OMG Xanadu

What Up, Nerds?


The great Khan of the Mongols—Mongke—had just died while leading the invasion of the Song dynasty in south China. 

The old Khan was dead and that meant the Mongols were without an leader. The way they usually chose a new leader was to have all the political officials, military officials, and important descendants of Genghis Khan meet together and elect a new Khan.

Kublai, being an ambitious sort of guy, thought that maybe he should become the new Mongol leader.  In order to do that he would need the freedon to devote more attention and resources to Mongol Politics than to the war against the Song. So he negotiated a peace treaty where he wouldn't attack the Song and the Song would pay him off with a heaping pile of silk, and then he headed back north to Mongolia. A pretty good peace, if you ask me.

When Kublai arrived up north he got some bad news. Most of the eligible voters and most of the Mongols thought that his uncle Ariq should be Khan. Only Kublai and his brother Hulagu thought Kublai was the better choice. So Ariq had called a meeting in the Mongol Capital at Karakorum. The meeting had elected him, and he had already been crowned Khan. So Kublai had been beat before the game even began and he returned to the south to restart the war with the Song.

Karakorum. Kind of a dinky little town..
(Pic from Wiki)

Nahhh not really. When Kublai found out he shrugged and said "f*ck this, I own half of China!" He called his own meeting with hand-picked but politically unrepresentative "representatives" from all the important Mongol tribes and he got them to "elect" him Khan. So now there were two Khans, except that Kublai's claim was full of bullsh*t.

But when you own half of China you can get away with a little bull.

Kublai drew up his armies.

In the south, several of the generals who he'd had fighting the Song declared that they were loyal to Ariq. Ariq also held the loyalty of central Mongolia and of the Mongol domain in Russia. Kublai had north China and the loyalty of his brother Hulagu who owned Iran and Iraq. Kublai quickly started to crush Ariq's generals on the border with the Song.


After dealing with Ariq's men to his south Kublai marched his own army straight into Mongolia. He made a beeline for Ariq, who was only too happy to humor Kublai. But when the two armies met Kublai whupped Ariq's army hard. Ariq's primary general and strategist was killed, and Ariq fled. Ariq had bet too much on that battle and he had to disappear for a long while to bring his army back up to fighting shape. Whiae Ariq was busy Kublai moved to attack and capture the Mongol capital at Karakorum. Ariq recovered, and the two armies dueled in the field for several years. Ariq briefly retook Karokorum, but not for long, and the city was mostly destroyed in the fighting.


Over the course of several more years of warfare back and forth, Ariq's army wore down while Kublai just drew on the seemingly infinite strength of China to replentish his own forces. This meant that more and more Mongols started to see the way things were headed and they defected to Kublai. Eventually enough bigwigs like the governor Ariq himself had appointed over central Asia defected, and the war started to wind down

Ariq had to give up and he surrendered to Kublai. Kublai called a new meeting at his capital of Xanadu to confirm his as chief of the Mongols. At the meeting he "forgave" his uncle for totally being the one who illegally usurped Kublai's completely legitimate Khan status, and executed all of Ariq's followers.

When they heard about this, the Mongol ruler of Russia and also Kublai's own brother Hulagu who ruled Iraq and Iran got a little uncomfortable. They sent word that they agreed Kublai was Khan, but didn't come to Kublai's meeting and started to drift away from the central Mongol state. Soon war between the two Mongol provinces broke out. This was no surprise, since that war had been brewing between them for a while. Kublai did his best to force his control over the whole empire, but his rule was unstable and revolts sprung up all over. He would eventually put them down, but things were still shaky.

In the mean time, he was able to turn his attention back to south China. Kublai attacked the Song and started the war back up with an enormous victory, where the Mongols crushed many of the Song armies and where they captured a hundred Song ships. The Mongols started an enormous advance into the heart of the Song south, but were stopped at the twin cities of Xiangyang and Fencheng north of the Yangtze river. The cities resisted a massive siege, and both sides poured massive resources into this one fight. The sided sent fleets of thousands and thousands of ships down the river between the cities and brought up many siege weapons, including explosive devices called "thunder crash bombs" which still sounds like a racist stereotype to me, even though it is historical.

Xiangyang is on the northern edge of central Song territory.

After years and years of struggle at the twin cities, the Song defenders let political infighting get the better of them. Fencheng was stormed and completely butchered and Xiangyang surrendered quickly after that. As soon as the cities fell, the Song sent their own fleet of thousands of ships up the river the cities lay on to take them back. Song forces spent five years attacking before the Mongols finally drove them back.


The Mongols then pressed south and after a very long fight they made it to the Yangtze river. There they built an enormous fleet to use to conquer the rest of Song territory.

It would not be an easy fight. The Song had their own fleet which was also full of thousands and thousands of ships. And the Song ships were technologically advanced too, using paddle wheels and gunpowder to take on the Mongols. The sides fought on and gained and lost ground for years and years. Little progress was made. Everyone died in enormous numbers.

Paddleboats: apparently cutting edge technology.
(Pic from Wiki)

Slowly, Mongol power started to get the edge. As they realized this was the case, the Song districts started to surrender to the Mongols. The as the last districts outside the capital fell, the Song child-emperor saw how the die had fallen and resigned.


After so many years of war though, the hard core Song supporters simply could not stand to let the mongols win. So they took the emperor's younger brothers, enthroned them, and brought them to fight on in Hong Kong and the islands in the very far south of China. The mongols vastly outmatched this tiny force, and it was not too long until last of the Song faced total defeat. Having been completely crushed, the chief Song supporters and the remaining boy-emperor did the only thing they thought would be honorable and committed suicide by jumping off of a goddamn mountain.

And that is how Kublai Khan conquered China. He established the Yuan dynasty, which ruled China until the Ming revolution overthrew them in 1378.

OMG Kublai Khan

What Up, Nerds?


Mongols. Mongols are up.






