Prince Henry, the So-Called Navigator

by pamela on March 7, 2012

I’ve been thinking about Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal today, and re-reading bits of Peter Russell’s excellent biography,  Prince Henry “the Navigator”: A Life

You remember Prince Henry.  He’s the first in a series of names that you learned in grade school:  Prince Henry the Navigator, Columbus, Dias, Magellan–maybe Henry Hudson if your teacher was into the Great Explorers and the Age of Discovery.

If you got hooked, you trotted down to the school library and checked out a biography–or three.  (Not that I admit to having done anything of the sort.)  They introduced you to the princely scholar who founded a school on the coast of Portugal where he taught new arts of navigation to his sailors.  The visionary who sent men out explore the cost of Africa with the goal of reaching India.  The gifted mathematician whose theories made oceanic navigation possible.  The dynamic symbol of Portugal’s imperial destiny.  In short, a heroic figure a nerd could love.

Not surprisingly, the story told in a biography suitable for a ten-year-old is little more than a series of half-truths.  Even the nickname “the Navigator” is a misnomer, invented by nineteenth century historians eager to establish the Portuguese grandson of John of Gaunt as the forefather of British maritime success.  In fact, the prince’s only personal experience of seafaring was trips along the Portuguese post and the occasional short hop to Morocco.

Henry was an ambitious prince, a would-be Crusader, a celibate Christian knight, a talented administrator, and a shrewd businessman.  For more than forty years he funded expeditions of exploration along the west coast of Africa, pushing Portuguese seamen to sail further than they ever had before.  By providing the financial support and intellectual stimulus for Portugal’s voyages of discovery, Prince Henry the Navigator transformed Portugal from a small, impoverished nation into Europe’s first maritime empire.  Now that I think about it, a hero that a grown-up nerd can still admire.

Go, Henry.

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Al-Khwarizmi Does the Math

by pamela on February 29, 2012

Quick:  multiply DVII by XVIII.  Before you could work the problem you translated it into Arabic numbers didn’t you?

The person you can thank, or blame, for your ability to multiply and divide is the mathematician and astronomer Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (ca. 783-847), whose name lives on in a mangled form as “algorithm.  (Honest.  Take a moment to sound it out.)

We know very little about al-Kwarizmi’s life.  His name suggests he was born in the region of Khwarazm in what is now Uzbekistan.  There are suggestions that he was a Zoroastrian, who may have converted to Islam.

We know a lot about al-Kwarizmi’s work as a scholar in al-Mansur’s court in Baghdad.  He introduced what were then called “Hindu numerals” to the Muslim world.  He produced an important astronomical chart (zij) that made it possible to calculate the positions of the sun, the moon and the major planets and to tell time based on stellar and solar observations.

Al-Kwarizmi’s most important contribution to science was a ground-breaking mathematical treatise: al-Kitab al-Mukhtasar fi Hisab al-Jebr wal-Muqabala. The title translates to The Compendium on Calculation by Restoration and Balancing, but the book is most often referred to as al-jebr, or algebra.  His treatise was a combination of mathematical theory and practical examples related to inheritances, property division, land measurements, and canal digging.  He was the inventor both of quadratic equations and the dreaded word problem.    (Some of his word problems became classics, which meant they were still giving schoolboys grief several centuries later.)

So, the next time you need to calculate how long it will take for two cars to meet in Dubuque if one car leaves Minneapolis going 60 miles an hour and the other leaves Peoria traveling 75 miles an hour?  Thank al-Khwarizmi.

This post previously appeared in Wonders & Marvels.

 

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Building Baghdad

by pamela on February 22, 2012

Today we think of Baghdad in terms of tyranny, terrorism and mistakes. A sinkhole for American troops.  A sandbox for suicide bombers.

In the eighth century, Baghdad was the largest city in the world–and the most exciting.  Like Paris in the 1890s, Baghdad was a cultural magnet that drew scientists, poets, scholars and artists from all over the civilized world.  (Just for the record, that didn’t include Europe, which was having a bit of trouble on the civilization front in the centuries after the fall of Rome.)

Baghdad was a brand new city, built to replace Damascus as the capital of an Islamic empire that was no longer the sole property of the Arab tribes. The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur had his architects draw the outer walls of his new capital in a perfect circle, using the geometric precepts of Euclid.

Completed in 765, the Round City grew quickly. Within fifty years, it had a population of more than a million people: Muslim and Christian Arabs, non-Arab Muslims, Jews, Zoroastrians, Sabians and an occasional Hindu scholar visiting from India.  It had separate districts for different trades, including a street devoted to booksellers and papermakers.

