Category Archives: Greece

by | 1 March 2026 · 10:12 pm

Herodotus as a Child?

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage,  2009), Kindle pp. 44-46:

When I immersed myself in various sources, however, I learned that we know little about Herodotus’s life, and that even the few facts we do have are not entirely reliable. For in contrast to Rabindranath Tagore—or, for instance, his contemporary Marcel Proust, both of whom meticulously parsed every detail of their childhoods—Herodotus, like the other great men of this epoch—Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles—tells us next to nothing about his. Was it not customary? Was childhood considered irrelevant? Herodotus says only that he came from Halicarnassus. Halicarnassus lies above a calm bay shaped like an amphitheater, in a beautiful part of the world, where the western shore of Asia meets the Mediterranean Sea. It is a land of sun, warmth, and light, of olive trees and vineyards. One instinctively feels that someone born here must naturally have a good heart, an open mind, a healthy body, a consistently cheerful disposition.

Biographers tend to agree that Herodotus was born between 490 and 480 B.C.E., perhaps in 485. These are greatly important years in the history of world culture. Around 480 B.C.E., Buddha departs for the other world; a year later, in the Lu principality, Confucius dies; Plato will be born fifty years later. Asia is the center of the world; even insofar as the Greeks are concerned, the most creative members of their society—the Ionians—also live in Asia. There is no Europe yet; it exists as myth only, in the name of a beautiful girl, Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor, whom Zeus, transformed into a white bull, will carry off to Crete to have his way with her.

The parents of Herodotus? His siblings? His house? All of this is in deep shadowland uncertainty. Halicarnassus was a Greek colony on land subject to the Persians, with a non-Greek native population—the Carians. His father was called Lyxes, which is not a Greek name, so perhaps he was a Carian. It was his mother who most probably was Greek. Herodotus was therefore a Greek Carian, an ethnic half-breed. Such people who grow up amid different cultures, as a blend of different bloodlines, have their worldview determined by such concepts as border, distance, difference, diversity. We encounter the widest array of human types among them, from fanatical, fierce sectarians, to passive, apathetic provincials, to open, receptive wanderers—citizens of the world. It depends on how their blood got mixed, what spirits settled in it.

What sort of child is Herodotus? Does he smile at everyone and willingly extend his hand, or does he sulk and hide in the folds of his mother’s garments? Is he an eternal crybaby and whiner, giving his tormented mother at times to sigh: Gods, why did I give birth to such a child! Or is he cheerful, spreading joy all around? Is he obedient and polite, or does he torture everyone with questions: Where does the sun come from? Why is it so high up that no one can reach it? Why does it hide beneath the sea? Isn’t it afraid of drowning?

And in school? With whom does he share a bench? Did they seat him, as punishment, next to some unruly boy? Or, the gods forbid, a girl? Did he learn quickly to write on the clay tablet? Is he often late? Does he squirm during lessons? Does he slip others the answers? Is he a tattletale?

And toys? What did a little Greek living two and a half thousand years ago play with? A scooter carved out of wood? Did he build sand castles at the edge of the sea? Climb trees? Make himself clay birds, fish, and horses, which we can study today in museums?

Which aspects of his childhood will he remember for the rest of his life? For little Rabi, the most exalted moment was the morning prayer at his father’s side. For little Marcel, it was waiting in a dark room for his mother to come and hug him good night. Which experience did little Herodotus anticipate in this way?

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Filed under China, education, Greece, Mediterranean, philosophy, religion, South Asia

by | 21 February 2026 · 5:34 am

Mincemeat and Mussolini

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 291-293:

The most significant victim in the fallout on the Axis side was Mussolini himself. From the first Allied footfall in Sicily, Il Duce was doomed, though he refused to acknowledge it. Goebbels noted: “The only thing certain in this war is that Italy will lose it.” The Pact of Steel was cracking up. By July 18, the Allied front line had moved halfway up Sicily. That day, Mussolini sent an almost defiant cable to Hitler: “The sacrifice of my country cannot have as its principal purpose that of delaying a direct attack on Germany.” The Führer summoned him to an urgent meeting. Il Duce did not care to be summoned anywhere but went meekly. The two fascist leaders met in Feltre, fifty miles from Venice, where Hitler launched into a long harangue, lambasting the “inept and cowardly” Italian troops in Sicily and insisting: “What has happened now in Sicily must not be allowed to happen again.” In the midst of the tirade, an aide interrupted to inform Mussolini that Rome was under massive air attack, the first time the capital had been targeted. Mussolini sat impassively through the two-hour monologue. The great Italian bull seemed to be fatally gored, diminished, and distant. At the end of the excruciating meeting, he said simply: “We are fighting for a common cause, Führer.” It sounded more like an epitaph than a statement of solidarity. On July 22, Palermo fell to Patton’s American troops. Three days later, Mussolini was outvoted by the Fascist Grand Council, summoned by King Victor Emmanuel III to a private audience, and toppled. “It can’t go on any longer,” said the king: Mussolini must resign at once, to be replaced by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the former chief of the armed forces. Italy’s deposed dictator left the royal Villa Savoia hidden in an ambulance, and the new government in Rome began the secret task of extracting Italy from the war and Hitler’s poisonous embrace. In Badoglio’s words: “Fascism fell, as was fitting, like a rotten pear.” The next day, Rommel was recalled from Greece to defend northern Italy.