China was in disarray. The native Song dynasty had been forced out of north China by barbarians advancing past the border. The Manchurian Jin Dynasty seized the central north while the western north was ruled by the non-Chinese Xia. And then from out of the empty wilderness came the Mongols.


Genghis Khan led the Mongol tide of death and destruction as it engulfed northern China. The Great Khan's personal ethos brought war to everything that lay before him.


At first the Mongols only devastated the countryside, because they could not get into China's great walled cities.  But before long they captured local siege engineers and forced them to build siege machines to take the cities with. With this weaponry the Mongols conquered the north-central Jin dynasty. After beating the Jin, Genghis Khan turned west and conquered the Xia in a series of several military campaigns. This included one where Genghis tried to divert the flow of a river straight through the Xia capital, buthe  accidentally flooded his own camp instead. In the end he persevered with his conquest and he still conquered Xia.


After seizing the whole north, the decision about what to do with all these conquered Chinese people faced him. At first Genghis considered butchering them. After some dissuasion he heeded the advice of some of his more recently acquired foreign advisers. He did not butcher the people, destroy their homes, and graze his horses on the grass where cities had once stood. He just taxed them heavily instead.


By the end of his life the Khan had exacted a vast human toll that made him seem something like a Medieval Mongolian Hitler.






At first the Song dynasty, which still held power in the south, cooperated with the Mongols. They had been forced out of the north by the expansionist Jin, and were eager to retake their former northern Capitals at Luoyang, Chang'an, and Kaifeng. Once the Jin had been defeated, the Song attacked and captured their old capital city. Unfortunately when they took it they killed a Mongol diplomat. The Mongols treated this as a grave insult and for that insult they declared war on the Song. They attacked and conquered everything north of the Yangtze river in what was nearly a medieval Blitzkrieg. But once they hit the River things got a little more complicated.

The Yangtze is the big river through the middle of the Song. In case you
didn't know.
(Pic from Wiki)

The Song dynasty started to use every technological invention they could come across that might help. This included gunpowder, guns, and paddle-boats. These cutting edge technologies shut down the Mongol advance. But they weren't enough to overcome the Mongols either. The Mongols weren't about to give up on attacking, and the war got bogged down into a stalemate. 








After they started to grow tired of this ineffective and expensive slug-fest, the Mongols started to think about other ways they might speed up the war. So the successor to Genghis Khan, Mongke, sent out one of Genghis' grandsons to conquer the kingdom at Dali to the west of Song, outflanking the dynasty.


The grandson had been raised fully knowing he was the descendant of the most powerful man in the world. Young Kublai had been given ten thousand Chinese households to rule over when he was sixteen. At first he had ruled as badly as you'd expect a sixteen year old to do. But he improved with experience, and he learned who he could and who he could not trust.


Back when the Mongols had first conquered all of north China Kublai had got himself named as Mongke's vice-Khan for China, and he ruled the country. He pushed Mongol expansion to the south while he mediated and settled religious disputes within his kingdom. Where his grandfather Genghis had held contempt for Chinese civilization, Kublai actually liked China.  Grandpa might have criticized the boy for living too soft and Chinese, but for Kublai, softness was just a more comfortable lifestyle.


Kublai moved at lightning speed and conquered the westerners at Dali, but this did not bring the war any closer to an end. In response, the Great Khan Mongke decided to lead the Mongol army to attack the Song himself. He left on the expedition, but he quickly died of Cholera, and for the time being the Mongol war with the Song was back on the fritz.

OMG Sick as a Sick Person

Howdy, you wonderful nerds.

I am tooooo goddamn sick to blog right now. I'm sorry.






Speaking of sickness, did you know that the Ming Dynasty in China (1368-1644) was only founded because  a widespread and devastating disease ravaged the country?


Before about 1360 the Mongols had been ruling China under the name of the "Yuan" dynasty. The Chinese were not exactly fond of foreign rule. They weren't any fonder of the contempt and disregard that a lot of the Mongol elite held for them. They would have liked to have thrown the Mongols out but so far they had not because the Mongols had a habit of killing anyone who tried to throw them anywhere.


Well that's when the plague rolled on in. Chinese and Mongol alike started ti die from it. Things got grim and people began to lose hope. Then, since the Chinese folks had decided that they would probably die anyway, they might as well kill a few Mongols while doing it, and the whole country rose up in revolt. The Mongols killed as many as they could, but they had been hit by the plague too. There were a LOT more Chinese people than there were Mongol people, so the Mongols were quickly thrown out.


The head of the Chinese army that triumphed over the Mongols had been an illiterate peasant with a pig-face and plague scars. He was not exactly a vision of heavenly Imperial rule, so to counteract that fact, he named his dynasty Ming, meaning "Bright."




Moral of the story: don't get sick if you're Mongolian.

Got my wisdom teeth out. Today's update will be late.

OwOwOwOwOw.

OMG Japan Before the Emperors

What Up, Nerds?


It's goddamn history time. This here post is a prequel to the last one. Wanna find out where pre-imperial Japan came from? Wanna know more about what it looked like? Keep reading.






From some of the earliest days, Japan was inhabited by some folks closely related to today's Ainu people, who used to live all over north Japan, although today they're only really in Hokkaido. They were also pretty closely related to some folks in eastern Siberia, And coincidentally are also the same group of people that migrated across the Bering Strait and became the majority of American Indians.


These proto-Ainu folks were hunter gatherers. They'd eat a lot of nuts and they'd fish and hunt deer. They were not really nomads--they didn't keep herds and they didn't need to. Their lives were just too nice to bother with that hard work. They were so nice that they had the free time to do some things like invent pottery styles that would spread across the entire old world. This awesome and free and easy state of affairs was dominant until about 300 BC. Yep, 300 BC. That, my friends, is all of the recent. An entire cycle of world civilization had risen, lived it's life, and fallen by 1000 BC. 300 BC is historically not too far off from just last week. 


