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Book and Sword

~ Pontifex minimus

Book and Sword

Monthly Archives: June 2019

The Key Question in the Fall of the Roman Empire

24 Monday Jun 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

ancient, economic history, Late Antique, Roman, slavery, Steve Muhlberger

A conversation with Nathan Ross inspired me to track down two essays by Steve Muhlberger on what I think is the key issue in the fall of the western Roman empire. (The debate “were foreign invasions or civil wars more destructive?” is a bit of a semantic issue, since soldiers tried to be as Germanic as possible and wealthy Germans in the Imperium tried to become as Roman as possible: its never going to be easy to define figures like Stilicho as either Roman or barbarian). It has long been obvious that the fifth century saw light beautiful pottery, stone houses, roofs with leak-proof terracotta tiles, and philosophers who could do original work vanish from Europe north of the Alps, but recently archaeologists have noticed that people buried in Post-Roman Europe seem to be living longer and eating better than their ancestors who bore the Roman yoke.

My second reflection is on the current debate about the fall of the Roman Empire (the fifth-century fall) between people who equate it with “the End of Civilization” (Bryan Ward-Perkins) and people who don’t think it was an ending of unprecedented significance (say, Peter Brown and Walter Goffart). I really think that the unresolved and maybe unresolvable debate is about what civilization is. Is it a situation where a leisured minority sit around in the palace library, enjoying bread made from Egyptian wheat and dipping it in Syrian olive oil or Spanish fish sauce, and debating the great ideas of the ages, while other people dig minerals from the earth in dirty, dangerous mines, or harvest cotton in the hot sun, and die young? If that’s it, then there was probably a lot less “civilization” in large parts of the formerly Roman world after AD 400 than there had been for some centuries, in that it was far more difficult to assemble a large variety of enviable luxuries in one spot through the routine operations of centralized imperial power. And there is more civilization now, because here I sit, not even close to being rich by Canadian standards, but able to read, think and then speak to a privileged minority around the world while hundreds of millions sweat profusely (and all too often, die young).

But it might be worth considering whether the height of luxury — whatever luxury you prefer — is the only measure of civilization.

I say, bring on those resilient decentralized networks and extend them as far as we can. The only alternative is slavery for somebody.

– Steve Muhlberger, “Brave New War, The Upside of Down, and the fall of the Roman Empire,” 22 April 2007 https://smuhlberger.blogspot.com/2007/04/brave-new-war-upside-of-down-and-fall.htm
Continue reading →

Cross-Post: Subscriptions to Robin Netherton’s Festschrift

22 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Medieval

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

cross-post, historical textiles, medieval

Until 1 August 2019, Boydell and Brewer are accepting subscriptions for a Festschrift to textile historian Robin Netherton. Subscribers can buy the volume for 40 GBP/70 USD rather than the 70 GBP/135 USD retail price, and will get their name in the book. Chapters will include:

  • Introduction
  • Robin Netherton: A Life
  • Precious Offerings: Dressing Devotional Statues in Medieval England
  • Dressing the Earth: an Eleventh-century Garb in the Exultet Roll of Bari
  • Dress, Disguise, and Shape-Shifting in Nibelungenlied and Volsunga Saga
  • Survival, Recovery, Restoration, Re-creation: the Long Life of Medieval Garments
  • Coping with Connoisseurship: Issues in Attribution and Purpose raised by an Indo-Portuguese “Vestment” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Refashioning St. Edward: Clothing and Textiles
  • “Dressed to Kill:” The Clothing of Christ’s Tormentors in an Illustrated Polish Devotional Manuscript
  • Semper Ubi Sub Ubi: What Braies Cover and Reveal
  • Treason and Clothing in Sixteenth-Century England: The Case of Gregory “Sweetlips” Botolf
  • The Lexicon of Apparel in the Pastourelle Corpus: Refashioning Shepherdesses
  • The Real Unreal: Chrétien de Troyes’s Fashioning of Erec and Enide
  • Regulating and Refashioning Dress: Sumptuary Legislation and its Enforcement in Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century Lucca
  • Nuns’ Clothing and Ornaments in English and Northern French Ecclesiastical Regulations
  • Clothing Dependents: Dress of Children and Servants in the Petre Household, 1586-1587

To subscribe, download the order form at https://boydellandbrewer.com/refashioning-medieval-and-early-modern-dress-hb.html

Some Thoughts on Niven’s “A Gift from Earth”

22 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

book review, Larry Niven, modern, science fiction

Larry Niven, A Gift from Earth (Ballantine Books: New York, 1968)

Larry Niven had a brilliant creative career from his first published story in 1964 to the Tales from Draco’s Tavern and The Integral Trees in the mid-1980s. Since then his star has faded, although his name often appears on covers next to a co-author; I get the impression that he got bored with writing but did not find a new vocation. I recently had a chance to re-read one of his novels which I don’t often return to, and was struck by how good it is.
Continue reading →

The Myth of the Heavily Burdened Hoplite

15 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

ancient, Archaic Greek, classical Greek, combat mechanics, hoplite, material culture, Plataia 2021

How much weight did these warriors carry? Archaeological finds let us give a pretty good estimate. A Corinthian aryballos (oil flask)in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession Number: 41.162.157

Today, people with detailed direct knowledge of Iron Age arms and armour in the Aegean describe them as for athletes, as lightweight as the smiths could make them. Most hoplites had just one or two spears, a round shield, some kind of headpiece and some kind of sword, dagger, or cleaver. A hoplite was heavily burdened in comparison to man with a club and a selection of rocks in a fold of his tunic, not in comparison with modern ‘light’ (not motor-borne) infantry who often carry their own body weight in equipment. So where does the idea that hoplites wore 30 kilos of equipment come from? Back in 2010, Peter Krentz laid out the sad story.

