Quotulatiousness

May 19, 2025

The Roman Empire and climate change

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sebastian Wang considers “what we all know” about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire in the light of more recent research (not all of it politically motivated) into climate change:

The approximate extent of the Roman empire circa 395AD.

Before we get into climate, and for those who tend to the wholly ignorant spectrum of my readers, we need a quick sketch of Roman history. The Empire officially began in 27 BC, when Octavian — better known as Augustus — became the first emperor. It ended in the west in AD 476, when the last western emperor was kicked out. As said, the eastern half, based in Constantinople, carried on for another thousand years.

Broadly, we can divide Roman history as follows:

  • 27 BC – AD 180: The golden age. Augustus and his successors took over and further expanded a huge empire. There was peace (mostly), trade flourished, and cities grew. People call it the “Pax Romana“.
  • AD 180 – 284: Everything starts to fall apart. This is called the Crisis of the Third Century. Civil wars, foreign invasions, plagues, and economic collapse all hit at once.
  • AD 284 – 395: The empire pulls itself together. Emperors like Diocletian and Constantine bring in reforms. But the empire is now divided for administrative convenience — east and west.
  • AD 395 – 476: The west goes under. It’s invaded. It’s conquered and broken up. Very quickly, it disappears. Though, once again, a parochial view of history, we call this the Fall of the Roman Empire.

The standard histories still blame bad rulers or too many wars. That’s fair enough. There were some very bad rulers, and the wars without number. But if you look at the climate data — tree rings, ice cores, sediment levels — you start to see another pattern underneath what may be called the political and economic superstructure of Roman history.

When Rome came to greatness, the climate was unusually good. From around 200 BC to AD 150, there was a long phase of stable, warm, and mostly wet conditions. Scientists call this the Roman Climate Optimum. In Egypt, the Nile flooded regularly and well. That meant lots of grain. In the Alps, glaciers shrank. In northern Europe, people were growing grapes in places too cold for vineyards today. In the Middle East, the Dead Sea stayed high, showing good rainfall.

This kind of weather made everything easier. Crops were reliable. Surpluses could be taxed. Cities could be fed. Roads and aqueducts could be built and maintained. And because the army was well supplied, the Empire was protected, and could even continue a modest expansion. But, as McCormick and his team point out, the high phase of Nile flooding correlates exactly with the high point of Roman prosperity — and once those floods became less predictable, problems followed.

The good times came to an end. By the mid-second century, a wave of volcanic eruptions thew great masses of dust into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight. Solar activity dropped. The climate became less stable. Then came the Antonine Plague in AD 166. It probably started in the east and spread quickly. Some think it was smallpox. Whatever it was in terms of microbiology, it was almost certainly brought on by changes in the climate. It may have killed a third of the Empire’s population.

Worse was coming. By AD 200, climate records show more erratic rainfall and cooling. In Gaul and the Balkans, harvests became less predictable. Glaciers began to advance again. Speleothem data from Austrian caves shows sharp shifts in rainfall patterns.

At the same time, the empire started to shake. Between 235 and 284, Rome had over twenty emperors. Most were generals who seized power, then got killed. Civil wars broke out. Trade declined. Foreign tribes pushed harder at the frontiers. Coin hoards — money buried for safety — increased in number. That’s usually a sign of fear and instability. Cities shrank. The economy shrivelled.

Was this all because of climate? No — not wholly. A good definition of historical crank is someone who tries to explain everything in terms of one cause or set of causes. But as McCormick et al. argue, bad weather made everything worse. It weakened agriculture, strained supplies, and made people more likely to panic or rebel. In a world without modern logistics, you couldn’t afford bad harvests two or three years in a row.

The empire buckled in the third century, but didn’t collapse. And its survival probably was an effect of human agency. A line of competent Emperors rose from the army and stabilised the frontiers. This line culminated in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine, who restructured the Empire. They fixed taxes. They reorganised the army. Constantine built his new capital in the east. His successors found Constantinople safer and more strategically useful than Rome.

This being said, around AD 290, climate records suggest a small rebound. Warmer temperatures and better rainfall returned — especially in the east. That helped the eastern provinces recover faster. They had stronger governments and better infrastructure. But climate helped. Dead Sea levels remained relatively high, which meant steady rain in the Levant.

