Simon B. Jones's Blog: Slings and arrows, page 4

The Hourglass Sea

As the red planet reached opposition earlier this month, shining brightly over my garage roof, I thought I would do a post on significant moments in our relationship with our celestial neighbour.

The red planet
The ancient Greeks looked up and puzzled at the peculiar behaviour of Mars during its periods of apparent retrograde motion as the Earth, supposedly the fixed centre of their universe, passed it on the inside, making it appear from Earth as though Mars was moving in the opposite direction. Hipparchus of Nicaea, who compiled the earliest known catalogue of the stars in the 3rd Century BC, set out to explain this phenomenon through the theory of epicycles. These were small circular orbits traced out by the planets as they moved in larger circular orbits; known as deferents, around the Earth. Along with the misguided concept of an Earth-centric universe, the idea that the universe must possess a perfect nature and that the orbits of the planets must therefore be perfectly circular, caused the ancients to overcomplicate their explanation for the motion of the planets.

The great Alexandrian scholar Claudius Ptolemy, (90-168AD) whose vision of the cosmos would dominate for over a millennium, added further layers of complexity in his efforts to make the erratic motions of the planets fit within the framework of a perfect universe; centring their orbits around an imaginary central point known as the equant. With hindsight, it was all a case of trying to make the facts fit the theory, but until Nicolaus Copernicus looked up and pondered the heavens anew, no-one had a better idea.

 Copernicus' assertion in his seminal work of 1543, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, published shortly before his death, that the sun and not the earth was the central point about which the planets moved, was not universally accepted. One man who had trouble letting go of the idea of an earth-centric cosmos was the larger than life and magnificently moustached  Danish scholar Tycho Brahe, (pictured right).
Brahe was not a man to let go of an argument easily. The gold prosthetic that covered his nose was testament to that. He had lost part of his nose in a duel over a mathematical dispute. So the story goes. I bet there was a woman involved somewhere.

Brahe fell out with the king of Denmark too and left in 1597 to serve as court astronomer to Emperor Rudolph II in Prague. Tycho had his own ideas about the universe. Through his observations of a supernova he had shown the cosmos to be dynamic and evolving, dispelling classical notions of unchanging perfection. Nevertheless he clung to the idea of a universe with the earth at its centre but came up with a new model in which the sun circled the earth but the other planets circled the sun. Brahe amassed copious amounts of data from detailed observations of the heavens in the hope of lending empirical weight to his theory. In 1600 Brahe was joined by the young Johannes Kepler, fleeing religious persecution in Graz. Brahe put Kepler to work studying his observations of Mars with the object of elucidating its orbit. After five years of work, in which he proved that Tycho's observations could not be fitted to a circular orbit, Kepler would publish his seminal Astronomia Nova, in which he announced that the orbit of Mars was elliptical, as must be the orbits of all planets; a conclusion enshrined as his first law of Planetary Motion. The solution was simple in its elegance and the Ptolomaic universe of equants and epicycles was consigned to the dustbin of history, where it would soon be joined by the Tychian model, though mercifully Brahe did not live to see this. Doubtless he would not have taken it well.

The apparent orbit of Mars as drawn by Cassini As the telescope age dawned, further details of the nature of Mars were revealed. The first to observe the Martian polar ice caps was Christiaan Huygens who produced a sketch of the planet in 1659, showing three distinct views featuring different surface features. Between 1704 and 1720 Giacomo Maraldi, nephew of Gian Domenico Cassini, was following in his uncle's footsteps at the Paris observatory when he decided to take a particular interest in Mars. Maraldi too observed the polar caps and noted that they grew and shrank at different times. He was also able to observe other surface features on the planet, describing the shadowy band made by larval seas, although he believed the shadow to be a result of clouds in the Martian atmosphere rather than any solid entity. Through observation of the feature now known as Syrtis Major, 'the Hourglass Sea', Maraldi was able to determine Mars' rotation period at 24 hours and 40 minutes.

The advent of the 'Newtonian' reflector telescope brought better views of Mars than ever before. In the early 1780's William Herschel turned his attention to Mars with a 20 foot long reflector and observed with interest the changing nature of the poles. Herschel proposed that the growth and shrinkage of the polar caps was seasonal. He also demonstrated that Mars had very little atmosphere by observing that there was no discernible dimming of stars immediately before they passed into the shadow of the red planet. It was in the course of such observations in 1881 that Herschel made his most famous discovery; the planet Uranus. The moment of discovery is immortalised in this contemporary engraving (left) showing William and Caroline Herschel at work.

By 1862 the largest telescope in the world was the 26 inch reflector at the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC. Here the resident professor of astronomy was Asaph Hall, who sometimes received visits from Abraham Lincoln, who was fascinated by the work at the observatory. Hall enjoyed a prodigious career, publishing 500 papers on matters astronomical and determining the rotational period of Saturn. Hall's greatest quest was his search for satellites orbiting Mars. Finally he despaired and was ready to abandon the search but was encouraged to continue by his wife. And so he pressed his eye to the telescope once more and in 1877, within the space of a week after years of searching, he identified not one but two moons circling Mars. He named them Deimos and Phobos after the sons of Mars. Both moons are tiny, at just 14 and 8 miles across and are believed to be captured asteroids.

Drawings of Martian canals by Percival Lowell It was a splendid achievement but would be overshadowed, in the public imagination at least, by the announcement in the same year by Milanese astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli that he had observed 'canals' on Mars. Schiaparelli was an accomplished astronomer and had published his observations using the term 'canali' literally 'channels' to describe the features that he was seeing. These are now known to have been an optical illusion caused by the chance alignment of craters when viewing the Martian surface at the limit of resolution of Schiaparelli's telescope. Enter wealthy businessman and astronomy enthusiast Percival Lowell. Seizing upon the mistranslation of Schiaparelli's 'canals' Lowell embarked upon an obsession with the non-existent features, building a state of the art observatory in Arizona to aid his quest to explain the mystery of these Martian canals, suggesting that they had been created by intelligent beings living on Mars. The observatory that Lowell founded was nevertheless a great legacy and it was here in 1930 that Pluto was discovered.


The idea of Martians was firmly embedded in the public consciousness and in 1898 HG Wells' classic War of the Worlds was published, inspired in part by Lowell's ideas. Illustration right is from a 1908 edition. Legend has grown up around the mass panic that was suddenly sparked by Orson Welles' radio dramatization of War of the Worlds for the Mercury Theatre on Air in 1938.  The story goes that Welles began his broadcast with an explanation that it was a fictional dramatization but that most people were listening to the popular Edgar Bergen show on another station. When Edgar's show finished, people belatedly tuned in to Orson Welles' ultra realistic news bulletin style War of the Worlds and wrongly assumed that it was all really happening, with mass hysteria resulting. Sadly it seems that this is a myth and that stories of the panic were wildly exaggerated by the American press, with the newspapers taking the opportunity to show the arriviste wirelessmen in a bad light as reckless purveyors of misinformation. They of all people should have known however that there is no such thing as bad publicity. After all, has anyone these days heard of Edgar Bergen?

Man has yet to set foot on Mars but has done the next best thing by landing probes and rovers on the surface. The United States has led the way with its Mariner and Viking  missions of the 1960's and 70's and the redoubtable Curiosity and Opportunity rovers that have brought us such wonderful images in recent years. Appropriately enough however, it was the Soviet Union that first landed a craft on the surface of the red planet, albeit not very successfully.

Soviet efforts to reach Mars began in 1962, just as the US Mariner programme was also beginning. The Soviets launched four missions to Mars, only the last of which made it out of Earth orbit and out into interplanetary space for a distance of over one hundred million kilometres from earth before losing its way. Two more efforts to launch an orbiter in 1969 both exploded shortly after launch.

Efforts were nevertheless stepped up and continued with the ambitious launch in 1971 of Mars 2 & 3 which were combined orbiter/lander craft. Both craft successfully reached Mars and went into orbit around the red planet in the summer of 1972. The US Mariner 9 had already become the first craft to successfully make it into orbit around Mars the previous year. Now however the Soviets had the opportunity to move ahead of their rivals. The landers were released into the teeth of a fearsome Martian dust storm and the Mars 2 lander crashed on the surface. Mars 3 made a successful landing on the surface but may have sustained some damage. It reportedly sent a 20 second transmission including one grainy image before communications were lost, though some have questioned whether the transmission occurred. The orbiters continued their mission, sending back images and details of the atmospheric temperatures, pressures and chemical composition.

Follow up missions launched in 1973 were largely disappointing. The Mars 4 mission failed to enter Mars orbit and flew right by the red planet. Its twin Mars 5 was more successful and orbited the planet, gathering images and more details of the atmosphere, surface temperature and composition and magnetic field. Two more missions were launched with the intention of landing more modules on the surface. Mars 6 released its lander successfully but a likely failure of the landing retro boosters caused it to slam into the surface. Mars 7 was an identical mission but a fault caused the landing module to be released too soon and it missed the planet altogether. The inability of the Soviets to prevent the degradation of their computer chips during the flight to Mars has been blamed for the majority of the failures. In 1975 the successful US Viking missions were launched and both subsequently made successful landings on the surface and sent back sustained transmissions, effectively ending the Cold War race to explore Mars.

In a post script NASA's Mars orbiter last year took a picture of what is believed to be the Soviet Mars 3 lander, sitting on the Martian surface in the Ptolomais crater, providing potential proof that the Soviets did indeed make it to the red planet first.

The Cold War propaganda poster is not especially related to the Mars programme but I liked it.

Read more space related posts on Slings and Arrows
http://slingsandarrowsblog.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/space

Kepler and Mars
http://www.keplersdiscovery.com/Intro.htmlMaraldi and Herschel
http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/MARS/CHAP03.HTM

Asaph Hall and the moons of Mars
http://www.universetoday.com/88253/finding-phobos-discovery-of-a-martian-moon/

Canals on Mars
http://www.space.com/13197-mars-canals-water-history-lowell.html

War of the Worlds Mass Panic
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2013/10/orson_welles_war_of_the_worlds_panic_myth_the_infamous_radio_broadcast_did.html

The Soviet Mars Programme
http://burro.astr.cwru.edu/stu/advanced/20th_soviet_mars.html

Mars 3 Found?
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/04/12/nasa-mars-orbiter-may-have-soviet-lander_n_3067583.html