When 300 BC rolled around there wasn't some big event that changed things. It is just about the time when a new culture became more-or-less dominant. This culture is much closer to what you might think of as Japanese. Lots of historians have described it as a migration into the westernmost Japanese islands by a Korean culture that displaced the Ainu. But that isn't accurate. This new more "Japanese" culture arose in both Korea and in southwest Japan.


If you go back more then ten thousand years you'll see significantly lower sea levels, and consequentially the Japanese and Korean shores were much much closer to each other. The Japanese and Korean peoples archaeologically emerged at the same time and they were the exact same people. This shows in the record of the appearance of certain types of pottery. And it shows up in the fact that despite past confusion about the subject, the language that is most related to Japanese is Korean. These Japano-Korean people can be traced genetically, and shown to arise on the shores of the sea between Japan and Korea and subsequently to move east from there. 

See? They were pretty dang close together indeed.
(Pic from Wiki)

Well for a long time these people kept in good contact in both the Japanese and Korean halves of their territory. When rice agriculture started to seep into Korea from further west in mainland Asia, rice agriculture also started to appear in Japan too. Metalwork also came to these Japano-Koreans in a similar manner.


And at about 300 BC these more "Japanese" people became the dominant group in Japan. Their productivity exploded as they finally finished transitioning from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture. They started to produce complex goods and their society grew a divide between rich and poor.


At about 50 AD Chinese Imperial records start to attest to the emergence of a state in Japan. Based on Kyushu Island, the state of Wa is the earliest known country to emerge in the archipelago. It was described as being largely fractured into many small and scattered tribes. What's more, it wasn't organized into a system of taxation and relied on the occasional extraction of tribute. And then the whole country wasn't even independent, it paid tribute to a much greater Chinese state.


Another important state that emerged a few hundred years later in Japan was called Yamataikoku. The Chinese first described it as a kingdom in Wa, which is somewhat confusing until you realize the Chinese had come to call all the whole archipelago "Wa" after that first state they had dealt with. Yamataikoku had relations with China and was attested to have been ruled by a Queen named Himiko. This country probably existed on a different part of Kyushu, although the later Imperial Yamato rulers and tradition would assert that it was actually in the Yamato valley in central Japan. 


Over time the rulers of the state in Yamato started to expand their power. In a series of diplomatic, religious, and military conflicts they forced other countries to pay them occasional tribute. And they fought with an eye to establishing superiority over all of Kyushu and west Honshu. By the 300's AD they were in contact with China, and by the 500's they had established a lip-service superiority over all the other south Japanese states. Of course, they were constantly having to fight wars to retain their nominal superiority.


Another way that Yamato created a kind of superiority was by assembling the Shinto religion. As they warred with and gradually got the upper hand on each rivaling county they would merge the pantheons of the two countries. Although they were always willing to add another god into the pantheon, the Yamato rulers established their traditional god as the chief god. As the Yamato chieftains started to claim descendancy from their god, their chief position on earth became legitimated by their god's chief status in heaven.

Like a motherf*ckin' boss!
(Pic from Wiki)

The chiefs of Yamato not only controlled the other tribes, they may have controlled some of their very old relatives in Korea, in the Gaya Confederacy. It is more likely that Yamato and Gaya just still had very close tribal relations, but there were definitely common ties between the two. And of course the overarching common tie across the region was subservience to the Chinese Emperor, and paying him tribute.


In the 500's AD the chiefs of Yamato supported the introduction of Buddhism in their and in all the other subservient Japanese countries. After this, they started implementing reforms that gradually moved towards consolidating all the separate countries into one. This consolidation was never really effective until the reign of the first Emperor, Tenmu. But Tenmu would manage to break the power of the clans and to unify all of south Japan into the Japanese Empire.


Of course since you already read the previous post you already know all about that.

OMG Who Founded Japan?

What Up, Nerds?


Yeah, that's what I thought. Same here. Because disaster done struck OMG Hussites Part 2, so that will take a while more in production.

In the mean time you know what's cool? The early history of modern Japan and the Yamato state. Awww yeeee.

Early Japanese history is cool.

According to the official imperial chronology, the country we now know as Japan was founded more than half a millenia before the time of Jesus. It was just a few years after King Hezekiah died in ancient Judea. Supposedly the first Emperor Jinmu made the pilgrimage to and moved his court to the Yamato valley near modern Kyoto.


They were supposed to have come from the westernmost of the big Japanese islands: Kyushu. Jinmu was said to have lead the expedition as an armed migration with his brothers and his followers. He subjugated all the peoples he met on the way.


Oh, also Jinmu was directly descended from a god. That too.


Yep.


So that's all total bullshit. Jinmu was almost certainly just made up. 






What really happened:


1200 years later, at around 680 AD, the leader of the Yamato State was a fellow named Tenmu. Now Tenmu was a little bit of tough. He was a younger brother who was never supposed to have had the throne, and indeed he had been sent off to be a monk. But when his King/older-brother died he saw his chance. He moved like lightning, and seized the country in 672 AD. To get a sense of how goddamn recently this was, Islam had already been around for a half century by then.


Like you might expect from someone with that kind of initiative, he was officially reported to have rigorously reorganized the Empire into a more powerful state. What he really did was more impressive.


Because he was essentially the real founder of the Japanese Empire.


Before Tenmu there had been a whole series of bickering clan-states spread across the western half of the Japanese archipelago. There was a no real unity in them. Over the course of several centuries the patriarchal heads of the clan in the Yamato valley warred and politicked, and they gained a kind of lip-service sovereignty as the most powerful state in the area.


But these Yamato chiefs weren't emperors, and they didn't claim to be. They started claiming this wider lip-service sovereignty under a chief named Suijin in the 200's or 300's AD. But until the time of Tenmu they only controlled a very small part of Japan directly.