Most important of all, Baghdad had libraries. Encouraged by an official policy of intellectual curiosity, scholars in Baghdad collected works of literature, philosophy and science from all corners of the empire.  (Baghdad reportedly negotiated for a copy of Ptolemy’s Megale Syntax as part of a peace treaty with Byzantium.) Ambitious nobles followed the caliphs’ example and created their own libraries, many of which were open to scholars. Working in a culture that encouraged learning, Abbasid scholars in the eighth through the tenth centuries not only transcribed and translated the classical scholarship of Greece, Persia and India, they transformed it, pushing the boundaries of knowledge forward in mathematics, geography, astronomy and medicine.

This post previously appeared in Wonders & Marvels

(Dear Readers:  I’ve been AWOL for a few weeks because I’m working on a big exciting project that I can’t tell you about just yet.  It finally dawned on me that I have some posts and articles from other places that you might enjoy. Sometimes I’m a bit slow.  Thanks for sticking with me.–Pamela.)

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Déjà Vu All Over Again: Drug Wars

by pamela on January 17, 2012

A growing number of addicts.  A ruthless business cartel.  A country determined to close its borders to imported drugs.  Violence and corruption in major cities.  Sound familiar?

Welcome to the Opium War of 1839.

In the late eighteenth century, opium was a key element in the British East India Company’s business plan.  The company grew opium in India and sold it in China, using the proceeds to pay for porcelain, tea and silk for the market back home in Britain.  By the 1820s, the British were shipping enough opium to China each year to supply a million addicts, and the market was growing.

The Chinese government rightly saw imported opium as a threat to society.  Opium smoking not only destroyed individuals, it destroyed families. (You want a lecture on family values?  Read Confucious.)  The high price of opium led to violence and corruption.  The drain of silver payments for opium threatened the country’s economic base. The Chinese made the import and production of opium illegal in 1800, but their efforts to enforce the ban were unsuccessful.

Britain, in its turn, wanted China opened up to free trade.  The Chinese limited foreign trade to the port of Canton (now Guangzhou).  Within Canton, foreign merchants were subject to further limitations on where they could live and trade, when they could trade, and who they could trade with.  In 1793 , the British government sent Lord Geroge McCartney on diplomatic mission to China with the goals of establishing diplomatic relationships with the Chinese government and opening trade.  The Chinese Emperor sent a condescending note to King George III explaining his refusal:  “We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufacture.”  A second mission in 1816 under the leadership of Lord Amherst was dismissed by the Chinese due to Amherst’s refusal to follow the ceremonial forms of the Chinese court.*

In 1838, the Emperor sent an Imperial Commissioner to Canton to stop the opium trade–basically a drug tsar by another name.  Lin Zexu successfully suppressed the Chinese opium sellers, but was forced to barricade the foreigners in their warehouses before they surrendered their merchandise.

Lin Zexu confiscated and destroyed 20,000 chests of illegal opium from British warehouses.  The British responded by sending sixteen British warships to China. Between 1839 and 1842, the British navy attacked and blockaded Chinese ports, sank Chinese ships, occupied Shanghai, and sailed up the Yangzte River to threaten the city of Nanjing.  Their immediate goal was ‘”satisfaction and reparation” for the insult and loss of British property.  If they happened to force the Chinese to agree to more acceptable commercial privileges at the same time, that was gravy.

The 1842 Treaty of Nanking opened five treaty ports to Western trade, gave the British what was then the barren island of Hong Kong,  paid reparations to British merchants for lost property, and gave foreign merchants extra-territoriality (always the thin edge of the wedge when it comes to losing control of your country). **  Neither side was happy with the provisions of the treaty, making a Second Opium War almost inevitable.

 

*Familiarly known as “prostration” or  “kowtowing”.  Amherst took the position that it was below the dignity of an Englishman to prostrate himself before a foreign monarch.  The Chinese took the position that he could hit the floor or hit the road.

** Extraterritoriality makes foreigners subject to their own laws rather than those of the country in which they are foreign.  The basic idea is “When you’re in Rome, who cares what the Romans do?”

 

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Why I Want to Go to Omaha

by pamela on January 10, 2012

Why is Omaha on my travel list?  Two words, okay three:  The Bodmer Collection.

In 1832, German naturalist Prince Maximilian zu Weid-Neuweid led one of the earliest expeditions to the American West.*  As anyone who has snapped a picture of the Grand Canyon or the Grand Bazaar knows, expeditions need to be recorded.  Instead of a Canon Powershot, Prince Maximilian brought along Karl Bodmer, a young Swiss artist with a talent for watercolor.

Prince Maximilian and Bodmer traveled the rivers of the American West for two years, going from Saint Louis to North Dakota and back. They saw an Indian raid, a wild prairie fire, and herds of buffalo and elk at close range. They suffered through a harsh winter in North Dakota, trapped by snow and bitter cold. At one point their boat caught fire.

