Showing posts with label Constantinople. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Constantinople. Show all posts

Sunday, January 29, 2017

A tremendous wealth of the Vikings was discovered on a small island in the Baltic Sea. The entire Swedish was much poorer

Riches found on the island of Gotland. Credit: Gabriel Hildebrand / The Royal Coin Cabinet























Stratification did increase on the island as time passed, though. Archaeologists have found that, throughout the ninth and tenth centuries, silver hoards were distributed throughout Gotland, suggesting that wealth was more or less uniformly shared among the island’s farmers. But around 1050, this pattern shifted. “In the late eleventh century, you start to have fewer hoards overall, but, instead, there are some really massive hoards, usually found along the coast, containing many, many thousands of coins,” says Jonsson. This suggests that trading was increasingly controlled by a small number of coastal merchants.

This stratification accelerated near the end of the Viking Age, around 1140, when Gotland began to mint its own coins, becoming the first authority in the eastern Baltic region to do so. “Gotlandic coins were used on mainland Sweden and in the Baltic countries,” says Majvor Östergren, an archaeologist who has studied the island’s silver hoards. Whereas Gotlanders had valued foreign coins based on their weight alone, these coins, though hastily hammered out into an irregular shape, had a generally accepted value. More than eight million of these early Gotlandic coins are estimated to have been minted between 1140 and 1220, and more than 22,000 have been found, including 11,000 on Gotland alone.


(Nanouschka Myrberg Burström)An example of one of the earliest silver coins minted on Gotland (obverse, left; reverse, right) dates from around 1140.
Gotland is thought to have begun its coinage operation to take advantage of new trading opportunities made possible by strife among feuding groups on mainland Sweden and in western Russia. This allowed Gotland to make direct trading agreements with the Novgorod area of Russia and with powers to the island’s southwest, including Denmark, Frisia, and northern Germany. Gotland’s new coins helped facilitate trade between its Eastern and Western trading partners, and brought added profits to the island’s elite through tolls, fees, and taxes levied on visiting traders. In order to maintain control over trade on the island, it was limited to a single harbor, Visby, which remains the island’s largest town. As a result, the rest of Gotland’s trading harbors, including Fröjel, declined in importance around 1150.

Gotland remained a wealthy island in the medieval period that followed the Viking Age, but, says Carlsson, “Gotlanders stopped putting their silver in the ground. Instead, they built more than 90 stone churches during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.” Although many archaeologists believe that the Gotland Vikings stashed their wealth in hoards for safekeeping, 

Carlsson thinks that, just as did the churches that were built later, they served a devotional purpose. In many cases, he argues, hoards do not appear to have been buried in houses but rather atop graves, roads, or borderlands. Indeed, some were barely buried at all because, he argues, others in the community knew not to touch them. “These hoards were not meant to be taken up,

” he says, “because they were meant as a sort of sacrifice to the gods, to ensure a good harvest, good fortune, or a safer life.” 

In light of the scale, sophistication, and success of the Gotland Vikings’ activities, these ritual depositions may have seemed to them a small price to pay.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Archaeology . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Viking raids in the east: The fight for the riches of Constantinople

No place on Earth was as coveted by the Vikings as Constantinople, but the Scandinavian warriors could never breach the formidable defenses of the world’s richest city in spite of repeated attacks. It was only after the Vikings became the personal bodyguards of the Byzantine emperor that they grabbed a piece of Constantinople’s wealth.

The epic voyages of the Vikings to the British Isles, Iceland, North America and points west tend to obscure the fact that the Scandinavian warriors also ventured far to the east across Europe and parts of Asia. While the Danes and Norwegians sailed west, Swedish fighters and traders traveled in the opposite direction, enticed initially by the high-quality silver coins minted by the Abbasid Caliphate that sprawled across the Middle East.


Painting of The Invitation of the Varangians: Rurik and his brothers arrive in Staraya Ladoga.
These Vikings who crossed the Baltic Sea and descended across Eastern Europe were branded “Rus”—possibly derived from “ruotsi,” a Finnish word for the Swedes meaning “a crew of oarsmen” and the term from which Russia receives its name. As the Rus migrated down the Dnieper and Volga Rivers, they established settlements along trade routes to the Black and Caspian Seas and conquered the native Slavic populations in present-day Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.

By the middle of the ninth century, Rus merchants turned up in Baghdad. The capital of the Abbasid Caliphate may have been the world’s largest city with a population of more than one million people, but it failed to capture the Viking imagination like Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire that was said to harbor even greater riches.