The west wasn’t so lucky. Italy and parts of Gaul stayed unstable. In Britain, pollen records show that farmland was being abandoned. The archaeology matches this, with fewer building projects and shrinking urban centres. The killing shock for the west came in the fifth century. In Central Asia, a long drought began around AD 370. Steppe tribes like the Huns were hit hard. They migrated west, pushing other tribes like the Goths ahead of them. In AD 376, the Goths crossed the Danube into Roman territory. Two years later, they crushed a Roman army at Adrianople. This all happened in the eastern half. But greater wealth and better leadership allowed the government in Constantinople to push the barbarians west. Over the next century, the western empire was hit again and again.

Meanwhile, the weather got worse. Europe cooled. Rainfall patterns shifted. Flooding and crop failures increased. Volcanic sulphur levels spike in the ice core record from Greenland.

Rome was sacked in AD 410. Again in 455. Finally, in 476, the last western emperor was deposed. That was it. The western Roman Empire was gone.

The east survived. But was hardly untroubled. In AD 536, a huge volcanic eruption darkened skies around the world. The sun barely shone. Crops failed. Famines spread.

A few years later, the Plague of Justinian broke out. It probably started in Egypt and spread through trade routes. Some say it killed half the population in affected areas.

Climate and disease worked together. Hunger weakened people. Infection finished them off. As McCormick et al. put it, the event of 536 and the plague that followed created one of the worst demographic shocks in recorded history.

Best of Cunk on Shakespeare – Part 1

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Philomena Cunk
Published 20 Dec 2023

Are you saying I’m a liar?

Sharing all things Cunk – a fictional character from Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, Cunk on Britain, Cunk on Shakespeare and Cunk on Earth – Portrayed by the incredible Diane Morgan.

QotD: Food for Medieval English peasants

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The most common everyday sort of meal in wood-burning Britain was what we might call pottage or frumenty, a thick moist dish in which whole grains or pulses are brought to a boil and then simmered until as much liquid as possible has been absorbed. Think risotto but with less stirring. The simplest version was very simple indeed — wheat or barley or peas cooked in water with whatever fresh vegetables or herbs were available — but if you had the means you could add anything that was in season: meat, fish, butter or cheese, milk or cream, eggs, and even delicacies like sugar, almonds, or imported dried fruits.1 In fact most medieval dishes were thick and sticky, exactly the sort of thing I like to give my toddlers because it stays on even the most inexpertly wielded spoon, and they’re extremely well-adapted to cooking over wood. Just get your pot boiling over a big fire, then as the flames die down your dinner will simmer nicely. You’ll have to stir it, of course, to keep it from sticking to the pot, but you have to come back anyway to feed the fire. You can cook like this over coal, but it’s difficult: a coal fire stays hot much longer, so moderating the temperature of your frumenty requires constantly putting your pot on the grate and taking it off again. It’s far simpler to just add more liquid and let it all boil merrily away, with the added bonus that the wetter dish needs much less stirring to keep it from sticking. With the switch to coal, boiled dinners — soups, meats, puddings, and eventually potatoes — became the quintessentially English foods.2

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.

    1. We’re used to thinking of plants as being seasonal, but until quite recently animal products were seasonal too: chickens won’t lay in the winter without artificial lighting, cows stop giving milk when their calves reach a certain age, and generally one would only slaughter an animal for its meat at the right time of year. Geese, for instance, were typically eaten either as a “green goose”, brought up on summer grasses and slaughtered as soon as it reached adult size around the middle of July, or a “stubble goose”, fattened again on what remained in the fields after harvest and eaten for Michaelmas (in late September). Feeding a goose all autumn and half the winter only to eat it for Christmas would have been silly.

    2. It’s also typical of New England, which makes sense; the New Englanders by and large came from East Anglia, which is right on the Newcastle-London coal route and a region that adopted coal cookery relatively early.

May 18, 2025

Why it Sucked to be an Italian Prisoner in North Africa – WW2 Fireside Chat

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Germany, Greece, History, Italy, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 17 May 2025

Today, Indy and Sparty tackle some questions on the North African theatre. Why did the Italians think invading was a good idea in the first place? Was Allied treatment of Axis POWs a war crime? How did Italian and Allied tanks stack up?
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The FAL for British Troop Trials in 1954: X8E1 & X8E2

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Feb 2020

The NATO rifle trials of the early 1950s eventually chose the 7.62mm x 51mm cartridge, and the British and Belgians agreed on the FAL rifle to shoot it (and they thought the US would as well, but that’s another story). The British government formally accepted the FAL for troop trials, and in 1954 an order for 4,000 X8E1 rifles (with iron sights) and 1,000 X8E2 rifles (with SUIT 1x optical sights) was placed. These rifles were mechanically the same as what would be finalized as the L1A1 rifle, but they include a number of differing features. Both models had 3-position selector switches allowing automatic fire, and they also had manual forward assists on the bolt handles. The iron sights had top covers with integrated stripper clip guides, as there was concern that troops would have to manually reload their magazines, and stripper clips would speed this process up.
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QotD: Processing raw wool to make woollen cloth