Bodmer painted through it all, even when it was so cold that his paints froze solid. He captured images  of the landscape, the animals, and. most notably, the Native American peoples they met.  Bodmer’s depictions of the early American West have been described as the visual equivalent of Lewis and Clark’s journals.  Although originally intended as “notes” to Prince Maximilian’s account of their journey, Bodmer’s paintings and sketches are now seen as the most important work of the expedition.

 

Today the Bodmer Collection is housed at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska.  Put it on your list.

 

*Prince Maximilian wasn’t just a rich man with a yen for travel.  He had a bee in his bonnet.  He thought the native peoples of the Missouri and Mississippi river basins would help him prove that humankind developed from a single set of parents, presumably Adam and Eve.

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William Howard Russell, Special Correspondent to the Times

by pamela on January 5, 2012

William Howard Russell, “Special Correspondent for the Times”, was the original war correspondent.

His unexpected career began in the Crimean War. As Russell later wrote, “When the year of grace 1854 opened on me, I had no more idea of being what is now–absurdly, I think, called a ‘War Correspondent’ than I had of being Lord Chancellor.” Already a well-known “color” writer for The Times of London, Russell accompanied the British expeditionary force on its trip to show support for Turkey against Russian aggression.  When the show of force unexpectedly developed into a full-scale war, Russell was in place, ready to report on the war first hand.

Russell was a correspondent in the most literal sense.  His reports were written in the form of letters to John Delane, editor of The Times. Sent to London by steamer, they took two to three weeks to arrive.  Sometimes five or six of his letters would appear on the same day.  According to his biographer, Alan Hankinson,  “it was like getting long letters, hastily but honestly set down, from a soldier son who was fair-minded and fearless, who had an insatiable appetite for information of all kinds and a lively no-nonsense way of putting it down on paper.”

Russell’s reporting was accurate, intelligent, and unrelenting.  For two years, he painted a picture of official incompetence by British generals, suffering among the troops, and the “steady courage” of the British soldier.   His descriptions of battle are realistic, detailed and clear, if a bit florid by modern standards.  Many of his most vivid phrases have attained the status of cliches at the hands of his successors.

Russell is generally hailed as the father of war journalism.  Russell described himself in less grandiose terms as “the miserable parent of a luckless tribe”.

Reporting live from Chicago…

 

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Estonia’s Singing Revolution

by pamela on January 1, 2012

Most revolutions have a symbolic moment that defines them:  the Boston Tea Party, storming the Bastille, Gandhi’s march to the sea.  In Estonia, the struggle for freedom from Soviet Russia began on June 10, 1988, when 300,000 people stood up and sang.

After two hundred years of control by Tsarist Russia, Estonia became an independent nation in 1920, one of the post-World War I legacies of Woodrow Wilson’s belief in national self-determination.  Independent Estonia was a success, with a booming economy and a western-style democracy.

Independence didn’t last long.  In September, 1939, Stalin threatened to invade Estonia unless the country allowed Russia to establish military bases within its borders. Faced with the recent example of Poland, Estonia agreed, clinging to Stalin’s promises that Estonia would retain its national sovereignty if it opened its borders to Soviet troops.  Estonians soon found out that Stalin’s promises were worth no more than Monopoly money. In June, 1940, the Soviets took over the Estonian government, killing or deporting most of the country’s leaders.  Stalin announced that Estonia had “volunteered” to become part of the Soviet Union.

Like other countries under Soviet control, Estonia suffered under the program of cultural genocide known as “russification”. Tens of thousands of Russians were settled in the country in an effort to dilute the ethnic Estonian population.   Russian became the official language.  The Estonian flag was outlawed. And nationalist songs were banned from the Estonian Song Festival (Laulupidu)–at least in theory.

Amateur choral singing was an important element of the Estonian national identity.  The first Laulupidu was held in 1869, part of the Estonian nationalist movement under Tsarist rule. The soviets didn’t try to outlaw the Lauhupidu, but they did try to control what the Estonian choirs sang.  One song in particular was a point of struggle.  In 1947, Estonian composer and choir director Gustav Ernesaks wrote a musical setting for the nationalist poem Mu isama on minu arm ( Land of My Fathers, Land That I Love), written by  Lydia Koidula a century earlier. The song quickly became Estonia’s unofficial national anthem, and was just as quickly banned from the song festival program.*

In the mid 1980s,  Mikhail Gorbachev changed the relationship between Russia and its satellites with his policies of perestroika  (restructuring) and glasnost (openness).  Estonians began to press for greater freedom from Soviet control.  A handful of rock songs joined Mu isama on minu arm as rallying cries for Estonian independence.