“Silk and gold are the big lures,” says John Haywood, who chronicles the exploits of the Scandinavian raiders on four continents in his new book, “Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241.” “The Rus would have heard stories about the riches of Constantinople. The big attraction in trade was silk, which was a massively prestigious product for which they traded slaves, furs, beeswax and honey with the Byzantines. Constantinople was also one of the few places that still had gold coins, which were in short supply compared to the Roman period.”


Credit: xavierarnau/Getty Images)
Constantinople’s location on the shores of the Bosporus strait, which divided Europe from Asia, allowed it to become a prosperous crossroads of trade, the largest city in Europe and the richest city in the world. Great treasures necessitated stout defenses. The most-heavily fortified city in the world, Constantinople was encircled by a moat and three parallel walls. In addition, an iron chain that could be stretched across the mouth of the city’s harbor protected it from a naval assault.


It is not known when the Rus first reached Constantinople, but it was before 839 when Rus representatives arrived at the Frankish court as part of a Byzantine diplomatic mission. In June 860, the Rus launched a surprise attack on Constantinople at a time when the city was left largely undefended as Byzantine Emperor Michael III was off with his army fighting the Abbasid Caliphate in Asia Minor while the Byzantine navy was engaged with Arab pirates on the Mediterranean Sea.


Viking graffiti scars a balustrade in Hagia Sophia. (Credit: Jim Brandenburg/ Minden Pictures/Getty Images)
In what the Greek patriarch Photius called “a thunderbolt from heaven,” the Rus plundered the suburbs of Constantinople and launched coastal raids around the Sea of Marmara in which they burned houses, churches and monasteries and slaughtered the patriarch’s servants. However, they never attempted to breach the city walls before suddenly departing in August. The Byzantines credited divine intervention, but the Rus likely departed to ensure they could arrive back home before winter set in.


A medieval Russian source details a second attack on Constantinople in 907 when a fleet of 2,000 ships encountered the iron chain blockading the harbor entrance. The resourceful Vikings responded by going amphibious, hauling their ships ashore, affixing wheels and dragging them overland before placing them back in the water on the other side of the chain before being repelled by the Byzantines. No Byzantine accounts of a Viking attack in 907 exist, however, and Haywood notes that the story could have been concocted as a way to explain a subsequent trade agreement between the Rus and the Byzantines.


A Viking ship is approached by Byzantines at Constantinople. (Credit: Michael Hampshire/National Geographic/Getty Images)
In 941 the Rus launched a disastrous attack on Constantinople. With the Byzantine army and navy once again gone from the city, a fleet of 1,000 ships descended upon Constantinople only to be done in by 15 old dromons fitted with Greek Fire projectors that set the Viking ships ablaze. Weighed down by their armor, the Rus who avoided the flames by jumping into the sea sank to a watery demise. Others caught fire as they swam. When Byzantine reinforcements finally arrived, the Rus sailed for home.


A half-century later, the Vikings would be recruited to defend Constantinople instead of attacking it. When Byzantine Emperor Basil II faced an internal uprising in 987, Vladimir the Great gave him 6,000 Viking mercenaries known as Varangians to differentiate the native Scandinavians from the Rus who by the middle of the 10th century had assimilated with the native Slavs and lost their distinct identity. Impressed by the ferocity with which the Vikings battled the rebels, the emperor established the elite Varangian Guard to protect Constantinople and serve as his personal bodyguards.

 With no local ties or family connections that could divide their loyalties and an inability to speak the local language, the Varangians proved far less corruptible than Basil’s Greek guards.


The Varangian Guard. (Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
“They were immensely well rewarded,” Haywood says of the Varangians. “They were given silk for everyday wear. If you are Scandinavian at that time, you are doing well if you have silk trim on your clothes. They get an enhanced share of the booty. It’s this trickle of well-to-do homecoming mercenaries that spreads this image of Constantinople as the promised land of fabulous wealth.”


The Varangian Guard fought in every major Byzantine campaign—from Sicily to the Holy Land—until Constantinople was captured by Crusaders in 1204. Visitors to one of the most famous sites in the city now known as Istanbul can see that the Vikings left their mark on Constantinople—literally. At least two runic inscriptions carved into the marble walls of the Hagia Sophia may have been engraved by members of the Varangian Guard.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by History . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Warriors in the name of the Cross

" God wants ! " The appeal launched by Pope Urban II in 1095 has a tremendous impact. Both nobles and poor people no longer endure the thought that the Holy City to be violated by infidels.

