The first part of my three-part series on medieval linen armour has appeared in Medieval Clothing and Textiles 18. Whereas in some periods linen armour is commonly showed in paintings and sculptures, there are very few pictures of fabric armour from western Europe between 500 and 1250 CE. No quilted garment survives from Europe in this period either. So I discuss about thirty texts from this period. I work with texts in Greek, Latin, Old French, Ibero-Romance, Irish, Middle High German, Old Norse, and Arabic, and provide my own translations of the Greek, Latin, Romance languages, and Middle High German. Whereas most books summarize and allude to a few of these texts, I put them in context and give both the original language and a translation.
The building one street up, at Government and Fort, reminds me of architecture from the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire!
Cotton is an old word, but people west of India and north of Sudan often call cotton “tree wool.”
iṣe naš šipati “the tree which bears wool” (inscription of Sennacherib of Assyria describing plants in his garden, 705-681 BCE) Chicago Assyrian Dictionary volume “I” p. 217
“This breastplate had been stolen by the Samians in the year before they took the bowl; it was of linen, decked with gold and tree-wool (εἰρίοισι ἀπὸ ξύλου), and embroidered with many figures” Herodotus 3.47.2 (c. 430-420 BCE) tr. A.D. Godley slightly adapted, cp. 3.106.3, 7.65 on tree-wool in India and Theophrastus, On Plants IV. 7, 8 on cotton grown on the island of Bahrain (Akkadian and Sumerian Dilmun, Greek Tylos)
Middle and Modern German Baumwolle “tree wool, cotton” (already appears in Erec by Hartmann von Aue around the year 1185 per https://www.koeblergerhard.de/mhd/mhd_b.html “boumwolle”, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm do not have much to say. The line about a saddle cushion soft as a cotton (ein Paumwol) is line 7703 of the Ambraser Heldenbuch so there is Innsbruck content!)
Do my gentle readers know this calque in other languages?
Since 1805, combat between well-equipped air and naval forces has become rarer and rarer. This is because states which can produce such forces have little to gain from fighting one another, and because it has become harder and harder to sustain such forces at all. In the 19th century, the Royal Navy was usually overwhelmingly superior to everyone else (although the French and the United States sometimes gave it a run for its money). Since the 1950s, the US air force has had a similar advantage over everyone else’s. Small states look at these navies and air forces, decide they can never defeat them, and either stop bothering with their own navies and air forces, or side with one of the big powers, or hide in harbour or in neutral countries when war approaches (the fleet-in-being strategy). Big states do some spectacularly stupid and thoughtless things, but rarely something as stupid as getting into a war with their allies or a nuclear power, and pretty much all the states with sophisticated air forces and navies are either each other’s allies or nuclear powers.
This means that stories about how a future naval or air war would go are fantasies based on speculation and imagination and peacetime tests, not observation and experience of actual warfare.
Novelist, reenactor, Plataia 2024 organizer, and veteran Christian Cameron has launched a patreon https://www.patreon.com/CameronAuthor I am told that one of the corporate social media services he uses is stopping him from reaching followers just like corporate social media services do whenever they want more money. The Oatmeal has a comic about this.
Dokhtar castle alias Firuzabad in Iran. Photo by Hadi Karimi from Wikimedia Commons under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. I miss Iran.
Fans of classic Nintento games know that sometimes the princess is in another castle. People researching sites called Maiden Castle have to figure out which of the sites called that in Farsi, Arabic, or English they mean.
A little bowl like this was all my budget could afford, but its still handy for holding my sewing things!
One weekend in May 2023 I did two things on a weekend which involved spending several hours away from home doing things with people I did not know in 2013 other than the day job (!). When I was passing through downtown Victoria I stopped at a stall run by Journey House Actions, a Rwandan charity. They sell bowls, baskets, and jars of coiled grass ropes laced with dyed sisal fibres. As I worked my way through them, I was struck how much they were like the Turkish shields in Schloss Ambras.
On the late Roman map called the Peutinger Tables, three cities are represented by a man with a crown on a throne: Rome, Constantinople, and Antioch. To a cartographer in the fourth or fifth century CE, these were the three seats of imperial power.
Early on, the Indy Neidell World War Two documentary split off a series War Against Humanity from its narrative of the ground and surface naval wars. Their story presents the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ in December 1944 as a trivial thing, because the allies quickly put forces in place so that German forces could never break through to anywhere really dangerous, and because by the standards of winter 1944/1945 the forces involved were not huge. They even spend lots of time talking about how specific Anglo generals tried to take credit or shift the blame. I feel like that is the wrong story to tell, because the real story is all the ordinary people who ended up dead, or crippled, or frostbitten when they had started to think they would survive the war more or less intact. Here is one of those stories by the late Fred Pohl:
International Conference on Alexander the Great: Alexander and Macedon
South Dakota State University – Sioux Falls, SD – September 4-7, 2024
Announcing the next instalment of the series of international conferences on Alexander the Great.
Alexander and Macedon, held at South Dakota State University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, September 4-7, 2024
2024 heralds the 2,350th anniversary of Alexander’s final major battle of the Hydaspes as well as the so-called Hyphasis mutiny, the death of his famed horse Bukephalos, Alexander’s journey down the Indus River, the start of the Mallian campaign, and the creation of Nearchos’ exploratory naval expedition.
Papers are welcome on any aspect of Alexander the Great and his era, or on the history of Macedon. A particular focus is on Alexander’s influence on Macedon and vice versa.
Papers from any relevant discipline are particularly encouraged to facilitate a multi-disciplinary discussion.
The conference is aimed equally at postgraduate students, early career researchers and established academics.
The keynote session on Thursday September 5th, will be delivered by Edward Anson, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock,and Waldemar Heckel, Research Fellow in the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.
There will also be a public afternoon workshop involving experimental history in recreating a sarissa phalanx using replica weapons.
Please send an abstract of 300 words and a brief bio to the organizer, Graham Wrightson (alexanderconference@yahoo.com ) BEFORE March 30th 2024.
On these plains above Jena in 1806, the Prussian army was having a really bad day. Photo by Sean Manning, October 2016
In my first book, I talked about how ‘mercenary’ is more a moral and political term than a neutral category. People use different names like allies, volunteers, professionals, Private Military Companies, and mercenaries depending on their moral and political stance on those soldiers (in ancient Greece or Sir Charles Oman’s England, this was deeply tied up in aristocratic suspicion of anyone who had to work for a living). A year or two ago, military historian Alex Burns made a similar point about Hessian soldiers in the American Revolutionary War.