Rise of the Rus

 Having visited the excellent Viking exhibition at the British Museum last week, I thought I would write a post on the Rus, whose activities received an overdue focus in the exhibition which featured many artefacts from their stomping grounds. As the opening quote shows, they are a familiar lot.  The Rus on the rampage
There was an invasion of the barbarian Rus, a people, as everyone knows who are brutal and crude and bear no remnant of love for humankind. They have savage customs and are inhuman in their deeds, displaying bloodthirstiness in their very appearance. They rejoice in slaughter more than in any other thing that people naturally enjoy. This nation, destructive both in deed and name, began their brutal outrage from the Propontis and then spread up the coast. They came as far as the native city of the saint and cut down unsparingly people of both sexes and every generation. They did not pity the old or overlook the young but rather raised their bloodthirsty hands equally against all and hastened to bring destruction with as much force as possible.
So says the Life of St George of Amastris (pictured below) in recording what could be the earliest reference to a raid by the Rus upon the territory of Byzantium early in the Ninth Century AD. Its author gave these Vikings who had made their way down the River Dnieper into the Black Sea to raid the communities on its shores, about as good a write up as they received from the monkish chroniclers who had recorded the 793 raid on Lindesfarne  in very similar language. Amastris, we are told, was saved by a miracle, for when the raiders tried to break into the saint’s tomb, they were struck down by the power of God and became weak and helpless.
Whilst there is considerable debate about the date of this raid on the Paphlagonian town of Amastris, it is clear that by the early Ninth Century, the people known as the Rus were viewed as a significant threat. Early in his reign emperor Theophilus took considerable steps to protect the empire’s trading interests on the northern shore of the Black Sea. Ongoing hostilities between the Byzantines and the Caliphate would ensure that the route by which luxury goods reached Constantinople from the east would shift increasingly to the Caspian Sea and thence via the great rivers of the Volga and the Don to the Black Sea. Trade with the peoples to the north would therefore grow in importance. The major power in the region between the lower reaches of the Dnieper and the Volga were the Khazars; a Turkic people who had been on good terms with the Byzantines for two centuries whilst staving off attempts at conquest from the Arabs. The Khazar Khagan had astutely adopted Judaism as his religion in order to resist efforts from both empires to convert his people and thereby place him in a position of being seen as antagonistic to one or the other. The Khazar capital of Itil at the mouth of the Volga was a trading enclave from which ships set out across the Caspian Sea to trade furs, slaves, amber, honey and wax with Abbasid merchants and return with silks and spices from as far afield as India and China as well as Persian glassware and pocketfuls of jingling silver dirhams. Heading northwards from Itil, boats could make their way up the Volga and then turn westwards, making use of smaller waterways and where necessary portage to enter the Don and then turn south for the Black Sea and the ports of the Byzantine Empire.  It was to protect this trade that Theophilus took action in 833, establishing a new province in the Crimea known as the Klimata which incorporated the previously independent city of Cherson at the mouth of the Dnieper under direct Byzantine control. A permanent force of 2000 troops was dispatched to the new province under the command of a military governor. At the same time Theophilus sent a task force of engineers and soldiers under the governor of Paphlagonia to build a new fortification close to the mouth of the Don. Known as Sarkel, the white house, this construction served to protect the Khazar controlled town of Tamatarkha which was dominated by a Jewish merchant community. It is believed that Sarkel anchored the western flank of a line of earthworks and fortifications stretching between the Volga and the Don. The scale of this undertaking clearly demonstrates the level of threat that faced by the region from the potentially aggressive newcomers to the north. The most potent threat was believed to be posed by the Rus.
Itil was home to communities of merchants including a sizable contingent of Rus, who represented the southern terminus of a commercial network stretching all the way back to Scandinavia. Approximately 200,000 silver coins have been found throughout Scandinavia dating from the Viking period. Of these around half were turned up on the island of Gotland and 40,000 of these were Abbasid dirhams. It is an eloquent illustration of the extent and importance of the trade links established by the intrepid Rus.  Rus traders resorting to portage - Olaus Magnus The first permanent Viking presence in what is now Russia was established in the form of fortified settlements along the shores of Lake Ladoga during the mid Eighth Century. Setting out from their Swedish homeland, the first colonists came both as warriors and as traders, as the presence of both a sword and a set of scales as grave goods for the same individual testifies. They had the capacity to fight for land or plunder and to defend and keep it and to take slaves in large numbers from the native population to be sold down the river. They could however, also offer protection to the native population and they set out to put down roots and establish peaceful and profitable trade. Indeed, so welcome did the Viking presence become that in the end a legend was born that the natives, tired by ceaseless infighting, had actually invited them to come and rule over them. Such is the tale of Rurik, eldest of three Viking brothers who is credited with establishing his rule in the town of Gorodisce, known as Holmgard in the Icelandic sagas, on Lake Ilmen, near the headwaters of the Volga.
  The furry critters of Russia never stood a chance - Olaus Magnus The Primary Russian Chronicle, which was written in Kiev around 1100, dates the beginning of Rurik’s kingship to 860, but we know there was a significant political entity controlled by a Rus ‘Khagan’ established well before this date. In 838 a Rus delegation arrived in Constantinople, having made their way down the Dnieper. It has been posited that these Rus ambassadors came to seek improved trading relations with the empire following the Amastris raid. What was discussed with Theophilus is not recorded and we know of their visit from a Frankish source, the Annals of St Bertin, which records the arrival of these envoys at the court of Louis the Pious in 839 accompanying a Byzantine embassy. The Rus declared that the reason for their diversion west was that they feared ascending the Dnieper on account of the hostile natives. At this stage therefore the Rus clearly had not achieved control over the Dnieper route. Louis, who trusted Vikings not a jot, detained the envoys as spies.
The Russian Primary Chronicle credits two brothers, followers of Rurik, with the initial, seemingly peaceful conquest of the town of Kiev on the Dnieper. They are named as Askold and Dir. Having found the town conveniently leaderless due to the deaths of its previous rulers they set about restoring good governance. The situation sounds too good to be true but however it was achieved, it seems that the Rus gained a crucial strategic foothold on the Dnieper in the mid 9thCentury, wresting control of Kiev from the Khazars. It was from Kiev, so the chronicle informs us, under the command of these two enterprising Vikings that the terrifying raid of 860 on Constantinople took place.
Photius dips the robe in the sea Theophilus’ successor Michael III was away on campaign against the Abbasids and the imperial fleet was also absent from the capital when on the northern horizon there appeared a great host of sails and soon the terrorised citizens beheld the awful spectacle of a two hundred strong fleet of longships descending upon them. Swarming into the Bosphorus ‘like wasps’ as the Patriarch Photius described them, these invaders fell upon the vulnerable monasteries along the shore and on the islands in the Marmara. The Rus burned and pillaged as they saw fit; destroying everything outside of the protective walls of the capital quite unopposed. The city itself remained invulnerable however and so once all  of the easy pickings had been taken the Rus turned for home. A later legend grew up around the raid, which is preserved in the Russian Primary Chronicle, in which the Patriarch Photius dipped the sacred relic of the robe of the Virgin Mary into the waters of the Golden Horn. All at once a storm blew up and scattered the ships.
Control of Kiev was consolidated by Oleg, who we are told succeeded Rurik as regent for his young son Prince Igor. Oleg moved his capital to Kiev in 880 and kingdom of Kiev Rus would grow to eclipse the Khazars as the pre-eminent power of the region. Trade was the name of the game but the Rus were prepared to fight for their rights. In 907 Oleg led another fleet against Constantinople. The details of the attack in the Primary Russian Chronicle are irresistible if somewhat fanciful.
Oleg disembarked upon the shore, and ordered his soldiery to beach the ships. They waged war around the city, and accomplished much slaughter of the Greeks. They also destroyed many palaces and burned the churches. Of the prisoners they captured, some they beheaded, some they tortured, some they shot, and still others they cast into the sea. The Russians inflicted many other woes upon the Greeks after the usual manner of soldiers. Oleg commanded his warriors to make wheels, which they attached to the ships, and when the wind was favourable they spread the sails and bore down upon the city from the open country. When the Greeks beheld this, they were afraid, and sending messengers to Oleg, they implored him not to destroy the city, and offered to submit to such tribute as he should desire.
Oleg's shield is nailed to the walls of Constantinople
The Byzantine sources are silent on this raid although we know that Leo VI concluded a treaty with the Rus in 911. According to the RPC, under the terms Oleg agreed, Russian merchants were to be permitted to enter the city in groups of fifty and were able to stay for up to six months to trade. They were to be provided board and lodging and hot baths on demand and were able to purchase goods for their needs tax free. The Byzantine sources beg to differ and it may have been another half century before this package of trading rights was on the table after the Rus had resorted to the brutally persuasive tactic of armed raids on a few more occasions, each time negotiating a better deal in exchange for withdrawal.

In 913 similar tactics were adopted against the Caliphate. The Arab writer al-Mas'udi tells us that they entered the Don from the Black Sea with 500 ships and then made their way via the Volga to Itil and thence into the Caspian, terrorising the communities on its shores. His account once again echoes those of Anglo Saxons, Franks and Byzantines who encountered Vikings on the rampage.

The Rus spilled rivers of blood, seized women and children and property, raided and everywhere destroyed and burned. The people who lived on these shores were in turmoil, for they had never been attacked by an enemy from the sea, and their shores had only been visited by the ships of merchants and fishermen.

According to Mas'udi the Rus occupied islands in the Caspian from which they repelled an attack by the Arab forces, but when they returned upriver they were set upon by the Muslim subjects of the Khazars and put to slaughter. It would be thirty years before they attempted another expedition of this type and they settled down to peaceful trade once more.

So this was how it was to be. The Rus would be good neighbours but only on the terms that suited them, and those would be negotiated at sword point if necessary. Well what did the Arabs and Byzantines expect? The Rus were Vikings after all.
Vikings at the British Museum
http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/vikings.aspx

Excellent article on the archaeological evidence for the early Rus
http://www.academia.edu/1429916/Rus_Varangians_and_Birka_Warriors

The Life of St George of Amastris
http://library.nd.edu/byzantine_studies/documents/Amastris.pdf

The Russian Primary Chronicle
http://www.mgh-bibliothek.de/dokumente/a/a011458.pdf

compare the monument

 As you may know if you are a regular reader of Slings and Arrows, if indeed there is such a thing, I have recently returned from a trip to Cambodia, where I beheld with my own eyeballs the awe inspiring Angkor Wat. Inevitably when people ask about the trip I get the question, "Well, how did it compare to other things you've seen?" I always find this a difficult question. Having been lucky enough now to have visited quite a few of the world's great historic sites, although there are plenty more still on my list, I struggle to rank them neatly in any sort of order of impressiveness. AW probably makes a lot of lists of top ten must-see sights, but whenever I read one of those there is always something left off the list that really surprises me. In the end of course it is as impossible as it is futile to compare great architectural monuments and artistic achievements of human civilisation from completely different cultures and eras. How can you judge whether Angkor Wat is more beautiful than say Abu Simbel? Both blew me away. Which is more impressive, the Great Wall of China or the Sistine Chapel? Both made me catch my breath in very different ways.
So anyway, this got me thinking about historical sites I have visited that have had a particular impact on me, sights that have moved me with their grandeur or beauty or places where I have simply felt a great sense of history. Here is a list of ten. They are in no particular order and indeed I could have probably chosen a completely different list of ten without too much trouble. These are just the first ten that came to mind.

The Terracotta Army

If I have to pick one thing, for what its worth, the Terracotta army blew me away. It is the only one of the great historical sights that actually reduced me to tears. I don't know why really. It just absolutely moved the part of me that eats sleeps and breathes history. The main pit is inside a vast covered space the size of stadium with long rows of trenches stretching away from you. The army seems to be rising up out of the ground in front of you as you stand there and stare in wonder. The front ranks of men and horses are well restored, indeed, it is difficult to believe that every soldier was found in shattered pieces and has been painstakingly put back together. As your eye follows the ranks back, the soldiers become a little more battered with more bits missing, and further back still they are only partially excavated, giving the impression of the whole army rising up from beneath the earth and marching out of history. It really is a most incredible sight.

At the Terracotta Army main pit Xian 2005
Sounion at sunset

It had been a tough day's boating from the island of Kythnos to the Greek mainland. I was on a charter boat holiday with my best friend Jon after graduating from university. The sea had been rough and we had struggled to ride the waves and keep the yacht on its heading. Finally we made it into the shelter of the headland upon which stands the temple of Poseidon at Sounion. It was late afternoon and the sun was going down. Its rays were shining down through the clouds in beams and illuminating the temple on the headland above us in bands of light and shadow. It was an awe inspiring sight and as no religious building has before or since it filled me with a sense of the presence of the divine. I knew of course that the sudden calm that descended was purely due to the fact that we were now sheltered from the worst of the wind and waves by the headland but at that moment it felt as if Poseidon himself had intervened and stilled the waters and I understood the power of the temple. If a fleet of triremes had come around the headland at that moment with bronze rams glinting and oars flashing, I doubt I would have batted an eyelid.