It was concord

In Europe, the tradition of pilgrimages began to work immediately after the reign of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (IV century). Christians wanted to go to the places where Jesus lived and went walking, trips lengthy and full of privations, without caring any time that I sacrificed nor the suffering that awaited them. It was, perhaps, a kind of listening literal words of the Savior and putting them into practice, "Who will leave his father and mother, wife and his children to come to me, you will get back a hundredfold and It will be his eternal life. "

When, in 638, the Arabs conquered Jerusalem, Christian pilgrimages are in no way affected, Bethlehem and Nazareth impanzinte continuing to be faithful arrived from overseas. 


The Burning of Jerusalem photo: realtruth.org

Except for one incident brutal (death, in 1009, the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, by Khalif El-Hakim of Egypt gesture fanatic corrected by his descendants, who allowed reconstructing the building) peaceful coexistence of Christians Western and the Eastern Muslims is not disturbed than chance.

Aspiration to eternal salvation pushes on eliminating both the noble and the peasants to grab on roads leading to the Holy Land. In 1054, for instance, could be counted some 3,000 pilgrims leave the Picardy and Flanders, who did not hesitate to brave the dangers of the journey and sporadic attacks of Bedouins


Gunthertuch photo: youtube

In 1064 hundreds of pilgrims Germans less fortunate, led by Bishop Gunther of Blamberg are destroyed by the same Bedouin. Age seems to balance close gates: August 19, 1071 Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantine armies in Malazgerd and get hold of Jerusalem, which until then under the domination of Arabs Fatimid Egypt. Pilgrimages to Holy Sepulchre are prohibited.

Dieu li volt!
Pope Urban II photo: wikipedia.org
The first crusade is launched at the urging of Pope Urban II (whose pontificate lasts from 1088 until 1099), which, in a sermon published in the November 27, 1095 - the tenth day of the Council of Clermont - call to arms breath the whole Christian faith if protection of threatened new invasions of Muslim conquest in Asia Minor and Nicaea



The cry of recognition assembly and then the fight is "Dieu li volt!" - "God wants."

Start the heap, without weapons and without skill or experience how pale in the war, with thousands marching peasants, recognizing the command of Peter the Hermit (Peter the Hermit), an "apostle" in Amiens touched fanaticism. Pilgrims have their historical consciousness time, imagines that Christ lived only a short time before them, so I'm rather tempted to they sense killers Hebrew as Savior (Rhineland massacres). Arriving in Constantinople in August 1096, are advised by the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos to wait crusade lords and knights. Bursting with enthusiasm, pilgrims did not obey and rush back on the road to Jerusalem, but become easy prey for the Turks, who destroy or put them in chains.


Portrait of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081-1118) photo: wikipedia.org
Awaiting instructions of Urban II, the real warriors are preparing thoroughly campaign, weapons and victuals, then under the command pontifical legate Adhemar of Montheil, went to the Holy City

Not a few are killed by long marches, the heat of a relentless sun, disease, sieges, battles the Turks harassment and, not least, the repercussions intestines. Some of them, forgetting the oath of vassalage did Alexius, but the true purpose of the trip, he delineates own principalities: Bohemond of Taranto proclaimed prince of Antioch, and Baudouin of Flanders attacking the city Edes (Urfa or Osroene), beyond the Euphrates.

Siege of Jerusalem (1099)
Taking of Jerusalem by the Crusaders, 15th July 1099" / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library photo: wikipedia.org

The Siege of Jerusalem took place from June 7 to July 15, 1099, during the First Crusade. The climax of the First Crusade, the successful siege saw the Crusaders seize Jerusalem from the Fatimid Caliphate and laid the foundations for the Kingdom of Jerusalem

In 1099 of the 150,000 Crusaders - combatants or non-combatants - get around the walls of Jerusalem only a tenth. The city, weakened by divisions between Muslims, capitulates quickly and barons francs, elated, reconstruct spot feudal system Europe, sharing the achievements and establishing a domain Christian who will be led by Godfrey of Bouillon, who, with all modesty will be proclaimed "advocatus Sancti Sepulchri" but, in fact, will be master "Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem".

In bugle struggle for the Second Crusade blow in March 1146, one of the most famous and esteemed people of Western Christianity, Bernard of Clairvaux


Bernard of Clairvaux - Gutenburg photo: wikipedia.org


Reconquest of Edessa by the Turks of Western Christianity revived anger and raised to fight thousands of adventurers. But instead of get where she had proposed, hit in Damascus (1148), which suffer a bitter defeat. Relations between the United Crusader, Byzantine and Muslim rulers neighbors surroundings become more embittered than ever.


