Herodotus the History Blog

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Monday 9 April

'What did the Portuguese ever do for us?' to paraphrase the title of a series of historical TV programmes in the UK. The answer, as I'm finding out, is 'quite a lot'. My next project is a history of the Portuguese voyages of discovery - a change from the Mediterranean arena which has kept me at my desk for nearly a decade. I had a vague idea of following this thread at the end of City of Fortune. It was clear to the Venetians that Vasco da Gama's circumnavigation of Africa was potentially a huge threat to their business model, based on importing spices through the agency of Muslim middlemen via Egypt and the Red Sea. However the real push to this subject came from a near neighbour of mine, Pascal Monteiro de Barros, passionate about his country's history and highly persuasive. What I realised, with Pascal's input and some initial reading, was that the Portuguese exploration of the world - from Africa to India, Brazil to China - was an extraordinary story of bravery, brutality, imagination and innovation. In the nineteenth century, the history of Vasco da Gama and his successors was considerably better known than it is now. It has since been dimmed by the rise and rise of Columbus, especially in the USA, but as we survey the ever accelerating pace of globalization and ask ourselves where it started, the answer is - on the Atlantic seaboard of the Iberian Peninsula with the Portuguese.

In the wake of Da Gama, Portuguese navigators vaulted the globe. They were the imperial pathfinders, who provided the template for a wave of successors, such as the English and the Dutch. At the start of the sixteenth century Lisbon became, for a short while, the wealthiest city in Europe. The Portuguese empire connected the world and created a framework for global interactions. In time it would link the oceans, bringing firearms and bread to Japan and astrolabes and green beans to China, tea to England, pepper to the New World, Chinese silk and Indian medecines to the whole of Europe, and an elephant to the pope. It left a huge and long-lasting influence on the culture, food, flora, art, history and language of the globe. It marked the start of 500 years of domination by the West which is only reversing now. From a writer's point of view, this whole story is enriched by the fact that the Portuguese wrote a lot of vivid first-hand accounts – fantastic material to draw on.

For a sense of Portugal’s extraordinary imperial reach, watch this short video. Its haunting music also hints at the lasting nostalgia that imperial legacies leave behind.


 

 

Sunday 25 March

I was reminded today by JoAnn Locktov, who runs an interesting Face Book site about Venice, that 25 March, is the legendary founding day of the city. On this day in 421, at noon precisely, settlers driven from the mainland are said to have dedicated the church of San Giacomo on the island of the Rialto - the 'rivo alto', the high shore. Venice was the only sizeable town in medieval Italy not existent in Roman times. It was a city without a deep past; it sought legitimacy by inventing such myths and by borrowing or stealing artefacts, architectural styles, even the bones of saints from a deeper antiquity. The body of St Mark, said to have been removed from Alexandria under the noses of Muslim customs officials hidden under a barrel of pork, was the first of a long line of sacred relics to be ‘liberated’ from the eastern Mediterranean, much to the ire and sorrow of Orthodox Christians, to lend itself legitimacy. In the process it turned itself into a major centre of pilgrimage. This sense of exotic bric-a-brac, so potent in the fantastic assemblage that is St Mark’s basilica, is what makes Venice, paradoxically, unique. It reminds me at the same time of the east and the west, of Cairo, Constantinople and Bruges, morphed by the distorted reflections of the canals into a fantastical confection. Venice is at once Byzantine, Gothic and Oriental but ultimately quite unlike anywhere else on earth. I think it stirs such profound feelings because it reassures us that the fantasy cities of our deepest imagination can actually exist.

 

Monday 5 March

Big in Turkey this week - in fact intergalactic - is a historical epic about the fall of Constantinople:

File:Conquest1453.jpg

It's a frankly triumphalist account of the fall of the city to the Ottomans, an event which is becoming increasingly symbolic of the new national confidence, and myth-making, of the country as it reclaims, and remakes, its past. See the trailer here. I can't help fearing that its overtones of religious fervour are going to inspire audiences across the Islamic world in undesirable ways. Still, it might do wonders for the Turkish sales of my book ...

Monday 27 February

A couple of weeks ago I did an interview with New Zealand Radio about City of Fortune and the maritime history of Venice, which you can listen to here.