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Now when we left our wool it had just been shorn from our sheep. It is however, raw, oily from being on the sheep, likely still somewhat dirty, of uneven grades and types and also of course contains the other two fibers in the fleece (hair and kemp) which need to be removed before it can be used. The various processes used to get wool ready for spinning (or for sale) were sometimes collectively called “dressing” and involved various methods of sorting, scouring, combing, and washing.

The first step is sorting, dividing the raw wool into grades and types based on any number of factors, including fiber length, color, texture, crimp, strength, ability to take dye and so on. Different parts of the sheep produce wool with somewhat different qualities in this regard, but there are also differences based on the sex of the sheep, their health, age, diet, and for ewes whether they have had lambs. In order to get the best results in spinning (or the best value in selling) it is necessary to separate these grades out, grouping like wool with like. Too much mixing of fiber quality can make the end-product textile patchy in color, texture and its ability to take dye (the last one being quite visible, of course) and is to be avoided. This sorting was generally done by hand.

At this point, with the wool sorted, it could be sold, or further processed. The key question at this point was if the wool was to be washed or scoured (it would be combed or carded in either case, but this decision generally has to be made at this point). Scouring removes the lanolin (an oil secreted by the sheep which effectively waterproofs their wool) and other impurities. Leaving the lanolin in the wool can help with the spinning process and also to preserve the wool, but if the wool is to be dyed before being spun (for instance, if it is to be made into colored yarn rather than dyed as a whole fabric after weaving), it must be washed (or the lanolin will prevent the dye from sticking). Scouring could also be useful for wool that was going to be transported; in some cases the lanolin and other impurities might amount for up to 40% of the total weight of the raw wool (Gleba, op. cit. 98).

Practices in this regard clearly differed. In Greece, wool seems often to have been spun unwashed and women might use an epinetron, a ceramic thigh-protector, to keep the grease of the wool roving off of their clothes. On the flip side, both Varro (Rust 2.2.18) and Columella (De Rust. 11.35) assume that wool is generally to be washed (though they are thinking of wool being sold by large estates for commercial purposes and thus may have dyeing in mind). J.S. Lee notes that in medieval England wools with longer staples (that is, that forms into longer clusters or locks of fibers) were unscoured while short staple wools (which might be used in knitting) were more likely to be scoured. Scouring might be done on a small scale in the home or on a larger scale by either producers (before sale) or by clothiers and other purchasers (before dyeing).

Pre-modern scouring generally meant bathing the wool in a solution of warm water along with some agent that would remove the lanolin and other greases and impurities. The most common scouring agent was urine, something that pre-modern communities had in abundance; the ammonia content of urine allows it to break up and wash away the greases in the wool. Alternately, in the ancient period, the soapwort was sometimes used, as soaking its leaves in water could create a form of soap. By the early modern period, potash might also be used for this purpose, but even in the 1500s, it seems that urine was the most commons scouring agent in England. The process is smelly but generally fairly simple: the wool is allowed to sit in a solution of the scouring agent (again, generally urine) and warm water. Scoured wool would need to be re-oiled after it was dried to lubricate and protect the wool; typically olive oil was used for this purpose (both during the ancient and early modern periods) although J.S. Lee notes (op. cit. 45) that in the earlier parts of the Middle Ages, butter might be used instead in parts of Europe where olive oil was difficult to obtain in quantity.

Next, the wool has to be carded or combed, to remove any unusable or imperfect fibers or dirt, along with separating the strands by length and getting any tangles out before spinning. Let’s treat combing first, as it is the older of the two methods. Wool combs (in the ancient world, these were generally made of wood, bone or horn, but combs from the medieval period onward seem to generally be made with metal teeth projecting through a wooden handle) were used in pairs with the aid of a lubricant (grease, olive oil; these days there are specialty “combing oils”). One comb, the “moving comb” would be worked through the wool while the other comb which held the wool together was kept stationary, sometimes on the comber’s knee; in some cases it would secured to a fixed post (called a “combing stock”). You can see a demonstration of the basic method here.