Would it have fallen so fast, or rotted so quickly, without Operation Mincemeat? The invasion of Sicily was a far from perfect military operation, bedeviled by poor planning and personal rivalries between selfish and powerful men. A relatively small contingent of German troops successfully held up the advance of an Allied host seven times larger and then evacuated the island to continue the battle up mainland Italy. The fight for Sicily was grim, bitter, and costly. But how much worse would it have been had the Nazi high command been prepared for it? What if, say, the full-strength, battle-tempered First Panzer Division, instead of being dispatched to Greece to await an imaginary invasion, had been deployed along the coast at Gela?

It is impossible to calculate how many lives, on both sides of the conflict, were saved by Operation Mincemeat, or exactly how much it contributed to hastening the end of the war and the defeat of Hitler. The Allies had expected it would take ninety days to conquer Sicily. The occupation was completed on August 17, thirty-eight days after the invasion began. Looking back after the war, Professor Percy Ernst Schramm, keeper of the OKW war diary, left no doubt that the fake documents had played a critical role: “It is well known that under the influence of the letters, Hitler moved troops to Sardinia and southern Greece, thereby preventing them from taking part in the defence against [Husky].” In September, Italy formally surrendered, although the war in Italy would not end until May 1945.

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Filed under Britain, Germany, Greece, Italy, Mediterranean, military, U.S., war

by | 20 February 2026 · 3:02 am

Nazi Intelligence Failure in 1943?

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 229-232:

The first full German intelligence assessment of the documents was written on May 11 and signed by Baron von Roenne himself. It was addressed to the OKW Operations Staff, or Wehrmachtführungsstab, headed by General Alfred Jodl, and entitled, portentously, “Discovery of the English Courier.” It began: “On the corpse of an English courier which was found on the Spanish coast, were three letters from senior British Officers to high Allied Officers in North Africa. … They give information concerning the decisions taken on the 23rd April, 1943, regarding Anglo-American strategy for the conduct of the war in the Mediterranean after the conclusion of the Tunisian campaign.” Major Martin is described as “an experienced specialist in amphibious operations.”

Von Roenne went on to lay out, point by point, the misinformation prepared by Cholmondeley and Montagu. “Large scale amphibious operations in both the Western and Eastern Mediterranean are intended. The proposed operation in the eastern Mediterranean, under the command of General Wilson, is to be made on the coast round Kalamata, and the section of the coast south of Cape Araxos. The code name for the landings on the Peloponnesus is ‘Husky.’ … The operation to be conducted in the Western Mediterranean by General Alexander was mentioned, but without naming any objective.” Von Roenne, however, had picked up on the reference to sardines. “A jocular remark in this letter refers to Sardinia,” he wrote. “The code name for this operation is ‘Brimstone.’” The attack on Sardinia, he surmised, must be “a minor ‘commando type’ since Mountbatten had requested the return of Major Martin after the operation. This indication points to the invasion of an island rather than of a major undertaking. … This is another point in favour of Sardinia.”

Just as important, Von Roenne relayed the news that Sicily was not a real target for the Allies, but a decoy: “The proposed cover operation for ‘Brimstone’ is Sicily.” That lie would sit, immovably, at the center of German strategic thinking over the coming months: the attacks would come in the east, in Greece, and in the west, most probably in Sardinia; evidence of any planned assault on Sicily could safely be dismissed as a hoax. The only uncertainty, von Roenne warned, was that of timing. If the two divisions identified in Nye’s letter—the Fifty-sixth Infantry attacking Kalamata and the Fifth Infantry Division aimed at Cape Araxos—were deployed at less than full strength, then the “operation could be mounted immediately” and the offensive might start at any time. However, the Fifty-sixth Division, von Roenne noted, had two brigades “still in action” at Enfidaville. If the entire division was to be used in the assault, these troops “must first be rested and then embarked. This possibility, which necessitates a certain time lag before the launching of the operation, is, judging by the form of the letters, the most likely.” In von Roenne’s mature estimation, Germany still had “at least two or three weeks” to reinforce the Greek coast before the attack.