Meanwhile, Venice itself is being hit by the stringent cuts imposed on the Italian economy by the government of Mario Monti. Venice costs a fortune to run, the sea eats away at it continuously, the salt air perishes plaster and gnaws at tfe fabric of buildings; maintaining a modern infracture in a medieval city by boat is expensive. A massively costly system of barriers to protect the city from flooding is going ahead, but Venice itself may be floundering in the choppy waves of the new austerity programme, according to this BBC report.

 

Wednesday 8 February

The maps in City of Fortune

If you're reading City of Fortune and you're frustrated by the key map of 'Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean', my apologies. The centre of the sea and some crucial islands have been swallowed up in the gutter between the two pages. To rectify the situation a little I've put a copy of the map as one piece on this website so that you can enlarge to view on screen or download as a picture file and print out. You can access it here, or by going to the City of Fortune tab and clicking on 'More Resouces' - it's the first item. Thanks.

Monday 6 February

 

Venetian glass making on the island of Murano goes back centuries; its origins are embedded in the trading history of the crusades. Merchants imported glass from Tyre on the shores of Palestine, where Jewish artisans produced a commodity of extraordinary transparency. In time the Venetians began to undermine this middle-eastern export by acquiring a monopoly on the trade in a crucial raw material – soda ash – extracted by burning plants in the Syrian desert. This combined with sand ground from the pure quartz pebbles of their own lagoon enabled them by the fourteenth century to create the most sought-after glass ornaments in the western world. Venice guarded its craft skills jealously. It was a capital offence for its Murano glassmakers, highly regarded citizens of the Venetian state, to abscond with their trade secrets to other cities.

Now, as a recent newspaper article relates, the Murano glass industry is one more barometer of the shifting currents of world trade. The Venetians eventually undermined the middle-eastern glass industry to the extent that they were producing the lamps for the mosques of Cairo and Aleppo. They, in their turn, are now under threat from twenty-first century imports from the East.

 

Friday 27 January

I have mis-spent the past week constructing a first attempt at a book video. You can access it here or via the YouTube button on the home page:

 
I’ll hope to create some more video material in due course about some of the subject matter research that lies behind the book. There are so many aspects of the Venetian experience of survival, growth and development in the five hundred years from 1000 to 1500 that interest me: trade, ship development, voyaging, crusading, Venice’s maritime empire, the merchant city. This was the period in which Venice transformed itself from a backwater into the most triumphant city on earth.
 
Much of the on the ground research time was spent, not in Venice, but visiting its maritime empire, particularly Crete. I’ve always been fascinated by the Great Island. I first went there when I was about eighteen; arriving at dawn, deck class on the overnight boat from Piraeus, on a June morning at the perfect little Venetian harbour at Chania, shaped like a circle around a bay. Looking back at the Crete I visited in the late 1960s I didn’t realise quite what I was witnessing. The Second World War seemed close, a wound in the memory of the people – particularly in the inaccessible mountain villages. Much was still deeply traditional. Many of the men still wore the traditional costume – black top boots and waistcoats. I walked and hitch-hiked round western Crete and was welcomed everywhere because I was English. I remember the villages as being sparse and poor and the people proud and incredibly generous. I sat under olives trees with old shepherds with faces of extraordinary antiquity, eating hard goat’s cheese and bread untied from a cloth. The midday sun was atomically hot and the nights brilliant with stars. I got lost up deep ravines and got welcomed to stay in people’s houses. I spoke no Greek but it made no difference. I came away with a sense of the deep layers of history – Minoan, Byzantine, Venetian, Ottoman – laid one on top of another. I didn’t return for 34 years by which time many things had changed. 

17 January

I've just received advance copies of City of Fortune. It's extremely well produced and pleasurable to handle - good quality paper, nice internal design and a well-produced colour plate section (let's just hope it's as enjoyable to read!) - on sale next week, from 24 January. The only glitch I can see is that unfortunately, on the Mediterranean map at the front, a small section has vanished down the gutter in the centre between the two pages - including the island which the Venetians called Negroponte (Euboea in Greek) off the east coast of Greece. As Negroponte played quite an important part in the Venetian Mediterranean empire this may confuse readers. I'll try to post a copy of the map on the site next week.

 Elsewise I've been fascinated by news items about how the Vikings navigated, before the use of compasses, with 'sunstones', and a decade's work in the British Museum rebuilding an extraordinary Roman helmet.