Carding came later, though I have found no consensus on how much later. Gleba (Textile Production, 98) suggests that carding may have been in use in Italy by the end of the Roman period, while J.S. Lee (op. cit., 45) supposes carding to have been adopted into Europe via borrowing from the Islamic cotton industries of Sicily or Spain in the late 1200s. These suggestions are, of course, not mutually exclusive but I am hesitant to render a verdict between them. In any event, by late Middle Ages, carding is also a reasonably common processing method. Hand carders are generally wider, more paddle-like wooden boards with handles and pierced through by iron teeth; the earliest carders used teasel heads in place of the iron teeth (and the word “card” here actually comes from Latin, carduus, meaning thistle, referring to the use of teasel heads). Like combs they are used in pairs, with the wool placed on one, often held on the thigh, and then the other carder is drawn over the first until the wool is ready for spinning. You can see a demonstration here, and a direct comparison of the two kinds of tools here.

Though obviously quite similar methods (albeit with different tools) the two methods produce importantly different results in a couple of different ways. Both methods will remove remaining hair or kemp along with dirt or other particles that aren’t wool. But combed fibers generally produced stronger yarns (as I understand it, this is partly because it doesn’t straighten them out so much, allowing them to better tangle together during spinning), but combing is also a bit more wasteful in material terms, as shorter fibers are discarded in the process. Consequently, once both processes were available, they might both be used (and still are by practitioners of traditional wool-working today, as the video links above show), with combing more often used for long-fibered wools and carding for short-fibered wools.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part II: Scouring in the Shire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-12.

May 17, 2025

German democracy … saved by bureaucratic incompetence?

Filed under: Germany, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Checking in to the situation in Germany, it seems that the big secret report compiled by the German spy agency on the extremely extreme extreme right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party is a bit less than what was expected. Okay, a lot less:

In my last post, I wrote that “The campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is not going well“. Today – a mere seventy-two hours later – you could say that the campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is all but dead. This is because the people most committed to banning the AfD also happen to be some of the stupidest, most incompetent legal and political operators the world has ever seen. Their incompetence is so enormous that I am for once willing to entertain conspiracy theories as to why they might have undermined their own project. It is that bad.

Two weeks ago, you may remember, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser forced the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to rush their long-planned upgrade of the AfD and declare the party to be a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation. Word spread of a mysterious 1,100-page assessment, full of damning proofs that allegedly supported this upgrade. This document had to be kept secret, Faeser explained in an interview, “… to protect sources and withhold indications of how our findings were obtained”. So espionage, much secret, wow.

The thing was, the anti-AfD dossier could not have been that secret, because somebody (almost certainly, somebody in the Interior Ministry) immediately leaked it to Der Spiegel, whose journalists published various excerpts in an effort to make the case for how evil and fascist and Nazi and Hitler the AfD are. In this way the press could climax repeatedly in a wave of democratic orgasms over the renewed possibility of an AfD ban, even in the absence of the supersecret report.

The media circus dissipated quickly, however. The publicity campaign, the roll-out – a lot of things went wrong, some of them inexplicably wrong. Still, I thought there was a 40% chance that the Bundestag would try to open ban proceedings sometime this year. That, as I said, was on Monday. What happened on Tuesday, is that Cicero, NiUS and Junge Freiheit all received the secret 1,100-page assessment (actually, it contains 1,108 pages) and published it in its entirety. Since Tuesday evening, a great many people have been reading this document, and they have been realising various things.

The first thing they’ve realised, is that it contains hardly anything derived from supersecret spy sources at all. It is little more than a collection of public statements by AfD politicians. Faeser’s sources-and-methods justification for keeping the report hidden was a total lie.

The second thing they’ve realised, is that it is an abomination. The vast majority of material that the BfV have collected is not even suspect. It is a lot of off-colour jokes, memes, but also just banal nothing statements – thousands and thousands and thousands of them, arranged under various hysterical subject headings. Nothing in here is remotely strong enough to support the case for banning the AfD and a lot of it is also very bizarre in terms of argument. Not only have the prospects of an AfD ban all but evaporated, but I think it’s even likely the party will succeed in their present lawsuit and that the administrative court in Cologne will throw out the “right-wing extremist” label.

Battle of the Atlantic, 1939-1940

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published 3 Jan 2025

In the summer of 1940, Great Britain is under attack in the air and at sea. German U-Boat wolf packs prowl the Atlantic and sink over a million tons of shipping. German skippers call this the “happy time” — but was the German Navy actually that successful early in the Battle of the Atlantic?
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May 16, 2025

Those scary “Brexity books”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Andrew Doyle on the sudden interest British police seem to be taking about what kind of books you may have on your shelves at home:

If the British police saw this collection, you’d be lucky to get out of prison in fifty years!