Jamais deux sans trois ...

Crusades - if we do not count Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars, children's crusade, a crusade poor or much later crusade against Hussites - were in number 8. Large and wide as two continents. Caused by the recapture of Jerusalem by Saladin of, in 1187, the Third Crusade failed to attach than the city of Acre


The Christians of the Holy City Defiling before Saladin photo: wikipedia.org

Ten years later, the fourth crusade has not even reached the Holy Land. After the Council of Lateran, Pope Innocent III called Quia bubble Major made public
, calling to fight the Christian world. A fight, the fifth without European monarchs, almost all employees in their crusade. An absurd fight that will end without any struggle, in the Nile, which just flooded land of Egypt.


Sieges, dead, wounded and dusty roads and thirst, hunger, love God, love for Allah. Battle theaters change from Tunis back to Constantinople ... Carol Login scene of Anjou, Louis the Saint, King Edward of England, and the number is always bigger losers than the winners. An equation whose result is sanctioned and repetitive eighth and last Crusade, the majority of Christian soldiers die in Syrian border, non-potable water poisoned, killed by plague and dysentery.

A war between meanings

In Western Europe, the Crusades are considered traditionally some heroic feats. Not all historians seem but agree with this view. In the Muslim world, the Crusades are some attacks perceived as cruel, full of wild, of Christians against Islam. 

Even today, some speeches by Fundamentalist Islamic crusade use the word to describe their attacks against the West. It can be said that there are visions of orthodoxy that seem congruent with this perspective, attitude determined largely by looting Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade.


Capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 photo: wikipedia.org

Here ought made an aside. Not all actions were heroic crusaders, even the eye perceived Western Christian. Crusaders committed atrocities not only against Muslims but also against Jews and even other Christians. 


Conquest Of Constantinople By The Crusaders In 1204 photo: wikipedia.org 

Fourth Crusade touted never made it to Palestine. Instead destroyed Constantinople, capital of Byzantine Empire. Many relics and valuables kidnapped there are now in the collections of the Venetian or the Vatican, and the fault line between Christianity and the Catholic Oriental was then deepened enormously.

Between Crusade and jihad terms there are some interesting consistent. In the West, the word crusade has positive connotations (for example, in the area of ​​social policy is successfully use the terms crusade against poverty, the crusade against drugs and so on), while the term jihad has connotations exclusively negative, being associated with a sacred war driven by fanaticism. In the Muslim world, the term jihad have positive connotations that include the sense of spiritual struggle against oneself.

Dictionary explanation of the word crusade is: "military expeditions undertaken between XI and XIII centuries, with its initial intention to drive out the Muslim holy places in Palestine and re-impose Christianity." Formula "original intent" is more than telling.

Knights of the Temple


Saint Bernard de Clairvaux, the Order's patron photo: wikipedia.org 
Born officially in 1118 in Jerusalem, Order of the Templars was to be closely linked to the life of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Crusades, before being dissolved at the beginning of the fourteenth century by Phillipe Le Bel (Philip the Fair). Crestininilor real regular army of the Holy Land, the Order was aware of his actions not only pontiff and was exempt from taxes and tithes by the clergy or laity owners. Official history has remembered that nine knights (Hugues de payns, Geoffroy Bisol, Payen of Montdidier, André de Montbard Godfrey of St-Omer, Rosal Archambaud St-Amand, Godemar and Geoffroy) in northeastern France and Flanders They gathered in Jerusalem and created the Order of poor Knights of Christ.

Their main concern was to protect all pilgrims coming to Jerusalem. Li was given a headquarters land located on the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. In this way, they become Knights of the Temple or Templars. In 1127, Pope convenes a council at Troyes, which enshrines the existing order and, above all, ensures total independence - moral and financial. The same council proclaims a new concept: the monk-soldier. The huge capital of sympathy that will make will enjoy the richest Templar order of time. Over the Crusades, many of them will leave their lives on the altar of faith.


Templar warrior photo: pinterest
The warriors will not know how to negotiate the conversion unlike Hospitaller after overthrowing the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Watch fiercely Phillipe Le Bel, for their wealth huge but also arrogance that we instill their full autonomy, all the Templars in France will be accused of heresy, and grand master of the order, Jacques de Molay, shall be burned living in the midst of Paris, the Ile de la Cité, at December 22, 1314.



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