The Lone Pine

In places the front line trenches at Gallipoli are so close together you cannot believe it. It was possible to throw a grenade from the Allied forward trench into the Turkish trench and vice-versa. The Aussies brought up their best bowlers for the job. The battlefield known as the Lone Pine, holy ground for those who come from Australia and New Zealand to honour the Anzac fallen, is a small patch of open ground no bigger than a modest village green, three hundred yards long by one hundred and fifty yards wide. It represents the sum total of ground captured in the fighting here, which cost 2,277 lives. Nowhere is the futility of the First World War more brutally illustrated than here. People stand and shake their heads at the madness of it all before walking up to the cemetery and the monument to pay their respects to those who paid the ultimate price for a few hundred yards of dusty ground.

I could weep at how young I look in this picture - Gallipoli 1999
In the gas chamber at Dachau

A sense of moral duty compelled us to take time out from the Munich beer halls and pay a visit to Dachau. I felt a need to bear witness to the outrage that was the Holocaust at one of its most infamous crime scenes. We joined a tour conducted by a man who was the son of a camp survivor. He took us around the surviving accommodation blocks, describing the conditions at the camp, the treatment of the prisoners, the unspeakable things that were done. It was grim, as you might expect. Then we stood in the gas chamber. It was a large group of forty or so people. There was not much room to move around and it felt rather claustrophobic. One poor lady completely freaked out and had to be helped out into the sunlight. Then the guide told us matter-of-factly that they gassed people in here two hundred at a time. I could not imagine the horror of that. Then we moved through to the crematorium to see the row of ovens, the meat hooks in the ceiling where they hung the bodies waiting to be burned. I have never felt a more chilling sense of evil in any place than I did right there. No doubt it was only the product of my own horrified sub-conscious but it went right through me. Two years later I found myself in Krakow and someone asked me if I wanted to accompany them to Auschwitz. 'No thank you,' I told them. 'I have seen enough. But you must go.'

Chesters Fort

In the autumn of 2009 I visited Hadrian’s Wall in the company of some mates on a boys’ expedition. We began at the remains of Housesteads and then set out along the wall itself, following it as it hugged the contours of the land; taking advantage of every natural barrier to a would-be attacker. Our plan had been to walk from Housesteads Fort to Chesters Fort along the wall, a distance of some ten miles. Such was the nature of the terrain however that our hung-over bodies were worn out by the time that we were less than half way there. And so we sat and admired the scenery for a while from a commanding viewpoint, sheltered by the remains of a mile castle from a sudden squall that blew in. This gave us the perfect excuse that as the weather was turning perhaps it would be more sensible to return to Housesteads. As the wind and rain blew into my face I reflected that in bad weather this would have been a grim posting indeed. Suddenly the dramatic Northumbrian scenery had taken on a forbidding cast. It seemed that an army of rampaging Picts may come hollering out of the forested hills at any moment to assail us. Returning to the car we drove on to Chesters which is situated beside a fast flowing stretch of the River Tyne. The remains here were more substantial than those of Housesteads, in particular those of the bath house, whose layout of furnaces, vents and hypocausts was still readily discernible. As we sat in what would once have been the caldarium making jokes about sodomy in the legions I experienced a realisation that Britain had once belonged within the Roman Empire. Its foundations were here beneath our feet and Rome’s story was our story too. There had been more to the Roman occupation of Britain than battles with blue-faced savages; the incongruity of a Roman bath house beside an English river showed that the empire had tried to put down roots here. As the all too British weather persisted in pouring down rain upon us, I could understand entirely the need for the Romans to have the comforts of home.
  Boys on a Roman adventure at Hadrian's Wall 2009

The Oseburg Ship

It lay in boggy ground for a millennium before it saw the light of day once more. The burial ship of a  Ninth Century Norse queen, it stands in the austere and light filled space of the church-like Viking Ship Museum in Oslo. I had the museum almost to myself on a quiet weekday morning and was able to walk around it undisturbed. The ship is in incredible condition. The elegant carved prow looked as if it could have been finished the day before. The lines of the ship are beautiful and graceful and from every angle it is a superb example of Viking ship building prowess. Of course this ship with its shallow draft was only intended for coastal and inland use in calm waters but it is nevertheless a very close relative of the longships that terrorised the coastal settlements of Europe from Ireland to Italy and struck out for new lands during the Viking period. Seeing such a thing, in such a condition, which dates from the Viking age, suddenly filled me with an incredible sense of touching history. In fact, I just had to lay my fingers upon the cold hard oak of her prow, just for a moment. Just to make sure she was real.

The walls of Jodhpur
Massive. That's the only word to describe the walls of Mehrangarh Fort which towers over the city of Jodhpur. It is hard to know where the natural rock ends and the walls begin.They appear utterly unassailable. And the scars of cannonballs that ricocheted from their surface leaving barely a dent is testament to that. Of all the great castles and forts I have seen, this is the mightiest. To stand at the foot of the walls and look up is to be in awe at the feat of its construction and it looks like something out of a fantasy novel, something built by giants. Through seven gates you make your way up the steep sloping road that leads eventually to the palace at the top. The delicacy of its construction is a remarkable contrast to the mighty outer defences. Here the imposing power of the Mughals gives way to grandeur and the halls are filled with a magnificent collection of ornate howdahs and palanquins from the hey day of the pomp-loving rulers. On the way back down I paused to see preserved on the wall the hand prints of the wives of the last independent ruler of Jodhpur, who committed sati in defiance of a British ruling which had outlawed the practice. It is a potent symbol of the passing of one empire and the rise of another.

Mehrangarh Fort Jodhpur 2001
The tomb of Ramses VI

Down you go. Down and down and down, leaving the bright sunlight of the Valley of the Kings behind and descending into the earth. It is steep and the wooden ramp that covers the floor of the passage is slippery. On either side the painted walls are rich with scenes from the daily life and afterlife of the Ancient Egyptians. There are magical texts and visions of the underworld and of the judgement of souls. Osiris sits in judgement and Thoth writes down the verdict as the heart is weighed against the feather of truth. The terrible hippo bodied, crocodile headed Ebeb waits to devour the heart of the unworthy. Down you go. The passage reaches a chamber, kinks and then continues down. There at the bottom is a vast black granite sarcophagus in the image of the dead Ramses, cracked asunder across the middle of the chest. Its occupant is long since gone, his body removed to spare him from the depredations of the looters who had already systematically emptied his tomb of its treasures. The eyes of the pharaoh bore into you, demanding to know what you are doing in his resting place that was supposed to have been sealed for all eternity. Having stood in respectful silence before his empty tomb, you head back towards the light with a sense of profound relief.

From the Colosseum to the Forum

My second visit to Rome in 2006 was a completely different and infinitely richer experience from my first a decade earlier. Having spent the three years before devouring books on ancient and classical history I was able to appreciate the city's monuments in a way that I could not possibly have  done as a high spirited nineteen year old on a big adventure. Now I knew the history, the second visit was in fact a much bigger adventure. It was a crisp, bright January day as we elbowed our way onto the bustling metro system and emerged several stops later directly in the shadow of the Colosseum. It loomed above me as I ascended the staircase from the metro, suddenly filling the patch of blue sky that had been visible through the exit to street level with a vision of soaring arches. It literally took my breath away and as I emerged blinking into the sunlight, I stood and stared and was nearly flattened by a man on a bicycle. We circled Vespasian’s masterpiece and then entered and made our way to the highest vantage point which looked down into the labyrinthine system of passages and rooms that had in the building’s heyday been concealed beneath the arena floor. There gladiators had awaited their fate and wild beasts had been goaded to fury before being released. Leaving the Colosseum to provide a number of photogenic backdrops behind us as we progressed along the cobbled path which leads up to the Arch of Titus and thence to the forum, we carried on our way.

A lovely day in Rome
The Arch of Titus made a deep impression upon me as I gazed at the relief carved upon its inner surface which depicted the sack of Jerusalem in a snapshot from history, capturing the moment as the victorious legionaries carried away the seven branched candlestick from the temple as loot. As I looked upon it I recalled the vivid description of the city’s fall by Josephus whose work I had recently finished reading. A picture as they say, tells a thousand words. Walking through the forum I recalled the events that had taken place here and enjoyed the idea that the very stones beneath my feet had been walked upon by all the great protagonists of Roman history. Of all the structures in the Forum the most evocative has to be the Senate House, the surviving incarnation of which was constructed in the time of Diocletian. It was incredible to think that in the days of the Republic, the fate of so much of the world had been decided from so small and simple a building, or at least one much like it. Ascending the Capitol  and looking back on that famous view I felt a tremendous sense of satisfaction. I had walked in the footsteps of Caesar and that was a special moment for me.
The Kremlin

When I was a boy in the 80's it was not exactly the height of the cold war but it was still going strong. The Berlin Wall was firmly in place and on a daily basis people would jokingly use fatalistic phrases about when the button would be pushed and the bomb would drop. 'Never mind, we could all be dead tomorrow!' World War Three remained a distinct possibility and the USSR was the enemy. I could not have imagined that Russia would be a country I would ever visit. It was the alien other.
But then of course the wall came down and everything changed. In February 2001 I took a fantastic train journey from London via Warsaw and Minsk to Moscow. The snow was deep and the air was so cold that when I took my gloves off to light a cigarette, it froze to my fingers. Walking through the gate in those huge red walls and into the Kremlin I just couldn't believe that I was there, that they had let me in. That it was February and there were virtually no tourists in Moscow made it all the more atmospheric. A road led past some Soviet era administrative buildings towards the three beautiful white cathedrals of the Assumption, Ascension and Archangel with their shining gold domes. As I walked along, at any moment I expected to be detained by a couple of KGB agents in trench coats, told that my papers were not in order and marched away for interrogation. When I accidentally stepped over a painted white line marking the limit of where tourists could go, an AK47 toting conscript in a grey greatcoat and black fur hat blew a whistle at me and shouted. I nearly shit myself, I don't mind admitting. The interior of the Kremlin cathedrals was incredible, filled with the glint of gold from countless icons. I saw Ivan the Terrible's throne, the biggest canon ever made and the biggest bell ever cast, both upon that despot's orders. I idly wondered if they had every tried ringing the bell and firing the canon at the same time to see which was loudest. But the best thing of all was just being there, in the Kremlin of all places. And they let me out again!

To gain access to the Kremlin I had to disguise myself
And now I've completed the list I can't believe the things I have left off of it. How have I not included Petra, or Palenque or the Pyramids or for that matter Angkor Wat? I think I'll have to do another list.

Attack of the Yellow Teapot

If Ron Howard was seeking to make a sequel to the magnificent Rush set during the 1977 season, perhaps he could go with the title above. Admittedly, the car dubbed by Ken Tyrrell as the Yellow Teapot, the Renault RS01, did not trouble the score sheets in that year, but it was the herald of a new era. In deciding to exploit the rule that allowed teams to enter either a three litre normally aspirated engine or a 1.5 litre turbocharged engine, the fledgling Renault team would ultimately steer Formula One in a new direction by being the first constructor to opt for the latter. Today with turbochargers commonplace on road cars and set to make a return in F1 this year, it is hard to grasp what a radical departure this was. At the time turbocharging was a technology restricted to aircraft engines and diesel engines for trucks.

A500 'Phantom' test car 1976 In truth the conservative and risk averse powers that be at Renault were dragged somewhat reluctantly into F1. The development of the turbo engine had been run as an under-the-radar R&D project, the result of fruitful collaboration between chassis manufacturer Alpine, Renault's performance engine subsidiary Gordini and the fuel giant Elf who initially bankrolled the engine development. Not until the engine developed under the ingenious gaze of Bernard Dudot was showing promise was the turbo concept's potential to take Renault into Formula One or to victory in the Le Mans 24hrs revealed to the board. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall in that meeting.

