Men at arms' hostility to archers – more from the Chronicle of the Good Duke

Have you ever heard a cliché so often that you begin to doubt that it could possibly be true?One such cliché for me is the hostility of men at arms in the late Middle Ages to archers and crossbowmen. Men at arms being of course mounted well armored soldiers who in a different era...

Mahdis! Mahdis! Mahdis!

Brian Ulrich forwards this from the Economist:Earlier this year Iran’s authorities arrested a score of men who, in separate incidents, claimed to be the Mahdi, a sacred figure of Shia Islam, who was “hidden” by God just over a millennium ago and will return some time to conquer evil...

Painting world religions in broad strokes

Just about every day my first read is Juan Cole's blog Informed Comment. Cole is a historian of the Middle East and has taken it on as his personal duty to comment every day on important issues. When it comes to the Middle East and Islam, you can hardly have a better source.Today Cole posted one of the best things he has ever written, a response to another blog in which the claim...

Headline of the day

From Human Rights Watch:"New Campaign to Stop Killer Robots"Life in the future, inde...

Teenagers

It is easy to classify today's teenagers, if you are older, as disappointing, irresponsible, and even crazy. This is true enough in some ways but give those teenagers a good script, maybe a good set of music and see them shine. I saw a student production of Les Miserables last night and if  it was far from perfect it was extremely stirring. One thing that really struck me...

This was segregation

David Frum reviews Crespino's book on arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond :The old Democratic South was not a very democratic place. In 1932, South Carolina gave 98.03% of its vote to Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt gained a further half point in 1936. Yet that astonishing percentage was produced by an equally astonishingly tiny electorate: in a state of 1.7 million souls, only 105,000...

Creating enemies

 Tom Englehardt at Tomdispatch.com has long offered an analysis of the post-9/11 world emphasizes the need of the American security establishment for enemies to fight in the post-Cold War world. In his most recent essay, he discusses how elites who want to manipulate the public through fear must first manipulate themselves into believing their fear-based analysis.  This...

The brother of Bliomberis Loup

...was named Blain Loup. Both men fought on the French side in the campaign of 1380-1.Just so's you know that Bliomberis was not an isolated Wo...

A beehive cell

Darrell Markewitz, historically inspired metalworker par excellence, starts thinking about sacred enclosures and monastic beehive cells. Have a lo...

Corey Robin on that Thatcher quotation

As the heat around Margaret Thatcher's death begins to cool a bit, I thought I would post something that addresses some larger questions around her career. Here is what Corey Robin had to say about the famous quotation about the nature of society.Left critics of neoliberalism—or...

Condemned out of his own mouth – Rand Paul

A few days ago Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the great hope of the new libertarianism, went to Howard University and spoke to mostly African-American students in an attempt to show them that it was the Democrats back in the 1850s who showed themselves to be hostile to African-American interests, and one should never forget that, while nothing the Republicans have done since 1964...

Look for a red shoe

Couple of weeks ago, to my great surprise, a writer named Ted Gioia wrote an article about science-fiction author Cordwainer Smith for the Atlantic. It was a good article, but what I found most remarkable about it was the fact that it was written at all. Cordwainer Smith was highly...

The Big Chill in the Eastern Mediterranean

Brian Ulrich alerted me to this: The Big Chill and the Eastern Mediterranean Among the solid contributions to Middle Eastern environmental history which have come out the past couple of years is Ronnie Ellenblum's The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change...

Just about...

I passed 2500 published posts on this blog sometime in the last month. Imagi...

"Spring" in the Near North, 2013

Morning temp:  -14 CSnow: 6-9 inches on the groundTrees: barely any buddingIn the air:  a bug.Yakutia laug...

Oddball 14th century herald's name of the day

Moniquot, an "honorable" herald (is there any other kind?) who brought a message from King Henry of Spain (= Castile) to the Good Duke..Image: More AEM...