Ken Wallace, with the Hollaton Helmet

 

10 January 2012

Voices from the Black Sea.

During my tour of the Black Sea in the autumn we visited a number of classical Greek settlements – such as the world heritage site of Chersonesus near Sevastopol in the Ukraine and Odessus near Varna in Bulgaria – hauntingly positioned maritime outposts from the Greek city states of the Aegean coast that became, in time, completely independent. There’s always been, in the European imagination, the sense of the Black Sea being at the edge of the civilised world, its coastal margins continuously threatened by the nomadic tribal peoples of the open steppe beyond.

In site after site these incomers from the Mediterranean left inscribed funeral tablets in which the dead seem to speak to us directly of their lives. They’re acts of poignant ventriloquism: ‘Hades came towards me so fast’, says a tablet from Amasra on the Turkish coast. At Tomis (the modern Constanţa in Rumania), a woman almost catches us by the sleeve: ‘If you want to know, passer-by, who and whose I am, listen: when I was 13 a young man loved me, worthy of us; then I married him and bore three children: a son first and two daughters, the very image of my face; finally I bore a fourth time, though I should not have had any more, because the child died first and I also, a short time after. I left the light of the sun when I was thirty. I, Cecilia Artemisia lie here…A salutation to you too whoever you should be, you who pass by our graves!”


By far the most famous laments from the Black Sea’s classical antiquity are the verses of the poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), exiled for life to Tomis in 9 AD for an unknown offence against the Emperor Augustus. Ovid only left a tantalising clue as to his crime. It was, he said, for ‘a poem and a mistake’, i.e. something he wrote and something he saw or did which had offended the emperor. The Rumanians seem to have taken Ovid to their hearts in Constanţa. He’s something of a brand name – you can visit an Ovidiu bar or pharmacy and study at the city’s Ovidiu university. His statue stands on a plinth in the centre of town with his own Latin epitaph:

Here I lie, the composer of tender loves,
Naso the poet, killed by my own talent.
But you who pass by, if you've ever loved,let it not be hard for you to say: ‘May the bones of Naso lie gently’.


Cheery stuff all round - and happy new year!


 The Greek city of Chersonesus near Sevastopol, founded in the 6th century BC

Saturday 31 December

 

Last year I read The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens’ last, unfinished novel. It’s a claustrophobic, sinister tale of opium addiction and a vanished body, set in the cathedral town of Cloisterham, closely modelled on Rochester in Kent. On Boxing Day we went to Rochester to investigate. It was a wonderful surprise. Situated on a commanding position above the river Medway, and crowned by a fine medieval castle, Rochester has an atmospheric high street, with narrow side alleys, and extremely old houses – much drawn on by Dickens in various books – and a lovely cathedral and surrounding close. A great deal of history has passed through Rochester – it’s on the highway from Dover to London, thus there’s both a Restoration House (the inspiration for Miss Haversham’s house in Great Expectations), in which Charles II stayed when he returned to the throne in 1660, and an Abdication House where his son James II also passed the night – unfortunately going the other way.
 
Its strategic location was closely guarded by the castle, whose keep still stands as one of the most impressive in England. It was the scene of a spectacular siege – rebels to King John held out here for seven weeks in 1215, resisting bombardment and furious tunneling until finally forced out by hunger. ‘Our age has not known a siege so hard pressed nor so strongly resisted,’ a chronicler wrote, before suggesting that its surrender marked a turning point in the value of fortified places: ‘Afterwards few cared to put their trust in castles.’
 
 
 
Tucked away in the centre of the town is Dickens’ writing chalet – transported from his home at Gad’s Hill a few miles away. He wrote the very last words of the unfinished Edwin Drood in the room upstairs before he was felled by a stroke on 9 June 1870.
 
 
The great writer is everywhere in this town – he even drew names from the churchyard. A gravestone for the Dorrett family got translated into Little Dorrit.  He wanted to be buried near the cathedral but his wishes were overruled. He lies in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. 2012 will be a Dickens year, the 200th anniversary of his birth and Rochester will be visible in the BBC adaptation of Edwin Drood on 10 January, in which clues from Dickens’ notes have been used to complete the unfinished plot.
 
The following day we went to see the Battle of Britain memorial on the cliffs above Folkestone. A shallow grass amphitheatre, open at one end, looks out to sea. At its centre a lone pilot in flying kit sits watching the wintry skies over the English Channel.
 

