Preview of the Review of the Knights Templar Revealed

I saw the book The Knights Templar Revealed at a Barnes and Noble in some discount bin and thought that I should definitely pick it, definitely (and then I immediately thought of Judge Wopner). I thumbed through it and saw they referenced Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Immediately I began to question what the gist was. No longer was it potentially some interesting and engaging research book - it was now firmly in the "fringe" category. It had the potential to bridge regular research with the fringier parts, so I read it with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Hopeful, but jaundiced.
This post, however isn't the actual review of the book - this is the preview of that review. Why is there a preview and not just the regular review? Because I decided to read Dracula since the time I completed it. So I really want to re-read it again before writing the actual review. Why is that? Well, here's what I recall about it.
First, the book tries to link several different theories about the Templars and early civilization linkages. It thankfully wasn't about aliens helping the Minoan civilization achieve some level of greatness. I mean, I like Stargate SG-1 as much as the next guy, but... Anyway, the authors, Butler and Dafoe, reference a few theories about the monolithic cultures, including Minoan connections to the Levant (the Holy Land), a theory (introduced elsewhere) about Salt Lines, and the Templars. It's so intertwined, though, that I really need to re-read it before I can write something cogent about it.
One thing about these books is that they lay out a very logical argument for their point. They use terms like "reasonable to assume" and "it seems likely" which all "seem reasonable" (heh). The problem is that unfortunately all of these likelys and reasonables result in a very small actual percentage. I'll explain that more in the review when I can actually bring an actual example to bear.
So, in the meantime, what did I think of it? I think they raise some interesting ideas about St. Bernard of Clairvaux. And there certainly are some interesting things raised about Bernard that I will have to investigate. Still, given the rest of material, I just recall it being "interesting". Would I recommend it? While I could punt this off to the "real" review, I will say that I would read it only if you have a strong basis in Templar history and can separate the truth from these "facts". Hopefully I can get through it faster than the first time...

Review of Russell Crowe's "Robin Hood"

I had thought that I wouldn't ever watch the new Russell Crowe* Robin Hood movie. But then I saw it at King Soopers for $19.99 and thought "well, maybe I should watch it being a wannabe medievalist and all and have a special interest in the Norman period, especially it relates to Richard and John". (Yes, sometimes my internal dialogues are this long). So I picked it up and brought it home. That evening I cajoled threatened bribed convinced my wife to watch it and we picked the Director's Cut version because, honestly, the theatrical release usually sucks when compared to the Director's Cut (i.e., Blade Runner). I was especially interested because I recall hearing an interview with Russell Crowe where he talked about how they were making it "more historically accurate", especially around Richard and John. I was wary, but hopeful.
Unfortunately, for a movie claiming "historical accuracy" around Richard and John, it was far off the mark. If I had the desire, I could watch it again and pick out all of the things that were inaccurate. From what I remember, though, there was almost a serious lack of understanding of what "England" was in the Norman period. One has to remember that William I (the Conqueror) was the Duke of Normandy. You'll remember that as the place in France that the Allies invaded in World War II. Richard and John still owned that tract of land and, when Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine (and her huge tracts of land - sorry, it had to be said), they acquired even more of what is modern-day France. The French King, Phillip, on the other hand, pretty much owned Paris and nothing else. His dukes and barons were only partially supportive of him and only when it suited them. The king of France was a (feudally) weak king indeed. There is sequence in the movie where the French invade England - across the English Channel. Which they wouldn't have needed to do - they just could of walked north to Normandy and invaded there. Not as dramatic, no, but it showed a pretty poor grasp of the European map of the day.
The second thing was that everyone spoke English, even Richard and John. Who most certainly didn't - they spoke Norman French (see my first post). There's a scene where Richard is walking among his troops (Henry V anyone?) and meets Robin Longstride - and they have a lengthy exchange. Which they couldn't have because Robin didn't speak French and Richard didn't speak any version of English (that we know). There's even another scene where Phillip II asks a vassal to speak English to him. *facepalm*