The UK police certainly seem to believe in that old aphorism that that “You can tell everything you need to know about a person from their bookshelf”. There has been much press coverage this week of the case of Julian Foulkes, a former policeman who was arrested at his home in Gillingham for tweetcrime. It took six officers to handcuff the pensioner and take him to a cell, and bodycam footage from the arrest shows them assessing the contents of his bookshelves. One was seen singling out The War on the West by Douglas Murray and another remarked that there were “very Brexity things”.

I have a fair few “Brexity” books on my shelf too. I have just as many “anti-Brexity” books, as it happens. It seems to have escaped the attention of these officers that it is possible to read multiple points of view without necessarily subscribing to any of them. They have also apparently forgotten that “Brexity” views are fairly commonplace, enough so to win the largest democratic mandate the country has ever seen. If it’s a majority view, is it really all that controversial?

I recall during the lockdown I was scheduled for a television interview and, having set up the webcam, I suddenly realised that the two volumes of Ian Kershaw’s excellent biography of Hitler were not only visible, but prominent. The design of the books’ spines is such that the word “HITLER” is displayed in huge letters. Very dramatic and marketable, but not so helpful if you’re about to appear on live television. I must confess that I repositioned my chair to ensure that the books were obscured.

But why? It isn’t as though any sensible person could possibly believe that my interest in the history of tyranny implies an endorsement of it. I could just as easily have a copy of Mein Kampf on the shelf and still retain my wholehearted opposition to its author and everything he stood for. If I owned a copy of the Koran, would that make me a Muslim? If I owned a copy of Jilly Cooper’s Riders, would that make me prone to passionate romps in stables? As a chronic hay fever sufferer, this hardly seems likely.

The assumption that the books we choose to read are a mirror-image of our private thoughts, or that we are so malleable that any opinion we encounter will automatically be assimilated, is very much a core tenet of faith in today’s woke mindset, one that has quite palpably infected the justice system. Those who are currently serving prison time for offensive tweets will be aware that the unevidenced belief that the public act on cue to the language they read has some very authoritarian consequences.

May 13, 2025

Checking on the parlous state of German democracy this week

Filed under: Germany, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

First, Sabine Beppler-Spahl points out how difficult it was for the new ruling coalition to get their candidate for Chancellor actually installed:

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, 5 May 2025.
Photo by Sandro Halank for Wikimedia Commons.

The spectacle in the Bundestag this week sent shockwaves through Germany’s political establishment. For the first time in modern German history, a chancellor candidate – Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader Friedrich Merz – failed to get elected by parliament. In the first round of voting, he received just 310 out of 621 votes – six votes short of the necessary majority. A total of 18 members of his own coalition brazenly refused to support him.

A second round of voting was then called and Merz managed to scrape through with 325 votes. But this was a stinging embarrassment for both Merz himself and the new coalition government more broadly. “Never before has there been a political car crash on such a scale”, wrote Berthold Kohler, editor of the conservative FAZ.

In hindsight, Merz’s failure shouldn’t have been such a surprise. From the beginning, the new government was always going to be in for a rough ride. For a start, it is made up of two parties that both received phenomenally bad results in February’s federal elections. The CDU suffered its second-worst result since its founding. Meanwhile, the CDU’s coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD), received its worst result ever.

Worse still, the coalition was losing even more support in the polls in the weeks running up to the chancellor vote. At times, the governing parties barely managed 40 per cent between them. Hermann Binkert, head of the INSA polling institute, described this as a “loss of approval like never before in the period between a federal election and the formation of a new government”.

Many commentators are now questioning whether Merz and his coalition will ever truly recover from this humiliation. The fiasco certainly confirms that Germany is in a deep political crisis, which isn’t going anywhere. It also undermines the smug assertions of Europe’s anti-populist establishment, which has been claiming, against all evidence to the contrary, that German politics is less prone to populist upheavals than those of other Western democracies.

Outside parliamentary machinations, the move to declare the largest opposition party to be a formal threat to German democracy isn’t going smoothly either:

On 2 May, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) yielded to intense pressure from their boss, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, and declared Alternative für Deutschland to be a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation“. The media filled with hit pieces and leftoids began a new round of shouting and morally hyperventilating about the evil fascist Nazi Hitler party. I thought we might be seeing the beginning of an earnest campaign to prohibit the AfD and that over the coming weeks the momentum would just build and build.