Wednesday 21 December

I spent a fascinating fortnight in the autumn talking on Zegrahm Expedition's circumnavigation of the Black Sea - Turkey, Georgia, the Ukraine, Rumania and Bulgaria, starting in Istanbul with a visit, among other places, to my favourite Ottoman mosque, the Rustem Pasha Camii: small, but exquisite, tucked into a backstreet, upstairs behind the Spice Bazaar. It has the most perfect turquoise tiles:

And leaving Istanbul at night fall, sliding up the Bosphorus, past the dying silhouettes of mosques and office blocks. The illuminations of the ever expanding city shine more brightly each year and the new Bosphorus bridges are festooned with coloured lights, but there's something timeless and mysterious about sailing into the growing darkness.

And after that along the Black Sea coast of Turkey, to Amasra - a perfect little harbour - held successively by the Byzantines, the Genoese and finally the Ottomans. The following day, inland to the almost identically named Amasya - set in a deep cleft in the hills, straddling a river. It's a place of extraordinary interest. The ancient geographer Strabo was born here; the Pontic kings held out against the advance of the Roman empire for 200 years and left their rock tombs on the cliffs above the town:  

There are Seljuk mosques with faint traces of turquoise on their facades - and a Mongol mental hospital, dedicated to treating patients with music therapy - rather a different side to the descendents of Gengis Khan:

 

Thursday 8 December

A few history stories that have interested me while I haven't been blogging...

Roman soldiers murder girl in Kent

An archaeological dig reveals the skeleton of a girl probably executed by Roman soldiers in Kent.

 George Washington's $300,000 library fine

George Washington is somewhat overdue with his library books from the New York Society Library.

 Medieval armour - too exhausting to fight in

Scientific tests have shown that medieval armour was so heavy that it would seriously debilitate men in battle.

Monday 5 December 2011

 After a long long pause the blog is back. Several seasons have gone by. I have been to Istanbul to take part in the TV series Museum Secrets on the Topkapi Palace (coming up early next year) - I got the chance to stand on the city walls and talk about the fall of Constantinople, whilst some kids played soccer on a pitch just behind. It was a commanding spot with great views over the ramparts and down into the moat (now occupied by vegetable gardens). The only trouble was that every time the referee blew his whistle on the pitch below the sound man needed a retake. Here we are waiting for a free kick whilst the camera crane noses over the walls:

 We also went to film in Istanbul's new panorama about the capture of Constantinople in 1453. You stand on a central viewing platform in a circular building and the action's all around you. It's a rather nationalistic take on the events but hugely dramatic:

 

 The street life of Istanbul never fails to delight, whether it's a box of oranges:

 

Or the fortune telling rabbit - the rabbit choses a piece of paper with your future written on it. Istanbul has changed enormously over the years but the rabbit goes on forever. I can imagine that the Byzantines, who had an unfortunate weakness for prophecy, consulted its ancestor on 28 May 1453, just before the city fell. It probably promised the emperor the girl of his dreams...

 

 

Monday 14 February 2011

ryght welebeloued Voluntyne

"Yf that ye loffe me as Itryste verely that ye do ye will not leffe me." The first mention of the word Valentine was in a letter written by Margery Brews to her betrothed John Paston in 1477. The sentiments remain the same down the centuries.

Saturday 29 January 2011

"It is a link to my mother and to the happy time before."
Lily Ebert hid a pendant in the sole of her shoe in Auschwitz and survived. "Since the end of the war, I've worn my pendant all the time. I think it's the only gold to go into Auschwitz and come out with its original owner." Thursday was Holocaust Memorial Day. Survivors from the Second World War, Rwanda and Cambodia retold their terribly moving stories through the objects which they managed to preserve: often the only mementos of totally vanished lives.

Tuesday 25 January 2011

Armenia - home of wine and shoes
Armenia is not only home to the world's oldest known shoe, archaeologists have also recently found the world's oldest winery there. Further on shoe related matters, the tomb of the Emperor Caligula, the little boot, possibly one of the least cuddly holders of the office, an insane tyrant with a taste for recreational cruelty, has been found near Rome.

Saturday 1 January 2011

Americans discover Europe - 1000 years ago

The blog has been dormant for a long time, while I finish a book on Venice, but New Year resolutions...

Click here to read more.