King John

I do think that Ridley tried to do something in rehabilitating John. John's not nearly as nasty or as venal as is normally portrayed. John wasn't a bad king, in general - he wasn't his brother and certainly not his father (Henry II), who was about as strong-willed a man as you could find. Richard, on the other hand, was certainly not as saintly and kingly as people believed either (or as the latter Robin Hood stories attested). He hated England, hated the English, once said he'd sell London if he could find a suitable buyer, and spent most of his time with his lover, Phillip II (remember him? This was a plot point in The Lion in Winter - a fantastic play and great movie)**. Richard was all "manly man" on the outside, but there is pretty strong evidence that he was at least bisexual. He was also a great pragmatist. When he invaded the Levant and Holy Land in the Third Crusade, he pretty quickly discovered that he couldn't hold it without spending his entire life and all of his resources defending it. Rather than do that, he decided to broker a deal with Saladin to protect pilgrims coming to Jerusalem.
Overall, the movie is fun, but don't look at it for historicity. Quite a few of the things in the movie are just plain wrong (some I pointed out above) and I think much was done for moviegoers' tastes as opposed to accuracy (the invasion of the British coast, for instance). Robin Hood is one of those interesting pieces of medieval history that's carried forward to the modern era. Original Robin Hood ballads were entertainment with occasional fable-like morals. Only later (around the 16th century) did the "evil Prince John" enter the picture - most of the ballads before then were just about Robin and his men being likable outlaws. This movie, while engaging and telling a good ripping yarn, is moving the pendulum back toward history - just not quite far enough.***

* Why no Brits play Robin Hood in major movies I'll never know.
** There's no real evidence that Richard and Phillip were lovers, but oh, if they had been...
*** I don't think American movie audiences can handle the truth (with a tip o' the hat to Jack).****
**** You'll notice I backed off using NB for footnotes. I've just decided that I like the *'s better.

Religion in the Middle Ages

When examining the past it's very easy to put a modern bias on events and cultural norms. As Carl Pyrdum shows at his blog Got Medieval (a GREAT site!), there's an awful lot we don't understand very well - especially some of the marginalia that's present on manuscripts. Maybe it's just juvenile humor at it's best (worst?). Monkeys and animals and grylli. It's surprising to think that Monty Python and the Holy Grail got an awful lot of things "correct" - trumpets being blown by posteriors, etc. (with the caveat that Arthur was supposed to be around in the 5th century, not the 14th). Still, we are apt to bring our societal and intellectual baggage and bias to our analysis.
A great example of this was when I  was studying the English Civil War (17th century). In brief, the Jacobite kings (James, Charles I, and Charles II of England - who were Scottish) were very unpopular with the English. They even accused them of being closet Catholics (this was after the creation of the Anglican church by Henry VIII). A civil war erupted between those who believed in Parliament's absolute authority and those who believed in the monarchy. Unfortunately for Charles II, the Parliamentarians won and he was tried and executed. Remember - this was before the French Revolution were such things became commonplace. One thing that struck me while I was reading the documents from the era (via the Thomason Tracts, an AMAZING collection of pretty much everything printed during this turbulent period) was that God was an ever-present force in these peoples' lives. When Oliver Cromwell would write to the Parliamentarians of his advances into Scotland or Ireland, he saw the hand of God actively helping their cause everywhere. God made it rain very little so the stream would be fordable and his army could advance. God provided a fog that allowed his troops to establish a stronger encampment that enabled them to repel the enemy. Bringing my 21st century biases, though, it was easy to be cynical about the omnipresence of God, but I found it easier to believe that there was sincerity in that due to the history of religion in Europe. And that reason was the start of the Crusades.
Why the crusades? The one thing that had really outlived the western Roman Empire (the eastern still existed as the Byzantine Empire) was the Church. Not the Catholic church, because that didn't exist - this was the precursor to that and the Church was pretty much THE religious institution for Christianity in western Europe (small, outlier groups existed, but the Church was the Microsoft of its day). In 1095, when the Byzantine emperor (Alexis I Komnenos - and yes, I had to look that up) asked Pope Urban II for help in quelling the uprising happening in modern-day Turkey and the Levant, the Pope saw it as an opportunity to expand the influence of the Church and, in his wildest dreams, to even recapture the holiest of cities, Jerusalem (pretty much the only city in the world that is important to 3 major religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). The Pope communicated out through the Church's hierarchy to the parish priests to tell the people of the horrible atrocities being committed by the heathen Muslims in the Holy Land. That these atrocities weren't being committed didn't really matter - the Muslims controlling Jerusalem were actually quite accommodating - it was all just medieval propaganda.