Instead it’s kind of fizzled out.

One thing that went wrong, was the roll-out. The AfD immediately filed suit with the Cologne Administrative Court to have their extremist status lifted, and the BfV ended up temporarily suspending their assessment for tactical reasons – above all, to avoid a temporary court injunction that the AfD could portray as a victory. I’ve said many times that a lot of the media pressure against the AfD seems to be coordinated by the constitutional protectors themselves. Now that they’re no longer agitating behind the scenes, the steady drumbeat of pearl-clutching news stories has ground to a halt.

The second thing that has gone wrong, is the publicity campaign. You may remember that the constitutional protectors have produced a 1,100-page assessment documenting the right-wing extremism of the AfD. This dossier, however, remains entirely secret, and so journalists have been leaking choice passages from its pages instead. Their leaks strongly suggest that this document is little more than a vast assemblage of public statements by AfD politicians and functionaries that people in the BfV find untoward.

First we had the three leaks in Welt, which I covered in my first post on this topic. These featured people saying such benign things as “There is more to being German than simply holding citizenship papers” and “Failed migration policy and asylum abuse have led to the importation of 100,000 people from deeply backward and misogynistic cultures”.

That did not impress anybody, so Der Spiegel rushed out a new round of leaks. This piece tells us, breathlessly, that “politicians from the party have been ‘continuously’ agitating against refugees and migrants”, that “they have made xenophobic and Islamophobic statements” and that they have an “ethnic-ancestral understanding” of human descent groups that “is not compatible with the free democratic basic order”. They particularly deplore the use of terms like “knife migrants” (“Messermigranten“) which “attribute an ‘ethnocultural propensity for violence to entire groups'”. They say that the party does not consider Germans “with a migrant background from Muslim-influenced countries” to be equal citizens and that the AfD thus “devalues entire population groups in Germany”, violating their human dignity.

Mao Wins the Civil War – Chinese Civil War Part 4 – W2W 28

Filed under: Britain, China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 12 May 2025

By early 1949, Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang is falling apart. Hundreds of thousands of Nationalist troops surrender as city after city fall to Mao Zedong. Beijing falls without a fight and the Communists cross the Yangtze. Chiang’s final plan is escape and he moves tons of gold and his best troops to Taiwan. Meanwhile, Mao declares victory and the birth of the People’s Republic of China.
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Gout – The Disease of Kings

Filed under: Europe, Food, Health, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 7 Jan 2025

Sliced roast venison with a spiced red wine sauce and a sprinkling of salt

City/Region: England
Time Period: 1723

Gout has plagued people for thousands of years, but mostly the rich people. It often follows an indulgent diet full of red meat and alcohol, so for a long time only the rich had regular access to a gout-inducing food.

This recipe from 1723 is delicious, as well it ought to be as it flies in the face of the rules you should follow to prevent gout with venison (red meat) served with a wine sauce (alcohol). Venison is best when it’s not cooked past medium, and this recipe is tender and flavorful with the rosemary coming through. The sauce could really go on anything, and you could swap out the red wine for something different. Port would be delicious, though I would reduce the amount of sugar a bit.

I don’t expect most people will have a larding needle on hand, and I think you could probably skip the larding and still end up with a flavorful, tender dish.

    To roast a Haunch of Venison.
    First lard it with Bacon, and stick it thin with Rosemary; then roast it with a brisk Fire; but let it not lye too near it; bate it with fresh Butter; then boil a Pint of Claret with a little beaten Ginger, Cinnamon and Sugar, with a half a dozen whole Cloves, and some grated bread; and when they have boil’d enough, put in a little Salt, Vinegar and fresh Butter; dish your Venison, strew Salt about the Dish, and serve it with this Sauce.
    — The Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary: Or, the Accomplish’d Housewives Companion by John Nott, 1723

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May 12, 2025

The rise of the Hansa

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Works in Progress, Agree Ahmed describes the conditions in northern Europe in the Middle Ages that helped create the Hanseatic League:

Today, we typically think of coalitions in the context of modern electoral politics. So it might be surprising that one of the greatest case studies in the history of coalitions is a community of medieval German merchants known as the Hansa.

Starting as individual traveling traders, the Hansa built up coalitions for collective bargaining, collective action, and collective security. Through this process, they formed Northern Europe’s first ever long-distance trade network.

