OMG Carolina Colony Part 1

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Between 1658 and 1660 eight men risked their lives working in a movement that was trying to replace the heir of an ambiguously benevolent dictator with the heir of their old de-throned king. They succeeded when they put the new king, Charlie Two, on the throne of England. Once king Charlie was secure in his place these eight men expected him to reward them for their part in helping to give him England.


They got their reward. It was a pretty expansive one, too. Three years after his coronation the king gave these three men a present. What was that gift?

It was all the land in blue.
I wouldn't mind finding THAT under a Christmas tree.

The king wanted to use the gift to honor his dethroned and decapitated daddy, king Charlie One. So he called it the Carolina Colony--so called because Carolus is how you say Charles in Latin, and because "Charlolina" sounds stupid. One of those eight men who were given the colony was named Lord Shaftesbury. He had his favorite secretary draw up a constitution for the Colony. And that secretary? He was none other than John Goddamn Locke, the political-philosopher and father of liberal democracy. Locke, Shaftesbury, and a friend drew the document up, and this wonderful new transcontinental colony was bequeathed a constitution.


And so the Carolina Colony got off to a great start.


There was only one problem. There were not a lot of people who thought king Charlie had owned the land in the first place. Charlie had basically only called "dibs" on the area. And that weak claim was even weaker because the Spanish had already claimed it a hundred and seventy years earlier. Never mind the local American Indians who had also already dibs-ed it long before that.


The question is that of who supported Carolina's claim to the land?


Did the inhabitants of Carolina think that the English owned the land? Nope. There were enormous numbers of people who lived in the lands that Carolina Colony occupied. But they were the American Indians who'd been hanging out on the continent for a few tens of thousands of years already. They had very little reason the care what some guy named Charlie across an ocean declared about their land.


Did any other European countries think Charlie Two owned the land? No. People either recognized the Spanish right to that land or claimed it themselves. And there were actually Spaniards living in the territory to enforce Spanish rule.


But at least the English agreed that the territory belonged to England, belonged to the king, and belonged to those eight men. Those Englishmen were willing to fight to support their King's claim. And those who lived in Carolina could fight to enforce English administration. Surely there must have been at least a few Englishmen somewhere in this huge swath of land. Right?




Well. Let's look at the land's history.


Way back in the day the English had built Lost Colony at Roanoke within the bounds of Carolina Colony. That had disappeared mysteriously, but in the far northeast corner of the territory  a small community of Englishmen had recently appeared. Ten years before Carolina Colony was chartered, there had been a few rapscallions in Virginia and other British colonies who had decided that the ungoverned Virginia frontier just had too much Johnny Law for them. So they picked up, left, and settled themselves on the inland shore of the Albermarle sound. This settlement is located in the northeast of modern North Carolina. Because of these settlers' dispositions, the Virginians called their settlement "Rogues' Harbor." That small Virginian frontier community constituted all of the Englishmen in Carolina.


So what the eight men had been given was actually lordship over these few citizens in Rogues' Harbor, and the right to fight off the Spanish and the local Indians before trying to colonize the rest.

You know what? Could I actually have a different reward?
Please? Any different reward?

Except it was an even worse deal than that. Because the king had messed up and drawn the border so that Rogues' harbor was actually just outside of the Carolina border to the northeast.


That meant that the number of Englishmen who actually lived in Carolina Colony was officially zero. The eight men had been given no citizens to live in their vast tract of territory.


So the king decided to be a little more generous, and in 1665 he added a little more land to Carolina. He added everything in the light blue below. This larger grant included the Spanish City of St. Augustine, in Florida. Needless to say, the Spaniards living there did not feel very Carolinian. Indeed, they still insisted the King of Spain's dibs from a hundred and seventy years earlier meant the whole continent belonged to them. And they were well enough armed to fight over the point. Undoubtedly the eight recipients of Carolina were somewhat less than overjoyed at this.

Oh yay, more of a reward I really don't want.

It is hard to imagine that the colony was the world's most attractive gift. But when your king gives you something you don't tell him "no." So the eight men accepted this vast swath of earth that several other people already owned. And they started planning how to make something out of it.


They decided that the first necessary step in improving Carolina was to try and get a few more Englishmen living in it. At least then they'd have somebody to rule. One man established the town of Clarendon near modern Wilmington, NC. But that town town didn't really take off though. It suffered from the northern Carolina problem of bad ports. And for the next five years Clarendon just puttered along and communed with Rogues' Harbor.


In 1670 the eight men decided to try to settle the colony again. They sailed a boat to the geographical center of the colony's east coast where they discovered a good harbor at the mouth of two rivers. They set up a new town on the edge of the wilderness there, and it flourished. They named the two rivers after one of the eight: Lord Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury's real name was Anthony Ashley Cooper. So one river was named the Ashley and the other was named the Cooper. They named the town after the king, and called it Charleston.


Charleston was a good place for a port and the city grew and flourished. Before long it was the biggest city in all of Carolina. But the success of this big old town was going to lead to some problems between the north and the south.

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

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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.