The Peasants' Crusade meeting
the Seljuk Turks - and not doing well

The reason this figures prominently in understanding the early modern mindset about God is that in 1096 entire villages picked up and went on Crusade. This so-called Peasants' Crusade (the outcome shown right) was actually the first march to the Holy Land - the major army that Urban II wanted was still in the early planning stages. But the people, with their fervent belief that this Crusade was truly God's work, left their fields, their homes, their lives, to protect Christians in Jerusalem. To say the Church was surprised would be a bit of an understatement. Unfortunately, the peasants (about 40,000 of them) weren't well led and, at one point, even decided to follow a divinely-inspired duck. Needless to say, when they finally did meet the actual enemy, they were pretty much slaughtered.
To the medieval/middle ages mind, God was omnipresent. Not only was he everywhere, but he took direct action in the world. He wasn't passive, setting up the rules and then letting things happen - if something bad happened to you, it was God letting the Devil do it; good, it was God. God made it rain, made the sun burn your crops, created the insects that plagued your food. In hindsight, it's hard to think that the peasants wouldn't march to war to do God's work - especially when extolled to do so by their priests (who were still their sole conduit to their deity).

Richard I of England
The Lionheart

The regular Crusades kicked off later that year and did finally result in the capture of the Holy Land by Christians for the first time in history. The Christian kingdoms would only last about a century before finally being driven off by the forces of Saladin. There would be many more Crusades to follow (including the Third which made a household name of the Fighting Fairy, King Richard the Lionheart (and that guy Robin of the Hood) and the Fourth that just decided to sack Constantinople instead of going all the way to Jerusalem - they were sort of convinced to do it by the Doge of Venice).
So where does this lead us? In the centuries between the Peasants' Crusade and the English Civil War, the belief that God took an active role in daily life was relatively unchanged. And while we may look at events and writings of the middle ages and early modern periods with a skeptical eye, we must always temper that with the understanding of God's role in these peoples' lives. Maybe that's a good attitude to have even when not looking just at the middle ages.

Compulsory review of Timeline by Michael Crichton

One of books I read while in grad school was Timeline, by Michael Crichton. First, let me say that I've always been a big fan of Crichton - even "crappy" books like Sphere were vastly entertaining and I enjoyed the twists and turns. Timeline, on the other hand, was a facepalm (before we'd invented the word) from start to finish.

The Crichton hardcover edition
(for which I sadly doled out $20)