That was also enough time for the British to change their plans, which they might well do if they knew the information had reached the Germans. Von Roenne now turned to this important consideration. “It is known to the British Staff that the courier’s despatches to [sic] Major Martin fell into Spanish hands,” he wrote, but “it is not perhaps known to the British General Staff that these letters came to our notice, since an English Consul was present at the examination of the letters by Spanish officials.” The letters had been reinserted in the envelopes and returned to the British, and a senior officer of the Madrid Abwehr station had personally inspected the resealed envelopes before they were returned to Alan Hillgarth. The British might suspect but would have no proof that the letters had been read, let alone passed to the Germans and copied. “It is, therefore, to be hoped that the British General Staff will continue with these projected operations and thereby make possible a resounding Abwehr success.” In order to convince the British that their secrets were still safe, von Roenne suggested that the Germans mount their own deception: they should give no indication that they feared simultaneous attacks in the eastern and western Mediterranean and instead “initiate a misleading plan of action which will deceive the enemy by painting a picture of growing Axis concern regarding Sicily.” The Germans should pretend to reinforce Sicily, while doing nothing of the sort.

Von Roenne ended with a security warning. “News of this discovery will be treated with the greatest secrecy, and knowledge of it confined to as few as possible.” The baron’s assessment was remarkable in many ways: it hauled on board every single aspect of the deception and even launched a corresponding deception plan to reinforce it. But perhaps most astonishing of all was the ringing endorsement that accompanied the appraisal: “The circumstances of the discovery, together with the form and contents of the despatches, are absolutely convincing proof of the reliability of the letters.” The army’s chief intelligence analyst, from the outset, utterly dismissed the possibility of a plant.

This was, to say the least, strange. The analysts of FHW usually distrusted uncorroborated information emanating directly from the Abwehr, knowing the inefficiency and corruption of that organization, and tended to be skeptical of Abwehr revelations “unless these were clearly corroborated by more tangible evidence.” Von Roenne’s natural caution seems to have deserted him. He knew only what the Madrid Abwehr station had told him about the discovery of the body, which was secondhand information derived through Adolf Clauss. The report detailing the results of the second meeting with Pardo on May 10 had not yet reached Berlin. No additional checks had been made, the body had not been examined, and the original documents had remained in German hands for only one hour, far too short a time for forensic testing. And yet he chose to describe the documents as incontrovertibly genuine.

Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived. The betrayed lover sees only the signs of love and blocks out the evidence of faithlessness, however glaring. This unconscious willingness to see the lie as truth—“wishfulness” was Admiral Godfrey’s word for it—comes in many forms: Adolf Clauss in Huelva wanted to believe the false documents because his reputation depended on believing them; for Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, any intelligence breakthrough to his credit, no matter how fantastic, made him safer, a Jew among anti-Semitic killers. Von Roenne, however, may have chosen to believe in the fake documents for an entirely different reason: because he loathed Hitler, wanted to undermine the Nazi war effort, and was intent on passing false information to the high command in the certain knowledge that it was wholly false and extremely damaging.

It is quite possible that Lieutenant Colonel Alexis Baron von Roenne did not believe the Mincemeat deception for an instant.

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Filed under Spain, military, war, Mediterranean, Britain, Germany, Italy, Greece

by | 12 July 2025 · 5:55 am

Catholic vs. Orthodox Slavs

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 231-235:

The war with Muscovite Russia was hardly over. Despite the accomplishments of the valiant Transylvanian [Stefan Batory], Polish-Russian relations had yet to enter into their most interesting—indeed, most incredible—phase. In the interim, another development took place, one that would have important repercussions for the battle not only for territory but also for the hearts and minds of the borderland inhabitants.

More precisely, this new development represented a war for souls. At the same time that Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy were vying for control of the Rus’ principalities, questions of jurisdiction over the Orthodox population of Eastern Europe generated sparks. This was the world of the Greek Church, adherents of Christianity in its Byzantine (that is, Eastern) rite.

Byzantine Christianity differed from the Church of Rome in a number of ways, not all of them doctrinal. Whereas in Roman Catholicism the high church language was Latin, there was no one single high church language in the Greek world: the Slavic lands had been given their own church language by the earliest missionaries to the Slavs, Cyril and Methodius. This language came to be known as Old Church Slavonic. Distinct from the spoken vernaculars of the region, it was nonetheless for the most part comprehensible to the population.

The relationship of the church and state in the East was also different than in the West. Following the pattern of Byzantium, the Eastern Church pragmatically subordinated itself to the authority of the state in which it functioned. Another seemingly obvious distinction: the Eastern churches did not owe allegiance to the pope in Rome but, rather, acknowledged the patriarch of Constantinople. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the position of the Greek Church was much diminished. This allowed for some jockeying within Eastern Christendom, especially in the East Slavic lands, where the majority of the faithful resided and the religion flourished.