Very small. Just what's in red.
(Pic from Wiki)

As Yamato clan-chief, Tenmu did something revolutionary after he seized the throne. He invented a new title: Emperor of Japan. And then he enforced his new empire. He moved his armies and manipulated public opinion and he shattered support for all the rival clans. He conquered and unified and then built forts throughout his new empire.

Tenmu's unified Japanese Empire was not what all of you might think of as Japan. From Yamato it extended westwards along Honshu (the big island) and also included Kyushu (the small island to the southwest). What's more he might not have been related to the past chiefs of the Yamato like Suijin, but he thought he'd be better off if he said they were all from the same line.


Tenmu wanted to create the idea of an all-Japanese imperial lineage so he compiled the various stories and legends about those old chiefs and the legendary first chief. In this compilation he called them all Emperors and said everyone from the mythical "Jinmu" to Suijin were members of a direct male lineage. He wrote it down in the book Nihon Shoki. 


So Tenmu styled Jinmu to be his legendary predecessor, who somehow legitimized Tenmu's conquest of his Empire. Jinmu's supposed subjugation of the peoples along his migration route helped him spin the fight as more of a reconquest, and thus it became much more palatable to the Japanese people. Tenmu would go on continuing centralizing his Empire and would father several more future Emperors.


Funny enough his imperial line eventually sputtered out, and the throne reverted to someone else who came from his invented "imperial" line of succession. To be fair, those later Emperors probably were at least related to Tenmu, though not necessarily. And that dynasty continued on for more then a thousand years. It presided over a state that became the Japanese Empire that America fought to the death in WWII. And that line of Emperors still reigns to this day.

OMG One-Story-Houses

What Up, Nerds?


OMG Hussites Part 2 is in production! In the mean time, my ever-lovely girlfriend has now made it to Marrakech, Morocco, which just happens to be one of the seats of one of my favorite western Islamic Empires ever.

Because everyone has a list of their favorite Western Islamic Empires, right?




In the early 1040's, at about the same time Robert "the Weasel" Guiscard was getting off the boat to be a mercenary in south Italy, there lived a Muslim west-African chief named Yahya. Yahya was a pretty good Muslim. And as such, he was returning home from his Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. While traveling along the coast of the southern Mediterranean he met a religious scholar from Morocco.

The two men hit it off, and Yahya got to complaining about how his people were such bad Muslims and how he didn't think there was anything he could do about it. The scholar told Yahya about a school where he could find someone who could reform his people. Yahya was ecstatic to discover this and so he stopped at the school on his way home. The man the school sent with him was named Abdallah.

Yahya happily came home with his brand new proselytizing Abdallah. When they arrived Abdallah proscribed the tribe rigid orthodoxy, strict adherence to Islamic law, even stricter punishments for breaking the law, and practically puritanical zeal. Abdallah was a provocative firebrand. Yahya's people did not like Abdallah one bit. So as soon as Yahya died a few years later, Abdallah was told in no uncertain terms to f*ck right off.

At this point Abdallah was all the screwed. Or he would have been, except for some reason the leaders of the tribe right next to Yahya's decided to adopt him into their tribe. They kept him on a tight leash though. So Abdallah was no true provocateur, but he did preach for Islamic law and also for some reason against multi-story houses. But when Abdallah's new tribe really got excited about Islam was when Abdallah started emphasizing one particular religious calling: conquering the enemies of Islam.

OH JESUS two stories is bad enough!

In this case the enemies of Islam were the wishy-washy sorta-Muslims from Yahya's old tribe.

So Abdallah's people got excited, conquered their neighboring tribes, and started knocking down all the second floors off of their multi-story houses. Clearly because they had been able to conquer the other tribes they had a good thing going on. They named themselves el-MuraabeTuun, or the Almoravids, and set off to conquer them an empire!

They began with a smart first move, the quick seizure of the town Sijilmasa--which was THE trading hub and gold hub of the region. With this economic backing they moved on to attack both north and the south. They met some immediate success and managed to knock the second floors off of several houses. Unfortunately both the chief of the tribe and Abdallah were killed in battles pretty quick. But replacement leaders were found and the Almoravids continued to conquer more and more lands--especially to the north.

In 1062 the Almoravid leader Abu Bakr ibn Umar decided the old seat of his court was too busy and crowded. So he decided to lay out a new one-floor-high capital in modern Morocco. He chose a site in the middle of a plain that was neutral territory between two squabbling tribes, and up sprung the city of Marrakech.

Not long after that, Abu Bakr decided that ruling the Almoravids just wasn't his thing. So decided to give both control of Morocco--and for some inexplicable reason also his favorite wife--over to his cousin. Abu Bakr headed back down to the Almoravid homeland and spent the rest of his days suppressing revolts until he was killed by a poison arrow.

In 1075 the Almoravids decided to knock the second floors off the houses to their east, so they invaded the great Ghana Empire. By 1100 the Ghana empire collapsed and the Almoravids took some of it while other parts of rebounded and founded the Mali Empire.

In 1086 the princes of Islamic Spain begged the Almoravids to come help them turn back the advancing tide of the Christian Reconquista. The Almoravids stopped the Christian reconquest, but were so disgusted by the behavior of the Spanish princes that they came back four years later to conquer all of Islamic Spain. At that point that meant the south half of the Iberian peninsula. But as he fought onward,  the Almoravid king also managed to take the towns of Valencia and Zaragosa. This was basically the high water mark for the Almoravids, who owned a ridiculous amount of western Africa and Europe.

That right there is like seven countries all in one Empire. Hell yeah, son.
(Pic from Wiki)

Almost immediately afterwards the Almoravid Empire took a turn for the worse. They started losing ground to the Spanish Christian kings and were troubled by the disturbances of the Alomohad agitators in the Almoravid base of power at Morocco. In 1147 the Alamohads conquered Marrakech, and that was the end of the Almoravids. Oh well, at least it would take a while before everybody could rebuild the second floors of their houses.