No doubt after some Gallic grumbling and prevarication, the board committed to the project and Renault Sport was created under the direction of former racer and future team owner Gerard Larrousse. It was initially envisaged that Renault would enter Formula One as a supplier to the Tyrrell team, which had it come to fruition would have seen the first turbo engine in the back of the legendary P34 six wheeler, as if that wasn't radical enough already.
As it turned out Tyrrell was unconvinced by the potential of turbos and so Renault committed to going it alone with their own car.

Testing began in earnest in March 1976 with the 1.5L V6 turbo engine installed in the A500 Alpine test chassis known as the Phantom, pictured top. Early testing was dogged by problems as engineer and racer Jean Pierre Jabouille, the perfect man for the job, wrestled the car around Michelin's private test track, struggling with the turbo lag, the all-or-nothing power delivery of the engine and unforgiving Michelin radial tyres. These were another brand new innovation for F1 that Renault would introduce in the following season. Throughout 1976 the team continued to develop the car, targeting participation in the following year's championship with a single car for Jabouille.

Jabouille battles with Patrese's Shadow at the '77 Dutch GP
The Renault RS01 made its first appearance at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. The race saw champion James Hunt take his first of three wins in the season but poor reliability ruined his chances of retaining his title and instead the more consistent Lauda took his second title for Ferrari, seeing off the challenges of Scheckter and Andretti.

At Silverstone Jabouille qualified a lowly 21st and managed just sixteen laps before the car expired in a cloud of steam. This would become the trademark of the RS01 as it failed to finish all seven of the races that it entered in that year, prompting Tyrrell to christen it the Yellow Teapot, no doubt congratulating himself on having stuck with conventional wisdom at least where engines were concerned. When it was running, the car was hamstrung by turbo lag on twisty circuits and then left struggling for grip as the Michelin tyres gave out, much to Jabouille's frustration.

Nevertheless Renault had learned much in their first season and in 1978 the RS01 returned with a new twin turbo configuration to help overcome the lag problem. A second car was now entered for some races with Rene Arnoux lining up alongside Jabouille. The advantages of turbocharging were obvious with the Renault 1.5L developing 50bhp more than the three litre normally aspirated engines of its rivals. Whilst still at a disadvantage in twisty sections with the lag issue not entirely resolved, at high altitude circuits the Renault was expected to enjoy a significant advantage over its rivals, whose engines would lose performance at altitude whilst the turbo, with its origins in aviation for just this purpose, would allow the Renault engine to maintain its performance. At the South African Grand Prix at Kyalami, Jabouille proved the point by qualifying in sixth, the best performance yet for the Renault. Unfortunately the car lasted just 38 laps before retiring with engine failure. Reliability remained abysmal throughout 1978 with Jabouille finishing just four times in fourteen starts. Jabouille would finally score the first points for Renault with a fourth place finish at the US Grand Prix. The 1978 season was dominated by aerodynamics with the 'ground effect' Lotuses of Andretti and Peterson winning 8 of the 16 races. Turbos still had a way to go to prove their worth.

  Arnoux and Villeneuve dice for 2nd at the 79 French GP From a reliability point of view the 1979 season was no better with Jabouille and Arnoux managing just 8 finishes from 30 starts. Nevertheless they were far more competitive. Jabouille put the RS01 on pole at the third race in South Africa only to retire after 47 laps with engine failure. At the Monaco Grand Prix Renault debuted the new ground effect RS10 and from here on in they would be front runners if not frequent finishers. At the French Grand Prix at Dijon, another high altitude track, the Renaults locked out the front row. Other teams and manufacturers took note. In the race Jabouille saw off the challenge of Gilles Villeneuve's flat 12 Ferrari to take victory, with Arnoux finishing third after a scrap with Villeneuve in the closing stages which has passed into legend.
The Renaults continued to be dogged by poor reliability through the rest of the season but their pace was beyond question. In the remaining 7 races of the season the Renault drivers took two poles apiece, with podium finishes for Arnoux in the British and US Grands Prix. Three more wins would follow in 1980, although the season was marred by an effectively career ending accident for Jabouille at the penultimate race of the season in Canada. He would return briefly for Ligier in the following season but only managed two races before retiring for good. By now the potential of the turbo was becoming clear with other manufacturers developing their own turbo engines. Ferrari would be the first to introduce a turbo engine in 1981 with BMW, Honda and Porsche following their lead.
 By 1983 everyone was at it. Michele Alboretto's win in the '83 US Grand Prix for Tyrrell would be the last victory for a normally aspirated engine in Formula One until Turbos were banned at the end of 1988. Renault just missed out on the Formula One driver's title in 1983 with Alain Prost losing out to Nelson Piquet in the BMW powered Brabham by just two points, ironically suffering a turbo failure in the last race of the season. The acrimonious departure of Prost at the end of 1983 saw the fortunes of Renault slump. Renault continued in Formula One until the end of the 1985 season before wrapping up the works team due to financial pressures. Ultimately their investment did not deliver on its promise but they had revolutionised the sport, ushering in the era of the 1000bhp monsters that bestrode the 80's. The yellow teapot deserves a special place in F1 history, even though it never finished a race.

Derek Warwick hustles the RS40 around at the '84 US GP

Everything you could want to know about the development of the Renault turbo
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=646PVGF2Bd8C&pg=PA78&lpg=PA78&dq=renault+rs01+1977&source=bl&ots=eMyTBZJRb2&sig=uCjbj9NgAH0sOs9v6pLV_nJTlsw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=T0kHU8GCEqS07QafnYHQAw&ved=0CIQBEOgBMAs#v=onepage&q=renault%20rs01%201977&f=false1979 French GP - final laps - You Tube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MV7Rqoksio

You may also enjoy - Rudolf Caracciola - The Original Meister
http://slingsandarrowsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/rudolf-caracciola-original-meister.html

Mr and Mrs Jones and the Temple of Doom

Looking out of the aircraft window as the landscape of Cambodia passed beneath us, I wondered to myself, as I surveyed an unending vista of dense forest punctuated by lakes and rice fields, with the only sign of human civilisation being the occasional cluster of houseboats on the water, if there had ever been an unlikelier setting for a great empire.
Nevertheless, unlikely as it seemed, as the plane made its descent towards Siem Reap airport I was looking down on the heartland of the Khmer Empire which had dominated a sizeable chunk of Indochina for much of the Middle Ages.

Angkor Wat
It was the remains of the ancient capital of this empire, Angkor, that we had come to see. It is a site that draws visitors in their hundreds of thousands and like me most of them doubtless share the incredulity of the man whose diaries captured the popular western imagination with his description of their magnificence. Henri Mouhot, an accomplished young linguist, naturalist and pioneering photographer struck out in 1859 to explore the interior of Indochina, discovering a new species of beetle in the process. The interior of the region was a virtual blank on European maps at the time, known only to a few intrepid missionaries. With backing from the Royal Geographical Society Mouhot left his English wife and home in Jersey for an adventure from which he would not return, dying from malaria in Laos in 1861 aged just 35. His diaries, handed to the French consul in Bangkok by Mouhot's servants who had buried him beside the Mekong river, were eventually published and the world learned the name of Angkor.

In the province still bearing the name of Angkor, which is situated eastward of the great lake Tonle Sap...there are...ruins of such grandeur, remains of structures which must have been raised at such an immense cost of labour, that, at the first view, one is filled with profound admiration, and cannot but ask what has become of this powerful race, so civilised, so enlightened, the authors of these gigantic works.

Henri Mouhot 1826-1861
So who indeed were the creators of these works that so impressed Mouhot? The empire of Khmer was brought into being through the unification of a number of disparate states under the rule of one Jayavarman II, a Khmer prince who had returned from Java. It is unclear whether the Java referred to is the island of Java, at that time the pre-eminent power of South East Asia, where he had perhaps spent time as a political hostage, or a small kingdom in the Malay peninsula by the same name, which perhaps seems more likely. Jayavarman waged a campaign of conquest and unification and in 802 AD, just as Charlemagne was consolidating his position as Holy Roman Emperor in western Europe, Jayavarman was acclaimed upon the sacred mountain of Phnom Kulen as God King. He ruled over a kingdom which comprised much of modern Cambodia and extended into what is now Thailand and Laos.

Jayavarman established his capital at Roulos to the north of the great Tonle Sap lake, where some temples still stand which date to his reign or at least that of his immediate successors. His great-grandson Yasovarman I, who came to the throne in 889 moved the capital to Angkor, which would remain the heart of the empire throughout its golden age. Following a period of disunity in the Eleventh Century in which the capital briefly moved to Kho Ker to the north, the kings of Angkor embarked on increasingly lavish projects of construction.

Baphouon temple commenced by Suryavarman I
Angkor would in time grow to be a truly vast city, covering an area equivalent to modern day Los Angeles, albeit with a far lower population density. It was made possible by excellent water management. A huge network of canals and reservoirs known as barays, the largest of which was commenced in the reign of Suryavarman I (1010-1050) and is five miles long, allowed the Khmer to cope with the extremes of monsoon and dry season between which the water table rose and fell by five metres. Large reserves of fresh water allowed the Khmer to cultivate sufficient rice to feed their burgeoning urban population and supply large forces of workers and soldiers as they went about the business of construction and conquest. The kings of the Khmer were great road builders too, indeed, roads and watercourses often developed side by side, with roads established atop the earth embankments raised to channel and contain the waters. Six principle roads raised on earth banks led out from Angkor like the spokes of a wheel, at their greatest extent covering 1000km between them. Stone bridges were constructed to span rivers and shrines which served as regular rest stops were established every half day's journey. As well as sourcing the essentials of civilisation such as salt, copper and tin from the neighbouring kingdoms of the region, the Khmer were engaged in long distance trade with India and China and Tang Dynasty ceramics have been found in Angkor.

Suryavarman II from relief at Angkor Wat
In 1113 there came to the throne a usurper who took the name of Suryavarman II. Having either murdered his uncle Dharanindravarman I or possibly slain him personally in battle and seen off the challenge of a rival, Suryavarman set out to legitimise his reign through a grand construction project. The temple of Angkor Wat was Suryavarman's signature project and may have served as his mortuary temple. The temple was based on an existing Khmer blueprint of three terraces built one atop the other with the central sanctuary comprising five towers, symbolising the sacred Mt Meru of Hindu belief. It is unusually west-facing in accordance with its dedication to Vishnu.

Building Angkor Wat was a huge undertaking taking 300,000 workers an estimated 35 years to construct. Much of the underlying structure of the temple is built from laterite; blocks of iron rich soil left to harden in the sun which were easy to cut and light to move. Nevertheless the temple still required five million tons of sandstone for its outer walls and towers and this was brought from the quarry at Mt Kulen some thirty miles away. A 21 mile long canal was dug to facilitate the movement of sandstone blocks to the site. Angkor Wat is surrounded by a moat 190 metres wide, the digging of which represented a major challenge in itself. The moat serves to maintain the water level in the ground under the temple, preventing the collapse the buildings which would inevitably occur over centuries as the water table rose and fell dramatically beneath it.

 Army of Suryavarman II from relief at Angkor Wat Suryavarman was a conqueror as well as a builder and extended Khmer dominions further into Thailand, Laos and Malaysia as well as waging a series of wars against the kingdoms of Champa and Dai Viet in today's Vietnam. Suryavarman is known to have made diplomatic overtures to the Chinese and accepted vassal status in return for a free hand in Vietnam.