To be sure, even before the Ottomans moved into Byzantium, not all was well in the Eastern Greek world further north. This in part was the result of the fact that, from its inception, the head of the Greek Church in the Rus’ lands had been the metropolitan of Kyiv. The shift of state borders that resulted in the Greek faithful residing in different states complicated the ecclesiastical picture and led various clergymen to vie with each other for influence over the faithful of Eastern Europe. To give one example: the Bulgarian clergyman who was chosen as metropolitan of the Ruthenian lands in 1415 soon found himself excommunicated by the patriarch of Constantinople, whose mind had been poisoned by the metropolitan of Moscow, who wanted this position for himself. Not until 1458 was Poland-Lithuania able to establish an independent Kyivo-Halych metropolitanate for its Orthodox population.

…

Those in the Commonwealth realized that they needed to counteract such moves. Essentially there were two options. They could either establish an autocephalous Orthodox church for the country or bring about church union—here, union with what was still the biggest force in Christianity: the Church in Rome.

The latter option won out, in part because the Church of Rome had made similar efforts in the past. First attempted in Constance, union between the Roman and Greek Churches had been achieved at the Council of Florence (1439), although nothing ultimately came of it (it is this attempt at union, incidentally, that led to the formation of an autocephalous Orthodox church in Moscow). Yet another sign that union was the direction favored by the Vatican was that, as early as 1573, a Greek College was opened in Rome as well as a Congregation for Eastern Churches.

The Commonwealth, thus, was convinced to work toward union and capitalized on a desire among Commonwealth clergymen not to subordinate themselves to Muscovy—in particular, not to send their financial dues there. This became visible in the synods that took place in the town of Brest, along the internal Polish-Lithuanian border, at the end of the sixteenth century. The Greek clergy decided to support the idea of union—with qualifications. While they would recognize the authority of the pope in Rome, they were not ready to make many changes that would affect the look and feel of their religion. They were allowed to retain their distinctive Eastern rite: the liturgy in Church Slavonic, as well as other traditions, including the marriage of the clergy. A selling point for the Orthodox bishops was a further advantage specified in the act of union: they were to be admitted into the Senate of the Commonwealth, on par with the Roman Catholic bishops.

This Union of Brest, as the 1596 agreement was called, produced a new phenomenon in the Commonwealth: so-called Uniates. These were Eastern-rite Catholics, in official parlance members of the Greek-Catholic Confession of the Slavonic Rite. In other words, while they retained their traditional Eastern rite and practices, they were part of the Catholic Church.

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Filed under Greece, Hungary, language, nationalism, Poland, religion, Russia, Ukraine

by | 24 October 2024 · 6:20 am

Hungarian & Romanian Gentry, 1910s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 257-259:

Rather than getting involved in risky commercial activity and taking on the role of a middle class as their liberalism demanded, for the most part Hungary’s nobles turned to Jews, many from Galicia, who within a generation formed the backbone of the entrepreneurial and professional classes. In the process, they acculturated. If in 1880, 58.5 percent of Hungary’s Jews claimed Magyar as their mother tongue, by 1910 that number had risen to 77.8 percent. Enjoying full legal equality, young Jews advanced through Hungarian educational and professional institutions and then excelled in urban pursuits in commerce, finance, and industry. They also took an important place in the agricultural economy, as landowning farmers, but also as tenants and salaried employees of large landowners, who valued Jews as efficient and rational producers.

By World War I, Hungary’s elite seemed to be opening up to Jews as well. In 1914, one-fifth of the large landholders were Jews, and over one-fifth of the deputies in parliament were of Jewish parentage. Tens of thousands of upwardly mobile Jews also excelled in patriotism, and as teachers, journalists, and professionals went into Slovak and Romanian areas spreading Magyar culture. Numerically, Magyarized Jews made the culturally Magyar population just over half of the Hungarian kingdom. At the same time, the lower class Magyar Christian population, unable to adapt as quickly to the challenges of modernization, looked on the advance of Jews with skepticism and jealousy, becoming further alienated from the gentry elite.

In contrast to the Czech national elite, Hungary’s gentry thus failed to provide perspectives for social and economic advancement for the land’s village dwellers. Instead, it endeavored to use state resources to slowly Magyarize ethnic others. Because of the property limitations on the electorate, and multiple forms of administrative chicanery, the spaces for opposition politics in Hungary, whether social or national, were severely constrained. A Hungarian Social Democratic party emerged but not a significant movement for Christian Socialism or agrarianism. The elite’s suppression and neglect of the interests and rights of the local ethnicity virtually ensured a full outburst of radical nationalism when economic circumstances reached a nadir in the early 1930s.

