritance, once an imperial advantage, now guarantees slow decline.

Britain is unique in Western Europe: it was created not through union or invitation, but through conquest. In 1066 Norman knights crushed the native English and divided the land into fiefdoms. Unlike Russia, where foreign warriors were invited to defend the realm, or Hungary, where nomads fused with locals to form a people, England’s story was one of subjugation.

That pattern hardened in 1215, when barons forced King John to sign the Magna Carta. Propaganda later elevated the charter as the foundation of English liberty. In reality it entrenched oligarchy: the power of the wealthy over crown and people alike. Where monarchs elsewhere often stood with peasants against feudal tyranny, in England the crown itself was shackled by landowners. Injustice became not an aberration but the system’s operating principle.

Geography reinforced the pattern. For centuries there was no frontier of freedom. Only in 1620 did dissenters finally flee on the Mayflower, planting English settlements in North America. By then, 600 years of endurance had shaped a national character: patient, fatalistic, and resigned.

You can read the whole thing here.

Anantara Convento di Amalfi

Anantara Convento di Amalfi

300 piece jigsaw puzzle. I started with the edges and the blue areas and that went together pretty well.  The skyline and the left portion of the building was next. After that it was 'try one piece at a time'. In the first pass less than half of pieces found their place, so then we go around again. After that it's kind of like Euler's disk, more and more pieces are finding a home until you are down to half a dozen pieces and half a dozen holes and then, boom, you're done. The purple flowers weren't much help, scattered as they are all over the right hand side. 

Kind of cool looking building, so I go looking around for information. Found this on the Anatara Hotel website:

Old photo of the building
Look at those paths and stairs

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS 

A Cistercian Abbey 

The site was given to Cistercian monks from Fossanova in 1214 with the promise of forthcoming funds from the Pope to build on the foundations After nearly 10 years. it became an Abbey under Emperor Federico II of Palermo.

Frederick II

So the place is old. Federico, known in Wikipedia as Frederick the 2nd, Holy Roman Emperor, was a Wonder of the World:

For his many-sided activities and dynamic personality Frederick II has been called the greatest of all the German emperors, perhaps even of all medieval rulers. In the Kingdom of Sicily and much of Italy, Frederick built upon the work of his Norman predecessors and forged an early absolutist state bound together by an efficient secular bureaucracy. He was known by the appellation Stupor mundi (Wonder of the World), enjoying a reputation as a brilliant Renaissance man avant la lettre and polymath even today: a visionary statesman, an inspired naturalist, scholar, mathematician, architect, poet and composer. Frederick also reportedly spoke six languages: Latin, Sicilian, Middle High German, Old French, Greek, and Arabic. As an avid patron of science and the arts, he played a major role in promoting literature through the Sicilian School of poetry. His magnificent Sicilian imperial-royal court in Palermo and Foggia, beginning around 1220, saw the first use of a literary form of an Italo-Romance language, Sicilian. The poetry that emanated from the school had a significant influence on literature and on what was to become the modern Italian language. He was also the first monarch to formally outlaw trial by ordeal, which had come to be viewed as superstitious.

 Amalfi is just south of Naples, Italy. Fossanova Abbey is about halfway between Naples and Rome.

Fossanova Abbey (left) and Amalfi, Italy (right)

Fossanova Abbey and the hotel in Amalfi are about one hundred miles apart, as the crow flies. Probably take two weeks of walking to get from one to the other, unless you could catch a boat.

Viking Wolf

Viking Wolf | Official trailer | Netflix
Netflix Nordic

Gory little horror film that's not very horrific. We have a woman cop, recently transplanted from Oslo or Sweden, along with her two daughters. The younger daughter, Jenny, is elementary school age. The other, Thale, is a teenager. She is out in the boonies, hanging out with her friends when another girl is attacked and drug off into the woods. A search for the missing girl eventually turns up her mutilated body. A big city veterinarian examines the body and concludes that the girl was attacked by an extraordinarily large wolf.

A grisly, old, one-armed dude shows up and tells our lady cop that it's not an ordinary wolf, but a werewolf, a werewolf that he has been tracking for years. He gives her a box of silver bullets that he has put together using the reloading equipment he has set up in his aging RV. She thinks, as any normal, right thinking person would, that he's nuts. A hunting party is organized to track down and kill this wolf. The wolf makes mincemeat of the hunting party, but the lady cop manages to empty the magazine of her 9 mm H&K sidearm into the beast, killing it. 

Our nerdy vet (It's amazing what you can do with a little costuming and acting. He is super nerdy.) examines the corpse and determines that none of the lead bullets our lady cop fired did any real damage to the beast, but the silver bullet (aha!), that one killed it.

Meanwhile Thale has been nursing a scratch on her shoulder that she got when the first girl was attacked. Looks like she has been infected by the werewolf disease. Uh oh, this looks bad. Bad is putting it mildly. She raises hell in town until she is put down with the vet's tranquilizer gun. Last we see of her she is unconscious and tied down on the operating table. Mom has a silver bullet, but doesn't use it thereby leaving an opening for a sequel.

