History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VIII

[Cutlass]

At a bare minimum, wouldn't you be curious at some point?

You also have to consider that the ability to do that was very new to Europeans. 100 years previous they could not have attempted that.

 

[Imaus]

Consider the world of the Aztec and Maya. To their south is a nigh unpassable jungle by Darian, to their west is a island-less Ocean for thousands of miles, to their east is a string of islands full of Taino and othwers and Caribs down the way, to their north are civilized cities, tribes, polities. Aztec and Maya civilization focused on MesoAmerica because that was where everything was, they didn't have a China to look for. Mexico is huge, the Aztecs are nestled in some notch, the Maya at a premonitory, trade along the islands and gulf and pacific.

We know that the height of their maritime technology was akin to some sort of raft holding up to a 150 people, if Spanish records are to be believed, and trade did occur a bit from Southern Mexico, around the Isthmus, and into the Andes, though if the Aztecs knew of the Inca directly, we have no solid proof, or even of the Musica.

 

[caketastydelish]

You also have to consider that the ability to do that was very new to Europeans. 100 years previous they could not have attempted that.

Good luck telling that to the Vikings.

 

[Cutlass]

Good luck telling that to the Vikings.

Or the Inuit, for that matter. But the difference is that above the Arctic circle the distances between the land masses is very small. They were doing little more than island hopping. But for any of the large groups of Indians, there were no islands to hop.

 

[innonimatu]

At a bare minimum, wouldn't you be curious at some point?

There are a number of tales from middle-ages Europe, from Scandinavia to the Al-Andaluz, of adventurers who took a ship and disappeared into the western ocean. Kind of a warning tale... There's reason to believe that some people were curious. It's just that crossing the ocean was damn hard. Even the islands less than half-way across had never been discovered by anyone until the 15th century.
I would expect that from the Americas side some adventurers also set off. And met the same fate.

You also have to consider that the ability to do that was very new to Europeans. 100 years previous they could not have attempted that.

They did, ever earlier. They just fed the fish... and that continued to happen to so many even after the ocean became known. Between ships lost to storms and disease among crews, I don't think the first tales of successfully crossing the ocean inspired people who likes their own lives to attempt it!

 

[r16]

while ı decided that it would be dangerous and stuff , ı was downloading units to make some Civ lll scenario and from some thread ı learned that the first time Spaniards met lncans , it was at least a hundred miles into the ocean . Should actually look for it , now ı should

 

[r16]

and did come upon Torora , made by Aaglo , and if you search it on this site and find the thread , damned tablet requires me find the paper where ı wrote down the codes thing [url ... Stuff and linking is tough . Anyhow the page 3 of the development thread and the claim will be that first time Spaniards met the lncans it was 300 hundred miles out to the sea , apparently not in the wikipedia link given above .

 

[Traitorfish]

Why didn't any of the native Americans (especially those with sophisticated civilizations like the Aztecs and Mayans) ever sea travel to reach Europe first? If the answer is "they didn't develop the shipbuilding technology" then why didn't they?

There wasn't really any incentive for them to do so. The construction of large ships capable of travelling on the open ocean is very costly in terms of resources and human labour. The only societies in the Americas which were complex enough to bring these resources together weren't located close to viable sea trade routes. Plausibly some of the societies in the Caribbean and the adjacent mainland were complex enough that they could have developed large ship-building technologies given sufficient time, but at the time of European contact, many of these societies were experience a reduction in complexity due to changing climate, so their historical trajectory didn't seem to be in that direction. Even if they had developed such technologies, they would have had a lot of America to explore before anyone felt the need to see what lay over the horizon.

In contrast, pre-modern Europe can reasonably be thought of a series of large bodies of water ringed by human polities, so the sea was much more important from a far earlier stage, and corresponding resources devoted to exploiting it. Asia is on the whole less easily conceived of in these terms, but contained vast enough populations that there were as many people as in Europe for whom it made sense to think of the world as a network of seas, and who correspondingly developed sophisticated nautical technologies.

Good luck telling that to the Vikings.

Even the Norse were still essentially island-hopping, which is a bit different than just sailing into the great blue yonder. The existence of other lands can be deduced from currents and birds long before they are ever seen, and it is very likely that this contributed to the Norse discoveries of Iceland, Greenland, and North America. Most of these discoveries will have been preceded by deep-sea fishing expeditions which obtained these "hints", rather than just somebody pointing into open sea.