The relations between elite and common folk were similar in Romania, but the extremes were greater. In 1912, 82 percent of Romanians still lived in the countryside. Some 2,000 families had owned 38 percent of arable land in 1864, and that percentage worsened: in 1905, some 5,000 families controlled 50 percent of all arable land. The share of medium-sized properties was negligible (10 percent), while 40 percent of all lands consisted of tiny plots between five and ten hectares. By 1905, there was probably no country in Europe where the disparity was so great between large- and smallholdings: a few thousand families held as much land as more than a million. Like its Hungarian counterpart, the elite was quasi-aristocratic, and through control of the local administrative apparatus, they became a law unto themselves, with little concern for the welfare of peasants.

As in Hungary, professional bureaucrats of gentry (boyar) background dominated the state apparatus and acted as nationalist modernizers, focusing on development in a few large cities, but stopping short at the countryside, where grain and cereal were grown on huge estates, and asymmetrical social relations remained untouched. Also similar to Hungary was the low level of overall development, with industrial output not exceeding 15 percent of national income before World War I.

Jews likewise had particular roles in the economy and society in Romania, but as we have seen, Romania’s elite stalled on granting them citizenship rights—in defiance of the stipulations of the Congress of Berlin. Jews could not own land and therefore lived in cities, becoming artisans, traders, administrators, bankers, peddlers, tailors, and craftspeople. In 1900, less than 5 percent of Romania’s population was Jewish, but it was almost entirely urban, constituting 50 percent of the inhabitants of Iaşi and one-third those of Bucharest. Jews were employed in the advanced sectors of economy, as in Hungary, and though enjoying far less official support, they still managed to develop the economy.

The ethnic Romanian elite preferred city life and as a rule left the administration of their huge estates to middlemen, usually Greek, Armenian, Jewish, or German, who pressed as much from the peasants as possible in seasonal contracts. In Moldavia, the percentage of Jewish leaseholders approached 40 percent, and therefore in the eyes of peasants, Jews became identified as the outstretched hand of an exploitative system that extended from the remote and alien cities into their own rural homelands.

The peasants either had no land or too little to make ends meet and tended to sharecrop on the large estates. As their numbers increased, so did their misery, and many fell victim to poor diets and pellagra (a disease caused by a chronic lack of niacin, often among people heavily dependent on maize for sustenance, reported cases of which rose between 1888 and 1906 from 10,626 to more than 100,000). A particular index of peasant poverty was the high mortality rate among children. Meanwhile, the government did little to protect peasants from exploitation by landowners and their middlemen, against whom the peasants had almost no bargaining power. In tough times, desperate need for money forced peasants to sell grain to speculators at below-market value. The loans on offer were extortionate, and state taxes could amount to 80 percent of the peasants’ annual production.

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Filed under democracy, economics, Germany, Greece, Hungary, labor, language, migration, nationalism, religion, Romania

by | 14 May 2024 · 6:02 am

Sicily Gets the Boot (of Italy)

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 83-84:

When the news was brought to the Byzantine headquarters that the Sicilians, led by the King himself, were advancing in formidable numbers and strength, the Greeks saw their fellow fighters fall away. The mercenaries chose, as mercenaries will, the moment of supreme crisis to demand impossible increases in their pay; meeting with a refusal, they disappeared en masse. Robert of Loritello deserted, followed by his own men and most of his compatriots. The Sicilian fleet arrived first; then, a day or two later, the army appeared in the west. The battle that followed was short and bloody; the Greek defeat was total. The Sicilian ships effectively prevented any possibility of escape by sea. On that one day, May 28, 1156, all that the Byzantines had achieved in Italy over the past year was wiped out as completely as if they had never come.

William [the Bad] treated his Greek prisoners according to the recognized canons of war; but to his own rebellious subjects he was pitiless. This was a lesson he had learned from his father. Treason, particularly in Apulia where it was endemic, was the one crime that could never be forgiven. Of those erstwhile insurgents who fell into his hands, only the luckiest were imprisoned. The rest were hanged, blinded or tied about with heavy weights and hurled into the sea. From Brindisi he moved to Bari. Less than a year before, the Bariots had readily thrown in their lot with the Byzantines; now they too were to pay the price for their disloyalty. As they prostrated themselves before their King to implore his mercy, William pointed to the pile of rubble where until recently the citadel had stood. “Just as you had no pity on my house,” he said, “so now I shall have no pity on yours.” He gave them two clear days in which to salvage their belongings; on the third day Bari was destroyed. Only the cathedral, the great church of St. Nicholas and a few smaller religious buildings were left intact.