Suryavarman's army is depicted in bas-relief on the southern gallery of Angkor Wat in beautiful detail, marching in procession, as their king and his court look on. The generals ride upon war elephants whilst the soldiers march in neat ranks and the cavalry prance about, with details of weapons and equipment beautifully clear. The rest of the galleries feature beautifully executed scenes from Hindu mythology and afterlife. For myself, spectacular as the temple itself is, the reliefs were the greatest treasure, offering as they do a window into the world of the people who built them. Their accuracy is attested by the account of Zhou Daguan, a Chinese diplomat sent by the Yuan Dynasty to the Khmer court in 1296 and who witnessed a parade just such as this.

 Army of Suryavarman II from relief at Angkor Wat Suryavarman may have presided over unprecedented conquests but trouble was in store as the Cham of South Vietnam, whose capital he had sacked in 1144, plotted their revenge. In 1177 a Cham fleet sailed up the Mekong onto Tonle Sap lake and carried out an amphibious assault on Angkor. Surprise and defeat were total and the city was overrun and sacked in turn. Salvation came in the form of the man who would be crowned Jayavarman VII, regarded as the greatest Khmer ruler. Having turned the tables on the Cham and sent them to the bottom of Tonle Sap or fleeing back to Champa, Jayavarman, who was crowned in 1181, presided over the establishment of Buddhism as the state religion. The new king, in accordance with his beliefs, devoted his efforts at first to the wellbeing of the state and people. Under his rule the road system and waterways reached their greatest extent. He built over one hundred hospitals and rest houses. He would doubtless be pleased to see the prosperity brought to the people of Siem Reap today by the presence of the temples and accompanying tourist trade as he serves them still. Having served his people well, Jayavarman then turned his attention to his great project of the temple of Bayon.    The enigmatic faces of Bayon Approaching Bayon, the first impression is of a great jumbled mountain of stone. Only as you proceed inside does the structure reveal itself as the standard three terrace plan. The upper terrace is circular and is decorated with 54 towers in various states of repair. Two hundred enigmatic faces look out in all directions, giving one the distinct impression of being watched. They take the form of the bodhisattva of compassion but are thought at the same time to resemble Jayavarman's own features. Here then is the compassionate ruler watching over his people, whilst leaving them in no doubt as to his omnipotence. The lower galley of Bayon too is decorated with bas reliefs although they have not survived as well as those at Angkor Wat. One shows a battle on the lake, presumably the victory over the Cham. In 1203 the capital of the Cham was once again sacked by Jayavarman's troops. Under Jayavarman the Khmer empire reached its greatest extent and the height of its power and prosperity. He died in 1219. If Bayon endures as a symbol of the power of the Khmer Empire, the temple of Ta Phrom, which Jayavarman raised as a mortuary temple for his mother, has become the ultimate symbol of its decline as it is prised apart stone by stone by the irresistible fingers of the jungle. It served as the backdrop for Tomb Raider.  Ta Phrom - built by Jayavarman VII, made famous by Angelina Jolie Under the rule of Jayavarman's son Indravarman II, who welcomed Zhou Daguan to Angkor, the decline of the empire began. The frontiers began to be pushed back as territory conquered under Suryavarman and Jayavarman was abandoned. The kingdom of Khmer would neverthess survive for another two centuries. In the end a combination of factors spelled the end of the kingdom but the most significant seems to have been climatic. A prolonged drought in the early part of the 15th Century proved fatal to this empire built on the management of water. Extensive deforestation for  timber and land clearance had also played a significant part. Soil washed from the deforested mountain slopes had resulted in the silting up of the canals and barays until the system could no longer support the urban population and the Khmer rulers could no longer keep on top of the losing battle of maintaining the waterways. The final blow came from the immerging power of the Thai, who had migrated southward to claim the land that now bears their name. Initially vassals of the Khmer, in the 14th century they had shaken off the yoke. The army of the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya conquered Angkor in 1431. The Khmer rulers fled south, establishing a new capital at Phnom Penn, leaving their great city to be consumed by the merciless jungle. Angkor Wat was never forgotten or entirely abandoned however and was maintained as a temple by generations of Buddhist monks until a curious European bug collector emerged from the jungle and was awestruck by its magnificence. It has not lost its power.  Angkor Wat   Henri Mouhothttp://rooneyarchive.net/articles/mouhot/mouhot.htm Mouhot on Angkor Wathttps://archive.org/stream/travelsincentral01mouh#page/n299/mode/2up
Rise of the Khmer Empirehttp://www.npm.gov.tw/exh101/archaeology/en/ch02.html Building Angkor Wathttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/cambodia/9638352/Canals-may-have-sped-up-building-of-wonder-of-the-world-Angkor-Wat.html
Decline of the Khmer Empirehttp://archaeology.about.com/od/medieval/qt/Collapse-Of-Angkor.htmZhou Daguanhttp://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/passing-notes-157400693/?all


In the sky with diamonds – observing the Pleiades

Returning home at midnight the other week to find beautifully clear skies I braved the freezing night air and got out the trusty  ‘scope. Wrapped in two fleeces and wearing a woolly hat which is slightly too small and makes me look like I might feature in Last of the Summer Wine, I cranked it skywards and directed my gaze towards the twinkling cluster of the Pleiades. As my view filled with bright young stars, burning with blue fire and swathed in ghostly nebulosity I reflected that they are perhaps the prettiest sight in the heavens and that if Lucy is indeed in the sky with diamonds, then she must live in the Pleiades. I was unsurprised to learn that the Pleiades have been regarded as a significant feature of the heavens from the earliest times but this story nevertheless begins in an astonishing place, on a German hilltop in approximately 1700 BC.In 1999 two treasure seekers illegally unearthed an extraordinary object on the Bronze Age site of Mittelberg in the Ziegelroda Forest in Saxony. Being rascals, the pair sold the artefact, which has come to be known as the Nebra Sky Disk, on the black market. Three years later it was recovered along with the two splendid Bronze Age swords that had been found alongside it and its discoverers were jailed for looting. The Nebra Sky DiskThe shield-like object is crafted from bronze and decorated with gold and depicts a starry firmament which features, it is believed, images of the sun and moon, the seven clustered stars of the Pleiades and the planets Venus, Mars and Mercury. On the sides of the disk, two golden bows, of which only one remains attached, corresponded to the horizon at an angle of 82 degrees and are believed to mark the rising and setting positions of the sun at the summer and winter solstices. The disk also depicts what is believed to be an image of a ‘solar boat’ similar to that featured in Ancient Egyptian belief which carries the sun through the hours of darkness.Through analysis of lead isotopes in the bronze and of the formation of malachite in the patina on the surface of the disk, the object has been dated to between 2100 and 1700 BC. The arrangement of sun and moon, Pleiades and planets furthermore corresponds to their alignment during an eclipse of the sun which would have taken place on April 16th 1699 BC, as it would have appeared from the latitude of Mittelberg. So what we have in the Nebra Sky Disk is nothing less than a snapshot of the sky at a moment in distant history recorded for posterity by people whose names we will never know and for reasons we can only guess at.

The Sky Disk was originally thought to be a calendar due to the coincidence of the rising and setting of the Pleiades with the key times for sowing and reaping during the agricultural year. The idea is discredited however by the absence of evidence for an agrarian society in the forests of Bronze Age Germany.

Bust of Hesiod - British Museum
In Ancient Greece, on the other hand, the Pleiades enjoyed just this significance as is made clear in Hesiod’s Works and Days, a poem filled with practical advice set down in approximately 700 BC.

When the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, are rising begin your harvest, and your ploughing when they are going to set. Forty nights and days they are hidden and appear again as the year moves round, when first you sharpen your sickle. This is the law of the plains, and of those who live near the sea, and who inhabit rich country, the glens and dingles far from the tossing sea. Strip to sow and strip to plough and strip to reap, if you wish to get in all Demeter's fruits in due season, and that each kind may grow in its season. 
The rising of the Pleiades also marked the beginning of the sailing season, when ships could put to sea in expectation of good conditions and not fear storms and shipwreck. Once the Pleiades had set, sailors set out at their peril.
But if desire for uncomfortable sea-faring seize you; when the Pleiades plunge into the misty sea to escape Orion's rude strength, then truly gales of all kinds rage. Then keep ships no longer on the sparkling sea, but bethink you to till the land as I bid you. Haul up your ship upon the land and pack it closely with stones all round to keep off the power of the winds which blow damply, and draw out the bilge-plug so that the rain of heaven may not rot it. 
 In 1891 Victorian architect, keen amateur astronomer and man-with-shed Francis Penrose (pictured above) declared his belief that the Parthenon was aligned with the rising of the Pleiades. Penrose dedicated himself to the painstaking measurement of the Parthenon and was the first to discern the architectural trick of entasis deployed in the structure; the almost imperceptible bulging of the columns towards the base which serves to make them appear perfectly straight to the observer. That the great seafaring city of Athens should have chosen to align its greatest monument with the rising of the asterism that signalled the return of fair winds makes much sense, although Penrose’s theory is not universally accepted.

In myth the Pleiades were the daughters of Atlas; seven sisters transformed into stars, pursued endlessly through the heavens by the huntsman Orion. Seven sisters are named; Electra, Merope, Maia, Taygete, Alcyone, Celaeno and Sterope, but only six stars are now visible to the naked eye. This gives rise to the theory of the ‘lost Pleiad’; (imaginatively depicted left by William Bouguereau) a star which in antiquity was bright enough to be seen but which subsequently reduced in brightness. It is uncertain which individual stars in the Pleiades the ancients applied the names above to, so this may have been different from the modern application. Mythology suggests a couple of candidates for the ancient name of the lost Pleiad.  Electra is said to have covered her face in mourning at the fate of Troy whilst Merope was the only Pleiad to wed a mortal; Sisyphus, for which she was shunned by her sisters. The most likely star to be the missing Pleiad is the rapidly rotating star known today as Pleione; the mother of the seven. Pleione exhibits considerable variability in its brightness over time and thus may have been visible back in the days of Hesiod. 
In the Second Century BC the philosopher Hipparchus of Nicaea, (imagined right by Raphael) who had toyed with the idea of a heliocentric universe a millennium and more before Copernicus before dismissing it in accordance with the ancient belief that the orbits of heavenly bodies must be perfectly circular, set out the earliest known catalogue of the positions of the stars in the western world. In 1718 Edmund Halley revisited Hipparchus’ observations and discovered that a number of stars had shifted in their positions relative to the solar system as they moved through space. This phenomenon, known as ‘proper motion’ was subsequently enthusiastically studied.  In 1846 the German astronomer Johann von Maedler, (above) best known for creating the first accurate map of the moon, concluded that as the stars of the Pleiades showed no discernible proper motion relative to each other, they must constitute an unmoving central point around which all the other stars turned and breathlessly posited the star Alcyoneas the very centre of the universe!
Well perhaps they are not quite that significant but the Pleiades continue to intrigue and fascinate and remain a telescopic treat.  Pleiades photographed by Isaac Roberts 1888 
The Pleiades in mythology
http://www.scribd.com/doc/44487845/Amanda-Laouli-The-Greek-Myth-of-Pleiades-in-the-Archaeology-of-Natural-Disasters-Decoding-Dating-and-Environmental-Interpretation-Mediterranean-ArThe Nebra Sky Disk
http://www.megaliths.net/nebraskydisk.pdfThe Pleiades have their own site!
http://www.pleiade.org/pleiades_03.htmlFrancis Penrose and the Parthenon
http://www.metrum.org/key/athens/francis.htmHesiod - Works and Days full text
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hesiod/works.htmCheck out more astronomy posts on Slings and Arrowshttp://slingsandarrowsblog.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/astronomy 