Without corporate structures, they built supply chains that distributed goods between Northern Europe’s major ports, with capillaries that spread into each city’s hinterlands. Without formal territory, their laws governed trading hubs spanning thousands of miles, from London all the way to Western Russia. And, despite being composed of hundreds of member cities, the Hanseatic League had no head of state. Yet the Hansa still managed to sign treaty after treaty with foreign rulers and, a few times, even fought (and won!) wars.

[…]

Better climate, more arable land, and better farming techniques lifted Europe’s crop yields to above subsistence levels for the first time since the Roman period. After several centuries of decline, Europe’s population grew from 18 million in the 600s to over 70 million by the 1300s – nearly triple the population of the Roman period. The nutritional surplus allowed for Europe’s first significant artisan class since the Roman empire. Each town had common craftsmen like blacksmiths, leatherworkers, and carpenters. But local skills and resources allowed for the emergence of specialized crafts, which were unique to specific regions and could therefore be traded.

Tax-hungry lords across Europe began to set up permanent marketplaces for their growing communities. And so hundreds of towns formed in Europe, filled with workers who had flocked from countryside manors. These towns were the first substantial permanent markets in Northern Europe’s history.

As production accelerated, so did shipping. The warmer climate meant waterways in the North and Baltic Seas were navigable for longer stretches of the year. Meanwhile innovations in boatmaking dramatically improved shipping capacity. Excavations of the few surviving ships from this era show that, in the span of a few centuries, vessels tripled their average tonnage from 10 to 30 while dropping the number of rowers required by a factor of four.

The breakthrough in tonnage starting in 900 can be credited to the knarr, a Viking-style ship that was shorter and wider than the longboat that preceded it, allowing it to load substantially more cargo with a smaller crew. Prior to the knarr, trade convoys had to carry cargo on longboats, which were agile but could only carry small fractions of what the knarr could.

A model knarr in the Hedeby Viking Museum in Germany.
Image Source: Europabild via Wikimedia.

When Northern Europe’s first long-haul merchants set off on their voyages, they faced a world that had not yet been ordered for trade. Sailors had to worry about pirates in the Baltic and shipwrecks at icelocked winter ports.

Riverways gave merchants access to inland communities, where they could find products at lower prices to then sell for a profit in major port cities. But riverside towns were more interested in their own engineering projects or grinding their grain and so would block rivers with dams and water mills, and they would redirect water to irrigate fields.

And even if a river were clear of obstructive mills or dams, it might be heavily punctuated by toll stations. The Rhine River, a key shipping artery that connected inland Germany with the Baltic coast, had tolls approximately every five kilometers.

Under the laws of the Holy Roman Empire, the right to collect tolls on the Rhine could only be granted by the Emperor. But unauthorized tolling stations, or tolls levied in excess of what was authorized, were so rampant that the malpractice had a name: the lonia iniusta (Latin for “unjust tolls”). Some local authorities enforced toll collections along rivers by running chains from bank to bank, making it impossible for a boat to pass without paying. Others would patrol the river on their own boats and deny vessels passage until they paid up.

In the first four years of the Great Interregnum Period (1250–73), when the Empire had no emperor, the number of toll stations on the Rhine doubled to 20. This is the origin of the term “robber baron”: local barons, operating out of riverside castles, would set up illicit toll stations and demand significant shares of merchant cargo in order to pass.

The journey on land wasn’t much easier. Toll booths were similarly common. Nominally, these were to pay the landowner for the maintenance of the roads and bridges but in reality they were usually left dilapidated. Merchants voyaging on land had to load their wares on the backs of mules and horses (which were about a third the speed of ships). The narrow widths of medieval roads meant these caravans stretched out in long lines, leaving animals and cargo physically exposed. These vulnerable, slow moving, value-dense caravans attracted bandits who roamed the isolated roads between towns. It was nearly guaranteed a caravan would face an attempted robbery – either illegally by bandits or (somewhat) legally in the form of a toll shakedown – over the course of a sufficiently long trip.

As a matter of safety, Northern European merchants learned to move together in armed groups. These traveling merchant bands were called hansas, a Lower German word meaning “company” or “troop”. When a hansa formed for a trip, they elected an alderman (literally “elder man”) who would speak on behalf of the group to the various authorities – lords, princes, bishops, and other rulers – they might encounter along the way.

Once they completed the arduous journey, the merchants had to deal with the local governments of their destination cities, each of which had different and constantly changing laws. To protect the local merchants and craftsmen within their city walls from competition, princes might demand exorbitant taxes from foreign merchants or deny them access to the city altogether. Merchant bands had to negotiate collectively to secure the right to trade within each city in which they wished to conduct business. And if they made it into the city walls, they might not make it out: capricious lords might suddenly imprison foreign merchants (as happened to German merchants in England in 1468 and Novgorod in 1494), raid their offices, or seize their merchandise.