OMG That Weasel

What Up, Nerds?


OMG Hussites Part 2 is in filming! In the meantime I simply did not do Robert "the Weasel" Guiscard justice with my treatment of the Norman conquest of the Kingdom of Sicily. Lets fix that.








The Weasel was not born at the very top of the ladder. He wasn't just some peasant, and certainly that was an important advantage he was born with. But he was just a sixth-born son and he sure didn't start as no king. So as a young man he set off to make his fortune with just five horsemen and thirty foot soldiers in his pocket.


In 1047 he got off the boat in south Italy. He wasn't particularly physically intimidating. He was tall, but he had a ruddy face and kind of nondescript blondish hair. And here he was an a strange land with 35 soldiers he had to take care of and get fed. He didn't really know where to start.


So he gave a metaphorical shout out to his Viking heritage and lead his men into becoming freelance roving robbers.


And like any talented leader of a band of robber-vikings he quickly got noticed by the local lords who were at war with each other. He was hired and officially in business.


The Weasel performed admirably, and gained a bit of a reputation. But when his master refused to pay him the castle  he'd been promised for his services, the Weasel up and quit. He took his services to the lord next door. Here he got a castle, but he decided he didn't really like that castle. So he just went out and took himself a different one.


The Weasel was just real real good in battle. He'd make himself terrifying, and he had a natural grip on the usually slippery world of battle tactics that confounded most folks. That gave him more and more of a reputation. Soon enough the Normans' allies betrayed them and allied with the Pope to crush them. The Weasel got command of the left flank and charged into the Pope's force at the precise right moment. He led in the battle personally, and the Normans scored a huge victory.


So when the old Norman lord died the Weasel got the spot this was in 1057, just ten years after he had arrived in Italy with nothing but a handful of men. The Pope was a little terrified of the Weasel and so he decided to buy him over by officially promoting him to the rank of Duke. Naturally the Weasel accepted, and things started to be friendlier between the Normans and the Pope.


At this point the Weasel just went crazy. He attacked anyone and everyone he could find in south Italy. Sometimes it took a while but in the end he always won.


He started getting bored, and so he decided to do what nobody had successfully been able to do, well, ever. He launched an invasion of the Emirate of Sicily. At first he allied against one feuding Emir against another. He took almost the entire island, but when one fort refused to surrender he got frustrated and went home.


 He came back a few years later and almost conquered the whole island again. This time he didn't turn around because of impatience, he turned around because Giant F*cking Tarantulas swarmed his whole goddamn camp. So it took him until his next invasion a few years after that to actually conquer all the important cities.

I don't f*cking blame him for turning around.
(Pic from Wiki)

So he once again found himself with nothing much to do but occasionally put down rebellions. These rebellions were all basically sponsored by the Roman Empire (whose land in south Italy he'd already conquered). So he decided that he might as well just invade the goddamn Roman Empire.


So he did. The Weasel landed in Greece with plans to go straight for the capital. He met the famous Roman Emperor and whooped his ass in one big battle. The Weasel had a straight road to Constantinople at this point and he kicked around the idea of just taking over the whole empire. But then he was attacked in the back by the Venetians who burned his fleet without warning. Simultaneously Pope Greg Seven called the Weasel back to Italy to save him from the approaching German Emperor Henry Four.


So the Weasel had to abandon his army in Greece, sail back to Italy on his own, and save the Pope. When he did and the Romans thanked him for it by rising up and attacking the Normans the Weasel decided to just let his soldiers ransack the city for three days.


Once that fiasco was taken care of he set his sights back on taking over the Roman Empire.


Unfortunately his son had already lost control of the Norman conquests in Greece, so the Weasel had to launch another attack. He crossed over to Greece in his fleet of 150 ships and retook a good chunk of what he'd conquered last time.


And then all of a sudden he got sick and died. He and 500 other Norman knights died on or around the 17th of July, 1085. Just like that the Norman conquest of the Roman Empire was over. It had really all depended on that one single man.

OMG Gibraltar

What Up, Nerds?


So far I been trying to keep all my posts at least tangentially relevant to the first half of the OMG Hussites video (second half coming soon!). But today my wonderful brilliant beautiful fabulous girlfriend is in a pretty awesome place called Gibraltar. Gibraltar is the site of a story too fun not to tell, even if we're not 100% about all the details.






Everything in this story began with two very powerless people. One of those was the daughter of a Nobleman of Visigothic Spain. Her father was named Julian, count of Ceuta. The county that he ruled was the farthest flung part of Visigothic Spain. In fact the county was so far out there that it was actually in North Africa. Since Julian was so far from the rest of the nation he decided to send his rather powerless daughter from his backwater little county to the court of Visigothic Spanish King Roderic so that she'd get an education. 


The other powerless person was a slave of mysterious origin. Some people thought he was Persian. Some people called him an Arab. Still others thought he must be a Berber. His name was Taareq ibn Zeeeaad. And he was enslaved in the house of Muusa bin NuSaeer, who was the second ever Islamic governor of North Africa in the brand new Muslim State.


Taareq did his job diligently and well. He rose in his master's household and in his master's regard. He rose so far that one day Muusa decided to free him. So the slave was freed, and he was made a general in the North African army. He did this job well. So Muusa appointed him the Governor of Tangier. So Taareq worked his way up to become the ruler of Tangier.


One day old count Julian of Ceuta came to Taareq. This was strange, since Muslim power had just exploded and christian kingdoms were not on talking terms with Muslims. But nevertheless Julian came. And he told Taareq that he had sent his daughter to King Roderic in Toledo, and she had come back pregnant.


Clearly, Roderic had raped his daughter. Now Julian wanted vengeance. Julian made a deal with Taareq so that if Julian would ferry Taareq's army across the straight to Spain then Taareq would help Julian topple the evil Visigothic King Roderic and replace him with a much better candidate, who was named Womba. Spain would have a better king, Taareq would have a king who owed him a favor, and everybody would come out better for it. Well, except for Roderic.