Most scholars writing in English today estimate the weight of a hoplite’s equipment as 70 pounds (33 kilograms) or more, a figure that goes back to Delbrück, who took the figure 72 pounds from W. Rüstow and H. Köchly’s Geschichte des griechischen Kriegswesens von der ältesten Zeit bis auf Pyrrhos (1852). These are German pounds, each equal to 500 grams or 0.5 kilograms, as is clear from places where Rüstow and Köchly give weights in both pounds and kilograms. Their original estimate, therefore, was actually about 36 kilograms (79 avoirdupois pounds). Even this lofty figure has been exaggerated— in 1994 Richard A. Gabriel and Donald W. Boose gave the weight of a panoply (a full set of hoplite equipment) as 85–90 pounds (39–41 kilograms). But, as I say, most scholars writing in English today favor 70 avoirdupois pounds, which Victor Davis Hanson describes as “an incredible burden to endure for the ancient infantryman, who himself probably weighed no more than some 150 pounds.” Rüstow and Köchly’s figures do not deserve this veneration. They did not weigh museum pieces or attempt to reconstruct the equipment. As a result, a reviewer, Theodor Bergk, dismissed their figures as “purely hypothetical attempts,” while Hans Droysen justified his decision to ignore them by calling them “arbitrary estimates.” After all the archaeological discoveries of the past century and a half, especially in the German excavations at Olympia, we can do better today.

– Peter Krentz, “A Cup by Douris and the Battle of Marathon,” in Garrett G. Fagan and Matthew Trundle (eds.), New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare (Brill: Leiden, 2010) pp. 188-190

In short, this number persisted because it was the first one on the table, and because archaeologists refused to systematically measure and weigh finds until the 1990s (and when they did, they mostly did so in Greek and German, while the people becoming interested in hoplites only read English). Krentz estimates the weight of hoplite equipment as follows:

  • Helmet 1.2 kg {Extant Late Corinthian helmets}
  • Body Armour 3.6–6.8 kg {Extant bronze cuirasses and modern linen and leather armour}
  • Greaves (pair) 1.3 kg {Extant bronze greaves}
  • Shield 3.2–6.8 kg {Reconstructions based on two extant shields from Italy; for example, the poplar wood shield covered in 0.5 mm bronze sheet in the Museuo Gregoriano would have weighed 6.2 kg/13.5 lbs new}
  • Spear 1.5 kg {Reconstructions based on extant spearheads and buttspikes}
  • Sword, Scabbard, and Baldric 1-2 kg {Parallels with Roman gladii, weight of one damaged original}
  • Clothing 1 kg {Reconstructions}
  • Total (rounded) 13–21 kg

All of his figures are consistent with the weight of kit from other cultures. While modern infantry have to carry more than their body weight over the mountains of Afghanistan or the steppes of upper Mesopotamia, a Greek hoplite carried about as much weight into combat as I hauled to and from school five days a week.

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Edit 2019-08-03: Corrected the names of the editors of the collection with Krentz’ article

An grave stele from near Athens c. 390 BCE in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, accession number 40.11.23

Datini’s Wares in GURPS

08 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Medieval

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Archivio Datini di Prato, fourteenth century, GURPS, medieval, shameless plug

Two soldier crush silverware for easier packing as a comrade throws more loot out a window

Want to know whether helmets of scales like Mr. Red wears were just artists’ fantasies? Check out Medieval Warfare VIII.1. British Library, MS. Royal 20 C VII (painted in Paris between 1380 and 1400)

Last spring I published a two-page article in Medieval Warfare VIII.1 talking about the kinds of concealed armour which were for sale in the Avignon of the Babylonian Captivity. As far as I know nobody else has talked about these sources in any language except Italian, so I hope translating them was helpful! Now, I am interested in the real things and how they were made … if I ever have money I might commission a few reproductions. But what if your interest is in gaming? How might you represent this armour, say in GURPS?

Continue reading →

What Device Do You View This Site On?

01 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern, Not an expert

≈ Leave a comment

Some time in the next few months, I will be moving this site from Automattic’s servers to another host which accepts that a website is a website, which customers (not the service provider) own and edit. It seems like the thing to do is first to move to self-hosting WordPress, then consider moving to a simpler, stabler solution such as a static site generator.

I have some idea of trends in traffic and which sites and social media refer people to which pages, but I don’t know what kinds of device people use to view my site. Conventional wisdom is that everyone uses smartphones for browsing, but obviously that depends on who and for what: Instagram probably gets a higher proportion of small-device visits than say Encyclopedia Iranica. I know plenty of people who never got a smartphone, and Darrell Markewitz found data that only 33% of all web traffic in Canada, and only 18% of traffic to his blog, comes from mobile OSes. A lot of talk about technology trends is not really description but magic: the speakers seek to create a new reality with powerful words. So I would really appreciate it if you could fill out the following poll.

Edit 2019-06-06: After a week, 7 votes for laptops or external monitors, 2 votes for smartphones and other small screens, 0 votes for tablets or something unusual.

If I move away from the WordPress software entirely, it might be easier to remove comments from future posts. (I will definitely remove them from the ‘site’ part of this webpage, a list of my articles does not need a comments field but WordPress puts one on every page unless you install a plugin! So yes, to remove a few lines of code from the generator you have to add a separate ‘plugin’ to WordPress! It is sad to watch the comment section of dead friends’ blogs fill up with spam advertising quack pills and fake handbags because nobody can figure out how to disable comments).

What kind of dynamic features of this site such as the RSS feed or pingbacks and trackbacks to linked sites do you actually use? Do you have any other special needs which I should keep in mind? Feel free to comment here or by email.

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