It's honestly a matter of dumb historical luck that the European discovery of America didn't more closely resemble this: Basque and Portugese fishing fleets had been visiting the Newfoundland cod banks for decades before Columbus landed on San Domingo, so it was probably just a matter of time before somebody figured out there was a continent just a few hundred miles West.

 

[Ajidica]

In contrast, pre-modern Europe can reasonably be thought of a series of large bodies of water ringed by human polities, so the sea was much more important from a far earlier stage, and corresponding resources devoted to exploiting it. Asia is on the whole less easily conceived of in these terms, but contained vast enough populations that there were as many people as in Europe for whom it made sense to think of the world as a network of seas, and who correspondingly developed sophisticated nautical technologies.

I've heard China described, at least so far as trade goes, as essentially an island nation. To their south is dense jungle. To their north is empty steppes. To their west are terrifying mountain ranges and deserts. Any large scale economic activity will therefore have to go by ship.

 

[Traitorfish]

The Roman writer Jordanes wrote that "the inhabitants of Caledonia have reddish hair and large loose-limbed bodies".

I have no idea what is meant by "loose-limbed" in this context. Is this a Roman expression, or is it a contemporary expression which I've never encountered?

 

[Cutlass]

The Roman writer Jordanes wrote that "the inhabitants of Caledonia have reddish hair and large loose-limbed bodies".

I have no idea what is meant by "loose-limbed" in this context. Is this a Roman expression, or is it a contemporary expression which I've never encountered?

I've encountered the expression in a number of writings. But I couldn't really give you a description of what is meant by it.

 

[Imaus]

The Roman writer Jordanes wrote that "the inhabitants of Caledonia have reddish hair and large loose-limbed bodies".

I have no idea what is meant by "loose-limbed" in this context. Is this a Roman expression, or is it a contemporary expression which I've never encountered?

I've encountered the expression in a number of writings. But I couldn't really give you a description of what is meant by it.

Supple, vitality, nimble;

Looking at the untranslated transliterated Jordanes text,

13 Noctem quoque clariorem in extrema eius parte minimamque Cornelius etiam annalium scriptor enarrat, metallis plurimis cupiosam, herbis frequentem et his feraciorem omnibus, que pecora magis quam homines alant: labi vero per eam multa quam maximae relabique flumina gemmas margaritasque volventia. Silorum colorati vultus; torti pleroque crine et nigro nas****ur; Calydoniam vero incolentibus rutilae cumae, corpora magna, sed fluuida: Gallis sive Spanis, ut quibusque obtenduntur, adsimiles. 14 Vnde coniectavere nonnulli, quod ea ex his accolas contiguo vocatos acceperit. Inculti aeque omnes populi regesque populorum; cunctos tamen in Calydoniorum Meatarumque concessisse nomina Dio auctor est celeberrimus scriptor annalium. Virgeas habitant casas, communia tecta cum pecore, silveque illis saepe sunt domus. Ob decorem nescio an aliam quam ob rem ferro pingunt corpora.


Cornelius also, the author of the Annals, says that in 13
the farthest part of Britain the night gets brighter and
is very short. He also says that the island abounds in
metals, is well supplied with grass and is more produc-
tive in all those things which feed beasts rather than men.
Moreover many large rivers flow through it, and the
tides are borne back into them, rolling along precious
stones and pearls. The Silures have swarthy features
and are usually born with curly black hair, but the inhab-
itants of Caledonia have reddish hair and large loose-
jointed bodies. They are like the Gauls or the Spaniards,
according as they are opposite either nation. Hence some 14
have supposed that from these lands the island received
its inhabitants, alluring them by its nearness. All the
people and their kings are alike wild. Yet Dio, a most
celebrated writer of annals, assures us of the fact that
they have been combined under the name of Caledo-
nians and Maeatae. They live in wattled huts, a shelter
used in common with their flocks, and often the woods
are their home. They paint their bodies with iron-red.

"Calydoniam vero incolentibus rutilae cumae, corpora magna, sed fluuida"

Jordane's late latin basically says they have good fluid bodies, nimble, agile, that nature.

 

[innonimatu]

@Imaus Nicely done I thought of looking for the original text also, but thought it would be greek - which would be completely hopeless for me!

 

[Mouthwash]

How correct is this account of the Renaissance as being an unambiguous decline in thought and innovation? It's pretty reasonable sounding and I recommend reading the whole thing, but some of his claims are ringing alarm bells (like his insistence on the Dark Ages being a terrible period, or his assertion that fundamentalism killed Islamic thought 'stone-dead').