One lonely figure remained to face the coming storm. All Pope Hadrian’s allies were gone. Michael Palaeologus was dead and his army annihilated; the Norman barons were either in prison or in hiding. Hadrian himself was all too well aware that, if he were to save anything from the disaster, he would have to come to terms with the King of Sicily. The two met in the papal city of Benevento, and on June 18, 1156, an agreement was concluded. In return for an annual tribute, the Pope agreed to recognize William’s kingship not only over Sicily, Apulia, Calabria and the former principality of Capua, together with Naples, Salerno, Amalfi and all that pertained to them; it was now formally extended across the whole region of the northern Abruzzi and the Marches. William, negotiating as he was from a position of strength, obtained more than had ever been granted to his father or grandfather. He was now one of the most powerful princes of Europe.

Thus, in the three years separating the Treaty of Benevento from the death of Pope Hadrian [the only English Pope ever] on September 1, 1159, a curious change occurs in the relative positions of the three principal protagonists. Alignments were shifting. The Papacy, brought to its knees at Benevento, rediscovered a fact that its history over the past hundred years should have made self-evident—that its only hope of survival as a potent political force lay in close alliance with its neighbor, Norman Sicily. The German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, impressed despite himself by the speed and completeness of William’s victories over the Byzantines in Apulia, looked upon him with undiminished hatred but a new respect, and decided on the indefinite postponement of the punitive expedition to the south that he had long been planning. Instead, he resolved on a campaign against the Lombard towns and cities of north Italy which, though technically part of his imperial dominions, had recently been showing a quite unacceptable tendency toward republicanism and independence. The result was the supreme paradox: the Lombard towns began to see the Sicilian monarchy—more absolutist by far than any other state in western Europe—as the stalwart defender of their republican ideals, hailing its King as a champion of civic liberty almost before the dust had settled on the ruins of Bari. And in the end they were victorious: on May 29, 1176, Frederick’s German knights were routed at Legnano by the forces of the Lombard League. It was the end of his ambitions in Lombardy. In Venice in the following year he publicly kissed Pope Alexander’s foot before the central door of St. Mark’s, and six years later, at Constance, the truce became a treaty. Though imperial suzerainty was technically preserved, the cities of Lombardy (and to some extent Tuscany also) were henceforth free to manage their own affairs.

William returned to Sicily with his international standing higher than it had ever been; but the last years of his reign were anything but happy. His Emir of Emirs—the title given to the Chief Minister of the kingdom—a certain Maio of Bari, was assassinated in 1160; and the following year saw a palace revolution in which the King’s young son and heir, Roger, was killed and William himself was lucky to escape with his life. The disorder spread through much of Sicily and into Apulia and Calabria, the King as always leading his army in person, captured rebels being punished with hideous brutality. Worst of all, when he returned to Sicily in 1162, he found Christians and Muslims at each other’s throats; the interreligious harmony which the two Rogers had worked so hard to achieve had been destroyed forever.

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Filed under Greece, Italy, Mediterranean, nationalism, religion, Turkey, war

by | 7 May 2024 · 7:03 am

Sicilian Slave Revolts vs. Romans

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 36-39:

One thing is certain: that the Romans treated Sicily with little respect. That monstrous inferiority complex to which they always gave way when confronted with Greek culture led to exploitation on a colossal scale. A few Greek cities managed to retain a measure of independence, but much of the island was taken over by the latifundia: those vast landed estates, owned by absentee Roman landlords, setting a pattern of land tenure which was to ruin Sicilian agriculture for the next 2,000 years. Liberty, meanwhile, was almost extinguished as the slave gangs toiled naked in the fields, sowing and harvesting the grain for Rome.

It was thus hardly surprising that the second half of the century should have seen two great slave revolts. Tens of thousands of men, women and children had been sold into slavery during the third-century Sicilian wars, tens of thousands more as a result of warfare on the mainland in the century following. Meanwhile, the Hellenistic east was in a state of turmoil. The tidy distribution of territories among Alexander’s generals was a thing of the past; Asia Minor, Egypt and Syria were now torn apart by dynastic struggles. This meant prisoners, both military and political, a vast proportion of whom, with their families, were swept up by the slave traders and never heard of again. And in Sicily, still steadily developing its agriculture, a strong and healthy worker would fetch a more than reasonable price.

The slave population was in consequence dangerously large, but it gave the authorities little cause for alarm. After all, mass revolts were rare indeed. Almost by definition, slaves—branded, beaten and frequently chained together—were permanently demoralized by the life they led, while the conditions under which they were kept normally made any consultation and planning between them impossible. On the other hand, it should be remembered that many of those who had landed up in Sicily were intelligent and educated, and nearly all of them spoke Greek. And just sometimes, out of sheer desperation, they were driven to action.