Heddal Stave Church

The best part of the show was a shot of an old church:

Heddal Stave Church

It only appears on the screen for a second and it doesn't play any part in the proceedings other than to sit there and look ominous. The church is in Notodden, Norway, which is where the film was shot. It was built in 1200 and is one of the largest Stave Churches in Norway.

The Monks of the Thebaid

A Thebaid: Monks and Hermits in a Landscapeabout 1505
Lorenzo Costa (Italian, about 1460 - 1535)

The Commondore by Patrick O'Brian. On page 266 we find the doctor sitting down to breakfast:

". . . being no more particular about washing, shaving and brushing than the monks of the Thebaid."

Thebaid? Getty Museum gives us this explanation of the above image, though it doesn't say anything about their personal grooming habits:

Using only pen and ink, Lorenzo Costa portrayed the cradle of Christian monasticism, the Thebaid, a Roman division of the upper Nile River valley. Beginning with Saint Paul of Thebes and Saint Anthony of Egypt in the 200s, Christian monks retreated to this region, to live a solitary life of ascetism and prayer. Over time, these monks, also known as "desert fathers," organized into communities.

Costa's scratchy, energetic draftmanship created a bustling composition filled with monks and a landscape riddled with the grottoes, huts, and caves they used for prayer and shelter. He portrayed an imaginary scene, incorporating a variety of monastic saints and spanning different periods. In the upper left background, Saints Paul and Anthony are shown seated, receiving bread from a raven through which God provided nourishment. Mary Magdalene, who supposedly lived her later years alone in the desert, stands near the river to the right. The landscape itself appears more European than Egyptian, perhaps reflecting Costa's native countryside around Bologna, Italy, rather than the real Thebaid.

A thousand years later there was also a Northern Thebaid in Russia. Now I wonder which one Stephen was referring to. Personal preference says the Egyptian ones as they were in the domain of the known world. Russia was like beyond the pale.

P. S. In the book, Thebaid has two dots over the i, not one, but every reference I saw on the net has just one.

Stabbing

Attack and capture of Belle Isle in 1761 by British forces*

I am reading The Knife Man by Wendy Moore, a book about John Hunter and the birth of modern surgery. After getting his fill of dissecting dead bodies in London, John decides he needs to start earning a living, so he joins the army as a surgeon just in time to embark on an expedition to capture Belle Isle.

While there he gets involved in all the usual army surgeon stuff of the 18th Century, i.e. hacking, slicing and stitching, to put it mildly. But being the kind of guy he is, he also makes some observations, one of which is that wounded soldiers are as often likely to heal without any treatment as they are if subjected to treatment by a surgeon. A case in point is a soldier "shot through and through the breast, recovered perfectly" (page 94).

Konya, Turkey, 1240 or thereabouts

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, deep into Season 4 of Ertugrul, one of the girls takes it upon herself to journey to Konya to stab one of the guys. We won't say who because spoilers. 

Concealed Stabber

Her weapon looks like a big ice pick, possibly because you aren't allowed to carry blades into the presence of Mr. Important (and an ice pick is easier to conceal?). She manages to stab him three times in the abdomen, twice from the back and once from the front. Tragically, in spite of these wounds, he manages to overpower and kill her. Unfortunately, he doesn't die.

Yes, it's a TV show where dozens of people are laid to waste in every episode, and primary characters recover from what appear to be fatal injuries, but still, I thought it showed a little thought by the people making the show. Stabbing someone with a knife blade would more likely have been fatal. Recovering from being stabbed by an ice pick is at least plausible.

I guess as long as you don't cut any major blood vessels, or impact the heart, any kind of injury isn't going to kill you. Of course, being as the body is riddled with major blood vessels, getting stabbed without hitting one of them is pure chance.

*Transcription of the text under the image:
R. Short del,                                                                                                                                                             J Smith sculp,

An exact Representation of the Attack made by the Britifh Fleet, under the Command of 

Adm.¹ Kepple the 8th, of April,1761 at Port Andre, on the Island of Belle Isle.

London,Printed for Rob.^t Sayer Print t;Mapseller,No.53 in Fleet Street.

Quote of the Day

Zazdin Han

We've started watching Season 4 of Resurrection: Ertugrul. In Episode 7 we have the evil (boo, hiss) Emir Sadettin Kopek reading from a book:

"The sultan's crown depends upon the vizier's pen.
If the ink runs dry, his rule will come to an end." - Seljuks' grand emir Nizamulmulk

The real-life Kopek may have been just as sleazy as the villain in this Netflix maxi-series, but he also managed to get some things built, like this caravanserai shown above.

History

Salisbury Cathedral, reflections on the baptismal font
The cathedral in The Pillars of the Earth was modeled on Salisbury cathedral

I've started reading The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. It's not a great book, but it's a good story about building a cathedral in 12th century England. The story is painted in broad brush strokes. The hero is brave, strong and true, the princess is beautiful and the villain is despicable. In this way it is similar to Ertugrul, the Turkish soap opera we've been watching about a tribe of nomads in 13th century Turkey / Syria.