Taareq was intrigued.


But that wasn't the whole and real situation. You see King Roderic had not been born to be king. In fact he wasn't even in line to be king in any way at all. The old King had been a man named Wittiza. Wittiza had died unexpectedly, and people suspected Roderic. Many thought Wittiza's heir Womba should become king. But Roderic usurped the royal senate and was crowned instead. Those who thought Womba oughtta be king--the Wombatists--took over northeast Spain while Roderic owned the center and southwest.


Well Julian was supposed to have sent his daughter to Roderic's court in a show of trust. A show of trust that was necessary because he actually preferred Womba. Be he had to live under King Roderic because he was surrounded by Roderic country. It turns out we don't even know if he sent a daughter at all. Julian might have just been the mouthpiece for the Wombatists who wanted Taareq's help to clear out King Roderic and make room for Womba. And the daughter seemed like a plausible and sympathetic excuse.


Whatever Julian's motivation, the new governor of Tangier accepted his proposition.


And so in 711 AD Julian the Wombatist ferried Taareq's army into Spain in old trading ships. The army assembled at a coastal mountain they named the Taareq's Mountain, and then headed north to find Roderic. In 712 Taareq found King Roderic at the head of a united Spanish army at Guadalete. At the crucial moment the Wombatists all deserted Roderic and Roderic's army was eviscerated. Roderic was killed.


Well the Wombatists were very happy. Roderic was dead and gone and now Womba could be king. Except for one problem. The Muslims decided they liked Spain. So they kept it. 


And so Spain became a part of the Umayyad Caliphate. Muslim states would dominate the peninsula until 1236. The last Muslim state will remain on the peninsula until 1492.






Oh, and remember that mountain called Taareq's Mountain? In Arabic it's pronounced Jebbel el-Taareq. That's sort of a mouthful, so the Spanish shortened the name into "Gibraltar."


So that is how Gibraltar got its name. Have a lovely time at Jebbel el-Taareq, wonderful lady!

OMG Planning

Alright, y'all. Apparently there's been some confusion about the ongoing lack of the second half of the OMG Hussites video. That second video is in the works right now, and will be posted before too long. Until then there will be continued stories from all across history, as it seems appropriate.

History... Away!

OMG Vikings in South Italy

What Up, Nerds?

Hold up.


Hold up.


And wait a minute. Did you say that right in the last post? Did you say that the Pope brought Vikings from the south of Italy to fight Germans from the north? Goddamn Vikings in southern Italy? What the hell you you smoking, boy? Ain't Vikings from motherf*cking Scandinavia?






Damn straight I said Vikings in south Italy.






It was the year 912 and Vikings had been leaving Scandinavia to go raid Europe every year for more than a hundred years. They'd conquered and set up a Viking state in the Danelaw--the north east half of Britain. And now those Vikings were moving south. One Viking chief named Rollo conquered and then settled his people in the north of France. Like many Vikings they were called simply the "North Men." People kept saying "North Men" lazily and eventually it turned into the word "Norman."


Within seventy years these Viking Normans had set up such a powerful state in north France that they straight-up got to pick the next French King to suit their whims.


Eighty seven years after Rollo set up his Viking-land of Normandy, the Normans had become so renowned for their savage and effective fighting that they were getting hired to fuck sh*t up all over Europe. One of these places was southern Italy, which had some problems with Muslims raiding from North Africa. These Muslims had gone so far and were such a big threat that they had conquered all of Sicily and it was being governed as an Islamic Emirate. Once more there were problems trying to fight off the Eastern Roman Empire. Unlike what a lot of people are taught, the Roman Empire did not fall in 476 AD--the Empire managed to stay alive until well into the 1400's. And in the 1000's AD, the Roman Empire was quite interested in reconquering the Western half of its historical borders.


And so the Prince of Salerno in south Italy went out and hired him some Normans to kick some Muslim/Roman ass.


Soon the demand in south Italy for these wonderful Viking warriors skyrocketed. The Normans were quite happy to be hired out as soldiers to one Prince or another as long as they got paid, and more and more of these Viking warriors came down to Italy to fight for whoever had the cash. They could always make sure that there was a war here or a revolt against the Roman Empire there, and the fighting was always good.


By 1042 there were a whole bunch of Normans in south Italy who were fighting for for a rebellion against the Romans. They suddenly realized that they had the best army around, so they elected their own Count and demanded a big slice of the land that the rebellion controlled. No one was in any position to disagree, and these Viking Normans all of a sudden had their own sizable state in south Italy. And they proceeded to obliterate any army who disagreed.


Five years later they got official recognition from the big-boss-of-Europe, the German Emperor. They pushed on in the wars of the south. They expanded their influence until they came up against the combined armies of the Pope and the Roman Emperor. You may ask what a churchman is doing with an army? That's because at this point the Pope owned a Kingdom right across the center of Italy, and he wanted land and influence in the south as much as the Roman Empire did. The Pope was a king, and the combined Papal-Imperial army was a hell of a threat.


Well our old Viking Norman friends whooped ass. They defeated the Papal army so bad that they actually took the Pope prisoner.


Within about 20 years the Normans had found themselves an incredibly competent leader in the guise of the Viking Duke Robert Guiscard--"The Weasel." Over the next half century the Normans fought everyone and anyone they thought they could beat.

He could kill you in seven different ways even without his armies.

In 1081 the Weasel even invaded the Eastern Roman Empire in Greece. He crushed the Roman army and got on the road to the Roman capital at Constantinople. He was only turned back when Venice, which was terrified of these crazy Vikings, came south and burned the ships the Normans were using to resupply. The expedition to the east had to be called off, but the Normans kept conquering south Italy.


