Heirs to the Land (Los Herederos de la Tierra)

Los Herederos de la Tierra (EN ESPAÑOL) | Anuncio del estreno | Netflix España
Netflix España

Boy oh boy, what a mess. The show follows the life of Hugo Llor in 14th century Barcelona. Power politics is brutal. Whoever gets to be in charge pretty much uses their power to eliminate their enemies and if they don't, they are fools, because their enemies will plot and scheme to bring them down. It's the old story of the nobles believing they are god's gift to the world and anyone who isn't a noble, but has two shekels to rub together, believes the nobles are puffed up jackasses who need to be given the boot.

Hugo is nominally a Christian, but is smitten by a pretty young jewess. She dies in a purge when she refuses to convert to Christianity. She has an attractive friend, Regina, who has her eye on Hugo, but Hugo ignores her. Then he pledges to marry another young woman. The pledge entails his vineyard. If he fails to marry this girl, he forfeits the vineyard. The wedding is set for the following year. Meanwhile, Regina who has married some old fart, has been fooling around with Hugo. She gets baptized, which means her jewish marriage is annulled, so she can marry Hugo. Don't these idiots ever talk to each other? I guess not, it was the 14th century after all, maybe thinking hadn't been invented. Anyway, Regina knows some treasonous secrets about Hugo. She knows this because she was party to it. She blackmails him into marrying her by threatening to reveal these secrets knowing that she would be condemning herself as well, but she doesn't care. For her it's a case of 'give me Hugo or give me death'. Hugo marries her, but can't, or won't, warm up to her and instead takes up with a pretty, young, Russian slave. Hugo is a nice guy, he gets all the pretty girls, but he is pretty much an idiot.

This is a follow on to Cathedral of the Sea.

8 episodes on Netflix. We watched it Spanish with English subtitles. 

Doom and Gloom

Bring Out Your Dead - Monty Python And The Holy Grail. Remastered [HD]
The Channel That Can't Take Anything Seriously
The news seems to be all bad, all the time. Count your blessings cupcake, things could be much worse. From page 200 of The Verge:

I knew the plague killed a bunch of people during the middle ages, and I sort of knew there was a period when the weather was considerably colder for a while, but I didn't realize they happened at the same time.

But around 1500 things started picking up, people got a handle on what you could do with money and the printing press appeared. Things started changing, and the changes became ever more rapid. Two hundred years later, a watchmaker in London is lamenting that he gave up the trade because he got tired of keeping up with all the technical advances being made in his trade.

Update May 2024 replaced missing video.

Outlaw King, Again

Outlaw King and his cohorts

We watched it once before, back in 2019. It's still pretty good. The Battle of Loudoun Hill is glorious, Billy Howle as Prince of Wales is properly villainous, you will have no trouble hating him. Locking Queen Elizabeth in a cage and hanging it off the castle wall doesn't seem so bad until you realize how cold Scotland is. I don't image she could have survived long. Of course she survived, it's a movie after all.

Knightfall

Knightfall: Season Two Official Trailer | Drama Series Returns March 25 | History

Knightfall is a historical fiction drama television series . . . a second season, which premiered on March 25, 2019.
Knightfall recounts the success, fall, persecution, and suppression of the Knights Templar, as orchestrated by King Philip IV of France on October 13, 1307. The series focuses on the fictional Templar leader Landry du Lauzon, a brave warrior discouraged by the Templars' failures in the Holy Land who is reinvigorated by news that the Holy Grail has resurfaced. -Wikipedia

My wife watched the first season. I couldn't, I got turned off watching the first episode. But tonight we watched the first 4 episodes of season 2 and while it's not great, if has some good points. The dialog is stilted, the characters are crudely portrayed, but the grimness, or which there is plenty, seems pretty realistic. I mean this was 1300's. And there is plenty of action with horses and sword fighting. They are also trying to tell us the history of this period (of which there is plenty) and fit it into the drama. There just isn't enough time in the world to fit all of it in and take a deeper look into the characters as well.