Also, to illustrate that the decline was caused by a focus on symbolism and metaphor over concrete science, he points out without a hint of irony that Wars of the Roses were named after the heraldry of the two sides.

A reasonably popular consensus would start [the Renaissance] roughly with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, allowing the Middle Ages to finish on a suitably final note, and end about 1564. In that year, by a convenient coincidence, Michelangelo and Calvin died and Shakespeare, Marlowe and Galileo were born... It fits in all the people we would definitely want to see as Renaissance figures - Leonardo da Vinci, Lorenzo de Medici, Botticelli, Rabelais, Erasmus, More, the Borgias, Machiavelli and Luther. But the problem for an admirer of the period is that it can produce only one intellectual achievement of any significance at all - Copernicus' theory of the planets, published near the end of the period in 1543.

...

The scientists of the Merton School, at Oxford in the 1330s and 1340s, wrote at length on the "intension and remission of forms", that is, the changes of any quantities which could vary continuously. The topic covered the motion of bodies, the gradual change from hot to cold, the variation in brightness over a surface and, according to one of the school, the "intension and remission of certainty with respect to doubt". Their crucial achievement was to distinguish between speed and acceleration, and then between uniform and non-uniform acceleration. They were able to devise what we would express by an equation of uniformly accelerated motion. All this requires mathematical talent of a high order.

The next (and, as it proved, final), steps taken in this direction were the accomplishments of the last and greatest of the medieval scientists, Nicole Oresme. A remarkably versatile thinker, he wrote on such varied subjects as theology and money, but devoted much of his effort to science and mathematics. He invented graphs, one of the few mathematical discoveries since antiquity which are familiar to every reader of the newspapers. He was the first to perform calculations involving probability. He had a good grasp of the relativity of motion, and argued correctly that there was no way to distinguish by observation between the theory then held that the heavens revolve around the earth once a day, and the theory that the heavens are at rest and the earth spins once a day. He was apparently the first to compare the workings of the universe to a clock, an image much repeated in later ages. Many of his more technical achievements have also been admired by the experts.

Then everything came to a stop. Given the scientific and mathematical works of Descartes and Galileo, but no chronological information, one might suppose the authors were students of Oresme. Galileo's work on moving bodies is the next step after Oresme's physics; Cartesian geometry follows immediately on Oresme's work on graphs. But we know that the actual chronological gap was 250 years, during which nothing whatever happened in these fields. Nor did any thing of importance occur in any other branches of science in the two centuries between Oresme and Copernicus. Other intellectual fields have no more to offer. Histories of philosophy are naturally able to name philosophers between 1350 and 1600, but their inclusion seems to be on the same principle as world maps which include Wyndham, WA, but leave out Wollongong - big blank spaces must be filled. While it is almost impossible to find an English translation of any philosopher in the three hundred years between Scotus and Descartes, it is not a lack one feels acutely. The intellectual stagnation of those centuries is evident too in the lack of change in the universities: the curriculum which bored Locke at Oxford in 1650 was almost identical to the one which Wyclif found wanting in 1350.

...

It is not entirely easy to understand what happened in detail, since on the surface things went on as usual. The universities continued to teach the same things, and indeed a number of new universities were founded. But nothing new occurred in them - the university philosophers and theologians of the fifteenth century, for example, are found repeating Ockham almost word for word. At a more popular level of thought, some very odd developments took place in man's general conception of the world. The world became, as it were, covered up by an elaborate web of signs.

...

By 1500, there were apparently few thinkers left capable of telling the difference between signs and things. Religion, according to the Reformers, was not so much about man or God or the Christian community as about scripture, the signs written by God.

...

What the sign mania did to science can be seen in the work of the late Renaissance naturalist Aldrovandi, who considered his account of the snake incomplete until he had treated it in its anatomical, heraldic, allegorical, medicinal, anecdotal, historical and mythical aspects. To throw in the anatomy of the snake with the hotchpotch of signs collected about it in various fields of human interest is simply an indication of scientific thought driving into a blind alley.