One thing I'm often asked (okay, I'm not, but it sounds better if I say that they do) is whether the activities of the "history" students in the book at all resembles actual historical study. Sadly, no. What I recall hearing from my colleagues at CU about the fictional college was "man, I wish I was in that program! Go dig up crap and do field research? Hell yes!" It really felt that Crichton confused archaeology and history. I mean, it would be great to be working in the actual sites where these things took place, but only in Wonderland would history students be conducting an archaeological dig. Why? Because they're not archaeologists. Now the Wikipedia article says that it's a combination of historians and archaeologists, but I don't ever recall that being clearly stated in the novel.
The novel did expose to me something that I found extremely interesting - the study of historical architecture. I've always been intrigued by how some structures and substructures came into being, where, and when, so that was a pleasant surprise. I think had I been able to continue pursuing my academic career that I may have had a focus in architectural history.
The rest of the book reads like a screenplay that had to be novelized so it could be optioned for a movie. The action sequences are straight out of a Hollywood movie (which it later became). Why they then had to novelize the movie was somewhat surprising as they'd already done that work in advance. (Yes, that was pretty caustic.) There is, of course, a joust and there happens to be an historian who's an excellent jouster (he's apparently toured with Ren Fairs all over the US before deciding to study history - not really, but you'd think so). It's all way too pat and dumbed down for American audiences.
On an aside, I've noticed that trend for some years, especially with the sad excuse for a film, No Point to Remakes of No Return. A close friend of mine does love him some Bridget Fonda, but he's also appreciative of the subtlety of French cinema. Point of No Return is a remake of La Femme Nikita, a brilliant movie about a girl who's trained to become an operative of the French government. The Fonda flick, unfortunately, wasn't okay with ambiguity or slowly building tension. In Nikita, there's a scene where Nikita is called in to deliver a tray with a variety of listening devices (and perhaps more) to a room containing some not-so-nice men. She delivers the tray and is dismissed - no explanation; her job is done and she leaves. She never really knows what happens. In No Point to Remakes (my friend's relabeling, but it's apropos) she delivers the same tray service and then leaves. But on her way out, the entire top floor of the building EXPLODES! SHE WAS CARRYING A BOMB! *facepalm* Yeah - not so much for the subtlety. Wait - did Uwe Boll direct that one? Anyway, back to the story (yes, pun intended) at hand.
I would like to say that Timeline is a good read, but it's not. It's a fun read, but only if you're willing to suspend your disbelief all the way to the moon. It's terribly contrived, terribly executed, and predictably finished. It all gets wrapped up with a nice bow at the end and we can all leave the theatre put the book down with a satisfied grin. I liked the earlier Crichton work a lot better and I liked the science in this one, but from an historian's perspective, it came up WAY flat.

Geocentrism and the Middle Ages

Flyer for the Geocentrism conference
The site might have
exceeded bandwidth...

I was over reading one of my favorite blogs - Bad Astronomy - when I stumbled on an article Phil Plait had written about an upcoming conference about Geocentrism. He does an amazing job in this particular article deconstructing the theory. In brief, geocentrism (lower-case g) is using the Earth as a frame of reference when describing the universe (much as heliocentrism is used to describe the sun as the center of our solar system). But geocentrism doesn't necessitate the belief that Earth is the center of the universe, fixed, and unmoving - it simply posits that Earth can be viewed as stationary in relation to other objects in the universe. There is another Geocentrism (with a capital-G) that believes that the Earth is immovable and fixed in the universe and the rest of the universe revolves around us (i.e., it's the center of the universe). It's this Geocentrism that Phil takes to task in a way that I can only envy. I have some good understanding of Newtonian physics and relativity, but he understands and can communicate it in a way that I appreciate and enjoy. And I encourage you to check out the article.
The reason that I'm even remotely interested in this is that there's a whole heap-load of myths about what the inhabitants of the middle ages believed, Geocentrism being prime among them. I mean, they all thought that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the world was flat, right? It wasn't until Christopher Columbus came along in 1492 and proved them wrong. Oh, yeah, and that Galileo guy got punished for believing that the sun was the center of the solar system, right? Fortunately, no.
Just a couple of things about this whole thing. First, the Greeks back in the long-ago's BC knew the world was round. How? They'd done experiments with wells in Alexandria and Syene showed that the sun didn't create the shadow the same way it would were the world flat. In fact, those shadows proved it had to be a sphere. (By the way, it was really Eratosthenes in the second century BC.) Plus, they'd seen eclipses and the shadow of the Earth on the moon is round (although you could likely argue that's because the moon is round). Regardless, Eratosthenes had calculated the circumference of the spherical Earth quite accurately (for the day). It was relatively well-known (by the semi-educated, at least) that the Earth was not flat. For the average medieval peasant, though, eking out an existence on a small plot of land for a feudal system that destroyed any potential for advancement, whether the world was flat, spherical, or a Mobius strip was just not something they cared about. So, Columbus was wrong. Not about the world being a sphere (because he and most everyone else knew that), but apparently he couldn't do basic math and thought the world was much smaller than it was. And on his way west he hit that big landmass between him and India. Oops - his bad.