Many moons ago we took a trip to Limoux France to ride bicycles. Limoux is just a few miles south of Carcassonne in the Languedoc region of southern France. While we were there, I remember hearing about the Cathars and how they were persecuted by the Catholic Church a long time ago. So it's kind of cool to have the story about a place I had been recounted on the TV.

Torrazzo of Cremona

Cremona Cathedral

I'm reading The Note-Books of Captain Coignet. Chapter 3 finds him in northern Italy. When he visits Cremona he is impressed by the clock on the cathedral:

The town is considerable; there is a handsome cathedral with an immense dial; an arrow-hand makes the circuit of it once in a hundred years.

Cremona Cathedral Clock Face

It looks like this clock has 5 hands and one or two rotating dials. The face has six scales, from the outside in:

• the hour in Roman Numerals, from 1 to 24, clockwise starting at the bottom
• the names of the constellations of the zodiac
• a line of approximately 100 black dashes
• icons of the constellations
• the 12 months of the year
• another line of 100 dashes, this time in red
• numbers indicating day of the month or something.

The innermost black faced dial might be showing the phase of the moon, currently showing it as 'full'.
The numbered scale around it shows the day of the month and goes from 1 to 29 and a plus sign.

Detail of inner portion of clock face

I am not sure what the five hands are for. The one that reaches the central pivot is the time in hours. The other four have so sort of icon attached near the base. One is the sun, another is the moon, and seems to be attached to the moon phase disk. I have no idea what the other two symbols are, or how you would interpret what they are pointing to.

And I still don't know which hand indicates the passing of the years.

Google Maps 3D view of Cremona Cathedral

I would have provided links to the source of the images, but Google can't find them today even though it served them up just yesterday.

Quote of the Day

Ibn Khaldun

When asked about his spending plans and plans to cut taxes, Boris Johnson responds “as the great Tunisian scholar and sage Ibn Khaldun pointed out as early as the 14th century, there are plenty of taxes that you can cut which will actually increase your revenues”.

Boris might become the next prime minister of Great Britain. Found on Roger Pearse. He roots around to see if the sage actually said anything like that and he finds it. Huh, words from out of the past.

Outlaw King

Outlaw King | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix
Good movie about Robert the Bruce. It starts off about the time of the execution of William Wallace (Braveheart). The English are depicted as the bad guys (naturally), but one has to be amazed at how disagreeable the Scots are. During this period of history I suspect they spent more time and energy fighting amongst themselves than they did in fighting the English.

I've mentioned Braveheart in these pages before.

Update January 2022 fixed bad link.

La Catedral del Mar

Primer tráiler oficial de 'La Catedral del Mar'
I am ambivalent about this show. It's a little heavy handed in its depiction of just how awful things were in the 14th Century, but I imagine there are some audiences that enjoy getting their emotions drug around for no discernible purpose. If I can keep myself supplied with adult beverages I can tolerate it. Another problem is that it's dubbed. Unless the dubbing is exceptionally well done it just doesn't convey the same feeling. The dubbing here is adequate so we have two layers of crap icing laid over the story which makes it a little hard to watch, but the story underneath is pretty good.

We watched two episodes last night and so far it it very reminiscent of The Pillars of the Earth, which I almost managed to finish. Maybe I didn't drink enough.

I looked up the cathedral on Google Maps (because that's who I am), and, well, look at this.

La Catedral del Mar, Barcelona Spain

I can't imagine how many electrons gave their lives to bring this image to the screen. I just wonder whether this was done by stitching together a bunch of images, or whether they started with a geometric model. It's not a Mission Impossible level of detail, but it's pretty dang good, especially considering it is halfway around the world, and Google didn't really have any advance warning that I would be looking for this. Well, actually they did, since all those big tech companies are in cahoots, and if they were watching me they could reasonable expect that I would be looking up this cathedral on Google Maps. But that would be nuts. On the other hand, there are all those server farms out there, looking for things to do, so maybe there is a bot* assigned to watch me and whenever it finds an intersection of two data sets it sets about projecting what I might be asking for next. "Oh look! He's watching this show about a cathedral in Spain and we know he likes maps. I'll bet he's going to look up this cathedral on Google Maps, so we better get to work putting together a 3-D model of this thing." Careful Chucky, that sounds an awful lot like the road to paranoia.