Thursday 21 January 2010

Newton's mouse-powered windmill

"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank tea, under the shade of some apple trees." The Royal Society has put on line the memoirs of the life of Sir Isaac Newton by William Stukeley. Along the way we learn the truth about Newton being hit on the head by an apple, Newton's childhood invention of a mouse-powered windmill - and his legendary absent-mindedness.

Click here to read more.

Sunday 2 January 2010

Happy New Year

After a longish pause, a return to historical anecdotes. Thanks to everyone who has written to me about my books over the past year. The comments, queries, corrections and criticisms have all been stimulating. Over the past few months I have been delving deeply into the Venetian Mediterranean. On a general ship theme, we learn from a clay tablet that the Sumerians knew that the ark was in fact round: 'Draw out the boat that you will build with a circular design; Let its length and breadth be the same' - more a coracle than the pointy shaped vessel of nineteenth century prints.

Click here to read more.

Thursday 3 September 2009

The man in the bunker speaks

As the outbreak of the second world war releases a new wave of memory and international recrimination, the last survivor from Hitler's bunker talks about the final hours.

Click here to read more.

Saturday 1 August 2009

Before Venice

The top of the Adriatic has always been a strategic point in the trade networks of the Eastern Mediterranean and Central Europe. Before Venice there was the Greek town of Adria, from which the sea gets its name, now silted up and fifteen miles inland. Then the Roman town of Altinum, sacked by Attila the Hun. For greater security people started to move further into the lagoon, and Venice was born. Now the site of Altinum has been clearly mapped, just north of Venice's Marco Polo airport, the remnant of a unique Roman town. See the BBC site for the best images of Altinum, then the Daily Mail for an excellent interpretation of them

Sunday 21 June 2009

Tsunami strikes New York!

2,300 years ago a giant tidal wave hit New York, according to scientists. Today it would flood New York and the Long Island ExpressWay.

Click here to read more.

Wednesday 8 April 2009

The Templars, the Vatican and the Turin Shroud

Yet another take on the mystery of the Turin Shroud, which vanished after the fall of Constantinople in 1204 - this time involving the Templars. (Incidentally you can see the Shroud being paraded around the walls of Constantinople in the snippets of wall painting from Romania that I've used as the header for this website. Just above the 'L' of 'CROWLEY, it's the small head on the white background breaking the line of the wall.)

Click here to read more.

Sunday 5 April 2009

Henry VIII - the weight problem

An analysis of Henry's ever-expanding suits of armour in a new exhibition shows how the young man ballooned into a corpulent tyrant over a 25 year period.So intricate was Henry's armour that Nasa studied it for tips when designing space suits in the 1960s. The same exhibition displays the world's first football - found in the roof of Mary Queen of Scots' bedroom in Stirling Castle. She was a keen fan - and possible a player.

Click here to read more.

Monday 23 March 2009

Elizabeth I's superguns

Phillip II of Spain was extremely worried by the artillery on Elizabethan ships in the run up to the Armada. The recreation of a cannon dredged from the seabed tests their fire power.

Click here to read more

Sunday 15 February 2009

The scent of tragedy

An intricate 650 year-old-perfume bottle from Germany releases the scent of the past. It tells a tale of the Black Death and ensuing pogroms against the Jews of Europe. Small details are revealing: the bottle was stoppered with Egyptian cotton, proof of long-distance trade in the middle ages. The cotton was probably transported by sea to Venice, then carried by mule train through the Alpine passes to the cities of the Rhine.

Click here to read more.

Saturday 14 February 2009

H seeks A.B.

Be very afraid if you receive a love letter from Henry VIII.

Click here to read more.

Saturday 10 January 2009

Istanbul ages 6000 years.

Work on a new tunnel under the Bosphorus has uncovered not only Byzantine galleys and a fourth century wooden harbour, but proof that the ancient site of Constantinople was inhabited in neolithic times.

Click here to read more.

Monday 15 december 2008

Is this the face of Lucretia Borgia?

The sixteenth century gaze is utterly contemporary: she looks us up and down with a long cold stare. The portrait, in an Australian art gallery,may be the only real likeness of Lucretia Borgia, one of history's most notorious women.

Click here to read more.

Saturday 29 November 2008

The Credit Crunch 88BC

It's all happened before according to Cicero.

Click here to read more.