Hunting the Hunter – Observing Orion

Continuing my efforts to grasp with my feeble mind the things that incredibly clever people have worked out using only a few basic instruments, in order to bring more meaning to my own blundering observations of the heavens, I now turn my attention to the constellation of Orion.   Orion Nebula as drawn by Charles Messier 1771 The great hunter currently bestrides the firmament just above the shed roof, bow in hand; one of  the most instantly recognisable features of the winter sky. As such it has always enjoyed a special significance in every culture that has pondered the stars and sought to discern their own destiny in those distant, glimmering points of light.
In Ancient Egypt the constellation of Orion was associated with Osiris; the resurrected lord of the underworld. Within the Great Pyramid of Khufu, two ‘star shafts’ are angled upwards from the main burial chamber leading to the outside of the pyramid. The southern shaft is aligned with the centre of the constellation of Orion, which is associated with Osiris, at the same time as the northern shaft is aligned with Alpha Draconis; the star which at the time that the pyramids were constructed would have constituted the celestial pole. It is perhaps coincidental but the function of these shafts may have been to allow the spirit of the dead pharaoh to set out on and return from its celestial journeys.
 For the Maya too the constellation of Orion represented a major deity; Hunhunahpo, the Great Father, who is sacrificed following a celestial ball game and whose blood fertilises the earth. Like Osiris the myth of Hunhanahpo is bound up with the cycle of sowing and reaping and sowing anew; of life and death and resurrection. The Maya were keen observers of the heavens with structures at various Mayan sites tentatively identified as observatories. Within the constellation of Orion the Maya traced a triangle between the two stars which form  the ‘feet’ Rigel and Saiph and the first star of the belt Alnitak. This triangle was described as the celestial hearth and at its centre the Maya identified a feature that they referred to as the smoke of the hearth; making them the first people to record an observation of the Orion Nebula.  The Observatory at Tulum as drawn by Frederick Catherwood 1844  The Mayan civilisation was long fallen into ruin by the time that the first European observer recorded a sighting of the Orion Nebula. Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc was the archetypal enlightenment gentleman amateur scholar with a fascination for everything from the fossils beneath the earth to the stars in the heavens. His sprawling country home near Toulon featured an enormous garden filled with exotic plants and a menagerie of animals. By the end of his life he had amassed a correspondence of over ten thousand letters with around five hundred intellectuals of his day from all over Europe. Inspired by the exploits of Galileo and keen to see for himself the moons of Jupiter described in Sidereus Nuncius, De Peiresc had an observatory constructed and obtained one of the new fangled telescopes. In 1610 De Peiresc made a discovery of his own when he beheld through his new telescope the Orion Nebula. Indeed he coined the term ‘nebula’ to describe the cloudy phenomenon.
Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc   Having established himself as an astronomer of note De Peiresc then turned his attention to one of the vexing problems of the age; the accurate calculation of longitude. Seizing upon the opportunity of a lunar eclipse in 1635, De Peiresc on his own initiative dispatched agents to Rome, Cairo and Aleppo in order to record simultaneous observations of the event. From his resulting calculations De Peiresc was able to provide a revised estimate of the length of the Mediterranean, reducing the previous figure by an astonishing 1000km, not that they had kilometres back then! In the following year he produced the first recorded map of the surface of the moon.
The nebula that De Peiresc had discovered attracted the fascination of other notable astronomers. Christiaan Huygens produced a diagram of the nebula in 1656 and it came to the attention of the great cataloguer of nebulous objects Charles Messier in 1769. Messier's drawing of the nebula, which he designated M42, appears at the top of the post. Messier was primarily concerned with the search for comets and his cataloguing of other deep sky objects was intended to assist in this enterprise. The question remained however; just what were these nebulae made of? In 1814 the invention of the spectroscope by the expert lens maker Joseph von Fraunhofer presented the means to investigate the nature of nebulae.
Joseph von Fraunhofer demonstrates the spectroscope Combining the spectroscope with a telescope allowed the emission spectra; that is the emission of light by hot gasses at specific wavelengths corresponding to their chemical composition, of various celestial bodies to be studied. In 1865 English astronomer William Huggins, working alongside his wife Margaret, used this method to study the Orion nebula and declared it to be composed of ‘luminous gas'. Huggins was puzzled by the emission spectra that he obtained from his studies of nebulae as some of the emission lines did not correspond to any known element. He therefore proposed the existence of an entirely new one – Nebulium. Sadly it was later shown that the mysterious spectra corresponded to doubly ionised oxygen and that nebulas are not made of nebulium. Sometimes the truth can be so disappointing. In the course of his studies Huggins also observed the phenomenon of ‘doppler shift’ in the spectral lines of celestial bodies either towards the red or blue end of the spectrum depending on whether they were moving closer to or further away from the earth, which would later be seized upon as evidence of the fact that the universe was expanding.
Sir William Huggins                 The constellation of Orion also boasts another notable feature in the red giant star Betelgeuse. This behemoth of a star became in 1920 the first star, other than the sun, to have its size successfully determined. Now maths was never my strongpoint and years of reliance on spread sheets and calculators have caused my mathematical ability to regress to the point that I would probably fail a maths test for ten year olds, so I am not going to get into this too much but suffice to say some very clever chaps worked it all out.
                The measurement was achieved through the use of an interferometer; a device which allows a light source to be split into separate beams and then re-converged in a single image. This allowed the observers to overcome the spurious interference which blurred and distorted the image of the star in the telescope.
Hooker Telescope with Michelson interferometer 1920 Making use of our old friend the Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory California, Albert Michelson and Francis Pease mounted a twenty foot wide beam onto the front of the telescope upon which four six inch mirrors were arranged; two in front of the aperture angled at 45 degrees and two placed parallel opposite them at either end of beam. By observing Betelgeuse through the telescope and adjusting the distance between the two outlying mirrors until the image generated was free of interference, Michelson and Pease were able to accurately measure the angular diameter of its photosphere. From this, knowing its distance from the earth, they were able to determine its actual size at some 240 million miles across. See the links below for a full explanation. To put that in perspective, as the earth is 93 million miles from the sun if Betelgeusewas at the centre of the solar system it would engulf Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars and extend almost to Jupiter. Blimey!
You may also enjoy - Andromeda Risinghttp://slingsandarrowsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/andromeda-rising.html Orion and the Pyramids
http://www.soulsofdistortion.nl/Giza.htmlDe Peiresc
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Nicolas_Claude_Fabri_de_PeirescHuggins
http://cosmology.carnegiescience.edu/timeline/1861Michelson and Pease
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1921PA.....29..189W/0000189.000.html

Murder on Christmas Day!

For anyone seeking an antidote for all that tiresome 'Peace and good will to all men' over the next week look no further. Here is the cheerful Medieval tale of the murder of the Byzantine Emperor Leo V, who was struck down in church on Christmas morning 820 AD. Few crimes have been committed with less regard for the niceties of Christian tradition than this one.

It is an oft repeated lesson of history that those who usurp the royal power often show the way to those who would usurp them in turn. With the overthrow of a dynasty somehow a spell is broken and the crime of regicide loses its awful gravity. So it was with Leo V, who through skulduggery at the Battle of Versinicia in 813, had engineered the downfall of emperor Michael I and thereafter ushered in the second era of iconoclasm. More here on Leo V and iconoclasm
Michael I and Leo V - Madrid Skylitzes The Byzantine chroniclers would have us believe that the events to come were all mapped out long before. Christian though they may have been, the Byzantine writers still liked to look to the touchstone of the pagan past for inspiration. The pages of Plutarch and Livy are filled with purported prophecies foretelling the rise and fall of great men, all of them doubtless safely composed with the benefit of hindsight. In the Byzantine sources, who sought to emulate the style of these ancient writers, in the place of the Pythia or Sibyl we find the holy man. The utterings of these ascetic hermits, we are given to believe, often foretold events to come. It is a contrivance easily enough reconciled with Christianity, for after all, were there not prophets in the Old Testament too?
A story is told by the anonymous continuator of the chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor of how, many years earlier, back in the reign of Nicephorus I, three men accompanied the would-be rebel Bardanes Turkos to seek the advice of just such a hermit as he plotted his revolt. The hermit is said to have advised Bardanes against his rebellion but prophesised that his three companions; Leo, Michael and Thomas would all attain the purple, although Thomas, he warned, would never sit upon the throne. Bardanes’ revolt against Nicephorus failed and he was blinded and stripped of his property just as the old hermit had predicted.
If Leo gave any credence to this prophesy, if indeed such a prophesy there was, then it did not prevent him from elevating the two men who had accompanied him that day to high office under his rule. Michael, known as the Stammerer, was appointed Count of the Excubitors; commander of the imperial bodyguard and one of the most senior military positions within the empire. More than one former incumbent of this position had risen to claim the throne in the past. Thomas, known as the Slav, was appointed to Leo’s former command of the elite regiment of the Foederati.
Michael, not content with his station, soon began plotting to seize the throne for himself but proved to be loose tongued and incautious in company and drunkenly declared his intentions in the hearing of those who would report his words back to the emperor. On Christmas Eve 820,  Michael was arrested and charged with plotting against his friend the emperor. He confessed all. Placed under guard in chains, Michael was left to await a truly terrible fate. He was to be executed by being thrown into the furnace beneath the baths of Zeuxippos the next day. It was the empress Theodosia, we are told, who fatefully interceded for Michael, imploring Leo not to taint his rule with such a savage act on the sacred feast of Christmas day. Leo too was troubled by the judgement he had passed upon his former friend and spent a sleepless night. He agreed to put off the execution until after the Christmas festivities. It would prove a fatal delay. During the night, Michael’s supporters put a conspiracy into action. Under the pretext of the prisoner wishing to confess his sins, a priest was sent for from the city. The servant sent to bring the priest summoned a number of conspirators who, disguised as monks, made their way into the Daphne palace complex and entered the chapel of St Stephen, where the emperor would celebrate a dawn mass.
As the emperor arrived for morning prayers the conspirators drew swords from under their habits and set upon him. In the confusion the priest was struck down instead of the emperor, who grabbed a large cross from the alter and wielded it desperately against his attackers. It was to no avail however and a mighty blow severed Leo’s arm, with his hand still gripping the cross. Falling to the floor, the emperor was beheaded.
  Michael II receiving a delegation from the Bulgars - Madrid Skylitzes Michael was carried from his prison cell and then sat upon the throne to receive oaths of loyalty with the fetters still upon his legs. Not until mid day was he released from his chains in order to make his way to St Sophia where a scandalised but compliant Patriarch placed the crown of empire upon his head.
When news of Michael’s usurpation reached the ears of Thomas the Slav, he gave no heed to any doom-mongering predictions of his ultimate failure that he may have received in the past and immediately raised the standard of revolt in the eastern provinces of the empire. It is difficult to separate the truth of Thomas’ motives from the propaganda put about by himself and his enemies. It seems probable however that Thomas sought to be all things to all people in order to gain for himself the widest possible base of support.
At times Thomas is said to have claimed to be the murdered emperor Constantine VI back from the dead, although surely he would have been too well known a figure in his own right to pull this subterfuge off with any but the most credulous of peasants and it is likely to be a later fabrication. In the east he presented himself as the avenger of the murdered Leo and the champion of the poor and oppressed. In the west, where anti-iconoclast opinion prevailed, his supporters hinted that he would be sympathetic to the cause of the restoration of the icons. Despite the fact that Thomas’ base of Amorion in the Anatolian heartland of the empire was the home town of Michael, supporters flocked to his side. Thomas was by all accounts a charismatic leader and soon almost every Anatolian theme, as Byzantine military provinces were known, had thrown their lot in with the rebel.    Thomas the Slav in Syria - Madrid Skylitzes In 821 Thomas marched into Syria at the head of his considerable forces in a show of strength calculated to impress. Here too, the chameleon-like Thomas presented himself to best effect to gain the friendship of the Caliph Al-Mamun. His emissary to the Caliph was sent with extravagant promises to make. Allowing for propaganda intended to blacken his name as a traitor to the empire, Thomas is variously credited with signing away frontier provinces or perhaps even undertaking to en-fief the entire empire to the Caliphate in exchange for an alliance which would safeguard his rear whilst he turned his forces against Constantinople. The Caliph accepted with alacrity and provided Thomas with a substantial contribution to his war chest. The rebel was even permitted to celebrate his coronation as Emperor of the Romans in the city of Antioch. Al Ma’mun would have been advised to remain sceptical of the bargain. Thomas, after all, was not the first Byzantine rebel commander to promise much and deliver nothing. Leo III had struck a similar bargain a century before. At any rate Thomas’ friendly overtures were well timed for the Caliph had his hands full already with the rebellion of Barbak.  More on Babak's revolt here