Medieval Crossbow

But back to the story. You may notice that our hero is carrying a cross-bow, a cross-bow he picked up on his way out while stealing his son back from his lord's armory. (Why is the kid in the armory? Because that's what villains do, obviously.)

F-16C

The story portrays the lord as a bad, bad man who is persecuting our hero only because he can, but being as a cross-bow was about the 14th Century equivalent of a modern F-16 fighter, you could understand the lord being really pissed about the theft. But that wouldn't make our hero very sympathetic, so it doesn't get mentioned. They do show it, so I imagine it will have an important part to play later on.

P.S. The show is presumably based on the book. Wikipedia has an article about the church itself.

P.P.S. Cathedrals have shown up here on occasion.

* If you mess with the controls, you can turn on English subtitles. It's not really worth it since they don't tell you much. I was going to try and figure out how to do it, but I couldn't even get it to stop at the end without automatically replaying the clip.

**A bot is a little program that gets called up to perform some kind of action whenever a certain triggering event occurs.

Update April 2019 replaced missing video with something similar.
Update May 2020 replaced missing video with something similar.

Castle Bran

Castle Bran

The Beckley Foundation logo is derived from the Hapsberg family, which got its name from a castle in Europe, so two castles crossed my path this week.

Via Syaffolee

Mongols and The Plague

The Mongol Empire existed during the 13th and 14th centuries and was the largest contiguous land empire in history.

Mitch Williamson recently posted an entertaining article about the Mongol Empire. The story sounded a bit fanciful, so I consulted Jack, my history expert. He didn't find anything to dispute in Mitch's story, but he did add this comment:

[The Mongol's] put together a very impressive commercial system. One of the things that got transported was the Bubonic Plague in the 1340s; the end of the Mongol Empire.

Oh. How lovely.

Spread of the Black Death in Europe (1346–53)

Notice that the area around Cracow (Krakow, Poland) doesn't get hit. Being as my paternal grandparents are from Poland, I wonder what the deal is. Wikipedia gives us a clue:

The plague was somewhat less common in parts of Europe that had smaller trade relations with their neighbours, including the Kingdom of Poland, the majority of the Basque Country, isolated parts of Belgium and the Netherlands, and isolated alpine villages throughout the continent.

A little farther on I find this:

One development as a result of the Black Death was the establishment of the idea of quarantine in Dubrovnik in 1377 after continuing outbreaks.

Which leads to: Dubrovnik ( Italian: Ragusa), Croatia, is a seaport on the Adriatic Sea, in the region of Dalmatia. It is a prominent tourist destination and a World Heritage Site.

The Republic of Ragusa received its own Statutes as early as 1272, statutes which, among other things, codified Roman practice and local customs. The Statutes included prescriptions for town planning and the regulation of quarantine (for sanitary reasons).
The Republic was an early adopter of what are now regarded as modern laws and institutions:
- 1301 a medical service was introduced,
- 1317 the first pharmacy was opened. It is still operating.
- 1347 an almshouse was opened,
- 1377 the first quarantine hospital (Lazarete) was established.
- 1418 slave trading was abolished,
- 1432 an orphanage was opened.
- 1438 a 12 mile long water supply system was constructed.

I do wonder how well quarantine would have worked when filth was still the order of the day.

The importance of hygiene was recognised only in the nineteenth century; until then it was common that the streets were filthy, with live animals of all sorts around and human parasites abounding. 

Badass of the Week

Isabella of France
"No man ever excited her resentment who did not perish under its effect;
the king himself forming no exception to this fact."
Sharon sent me a link to the story of Isabella. It is told in a very understandable manor, not like what you find in those stuffy history books. It gives you a real feeling for the times. She makes all these modern tough talking punks look like pantywaists. Go read the whole thing.