Local laws threatened foreign merchants more than they protected them. Most town courts, themselves newly formed, had minimal experience adjudicating long distance commercial disputes. When such disputes did arise, courts could take weeks or months to arbitrate them, and were heavily biased towards locals over foreign traders. Without sovereign states, merchants were left dealing with a fractured landscape of town courts, where each market had its own idiosyncratic laws. And because foreign traders could evade punishment by fleeing overseas, courts in England, France, Italy, and the Holy Roman Empire often collectively punished foreign merchant communities for the unpaid debts of their countrymen.

The lack of early medieval records makes it difficult to quantify just how much Northern European commerce grew as a result of continuous long distance trade. Before the late medieval period, Northern Europe’s archaeological record of trade shows just several dozen sites known as emporiums: small, temporary settlements outside of towns where foreign merchants traded with locals. But starting in the late medieval period (1300 to 1500), Lower German merchants began to change this.

H/T to Niccolo Soldo for the link.

(A Few of) The Many Faces of the Dutch M95 Carbine

Filed under: Asia, Europe, History, Military, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 16 Jun 2015

When the Dutch military adopted the M95 Mannlicher rifle, they made a rifle for standard infantry, and a variety of carbines for specialist troops. These included artillery, cavalry, bicycle, engineers, and colonial service carbines. During World War I they attempted to standardize these and reduce the number of different designs, but met with only limited success. By the time World War II began, there were at least 13 different variants of M95 carbine in service with the Dutch military.

QotD: The Gracchi

Filed under: Europe, Government, History, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus’ tribunates – both of which ended with them being killed (I think it is perfectly fair to say “murdered”) – typically occupy a position in survey coverage of the Roman Republic as the inciting incident that begins (if not quite causes) the collapse of the Republic itself, the first outbreak of violence in Roman politics, the first escalation in a spiral that would lead to the repeated outbreak of civil war in the first century. And that is certainly how they were understood in antiquity; both Plutarch and Appian make this claim (App. BCiv. 1.17; Plut. Ti. Gracch. 20.1). And in part because the sources (again, Plutarch and Appian) frame the Gracchi quite positively and in part, to be frank, because their reforms are generally “left-coded” in a university environment that is inherently sympathetic to left-coded things, the Gracchi tend to come across to students as righteous reformers killed by foolish, hidebound and greedy reactionary Roman senators. And that is, to be fair, a potentially valid reading (if employed with some caveats).

But it is also generally the only reading students get and it is not the only valid reading of the evidence we have. So for this week, I want to complicate the Gracchi, presenting some of the details that often get left out of introductory surveys. In particular, we’re going to discuss the problems that Tiberius Gracchus’ key law, the Lex Sempronia Agraria was designed to solve and I am going to argue that Tiberius was attempting to solve a problem that didn’t exist (though he couldn’t have known it), a view which is now quite common in the scholarship but almost entirely absent in how we tend to teach the Gracchi.

But more to the point, I am going to argue that Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus’ behavior did, in fact, violate the norms of the Republic and that it was not entirely unreasonable for the senatorial elite to conclude these men, in their unrestrained and nakedly ambitious approach to politics, represented a real threat to the Roman political order and that they might be aiming for something approaching a “soft coup” in the context of a political order whose features – including the democratic ones – worked through an unwritten constitution of norms (what the Romans called the mos maiorum, “the customs of the ancestors”), which both brothers actively undermined. The claim that the Gracchi threatened to make themselves tyrants was not an empty claim and that is the dark reflection of their role as well intentioned reformers.

In short, then, if the only version of the Gracchi you have encountered is that of the near-saintly, then martyred proto-progressive reformers, that’s not quite the complete picture (and the left-coding of their ideas is decidedly anachronistic). Naturally, in trying to complicate this picture, I am essentially taking the position of prosecutor, so this “take” is going to be far more negative on the Gracchi than how I would, say, teach them in class or, indeed, how I regard them myself.

So the way we’re going to approach this problem is first to discuss the problem that Tiberius Gracchus thought he was addressing (and some of the issues there), before walking through the means he used to push forward the Lex Sempronia Agraria. Then I want to look at some of the wide-ranging laws proposed by Gaius Gracchus to assess the degree to which those laws cohere and ways we might understand his program and actions, potentially rather more negatively.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-17.

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