Obscure History Part I

While there is quite a bit going on in the world right now, I don't really feel much like writing about any of it. I didn't want to let this blog sit around and moulder any longer than it already has, though, so instead, here's a whole bunch of obscure pieces of history that I personally find interesting, entertaining, illuminating, intriguing, or otherwise useful to drop on pretentious people at parties. Doubtless when I hit another dry spot with this blog, I'll do this again.

Pepin the Short was the great-grandfather of Charles the Bald.

Immediately before the Battle of Chancellorsville, a cannonball took out the wooden post Fighting Joe Hooker (commander of the Union army) was leaning against. He was knocked senseless and was so shaken by the experience he was never an effective general again.

Alexander the Great founded at least 70 cities named “Alexandria.” The last was Alexandria Eschate (“Alexandria the Farthest”) in modern-day Tajikistan. The group of retired veterans and wounded he left there (as well as their descendants) defended the outpost as part of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom for almost two hundred years. Their expeditions ranged as far as Xinjiang in China and their children were known as the Ta-Yuan to the Chinese, and it was they who opened the Silk Road to the west.

Alexander also had a giant glass cylinder built because he was curious what things looked like at the bottom of the ocean.

The term “assassin” is a corruption of the name of the Hashshashin sect of Ismaili Muslims who terrorized the ruling Abbasid elite from the 8^th to the 14^th centuries. Their name derived from the use of hashish in their training and indoctrination rituals, and they were known for taking enormous doses before setting off to murder prominent Abbasids in public. Their founder, Hasan-i-Sabbah built them a mountaintop fortress and was thereafter known as “The Old Man in the Mountain.” Among their more prominent victims was Conrad of Montferrat, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Genghis Khan’s second son, Jagatai.

There was a woman named Alys who lived from 1160-1220. She was the daughter of Louis VII of France and his second wife, and was betrothed to Richard I of England (Richard the Lionheart), who was the son of Eleanor of Aquitaine—Louis VII’s first wife. She was mistress to Henry II, Richard’s father, and was imprisoned by Eleanor as a result. Her half-brother, Philip II (Augustus) betrothed her to John, Richard’s younger brother (after Richard terminated his engagement to her on the grounds that she had been impregnated by his father), but when John was deposed by Richard, she was married to a fairly minor French count. She was daughter of a king, betrothed to two kings, mistress of another king, and brother of yet another king. All of them related.

Israel Beer Josaphat, also known as Joseph Josephat, also known as Paul Julius Reuter, and known finally as Paul Julius Baron von Reuter, founder of the Reuters news agency purchased the rights to all Iranian oil from Nasser al-Din Shah of the dying Qajar dynasty in the late 1890’s before reports of the discovery of oil in Iran had even been confirmed. He paid roughly thirty thousand dollars.

Caligula, Emperor of Rome from 12-41 AD opened a brothel in his palace, had incestuous relationships with all three of his sisters (and later disemboweled one in order to see the baby he had fathered), made his horse Incitatus a consul, made it illegal not to leave him everything in a will, and declared war on both the ocean (because the tide refused to go out) and the sun (because it refused to rise when ordered).

The country of Liberia was founded by the American Colonization Society as a place to send freed African slaves. At their insistence, the citizens of Liberia were recognized by the local Africans and British colonial authorities in Sierra Leone as Americans. The ACS, incidentally, was founded following reports of planned slave uprisings and was based on the belief that freed African slaves would bring about widespread chaos and anarchy in civilized society.

In 1826, the Ottoman sultan Mahmoud II, when faced with the janissary corps as an intractable obstacle to military modernization, invited every officer in the corps to his palace on the shores of the Bosphorus for a birthday celebration. When they had all arrived, he had the doors blocked behind them and destroyed the palace with artillery fire, killing them to the last man. This is known in history as “The Auspicious Event.”

In order to raise revenue after the Thirty Years War, the Swedish monarchy decided to seize 10% of the land of every noble family. The nobles would have the option to buy back the land if they chose (since that would fill the royal treasury) or it would be used to farm and raise money for the government. The figure was initially meant to be 25%, but the nobles threatened revolt, so it was lowered to 10% in compromise—but with the restriction that the crown could choose which 10%. Thus, the crown selected the land that the nobles’ castles happened to be standing on, giving them the option to either buy the land back at exorbitant prices or become homeless.

The most prized relic of the French Foreign Legion is the severed, preserved arm of a lieutenant who was killed at the Battle of Cameron in 1863 in Mexico, where a patrol of 65 legionnaires held off over two thousand Mexican soldiers for over twelve hours until, their ammunition exhausted, the last five survivors fixed bayonets and charged. Two legionnaires were taken alive and refused to surrender unless given safe passage home, and an escort for their flag and the body of their commander.

The first English colony in North American was founded on Roanoke Island in North Carolina in 1584. When the English ships returned two years later with supplies and more colonists, they found the colony deserted with no signs of struggle or disease. The only clue was the word “Croatoan” carved into a nearby tree. What happened to the colony remains unsolved.

Lee Harvey Oswald’s personal diary, which is on display at the National Archives in Washington D.C. contains the name and home telephone number of George Bush Senior, who was on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time.

Bangladesh was formerly part of Pakistan, despite it being separated by (and surrounded by) roughly a thousand miles of India. It seceded in 1971 following the bloody Bangladesh Liberation War.

In 1190, Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor, fell into a river in Asia Minor and died, aged 70. His 100,000-man army, which he was leading to what is now known as the Third Crusade evaporated. Had he reached the Levant, it is extremely likely the Crusaders would have retaken Jerusalem and the course of eight hundred years of European/Islamic relations would have been radically different.

The city of Montevideo was besieged by the forces of Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas for nine years, beginning in 1838. This “New Troy,” as it was called in the European press, was at that time home of Italian revolutionary Guiseppe Garibaldi, who formed an Italian Legion and fought against the Argentines.

Iran’s first, last, and only democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, who was overthrown by the CIA in 1953, conducted virtually all state business from his bed.

Field Marshal Viscount William Slim took command of scattered and defeated British colonial forces in Southeast Asia in 1942, conducted a retreat all the way to India, where he reformed and reorganized and led an offensive against the Japanese during a monsoon: this was the only instance of a successful Allied land campaign against Japan during the entire war.

The War of Jenkin’s Ear took place between Great Britain and Spain from 1739-48 mainly in the Caribbean, was profoundly indecisive, and eventually became part of the larger War of the Austrian Succession. The one and only major engagement was at the silver exporting town of Puerto Bello, which is where the name of Portobello Road in Notting Hill comes from.

A Swedish Viking named Ingvar the Far-Travelled led a raid against Persia circa 1042 and fought in a battle in a civil war in what is now the country of Georgia. A runestone left on the shores of the Caspian Sea mark the furthest extent of Viking travels. It is also noteworthy that at about the same time, Vikings proved to be such a problem in the city of Constantinople that a law was enacted which limited the number of Vikings in the city at any one time to fifty.