Guy Fawkes Day Wednesday 5 November 2008

Gunpowder Plot's innocent victim
Henry Garnett, Jesuit priest, heard things in the confessional that cost him his life. He ended up the subject of a lurid tract bound in his own skin.Click here to read more.

Martin Luther, heavyweight father of Protestantism
Debunking history: archaeological digs reveal more about the 'austere' lifestyle of Martin Luther than we ought to know. They've even found the stone toilet on which he wrote the 95 theses - and, most shocking of all, he never used nails to fix them to the church door of Wittenberg...Click here to read more.

Friday 26 September 2008

Small gun, large consequences

The gun that fired the shot that started the First World War goes on show in London.

Click here to read more.

Saturday 20 September 2008

Jack the Ripper again

Jack the Ripper continues to exert an appalled fascination for students of the archives of late nineteenth century London crime.

Click here to read more.

Thursday 28 August 2008

Marcus Aurelius survives the passage of time
'Everything material soon disappears and the memory of everything is soon overwhelmed in time', wrote the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, contemplating the prospect of oblivion. Yet the giant image of the stoic Roman, whose dying words open Gladiator, has been resurrected from earthquake debris in the mountains of southern Turkey. Click here to read more.

Saturday 2 August 2008

The disappeared: the Americans in Stalin's gulags
In the 1930s hundreds of Americans emigrated to the Soviet Union for work or ideology. They played baseball in Gorki Park, they surrendered their US passports, then they vanished.Click here to read more.

'Did your mother work in the palace?' - and other jokes from antiquity
The world's oldest joke..it's about flatulence, apparently.Click here to read more.

Thursday 24 July 2008

Napoleon not killed by perfidious British wallpaper
Conspiracy theories abound about Napoleon's death in exile on St Helena. Italian toxicologists have now absolved the British of killing the emperor through their terrible taste in interior decoration. Click here to read more.

A Medici murder mystery
Another poisoning: the mysteriously convenient deaths of Francesco Medici and his wife within hours of each other 'from overeating and grief' have now been explained. Click here to read more.

Tuesday 22 July 2008

Bones of the dead

A new exhibition brings us close to the lives of the people of medieval London.

Click here to read more.

Saturday 12 July 2008

Herodotus has been on his holidays

"With Europe, however, the case is different; for no one has ever determined whether or not there is sea either to the east or to the north of it; all we know is that in length it is equal to Asia and Libya combined." (The Histories) Even the Father of History had his blind spots.

Sunday 15 June 2008

The world's oldest Christian church

Archaeologists in Jordan have found a cave that may have been the church for seventy persecuted Christians from Jerusalem, shortly after Christ's death.

Click here to read more.

Sunday 8 June 2008

The rag and bone man and the Persian gold cup
An exquisite gold cup from the Achaemenid empire has turned up in an auction house in the west of England. Click here to read more.

The first photograph?

It doesn't look like much - a muddy brown leaf hardly distinguishable from its black background - but it may turn out to be the true dawn of photography..

Click hereto read more.

Captain Kidd's ship found
The wreck of the Quedragh Merchant, Captain Kidd's last ship, still carrying 26 cannons, has been found off the coast of the Dominican Republic.Click here to read more.

Thursday 22 May 2008

Caesar's true face
Receding hair, face lined and wrinkled by years of war: from the bottom of the Rhone, French archaeologists have recovered a rare contemporary bust of Julius Caesar, which may be the most authentic representation ever seen.Click here to read more.

Otto Rahn and the temple of doom
The bizarre life and death of the archaeologist whose quest for the holy grail ended in a faustian pact with Himmler. Click here to read more.

Monday 12 May 2008

Hear our ancestors burp

It may not exactly be speech, but ingenious researchers in the US have reconstructed a fractional second of Neanderthal vocal performance - the sound of "E".

Click here to read more.

thursday 1 May 2008 : Ascension Day

Rebuilding the Golden Boat
On Ascension Day every year, there took place in Venice the great ceremony that expressed the city's sense of mystical union with the sea. The doge, ermin robed and wearing the corno - the pointed hat that symbolized the majesty of the Republic - was piped aboard his ceremonial barge at the quay in front of his palace. Nothing expressed the city's maritime pride so richly as the Bucintoro. This great double-decker vessel, ornately gilded and painted with heraldic lions and sea creatures, covered by a crimson canopy and rowed by 168 men, pulled away from the city. Accompanied by an armada of gondolas and sailing boats, the Bucintoro rowed out into the mouth of the Adriatic. Here the bishop would utter a heart-felt supplication - "Grant O Lord, that for us and for all who sail thereon, the sea may be calm and quiet" - and the doge took a golden wedding ring from his finger and tossed it into the depths with the time-honoured words: "We wed thee, O Sea, in token of our true and perpetual dominion over thee."