Tractatus de Sphaera -
with Ptolemaic System

Second, let's take the geocentric/heliocentric/acentric thing with Galileo. The problem was that those self-same Greeks who had determined that the world was a sphere also contended that it wasn't moving. I mean, if it was, wouldn't it leave everything behind? If the ground were to suddenly move, the things that weren't fixed to it (birds, etc) would move in space and not of their own volition. Since that wasn't happening, the ground had to be firm and not moving. They created the Ptolemaic system (shown right) which laid out that the heavens were a series of spheres set around the Earth. This worked great until they started looking at all of the planets outside the orbit of the Earth (Mars, etc) - those planets moved backwards sometimes (went retrograde - something with which astrologers were very familiar) and if everything were just moving around above us, that couldn't easily happen. So they added spheres to the spheres and that seemed okay for a while. But then Copernicus said that maybe this whole Geocentric thing was bunk. And then something weird happened with Galileo - he found moons orbiting another planet (Jupiter). And he found that the phases of Venus were far better explained by it orbiting the Sun than orbiting the Earth. Suddenly Copernicus' theory was looking pretty good. In the end, the primary charge against Galileo was that they thought he was saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of the universe. Again, a heliocentric view is perfectly valid using frames of reference, but Heliocentric (capital-H) is still very wrong.

Tychonian System

There was a major contender to Copernican theories at the tie and that was the theory of Tycho Brahe (he of the silver nose). His system (shown right) moved some of the planets to the orbiting the sun and the rest orbiting the Earth. It was sort of an amped up version of the Ptolemaic system that tried to address some of the things that Galileo had observed (Brahe was a scientist, after all). In the end, though, Occam's Razor sliced through the whole mess and what made the most sense (and made the math look really pretty, something that every mathematician and astronomer likes to see) was a model where the Earth was just another of the wanderers around an average star we call Sol.
For the Geocentrists out there (and thankfully there are far fewer than the number who believe that Obama is a muslim), the math just doesn't really work out for an Earth-as-the-center-of-the-universe model. One thing Phil raises is that Pluto would need to travel faster than the speed of light to race around the world and rise on the next day. And that doesn't even include the other much-further-away objects out there. It may seem like they're going that fast, but we all know that the 186,282 miles per second limit isn't just a good idea, it's the law. Of course, most of the bases for these theories comes not from scientific observation (because that would pretty much destroy any potential for the theory to be correct), but rather it's because in the poetic parts of the bible there are statements like "the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved" (Psalms 93:1). Okay - so maybe Archimedes is wrong (the whole lever and world thing?), but the Psalms wax poetic, not scientific. Not eating pork? Good idea when you couldn't cook your meat thoroughly. The world being fixed and stationary? Yeah, not so much.
In the interests of full disclosure, I will point out that one of my relatives is a staunch Geocentrist. He wrote an entire paper about why Copernicus and Kepler were wrong. My cousin Jack included it in the book on the deVaux family history. Admittedly, I got lost in the mathematics and couldn't finish it. Then again, I also staunchly believed in geocentrism, not Geocentrism, so it made it more difficult to find the gumption to read it with an open mind. Wait - that's what we need more of in the world. Oh, snap. Guess I need to find that book and get to reading...

N.B.: the two manuscript pics are from Wiki, so if you happen to see them, you'd be right in asserting that I foisted stole borrowed creatively commons'd them.
N.B. 2: N.B. means nota bene, which means "note well". I will use that rather than footnotes for most things I post. I know that some people have never seen this (having been told so by some people).

Ex Mediis Aevis, Scientia

I've decided that in the interest of being able to discuss the blog in the third person easily, without having to actually spell out the blog name every time (Got Medieval is far easier :), I'll be using the abbreviation EMAS. I think it should make things a little easier to understand and, perhaps, a bit nicer on my writing style. Just as an FYI more than anything else. You may now resume your regularly scheduled reading.

Otto Von Development Blog

Hello all,
Just a quick note that you should check out the blog I'm doing about starting up my own company doing iPhone and Facebook games. It's located here and has been an interesting (and somewhat meandering) ride so far and there's more to come!