The desire for independence came to a head on June 10, 1988, when  Soviet authorities closed down a rock concert in the Old Town Square in Tallinn, the country’s capital.  The crowd walked several miles to the song festival grounds, where the concert evolved into a massive sing-a-long of illegal patriotic songs.  For six nights, hundreds of thousands of people gathered  to sing, sway in unison, and wave Estonian flags that had been hidden in attics and basements for almost fifty years.  It was the first step in the non-violent “singing revolution” that ended with Estonian independence on August 21, 1991.

Choral singing is just as important as ever in Estonia.  The next Laulupidu will be held in 2015.  In the meantime, enjoy this sample of Estonian choral music:

[If you've received this post by e-mail, you may need to click on the post title to see the music clip.  This will take you to the blog website.]

*In the 1960s, Estonians began singing Mu isama on minu arm at festivals whether it was on the program or not.  One hundred thousand determined singers can easily drown out a  hundred-piece brass band.

 

 

 

 

 

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Word With a Past: How Did Germany Become the Hun?

by pamela on December 27, 2011

The original Huns were a tribe of nomadic horsemen from Central Asia who rode fast and fought hard.* When they reached Europe in the second half of the fourth century, the Huns triggered a mass migration of Germanic tribes that contributed to the fall of Rome in the fifth century.  Under the leadership of Attila, they invaded Italy in 452–and were defeated by an alliance of Germanic tribes in 455.

The Huns may have been the barbarian’s barbarians, but they certainly weren’t Germanic.  (Unlike the Vandals, the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths and the Franks.)  So who pinned the name “the Hun” on Germany as a term of abuse?

Ironically, it was Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who first linked Germany to the Huns.  Speaking in 1900 to German soldiers waiting to sail to China to help lift the siege of Peking in the Boxer Rebellion, Kaiser Wilhelm told his troops to fight “like the Huns under their King Attila a thousand years ago” so that “the name of Germany shall become known in China to such affect that no Chinaman will ever again dare so much as to look askance at a German.”  Ruthless was the name of the game, according to the Kaiser:  “Pardon will not be given, prisoners will not be taken.  Whoever falles into your hands will fall to your sword.”

Way to go, Wilhelm!  The Allies couldn’t have come up with a nastier description if they tried.

 

*Sometimes it seems like Central Asia had an inexhaustible supply of armed horsemen ready to ride across the Russian steppes or the Hindu Kush and change history. Think Ghengis Khan’s Mongol hordes.

 

 

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The Christmas Truce–1914

by pamela on December 23, 2011

For most of us, the most vivid images of World War I are the trenches on the Western front.  Men dug into positions on either side of a no-man’s land of craters and burned out buildings.  Barbed wire and sandbags provided little protection from enemy shelling or snipers; they provided no protection from rats, lice, flooding, or the dreaded “trench foot”.  The battlefields were noxious with the smell of rotting corpses, overflowing latrines and poison gas fumes.

Trench warfare was hell.  It also made possible one of the most extraordinary events of the war:  the unofficial Christmas armistice of 1914.  The truce began when some German troops decorated their trenches with candles and Christmas trees and sang carols.  British troops responded with carols of their own. On Christmas Day, some groups ventured into “no-man’s land” to share food, sing carols, hold joint services for their dead and play soccer  matches.

One German soldier, Josef Wenzel, described the scene in a letter to his parents:

One Englishman was playing on the harmonica of a German lad, some were dancing, while others were proud as peacocks to wear German helmets on their heads.  The British burst into a song with a carol, to which we replied with “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.  It was a very moving moment–hated and embittered enemies were singing carols around the Christmas tree.  All my life I will never forget that sight.

It is estimated that 100,000 men took part in the Christmas truce. In some places, the truce lasted only through Christmas day.  In others, it lasted until New Year’s Day. In some sectors, the war continued unabated.

The Christmas truce did not recur in 1915.  Both the British and the German high commands were appalled at the blatant fraternization with the enemy and gave strict orders against future incidents. After all, how do you fight a war if the men at the front decide not to fight?

Peace on earth, good will to men.

 

ADDENDUM:

My friend Nancy Friesen brought this lovely version of the story to my attention:

Thanks, Nancy.

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History on Display: Elizabeth Rex

by pamela on December 20, 2011

If you’re in Chicago between now and January 22, or are close enough that you can get here with no difficulty, I strongly recommend you get tickets to Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of Elizabeth Rex  by Canadian playwright Timothy Findley. *

Findley builds his story on three historical facts:

  • The Earl of Essex, a court favorite and rumored to be Elizabeth I’s lover, was beheaded for treason on Elizabeth’s order
  •  The day before he was beheaded, Elizabeth attended one of Shakespeare’s plays
  • Men played women’s roles on the Elizabethan stage.

The result in a breathtaking riff on gender, power, love, poetry, and history.  And it has a bear.

What are you waiting for?

 

*  If you can’t make it to Chicago, track down the DVD of the 2004 television adaptation.  Diane D’Aquila plays Elizabeth in both productions.

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