The first revolt began, so far as we can gather, in 139 B.C. on the estates of a certain Damophilus of Enna, “who surpassed the Persians in the sumptuousness and costliness of his feasts” and whose slaves most understandably resolved to kill him. Before doing so, however, they consulted another slave, a Syrian named Eunus, who was generally believed to possess magic, or at least oracular, powers. Would the gods, they asked him, give their blessing to such a plan? Eunus’s reply was as categorical as any of them could have wished. He personally marched into Enna with a following of some four hundred fellow slaves; the murder, rape and plunder lasted for several hours. Damophilus and his termagant wife, Megallis, were away in their country villa, but were quickly brought back to the city; he was killed at once, she was handed over to her own female slaves, who tortured her and then flung her from the roof. Eunus had meanwhile been proclaimed King, making his mistress (and former fellow slave) Queen at his side.

Once started, the revolt spread like wildfire. A certain Cleon, a Cilician herdsman working near Agrigento, joined Eunus with 5,000 men of his own; soon they were at Morgantina, then at Taormina. By this time their numbers probably approached the 100,000 mark, though we shall never know for sure. Another mystery is why, in contrast to the speed and efficiency they showed in dealing with similar but much smaller uprisings in Italy, the Romans were so unconscionably slow in sending troops to restore order. Admittedly they had other preoccupations at home and abroad, but the truth is that all through their history the Romans consistently underestimated Sicily; the fact that it was not part of the Italian peninsula but technically an offshore island seemed to lower it in their estimation. Had they properly considered the scale and importance of what was going on, had they sent an adequate force of trained soldiers to the island as soon as the first reports arrived, Eunus and his followers would hardly have stood a chance. As things turned out, it was not until 132 B.C.—seven years after its beginning—that the revolt was finally crushed. The prisoners taken at Taormina were tortured; their bodies, living or dead, were flung from the battlements of the citadel. Their leader, after wandering for some time at liberty, was finally captured and thrown into prison, where he died soon afterward. The vast majority of the rebels, however, were released. They no longer constituted a danger—and, after all, if life were to go on as it always had, slaves were a vital commodity.

Unlike the first, the second slave revolt had a specific cause other than general dissatisfaction. It began in 104 B.C., when Rome was once again under severe pressure, this time from Germanic tribes to the north. In order to deal more efficiently with these, she appealed for military assistance from Nicomedes III, King of Bithynia in Asia Minor.*2 Nicomedes replied that he unfortunately had no young men to spare, thanks to the activities of the slave traders who were seizing so many of them and who were actually protected by the Roman authorities. At this the horrified Senate ordered that all those of Rome’s “allies” who had been enslaved should be released at once. The effect of this decree when it reached Sicily may well be imagined. Huge crowds of slaves assembled before the Governor in Syracuse, demanding immediate emancipation. He granted freedom to some eight hundred, then realized that, if he continued, he would be destroying the entire base of the Sicilian economy. Laying down his pen, he ordered that the still-growing crowds should disperse and return to their homes. Not surprisingly, they refused—and the second slave revolt was under way.

Since the Roman decree—and the Governor’s refusal to enforce it—affected the slaves all over Sicily, the whole island was soon in an uproar.

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by | 14 March 2024 · 5:11 am

Germany’s Military Collapse in 1918

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 26-28:

Victory in Russia gave the German people real hope of victory in the war. On 21 March 1918, Germany launched a spring offensive, better known as the Ludendorff Offensive, on the Western Front. It aimed to knock Britain and France out of the war before significant numbers of US forces arrived in Europe. Unfortunately, German expectations of victory proved illusory. Scarcely in the annals of military history has there been such a spectacular reversal of military fortune as Germany suffered towards the end of the war. By early June 1918, it was clear that the Ludendorff Offensive had failed. On 8 August, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), spearheaded by tanks and supported by massive numbers of newly arrived American troops, launched a surprise attack between Amiens and St Quentin in northern France against the German Second Army. It punched a huge hole in the defensive line and captured 15,000 German soldiers. The significance of this decisive British breakthrough in the Battle of Amiens was not lost on Ludendorff, who called it ‘the blackest day of the German army in the history of this war’. He knew the Allies were now able to deploy thousands of tanks on the Western Front while the Germans had been able to manufacture only 20. Fritz Nagel, a German officer in the German anti-aircraft artillery, later recalled: ‘The German armies were in bad shape. Every soldier and civilian was hungry. Losses in material could not be replaced and the soldiers arriving as replacements were too young, poorly trained and often unwilling to risk their necks because the war looked like a lost cause.’

A two-day military conference on the critical situation on the Western Front was held on 13–14 August 1918 at the headquarters of the Supreme Military Command in Spa, Belgium. Hindenburg chaired it, and Paul von Hintze, the new Foreign Minister, and Ludendorff were present. Ludendorff said Germany now needed to adopt a purely defensive strategy, but he thought it might still be possible to sue for peace with the western Allies on favourable terms. Hindenburg agreed with Ludendorff’s judgement about continuing with strategic defence, while Hintze thought the German Army was in no condition to fight a successful strategic defence, and he felt diplomatic steps had to be taken to bring the war to an end.