The Bucintoro was destroyed by Napoleon at the fall of the Venetian Republic. Now it may sail again. Click here to read more.

Wednesday 23 April 2008

The first human images of Gods
The Guardian - source of most of my historical titbits - brings news of extraordinary finds in the foothills of Anatolia, above the Syrian plains. Turkey is rich in wonderful remains; those at Gobekli Tepe - 'the hill shaped like a navel' - perhaps catch human culture at a moment of significant transition: the end of a nomadic world before the advance of agriculture and perhaps show our earliest attempts to image Gods.Click here to read more.

Things I didn't know last week
The Hittites not only employed biological warfare, they were also the world's first known bagpipe players.The first documented bagpipe dates from a 1,000 BC Hittite carving. The urge to make noises from inflated animal bladders is almost universal - even the emperor Nero enjoyed a blast on the pipes.

Wednesday 16 April 2008

Hittite Germ Warfare

The Ottomans, who were experts at siege warfare, employed artillery for firing rotting corpses over the walls of beseiged towns: they realised that disease was often a far more potent device than cannon shot and massed attacks. The Hittites apparently had their own forms of biological warfare 3,500 years ago.

Click here to read more.

Wednesday 9 April 2008

Exit wounds
The first recorded gunshot death in the Americas took place in 1536. Click here to read more.

'If I find one reel I'll have to kill you.'
And a recent tale of cultural heroism from Afghanistan. Click here to read more.

Wednesday 2 April 2008

Stonehenge: 'the Lourdes of ancient Britain'

There are, apparently, two strongly competing theories about the function of Stonehenge. A new archaeological dig hopes to prove that the Welsh bluestones were revered for their healing properties.

Click here to read more.

Wednesday 26 March 2008

I have always been fascinated by the fact that Leonardo wrote to the Ottoman sultan, Bayazit, in 1502, with designs for a bridge across the Golden Horn. (This was just a couple of years after he was offering the Venetians submarines and diving suits for sinking Turkish ships.) But could Leonardo have had some deeper connection with Istanbul and the world of Islam?Click here to read more.

And Leonardo the chess illustrator?
Meanwhile, did Leonardo while away his few leisure moments illustrating chess problems? Click here to read more.

Sunday 16 March 2008

Hitler's lost fleet
Mehmet II’s siege of Constantinople is famous, amongst other things, for an extraordinary feat of practical engineering: the hauling of seventy galleys over land so that they could be launched into the Golden Horn behind the Byzantine defences. Now an equally breathtaking episode from the Second World War: the transportation of a German submarine fleet from the Baltic to the Black Sea to attack Russian shipping, and its recent discovery on the seabed off Turkey. Click here to read more

And off the coast of Norway
The remains of HMS Hunter are found at the bottom a fjord. Click here to read more. And a survivor rememembers the day it went down.Click here to read more.

Pardon for the admiral shot 'pour encourager les autres'?
The unfortunate British admiral, John Byng, was made famous by the manner of his death. Now an attempt to clear his name - just 250 years too late. Click here to read more

Lazare Ponticelli, 110, last 'poilu' of the World War 1 trenches
Following on from the previous week's entry about the last German veteran, comes news of the death of the last Frenchman to fight in the trenches. It's like watching the extinction of a species. One by one, as the dwindling band of living witnesses slips away, the First World War scrolls over the horizon of tangible history. The photographs and recordings will be all that's left. Click here to read more

Monday 9 March 2008

The Antikythera Mechanism
In 1900 a Greek sponge diver recovered some ancient gear wheels from a Roman shipwreck. Scientists have recently solved the riddle of the 2,000-year-old computer. Click here to read more

The Last German Veteran
Whereas the few remaining British survivors of World War I are the subjects of intense interest, it seems that that the passing of Erich Kaestner, Germany’s last veteran, has passed almost unnoticed. Click here to read more