For all these decades several different Norman kingdoms were just hanging around. They had bickered with each other like you might expect a bunch of Vikings to do. But in 1130 one Viking Duke inherited all of the kingdoms and south Italy was finally all united into one big Viking Norman Kingdom, called the Kingdom of Sicily. It took up all of Italy south of Rome. If Italy is shaped like a boot then the Kingdom of Sicily was the foot, the ankle, part of the calf, and the island of Sicily.


If you look at all the Normans in that year, Normans controlled a lot of territory all across the western world. They had the Kingdom of Sicily, Tunisia, most of Libya, north-west Syria, a chunk of north France, and a little old kingdom I like to call England.


This Viking-built kingdom of Sicily stuck around until just over a hundred and fifty years ago, when all Italy was unified. And Viking-built England went and unified Great Britain, which you may or may not know is still quite alive today. Not bad, Vikings.

OMG You Ain't the Emperor

What Up, Nerds?

If you've watched the video "OMG Hussites, Part 1" you'll know that Jan Hus got killed in 1415 by the decree of the Church Council at Constance, Germany.

But Sigismund, Emperor of the Germans and the brother of Hus' king, offered Hus safe passage to and from the council. He promised Hus his safety. And then when Hus showed up, the council tried him for heresy and had him executed. Obviously this was a breach of Sigismund's honor--a betrayal of Sigismund's word.

When they killed Hus it sparked off a movement that would spiral into the Hussite Wars. The Hussite Wars would weaken Sigismund and consume his empire for the rest of his life.

Now Sigismund was no wimp and he was no weakling who you'd expect to be pushed around by councils willy-nilly. He was the Emperor of Germany. He was Emperor of North Italy. He was King of Hungary and King of Croatia. He would be named the King of Bohemia. He was a real big deal.

So why did he let the Church override his word to Hus at the Council of Constance? Why did he let them send his realm spiraling into the Hussite Wars?

Historically, that's a complicated question to answer. But one big part of an answer might be an explanation of how come the church was so powerful compared to Emperors and Kings.

And that means telling the story about how once upon a time a Pope just declared that the Emperor of Germany wasn't the Emperor any more, and Germany listened to the Pope.

It all starts some 350 years before Emperor Sigismund started getting his Papal headaches. In 1056 a six year old boy was crowned Henry Four, Emperor of Germany. His daddy--Henry Three--did not share Sigismund's Papal headaches because he got to appoint his own Popes. There was no College of Cardinals to elect a Pope. The King of Germany got to just pick one.

So what happens when a six year old becomes Emperor of Germany? The Popes decide to declare "that kid don't get to pick the next Pope," that's what. Who with a shred of self respect is going to let some six year old choose the head of Christendom?

And, the Pope figures, why are the Kings of Europe still appointing the bishops and priests too? The Kings ain't spiritual. And really, what gives a King the right to rule in the first place? The church existed by the will of god. Kings existed because they had some soldiers who liked them. The Pope--Gregory Seven--spent the next little while doing his best to appoint bishops and clergymen in places where Kings might have appointed them before.

Then in 1075 he wrote a letter that said Popes were more important than the German Emperor, and that they could appoint and fire Emperors whenever they wanted.

Pretty sure it also says "What Up Nerds? is
the best blog/vlog that God shall ever deign to create."
(Pic from Wiki)

As German Emperor, Henry Four looked at this and asked "Since when the hell did I even agree that Emperors couldn't hire and fire Popes?"

And so Henry responded to Greg's insulting assertion by writing a letter firing the Pope and calling for a new one to be chosen. And then to drive the point home he appointed someone as the bishop of a city that Pope Greg had already appointed a bishop of.

Now it was Greg's turn to be pissed, so he swung back. He officially kicked Henry out of the church and he fired Henry from his job as Emperor.

At this points an enormous chunk of the nobles who served Henry to run the Empire said "well I guess we don't have an Emperor any more. We should probably elect a new one some time." But in the short term they didn't care that much about who was the Emperor. What they wanted was the chance to go looting. And loot they did, grabbing the Emperor's property all over Germany.

Suddenly young King Henry wasn't the Emperor no more.

Henry's in a lot of trouble right now, so he calls together a few soldiers who are still loyal to him and he gets the f*ck outta Dodge. He takes his soldiers out of Germany and straight to northern Italy where the Pope's hanging out. 

It isn't long before the Pope hears young Henry is headed right for him with a bunch of soldiers, and he barricades himself right up in the closest castle. He thinks Henry is goint to straight-up kill him and he's about to sh*t himself when Henry gets there. And then the unexpected happens.

Henry puts on a hair shirt (which is traditional penance-wear), falls to his knees outside of the castle while the snow falls all over him, and spends hours begging Pope Greg to make him Emperor again. After hours of this Greg takes pity on him, and both men agree that they'll both keep their jobs.

Could you say no to that face if he was begging
you to reinstate him as Emperor of the Germans? I didn't think so.
(Pic from Wiki)

Of course the nobles who rebelled and took Emperor Henry's things aren't so happy now. And they don't really care if the Pope said Henry was King again. They like being the new owners of Henry's things. So they just elect themselves a new King in the city of Mainz.

But the German people did care that the Pope said Henry was in charge again. They rose up an attacked. The rebellious Nobles and new king had to flee in a long retreat. Henry put new nobles who were loyal to him in charge of the parts of Germany that had come back to his side, and then promptly re-fired Pope Greg.

He appointed his own Pope. And then he attacked and killed the rebellious nobles and false King. And then he turned his attention to Pope Greg.

He headed back down into Italy and this time he definitely planned to kill poor Greg. In order to save his own skin, Greg invited a bunch of Vikings--who had decided to set up shop in southern Italy--to come defend him. The Vikings successfully held off Henry, but when they came to Rome they decided to loot the city because hey, they liked money.