With peace secured and having defeated a loyalist army from the Armeniakon Theme, Thomas turned his vast polyglot army which may have been as large as 80,000 men, against Constantinople. The fleets stationed along the eastern shore of the Marmara also declared for Thomas and so he was able to ferry his troops across the straits and lay siege to the land walls at Blacharnae. The defences here proved too strong for the attackers however and the massive catapults stationed on the towers wrecked destruction on every engine of war that Thomas was able to send against them. Just as it had seemed that the resolve of the defenders was weakening and the emperor Michael had appeared upon the walls in person to deliver a heartfelt plea for peace to the besiegers, lulling them into a false sense of security, a sortie launched from the gates fell upon the disorganised rebels and inflicted much slaughter upon them. At sea too Thomas’ forces were bested by the loyalist fleet and many of his ships were destroyed by Greek Fire. The siege dragged on through 822 and the besiegers endured a second miserable winter outside the walls before in the following spring came the fatal blow. From out of the west, falling like a hammer blow upon the rebel’s rear, came the army of Ormortag, son of Krum, who had been unable to resist the lure of easy plunder and come to Michael’s assistance. The Bulgar attack shattered Thomas’ army which withdrew westwards with the emperor’s forces hot on their trail; Michael himself at their head.
  Thomas placed his final hopes of victory in the favourite Byzantine tactic of feigned flight, calculated to draw the imperial forces on in disorganised pursuit before turning upon them. In the event however the morale of Thomas’ army was in tatters. Pretended rout swiftly turned to the real thing as the rebels lost all heart and as Thomas fled for his life, his remaining forces surrendered in their droves. Run to ground in the Thracian city of Arcadiopolis, Thomas and his remaining followers held out through the summer as provisions ran short and at last, in October, all loyalty was exhausted. Handed over to the emperor by his treacherous companions in exchange for clemency, Thomas was flung at Michael’s feet whilst the emperor placed a purple booted foot upon his neck and pronounced a terrible sentence of death. Thomas’ hands and feet were cut off and he was then impaled outside the city. If only he had heeded the words of the hermit.
Thomas besieges Constantinople - Madrid Skylitzes Michael had survived the great challenge to his reign but his remaining years brought little glory as freebooting Arab raiders fell upon imperial territory in the Mediterranean. In 825 Crete was overrun by invaders who had originally fled Andalusia following an unsuccessful rebellion. Having been ousted from Alexandria, these rebels-turned-pirates seized control of the island, founding the settlement of Candia, today known as Heraklion, and thereafter would use it as base to harass Byzantine shipping and launch raids against the coastal settlements of the empire. An expedition sent to the relieve the island ended in dismal failure and the pirates would long remain a thorn in the side of the empire.
Two years later worse was to follow when a disgraced admiral in Sicily by the name of Euphemius provoked the wrath of the governor by eloping with a nun. The penalty for his offence was rhinocopia and rather than be deprived of his nose, Euphemius launched a revolt against imperial power. When his plans began to unravel, Euphemius escaped to North Africa and plotted with the Emir of Kairouan to conquer the island between them. Euphemius would then rule Sicily as the Emir’s vassal. The rebellious admiral then returned to Sicily backed by an Arab invasion force of ten thousand men. Euphemius, dressing himself in imperial regalia and styling himself emperor, came to a sticky end as his forces advanced on Syracuse. Arriving to accept the surrender of the town of Castrogiovanni, Euphemius was approached by a welcoming committee of two young men of the town, who prostrated themselves before him. As he bent his head to bestow a sovereign’s kiss upon the brow of one of the men, Euphemius was summarily beheaded by the other, reflecting perhaps in his last moments on the irony of his fate. The course that he had taken to avoid the loss of his nose had led in the end to the loss of his head. Another usurper had been dispatched but the damage was done. The Arab invaders were not so easily removed and with a firm foothold established in Sicily they would continue to gain ground on the island over the ensuing half century until they made it their own.
 Michael died from dysentery in 829. He was succeeded by his son Theophilus who had ruled alongside him as his co-emperor from the age of seventeen. At twenty six, Theophilus promised to be a vigorous young ruler. He is remembered for many things, not least for being the last of the iconoclast emperors. He is remembered both for his love of justice and his love of pomp and ostentation. Like many an absolute ruler he could be capricious or merciful as the mood took him.
Theophilus condemns the assassins - Madrid Skylitzes Upon his accession Theophilus gave a stark and unmistakable demonstration of his commitment to the rule of law. Summoning the great and the good to appear before him in the great vaulted audience hall of the Magnaura, Theophilus declared that he wished to reward those who had loyally supported his father. He called forth those who had participated in the murder of Leo nine years before and proudly the men stepped forward, eagerly expecting the new emperor  to bestow gifts and honours upon them. Instead Theophilus called upon the Eparch of the city, responsible for maintaining law and order, to have the men seized and declaring:
‘Go to it Eparch! You have authority from God and from our own serenity to pass judgement on these persons and to reward them according to their deeds: not only for having stained their hands with human blood, but also because they slew the lord’s anointed within the sanctuary.’
It was a remarkable act. From the unlikeliest of quarters; the hands of the son of the man who had usurped him, Leo V had received his justice. For Theophilus perhaps, it was an act without which he could not feel that his accession to the throne was legitimate, tainted as it was by the heinous crime of Leo’s murder. Having seen justice done, he could set about ruling his empire with his hands washed clean.

Lightning Strikes Twice – The Sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse

This week we generally remember the events of 7thDecember 1941 when aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy fell upon the US naval base at Pearl Harbour and the Second World War went global.
10th December 1941 It remains one of the most audacious military operations of all time and was followed up by attacks the following day on the British possessions of Malaya and Hong Kong and on the American held island of Guam. Having dealt their tremendous blow to the US Pacific fleet, the Japanese actions of 8th December were launched with a confidence in their success which may have been owed in great measure to a critical British intelligence blunder of over a year before. A heavy price was paid two  days later on 10th December with the loss of the capital ships Prince of Wales and Repulse.On 11th November 1940 the Blue Funnel steamer SS Automedon had been steaming towards Singapore, 250 miles off the western tip of Sumatra when she was intercepted by the German surface raider Atlantis. This most successful German armed merchantman of the war had been terrorising allied shipping in the Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Pacific. Under her swashbuckling captain Bernhard Rogge (pictured below) the ship was a master of disguise, concealing her six inch guns beneath false canvas deck structures and side flaps, altering her silhouette with false masts and funnels and sailing under Soviet, Japanese, British, Dutch and Norwegian colours.
By the time she crossed the path of the Automedon, Atlantis had accounted for a dozen allied merchantmen in the past six months, sinking nine and capturing three as well as laying a minefield off of Cape Agulhas. TheAutomedon however was a prize of a different magnitude. Having raked Automedon with gunfire and left her a listing wreck with six of her crew dead, the crew of the Atlantis boarded the stricken ship.
On board they discovered bags full of secret mail, decoding tables and classified naval documents and the greatest prize of all was found inside a green bag marked ‘highly confidential – to be destroyed'. It was nothing less than a copy of the Chiefs of Staff Far Eastern Appraisal, intended for the eyes of the new Commander in Chief for the Far East ,Sir Robert Brooke Popham. This document which listed air, naval and troop strengths in the region also carried a gloomy assessment of the British position in the Far East, the vulnerability of Singapore, the inadequacy of its defences, the lack of available warships which could be sent to defend it, given the present state of war with Germany and the frank dismissal of the chances of any attempts to relieve or retake the colony in the event of its capture by the Japanese. It was  intelligence dynamite and Rogge could hardly believe that such a sensitive document had been sent by such an insecure means. Popham would never see the document, instead within a month it was on the desk of the Japanese naval attaché in Berlin. The rest as they say is history.
SS Automedon On 4th December 1941 the battleships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse sailed into Singapore harbour, their mission to deter Japanese ambitions in the region. Far from deterred, the Japanese had made their preparations in the knowledge that these ships represented the full extent of the British commitment to the protection of their far eastern colonies and that they were depending on reinforcement by the US Pacific fleet in the event of war. In July 1941 Japanese forces had moved to extend their occupation of Vichy French Indochina, securing key naval and air bases, fully aware from the captured appraisal that such a move would not precipitate any military action against them by the British.The bulk of the Japanese carrier force was available for the fateful attack on Pearl Harbour on 7th December, with the attack having been planned on the understanding that no substantial British fleet would be sent to the Pacific theatre. On the following day Japanese aircraft began to bomb Hong Kong and troops began landing at Kota Bharu in northern Malaya. HMS Prince of Wales In the early hours of Tuesday 9th December 1941 Force Z comprising the new battleship Prince of Wales, the veteran battle cruiser Repulsewhich had seen action in WW1 and the destroyers Electra, Express, Tenedos and Vampire sailed from Singapore in order to attack the Japanese transports supplying the landings at Kota Bharu and perhaps seeking an encounter with the battleship Kongo, which was known to be in the area.
The Prince of Wales, serving as the flag ship of Force Z commander Vice-Admiral Tom Phillips, had been commissioned for less than a year but had already born witness to one British naval disaster. In May 1941 she had fought in the engagement with the Bismarck in the Denmark Strait which led to the sinking of HMS Hood. Having survived this encounter, Prince of Wales had transported Churchill to his meeting with Roosevelt in Newfoundland in August before being redeployed to the Pacific. Steaming north 250 miles off the Malayan coast Force Z was spotted by Japanese reconnaissance aircraft. Fatefully the carrier HMS Indomitable which had been intended to join Force Z in the Pacific had been damaged by running aground on her maiden voyage and thus the British force was proceeding without air cover. Phillips had a dismissive attitude towards the threat posed towards capital ships at sea by aircraft and had refused offers of air cover from Australian and New Zealand Air Force units stationed in Malaya. It was a view shared by many senior naval officers and one which would be substantially revised within the next 24 hours. Nevertheless Phillips (pictured right) appreciated that he had lost the element of surprise and decided to reverse his course and steam back to Singapore. During the night in poor conditions a Japanese bomber strike sent out against force Z instead attacked their own cruiser Chokai which was at the time just five miles to the north of the British ships.At midnight a false report came through of new Japanese landings at Kuantan, midway between Kota Bharu and Singapore. Phillips took the fateful decision to sail towards Kuantan, where at dawn on 10thDecember, sixty miles from the Malayan coast, Force Z was once more spotted by Japanese reconnaissance aircraft.
G3M 'Nell' torpedo bomber The fate of Prince of Wales and Repulse was sealed. From airfields established in former French Indo-China waves of G3M ‘Nell’ bombers were sent to engage the British ships. The first wave mistook the destroyer Tenedosfor a capital ship and wasted their bombs in an unsuccessful attack upon her. Successive waves of Nells then came upon the main force. The first wave of eight aircraft carried 500lb bombs which they dropped on Repulse, with only one hit which penetrated to the hanger deck but did no significant damage. This first wave were seen off with AA fire but another seventeen Nell bombers approached carrying torpedoes; splitting into two formations and attacking both ships at once. Prince of Wales was hit by two torpedoes on the stern and aft port quarter which inflicted crippling damage and flooding and caused her to slow and list.At this point Repulse, relatively undamaged, radioed for air cover but the squadron of Australian Brewster Buffalo fighters that were scrambled would arrive too late to save the battleships. Another wave of 26 Japanese bombers, G4M ‘Bettys’ now closed in and split to attack both ships once more. Prince of Wales was hit by four torpedoes on the starboard side which destroyed her remaining good propeller shaft and caused further catastrophic flooding.
HMS Repulse Twenty Bettys along with the surviving G3M bombers from the very first wave now concentrated on Repulse which manoeuvred frantically to avoid their torpedo and bomb attacks but was unable to evade attacks coming simultaneously from port and starboard. Four torpedo strikes did fatal damage and the order was given to abandon ship. Just eleven minutes after the first torpedo hit, Repulse sank. A final attack by eight aircraft carrying 1000lb bombs scored a single hit on Prince of Wales, bringing her to a halt. As the destroyer Express came alongside to assist, Phillips persisted in doomed attempts to save the ship and ordered them away. The order to abandon ship came 35 minutes after the final fatal bomb attack and Prince of Wales capsized and sank eight minutes later.Admiral Phillips and Captain Leech of the Prince of Wales went down with the ship along with 325 of her crew. Captain Tennant of the Repulse was rescued but 513 men went down with the stricken cruiser. 2081 survivors were taken off or rescued from the water by the destroyers. Just two minutes after the Prince of Wales sank the air cover arrived, too late to do anything but chase off the remaining bombers. Japanese losses amounted to just four aircraft, with seventeen men killed. Phillips has been widely condemned for his failure to call for air support at any point during the attack. Brewster Buffalo aircraft of the Australian 453 Squadron were called in too late Singapore fell on February 15th 1942. Many of those who had survived the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse were killed during the evacuation or taken prisoner. See links below for a personal account from one survivor. The raider Atlantis was sunk by HMS Devonshire in October 1942. Her commander Bernhard Rogge survived the war having received the knights cross for his efforts as well as being presented with a ceremonial samurai sword by the Japanese for his actions in the capture of the Automedon. This extremely rare honour for a foreigner is telling as to the significance of the ship’s capture to the success of future Japanese plans.
The raider Atlantis Eye witness account from the Repulse
http://ww2today.com/10th-december-1941-far-east-disaster-for-the-royal-navyFootage of the sinking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHeZzx7qpi4