The literary end of intellectual life did not fare much better than science, except that the slump was not quite so long. Rather than protest, as is usual, about the difficulty of confining historical movements within definite dates, I am happy to name the fifteenth century as coinciding quite accurately with the decline of literature. Chaucer died in 1400; the next writers that anyone still reads are Erasmus, More, Rabelais and Machiavelli, just after 1500. Hard information on what is widely read is admittedly not easy to come by, but here is some evidence: of the 282 volumes currently available in the Penguin Classics series, twelve and most of two others are from the fourteenth century; they include works of Dante, Chaucer and Boccaccio. By contrast only two are from the fifteenth century. One is Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ, a work of genuine piety, but with an attitude to intellectual matters typified by its remark that "I would rather feel compunction than be able to define it". The other is Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, a not especially good example of a genre perfected hundreds of years earlier. A preoccupation with the past, in lieu of any developments in the present, was pervasive in the writings of the century, from the repetitive Arthurian and Trojan legends of England and France to the Italian humanists' obsessive commentaries on Latin rhetoric and poetical theory. The vanishing of past glories is almost the sole theme of Villon, the only French writer of the century who has any modern audience.

Literature in English suffered, if anything, an even worse eclipse than continental literatures. From the fourteenth century, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and other poems, Langland's Piers Plowman and the Gawain poems are still read, and not just by professional language students. But, except for Malory and a few lyric poets anthologised for completeness, it is hard to think of any writer in English between Chaucer and Spenser who is now read even by the most enthusiastic students. The gap is almost two hundred years.

...

The rediscovery of ancient knowledge, which the later Italian humanists claimed for themselves, was actually accomplished in the twelfth century. Hitherto I have mentioned almost entirely men whose names are well known to history, but there is a special obligation on anyone discussing this period to recall some of the real heroes of western culture, the first translators of the ancient classics into Latin. Though they are now almost forgotten, it was their extraordinary efforts in travelling around the Mediterranean, learning strange languages, discovering what books were worthwhile, and producing intelligible versions in Latin, that began the intellectual advance of the West.

 

[innonimatu]

To make a short answer now, I'll say that this James Franklin apparently only knows England. Quite a lot was happening across Europe at the time. No literature in Europe during that period, really? Where does he think that the great literature that came immediately after happened? Cervantes' Don Quixote may have been a mockery of it, but it happened at all because literacy advanced during the renaissance!
And of course all the development of Spain and France, and Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries was built upon the culture exported from Italy, and to a lesser degree flanders beforehand. The Renaissance was not a syncronous event in Europe, rather a series of waves, starting in Italy, spreading by the sea to low countries and across the alps to central Germany, then to Spain as it conquered much of Italy, and to France across the alps also. The whole process took nearly one century. The premise of that opinion piece is wrong from the moment it tries to box in "the Renaissance" within specific dates.

And it's no longer short, this answer but nor nearly long enough, I may get back to this if I have the time.

 

[stfoskey12]

I have read stories (from the 19th or early 20th century) where a childhood illness occurs. In these stories, after the kid recovers, the family sometimes has to destroy or burn all the kids' possessions to prevent the disease from spreading. Was this just done for one disease, or for many diseases, and how widespread was this practice? I forget where I originally heard about it, but it was mentioned in a historical flashback in Bojack Horseman, which made me think of stories I read as a child.

 

[H4run]

Anyone can suggest me a good book about Mongol organization system, leadership, government policies, philosophies and tactics? I heard the Soviet Union make a comprehensive research regarding that, and build on military tactics and strategy based on that research. I currently reading a light book "Genghis Khan’s Greatest General: Subotai the Valiant", if anyone has better recommendation it would be lovely.

cc: @Lexicus @red_elk

 

[Hrothbern]

Anyone can suggest me a good book about Mongol organization system, leadership, government policies, philosophies and tactics? I heard the Soviet Union make a comprehensive research regarding that, and build on military tactics and strategy based on that research. I currently reading a light book "Genghis Khan’s Greatest General: Subotai the Valiant", if anyone has better recommendation it would be lovely.

cc: @Lexicus @red_elk

Perhaps @Dachs knows some book as well

 

[H4run]

Perhaps @Dachs knows some book as well

Now with this comment, we are on the process on reviving the ghost of the biggest History-Buff ever in CFC history.

*Handing over the ritual cloak and dagger to Mr. @Hrothbern as the Master of Ceremony.

 

[red_elk]

Anyone can suggest me a good book about Mongol organization system, leadership, government policies, philosophies and tactics? I heard the Soviet Union make a comprehensive research regarding that, and build on military tactics and strategy based on that research. I currently reading a light book "Genghis Khan’s Greatest General: Subotai the Valiant", if anyone has better recommendation it would be lovely.

It's better to address this question to our resident historians. From what I read I can only recommend Lev Gumilyov as an author whose books may be relevant.
He had a few books about Steppe nomadic people and Mongols. Had unorthodox views, but the books may be interesting to read.

The Vasily Yan pop-historical novels about Mongol invasion were also interesting to me, but don't know if they have ever been translated to English.