Rome was unhappy about this, and they quickly formed a mob that ALSO wanted to kill Pope Greg. So then Greg had to flee south with the Vikings. He lived in exile in the south, and he died pretty quick after that.

The German Emperors would keep trying to appoint their own Popes for a while more. And the independent Popes kept stirring up revolt in Germany in response. Eventually the Popes' strategy weakened the German Emperors. People started to agree that the Pope should probably not be appointed by the Emperor, but that the Pope shouldn't appoint the Emperor either.

350 years later a lot of people still thought that the Pope was more important then the Emperor. So when Emperor Sigismund had the church break his promise of safety to Jan Hus, he knew the church could start a rebellion in his back yard any time it wanted to. And that may have been a significant part of why he let the Council of Constance imprison, try, and execute Hus.

OMG Avignon

What Up, Nerds?

So by the early 1400's the authority of the Pope had gotten very discredited. That lack of legitimate authority caused a lot of the disagreements that John Wycliffe and Jan Hus had  with the church. And in turn that caused the Hussites to revolt and to start the Hussite Wars.

A big-ol' cause of the Pope being discredited was the fact that there were several of them hanging around at the same time. Because hey, there's only ever supposed to be one Pope at a time. Right?

So how did there get to be more than one Pope?

In the beginning of the 1300's there was a lot of conflict between the Pope and Secular authorities. The Kings of France and Germany had been especially tough sticking points-- a couple Popes in a row excommunicated the kings, re-communicated them, excommunicated their ministers, and just fought between themselves over who had the final say.

At the same time the city of Rome was getting more dangerous. It was dangerous because of both mob violence and all the diseases that were bouncing up and down the streets. At one point a Pope died after only eight months on the job, and everybody suspected that he was poisoned by the French King's most important minister--a minister who the Pope had excommunicated.

And then in 1305 the Vatican had to elect a new Pope. All of their original choices were too divisive so they threw a Hail Mary and they elected an unexpected French Archbishop for the job.

This guy was supposed to be a neutral candidate who wouldn't be in the pocket of either the Italian Bishops who had dominated Rome or of the French establishment who was feuding with the Italians. He had been tight with a previous Italian pope, so it seemed like a good choice.

So he got himself crowned as Pope Clement V.

This badass new Pope looks at the situation. He sees a bunch of pushy Italian bishops who want to boss him around. He sees that Rome is a city that's full of diseases that will kill him and that it's a city that is full of a mob that will threaten him. He sees that the French king is 100% behind him. He sees that he's French and despite despite the fact that he'd been in good with an Italian Pope before, he really didn't care for Italy.

So instead of heading on down to that sh*thole Rome, he heads to the city of Avignon in the south of France. He sets up a sexy new bachelor pad and starts living the goddamn life.

Technically, ANY Papal residence is a bachelor pad.
(Pic from Wiki)

Now all the Italians are like "WHAT THE F*CK, BRAH?"

Depending on how familiar you are with the institution of the Papacy, this might seem weird. After all, who are a bunch of Italians to tell the Pope where he should live?

The problem is that there is no official position called "Pope." The real title of the Pope is the Bishop of Rome. And being the Bishop of Rome is only important because St. Peter was once the Bishop of Rome, before the Romans killed him. The actual meaning of the word "Pope" is just something like "Big Daddy."

So the Italians are all pissed off about the fact that the Bishop of Rome literally NEVER went to Rome. Clement is a total badass (or dickbag, depending on your perspective) and shrugs off the whining Italians. Then he goes right ahead and packs the College of Cardinals (the institution that elects the Pope) full of good old French boys. And Clement's papal administration picks up and moves to Avignon while making excuses about how the City of Rome was too dangerous for them to go.

For the next seventy years those Frenchmen who now controlled the College of Cardinals kept electing French Popes. And those French Popes happily kept chugging along and living in Avignon.

Eventually in 1377 Pope Gregory XI started really feeling the pressure from Italy. The pope Pope owned a kingdom that stretched right across Italy. And because neither he or any of the six Popes that came before him had ever visited Italy, there was a growing threat of rebellion. So Pope Greg packed up bags and moved to Rome. He died pretty quickly after that.

As per usual practice, the College of Cardinals all met so that they could elect the next Pope. While they met, one of those famous Roman mobs busted into the room where they were meeting and threatened them into electing an Italian as Pope.

So a guy named Urban VI got crowned as Pope.

Urban pissed off all the Frenchmen pretty quickly, because f*ck France apparently. The French Cardinals all stormed off to Avignon. There they met and declared the Urban wasn't really the Pope because a mob had forced them to elect him. They elected their own Pope, who called himself Clement.

So there were two Popes, one in Avignon and one in Rome, and Europe split up between which one they thought was the real Pope and which one they thought was the Antichrist.

The Popes feuded with each other and important countries put pressure on both Popes to resign and to end the schism. Neither side proved willing.

In 1409 a big hunk of the Church held a council at Pisa, where they officially deposed both Popes and elected a new Pope to replace them as head of a united Catholic Church. But neither Pope would admit they had been deposed, and so instead of bringing the number of Popes back down to one the council just created a third Pope.

In 1414 the Pope from Pisa called another council to stop the schism. This council did several things including condemning and executing Jan Hus (which very clearly led to the Hussite wars). However they also called upon all the current Popes to resign. The Popes from Pisa and from Rome both cooperated, but the Avignon Pope refused. Everyone in Europe decided that at this point the Avignon Pope was just being an asshole. And so when the council elected Pope Martin V almost everyone agreed that Martin was the true Pope.

This picture of Pope Martin was too good not to throw
in. I  mean Jesus Christ, he's more turtle than man!
(Pic from Wiki)

Eventually Avignon realized that it had f*ucked up and admitted its Popes weren't really the Pope. Funny enough the last big country to insist that the Avignon Pope was the real Pope wasn't France. At was the Kingdom of Aragon in Spain. Weird, right?

And that is how come there were three Popes at once.