Survivor’s account from the Prince of Wales
http://www.far-eastern-heroes.org.uk/John_MacMillan/html/sinking_of_prince_of_wales.htmDiscussion of the significance of the capture of Automedon
http://www.forcez-survivors.org.uk/automedon.html

Force Z in detail
http://www.netherlandsnavy.nl/Special_forcez.htm

More naval warfare posts from Slings and Arrows
http://slingsandarrowsblog.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/naval%20war

When Theophilus met Theophobos

Whilst currently enjoying the chronicle of John Skylitzes I came across the interesting story of Theophobos. This one-time Persian renegade enjoyed a turbulent career of highs and lows which brought him briefly and reluctantly to claim the imperial title and ultimately to his ruin.
The Khurramite leader Babak
Our story begins in the year 816 when a revolt by the Khurramite sect centred on present day Azerbaijan broke out against the incumbent regime of the Abbasid Caliphs. The Khurramites followed a belief system which fused ideas from the Zoroastrian cult of Mazdakism, which had been suppressed under the Sassanid Persian rulers, with Shi’a Islam. Both had a certain egalitarian appeal for the downtrodden and the dis-enfranchised. The Khurramites revered the memory of Abu Muslim, who had led the revolt which had swept the Abbasid Caliphs to power only to be slain in a fit of jealousy and paranoia by the second Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur. Ultimately the revolt could be seen as a Persian backlash against their Arab rulers in Baghdad. The leader of the revolt was Babak, who claimed descent from Abu Muslim and also claimed rather interestingly to have inherited the soul of the previous Khurramite leader, which had fused with his own.
In true guerilla style Babak took to the mountains when the Caliph al-Ma’mun sent a succession of governors of Azerbaijan against him and by using the terrain to his advantage he was able to win many victories over them; falling upon and slaughtering his enemies in bad country and then melting away once more. His successes brought more support for the revolt and pockets of Khurramite resistance sprang up all over the Persian territories.
In 833 another army of Khurramite rebels holding out in the Zagros Mountains of Western Iran led by a Persian nobleman by the name of Nasr was heavily defeated by the Caliph’s forces. Seeing the writing on the wall for the Khurramite cause, Nasr chose to lead his surviving troops through Armenia out of harm’s way and sought refuge within the Byzantine Empire.
The arrival of Nasr with some fourteen thousand armed followers who professed themselves willing to fight for the Empire against the Caliphate was greeted rapturously by the emperor Theophilus. The new arrivals were given land and incorporated into the Byzantine military under the command of Nasr himself, upon whom the emperor bestowed Patrician rank. Nasr and his followers agreed in principle at least to embrace Christianity and were baptised. Nasr now took a new Christian name and became Theophobos. As Christians, the former Khurramites were now permitted to marry and Theophobos was given the emperor’s own sister-in-law as a bride. The fugitive rebel had landed on his feet.
The fortress of Badd - Babak's last stronghold
Al Ma’mun died in 833 to be succeeded by his half-brother  al-Mu’tasim. The new Caliph was determined to crush the Khurramite rebellion and soon appointed a man equal to the task of rooting Babak out of his mountain stronghold. The new governor, a Persian noble named al-Afsin, adopted a methodical approach and moved forward steadily into the mountains, taking control of one rebel stronghold at a time. Babak attempted to counter the invasion by targeting al-Afsin’s supply lines but al-Afsin succeeded in inflicting a series of significant defeats upon Babak who retreated back to his seemingly impregnable mountaintop fortress of Badd.
Babak’s revolt came to its bloody end in 837. Despite the difficulties of reaching the fortress of Badd which could only be approached in single file through a narrow defile, al-Afsin’s soldiers succeeded in storming the stronghold and overcoming its defenders. Barbak and his few remaining followers slipped away into the forests but he was ultimately betrayed and run to ground. Paraded through the streets of Samarra on an elephant, Barbak had his hands and feet cut off before being beheaded. His body was then publically displayed on a gibbet.
Al Afsin and Babak - Tarikhnama of Balami
Any relief felt by the Caliph at this victory was soon tempered by the arrival in his territory of the emperor Theophilus at the head of an invading army. Theophobos and his Persian brigade marched with the emperor. Theophilus was eager to avenge a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of al-Ma’mun in 830-31 and may also have been responding to a call for aid from Barbak, although his intervention came too late to save the doomed rebel leader. The emperor’s forces reached the upper Euphrates and put the cities of Arsamosata and Zosopetra to the sack.
Following this victory and in the aftermath of Babak’s defeat another sixteen thousand Khurramites fled to the empire and were both converted to Christianity and enrolled in Theophobos’ Persian brigade, bringing its total strength to thirty thousand men.
Zosopetra was the birthplace of al-Mu’tasim who vowed revenge upon Theophilus and in the following year led his armies in a campaign of reprisal, aimed at the destruction of the emperor’s own birthplace of Amorion. Whilst the Caliph led his forces towards his target of Amorion, a second army under al-Afsin, fresh from his victory over Barbak which had seen him showered with honours by the Caliph, marched into Cappadocia.
The armies of Theophilus and al-Afsin met in battle at Anzen. Theophilus was accompanied by Theophobos and his Persian troops and probably outnumbered al-Afsin. Having disregarded advice from Theophobos to mount a night attack, feeling such tactics to be beneath his honour, the emperor led his troops into battle at dawn. At first the battle went the way of the Byzantines as their right wing made progress and forced their enemies back. Theophilus and Theophobos now led a contingent of troops from the right wing behind their army to their left in order to reinforce this wing and complete the victory. A well timed counterattack by Afsin’s Turkoman horse archers however threw the Byzantine right wing into chaos and, thinking themselves abandoned by their emperor, they routed. Theophilus found himself isolated and retreated to a hill top protected by those soldiers of the imperial Tagmata who had not fled along with some of the troops of Theophobos.  Al-Afsin brought up his siege engines to batter at the defenders who were also showered by arrows by the horse archers. The wretched Byzantines were saved by the elements as it began to rain and at last night fell.
Theophilus flees for the high ground at the  Battle of Anzen - Madrid Skylitzes
Skylitzes, himself writing some two centuries later and compiling his account from various surviving sources, tells two stories of the events of the night which show Theophobos in differing lights. In one version we are told that during the night the Domestic of the Scholae Manuel, Theophilus’ senior commander, persuaded the emperor that the troops of Theophobos could not be trusted. They must flee, he told the emperor, before the Persians sold the emperor out to the forces of al-Afsin. The emperor, accompanied by Manuel and his loyal troops succeeded in breaking through the enemy lines in the night and fled westwards. In another version however it is Theophobos who saves the emperor by the stratagem of ordering his troops to shout and sing joyfully as if they were being reinforced by friendly troops, causing the encircling enemy to withdraw and allowing the emperor to escape.
The events that followed suggest that the troops of the Persian brigade indeed had cause to believe that they had lost their emperor’s trust.
After the battle Theophobos and his troops withdrew to Sinope on the Black Sea coast. Fearful now of the consequences of the emperor’s wrath, the Persian brigade proclaimed their commander as emperor of the Romans. Arriviste though Theophobos may have been he was nevertheless a member of the imperial family and may well have been seen as a suitable candidate by those who longed for a restoration of the veneration of icons. The recent reverses suffered by the staunchly iconoclast Theophilus were cause for many to wonder if the displeasure of the Almighty was being manifested in Byzantine defeat at the hands of the infidel.
The court of Theophilus - Madrid Skylitzes
At any rate Theophobos had no wish to be raised to the purple and appealed to the emperor, declaring that his usurpation had been forced upon him by his troops. Whatever reservations Theophilus may have had, he pardoned his friend and recalled him to Constantinople where he was received with honour. As for the Khurramites, although pardoned for their actions, they nonetheless found themselves scattered throughout the forces of the empire in units of two thousand men so that they no longer represented a threat to the stability of the empire.
In 842 the emperor began to sicken and soon it was apparent that he would not be long for this world. Once again the potential of Theophobos as an imperial candidate was feared by those in the emperor’s inner circle. He posed a threat to the succession of Theophilus’ infant son Michael and this time although he had done nothing to warrant it, he was shown no mercy. Arrested and imprisoned, Theophobos was executed on the emperor’s orders. Skylitzes tells us that when the emperor was brought Theophobos' head he wept and held it in his hands, declaring.
‘Now you are no longer Theophobos and I am no longer Theophilus.’
Make of that what you will.  You may also enjoy: Enemies at the Gate Part One - The Reign of Michael III
http://slingsandarrowsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/enemies-at-gate-part-two-reign-of.html

More on the Khurramite rebellionhttp://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/korramis-in-byzantium
Battle of Anzenhttp://asiaminor.ehw.gr/forms/fLemmaBodyExtended.aspx?lemmaID=7921