Today I figured out why I like these stories. It's because they include many of the details of everyday life back then. Most scholastic history is all about names and dates. 'So and so went to war against these other people and defeated them at the battle of the slimy swamp', which is all very well if you want to chronicle the power struggles that were going on at the time. But that shit is endless. There is always somebody picking a fight, and someone betraying his allies and somebody getting their ass kicked, but it doesn't really tell you very much about the how or why of something happening.

Now occasionally a small group of motivated, and presumably talented, warriors will score an unexpected victory, but more often it is a matter of training, tactics and superior weaponry. And those come from a society that is rich enough to spend time developing these things. And you get a rich society from free trade, free minds and the rule of law.

The Pillars of the Earth is more nuts and bolts, building a cathedral requires a great many craftsmen making things. The politics, so far, has all been of the local variety. Ertugrul is more like propaganda: the Muslims are good, the Templars are bad, but it does a good job of portraying life in a nomadic encampment, well at least life among the one-percent-ers.

Aleppo

Aleppo in the 13th Century

We've been watching Resurrection: Ertugrul on Netflix. In episode 5 our hero pays a visit to Aleppo. It flashes on the screen for maybe a second just after the 17 minute mark. Is this the same Aleppo that has been getting hammered in the Syrian civil war? Why, yes it is. The place has expanded significantly since the 13th Century.

The ancient citadel with the modern city.

Resurrection: Ertugrul

A promotional image for the Turkish television series “Dirilis: Ertugrul.” Credit TRT 1 TV

We seem to be suckers for historical dramas, as long as they have plenty of sword swinging action. We started watching this one last night.

Diriliş: Ertuğrul is a Turkish historical adventure television series . . . The show is based on the history of the Muslim Oghuz Turks and takes place in the 13th century and centers around the life of Ertuğrul, the father of Osman I, who was the founder of the Ottoman Empire. - Wikipedia

The first episode was a bit slow getting started, but it quickly picked up steam. We ended up watching three episodes last night. Then we check to see how deep this rabbit hole goes and we find that Netflix has 180 episodes! (Wikipedia disagrees.) Most of the series we've watched have been more like a dozen episodes. This is truly phenomenal.

In some foreign sounding gibberish, presumably Turkish, with subtitles.

The Last King

The Last King

The Last King (original Norwegian title Birkebeinerne) is a historical drama that film centers on the efforts of the Birkebeiner loyalists to protect the infant heir to the Norwegian throne. The film is set during the Civil war era in Norway during the 13th century. - paraphrased from Wikipedia.

We watched this last night on Netflix. The first thing we noticed was the big, red-haired wilding from Game of Thrones, Kristofer Hivju, in a starring role. Well, of course, you'll find him here. Who is better at swinging an axe in brutal winter conditions?

The movie has a couple of surprising features:

• lots of chasing people on skis with evil intent, so much skiing that it put me in mind of old James Bond movies.
• squads of bad guys using crossbows effectively.
• horses carrying soldiers running on snow. The snow would have to be either not very deep or well packed. I can imagine short paths being well traveled enough for a horse, or perhaps a narrow path between adjacent villages, but I don't think there were much in the way of roads in medieval Norway. Well, you can't have a medieval war story without warhorses, so mark this one up to the influence of Hollywood.

Skiing Birchlegs Crossing the Mountain with the Royal Child, 1869, by Knud Bergslien.

The skiing was at least semi-authentic. No fancy tricks, basically just skiing long runs downhill with maybe a few gentle turns.

Tradition

Horseshoes, 61 nails, an axe and billhook are part of the rent London owes to the Queen. EPICS/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Atlas Obscura has a fine story about a simple business transaction that has been going of for hundreds of years. Becuase traditionalists are getting beat up left, right and sideways these days, an' I doan a-like it.

Via Detroit Steve

Why Thomas Aquinas Distrusted Islam

Saint Thomas Aquinas
An altarpiece in Ascoli Piceno, Italy, by Carlo Crivelli (15th century)

West Virginny Sharon sent me an article, Why Thomas Aquinas Distrusted Islam by Thomas D. Williams, originally posted on Breitbart dot com. Saint Thomas Aquinas, if you recall, was a 13th Century Italian friar, scholar and priest. Don't confuse this guy with Thomas More (A Man For All Seasons), a 16th Century Englishman, or Thomas Becket, a 12th Century English Archbishop. (Confused yet? I know I was.)
     Mohammed founded Islam in the 7th Century. By this point Christianity was well established in Europe and parts of Africa. Islam got started in the Arabian Peninsula, which is mostly desert, and hot, nasty desert at that.
    So why hadn't Christianity taken hold in Arabia? Perhaps because Christians need water? Maybe the harsh desert climate makes people a little crazy, and it took a crazed warlord to bring a semblance of civilization to that benighted land. So Saint Tom might be right about Islam, but Islam has managed to flourish where Christianity failed to make inroads.

The Breitbart article used a much more modern looking picture of Saint Thomas, though it appears to be from the same era.

P.S. I wonder if Friar Tuck invented Fried Chicken. I mean, have friars ever been employed as friers?