When Kaiser Wilhelm II was apprised of these discussions in a Grand Council meeting, he seemed blinded by the optimism of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and instructed Hintze to refrain from making a direct peace offer to the Allies and to wait for a more favourable moment. This proved wishful thinking, as Germany’s Central Power allies now began to collapse. On 24 September 1918, the Bulgarian Army was defeated when the Allied armies based in Greece broke through the Macedonian Front. The Bulgarian government, which had previously been under German control, requested an armistice and accepted it five days later. This placed the Austro-Hungarian empire, Germany’s principal ally, in a precarious position. Emperor Charles I of Austria, desperate to end the war, sent a circular diplomatic note inviting all the belligerents in the war to send representatives to Vienna to a confidential conference to discuss the basic principles of a peace settlement. On 27 October, Austria-Hungary ended its formal alliance with Germany, and the subject nationalities of the Habsburg Empire all declared their independence. On 30 October, the Ottoman Turks signed a regional armistice. Germany was now left without any allies.

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by | 4 February 2024 · 6:44 am

Tito vs. Stalin in Greece, 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 258-259:

One country, however, did want to help the Greek communists. Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito began sending large quantities of weapons and money to the Greek Left – partly out of zeal to help comrades in need, but also to assert an independent line, what he called ‘a national route to Socialism’ – heresy in Stalin’s eyes. Tito, who had been in Moscow exile for years in the 1930s, had in many ways modelled himself on the dictator in the Kremlin. Already he had established a terrifying secret police force, the OGPI, led by the thuggish Ante Ranković, which had murdered thousands of opponents. Stalin distrusted the Yugoslav dictator, who he told Beria and Molotov was too ‘ambitious, too ardent and full of zeal’. In Eastern Europe only Yugoslavia had liberated itself, albeit with money and weapons from the Russians and Britain – but without the need of Soviet troops. Tito resented being ordered around by Moscow, as he told his cronies in comments that he knew would get back to the Kremlin. He had ambitions to be the most powerful communist in the Balkans, which would give him a big power base. Tito resented the Soviet Union’s interference in Yugoslavia’s territorial demands. For months after the war the Yugoslavs had laid claim to Trieste, and thousands of partisans surrounded the city, but the British insisted that it must remain under Italian sovereignty. Tito continued to protest and threatened a full-scale invasion. Finally, the Soviets ordered him to give up his claims on Trieste and grudgingly he agreed, though he could not hide his frustration. He said he did not want to be ‘small change in the politics of the Great Powers’.

Stalin now instructed the Yugoslavs to stop aiding the Greeks. He told two senior officials from Belgrade, Milovan Djilas and Edward Kardelj, that the insurgents in Greece ‘have no prospect of success whatsoever. What, do you think that Great Britain and the United States – the most powerful state in the world – will permit you to break their lines of communication in the Mediterranean? Nonsense. The uprising in Greece must stop, and as quickly as possible.’

But Tito defied the Russians. He continued sending arms to the Greek communists, in increased quantities. The consequences were soon dire for hundreds of thousands of loyal communists throughout the Soviet domains. It was the first sign of the spectacular Soviet–Yugoslav split which would dominate Eastern Europe over the coming few years – and the seeds were sown for a mass Stalinist purge throughout the ‘socialist camp’. Alleged Titoists would be murdered and tortured in Eastern Europe, as ‘Trotskyites’ had been in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. Again the Bolsheviks devoured their own children in an orgy of bloodshed. In Greece, the fighting would continue until 1949, leaving more than a hundred thousand dead, around one million homeless – and would increasingly turn into a front line in the Cold War conflict between East and West.

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by | 14 January 2024 · 5:10 am

World’s Oldest Bookbinding

From “World’s Oldest Book,” by Ilana Herzig, in Archaeology, Jan/Feb 2024:

A 10-by-6-inch piece of papyrus is, researchers now believe, part of the world’s first book. And, like many of the volumes that fill offices, libraries, and homes, it has had many lives. The papyrus fragment, which was unearthed along with hundreds of other pieces of papyrus at the site of El Hibeh in 1902, began as a bound document dating to 260 B.C. that recorded taxation rates for beer and oil scrawled in Greek letters using black ink.

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The discovery pushes the origins of bookbinding back by centuries. “The oldest book previously known was from the first or second century A.D., so this predates anything by up to 400 years,” Zammit Lupi says. “The book could be indicative of how transactions happened, of how people lived, wrote, and passed information to each other. Most importantly, we learned that the structure of the book, as opposed to a scroll, existed well before we thought.”

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