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BOOK: Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World
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CHAPTER 9
 
  1. This image is in a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript edition—now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford—of an eleventh-century Islamic work, the
    Book
    of Kings
    by the Persian poet Firdausi. However, the earliest known reference to the concept of Alexander having paid homage at the Kaba is contained in an eighth-century Arabic romance,
    The Book of the Crowns of the Kings of Himyar,
    by the Arab writer Wahb ibn Munabbih.
  2. The Kaba, the most sacred building in the Muslim world, was a holy place even in pre-Islamic times. Although partially rebuilt on several occasions, it has maintained its ancient design. It contains a single chamber 43 feet long, 36 feet wide, and 53 feet high, with a cube-shaped masonry structure of only slightly larger proportions. In the northeast external corner of the building is a large black meteorite, and the entire structure is covered in black silk. The site has been sacred to Islam since Muhammad captured Mecca and cleared pagan idols out of the Kaba in
    A
    .
    D
    . 630.
  3. For more detailed information, see Chapter 7.
  4. This is the first time that Christian soldiers on active service were declared martyrs (the procedure which was, several centuries later, formalized into canonization) by the Church following their deaths at the hands of an enemy. The Church was actually quite reluctant to declare them martyrs, but was forced to do so by the Emperor Heraclius. Up until then, the Church had always resisted permitting moral approval to be used for military benefit.
 
CHAPTER 10
 
  1. Theophanes.
  2. Sayf ibn Umar.
  3. Eutychius,
    Annals,
    Breydy 129 text, 109 translation.
  4. Doctrina Iacobi Nuperbaptizati.
 
CHAPTER 11
 
  1. The
    Zhou shu.
  2. Again, according to the
    Zhou shu.
  3. The Samanids were members of an Iranian Islamic dynasty that ruled what is now eastern Iran, western Afghanistan, and parts of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan on behalf of the caliphate from the early ninth century to 1005.
  4. The Qarluqs were probably the main ruling element within the Ghaznavid state.
  5. The Seljuks were a very warlike Shiite Muslim Iranian mountain people whose power base was in Iran.
  6. The Battle of Manzikert took place near Lake Van in what is now eastern Turkey.
  7. The Muslim Ottomans were employed as mercenary allies by one of the factions in a Roman dynastic struggle.
 
CHAPTER 12
 
  1. The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage,
    by Arthur Koestler, Hutchinson, 1976. Reprinted by permission of the Peters Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd. The correspondence is published in full in
    Jewish Letters through
    the Ages
    by Adolph Kober.
  2. He was in fact the head of the caliph’s household and performed the role of chief minister, handling foreign and domestic affairs of state. He was arguably even more important than the official “prime minister,” the caliph’s vizier.
  3. Hasdai ibn Shaprut had heard about the existence of the Jewish kingdom through Roman diplomats.
  4. See Chapters 3 and 11.
  5. The Umayyad and then the Abbasid caliphates.
  6. The Khazar court was based in the Khazar capital Itil (or Atil, the Turkic name for the Volga) in the great river’s delta. Its exact location has never been found. Some scholars suspect it now lies under the Caspian Sea—a sort of steppe Atlantis, having been engulfed by rising sea levels. Others believe it still awaits discovery by archaeologists on land, somewhere near the modern Russian city of Astrakhan.
  7. From the
    Book of Kingdoms and Roads,
    as quoted in
    The Thirteenth Tribe.
  8. The Thirteenth Tribe
    by Arthur Koestler, Hutchinson, 1976.
  9. There are only a few thousand Karaites worldwide today, mainly in Israel, eastern Europe, Egypt, Russia, and the United States.
  10. From a tenth-century letter written by King Joseph to Hasdai ibn Shaprut of Spain, quoted in
    The Thirteenth Tribe.
  11. The rest of the population of the Khazar empire were other mainly Turkic groups (Bulgars, etc.), plus groups of Slavs and probably some Goths and Iranians, among others.
  12. The rulers of the pre-Ottoman Seljuk empire of Turkey.
  13. Qazwini.
  14. Suggestion by D. M. Dunlop.
  15. According to Arthur Koestler’s book
    The Thirteenth Tribe,
    quoting the Russian scholar M. I. Artamonov.
  16. The Pecheneg Turks, a nomadic steppe people living between the Ural and Volga rivers, were driven westward by other tribes in the late eighth and ninth centuries. As a result they collided with the Magyars (Hungarians) and forced them to move westward into what was to become Hungary.
  17. Pressburg Ecclesiastical Council, 1309.
  18. The tenth-century letter is published in
    Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the
    10th Century,
    by Golb and Pritsak, Cornell University Press, 1982.
  19. In later medieval times, these centers also attracted substantial Karaite populations.
  20. If the Khazar empire had remained pagan, it would have been much more likely to convert eventually to Islam—but once it had adopted another form of monotheism (in this case, Judaism), conversion to Islam became inherently less likely.
  21. This DNA data was published in
    Nature,
    volume 394, 9 July 1998, pages 138–139, in a chart in an article by M. G. Thomas et al., entitled “Origins of Old Testament Priests.”
  22. The text of the tenth-century letter is reproduced in
    Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the 10th Century,
    by Golb and Pritsak, Cornell University Press, 1982.
 
CHAPTER 13
 
  1. For more details of this, see Chapter 15.
  2. I examined all sixty British and near Continental weather entries for the 480–650 period in the Meteorological Office, Geophysical Memoirs number 70,
    Meteorological Chronology to
    A
    .
    D
    . 1450
    by C. E. Britton, HMSO, 1937. Britton compiled his chronology by using information contained in large numbers of medieval and later chronicles and surveys. For this period, his main source was a survey compiled in the eighteenth century (published in two volumes in London in 1749) by Dr. Thomas Short. Known as
    A General Chronological History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors, Etc.,
    the work appears to make use of many medieval sources, some of which are presumably now lost. On balance, I suspect that the sixth-century entries derived from Short’s work are genuine, because many of them are concentrated around the 535–555 period—the precise time when world climate is known to have been in an unstable condition. Britton, however, unaware of the wider international evidence, naturally thought they must be fictitious. In the introduction to his chronology, Britton says that Short spent fifteen years researching and that “his labour in hunting down obscure sources must have been prodigious.” In this period, the key Short-derived entries (referred to on page 105 above) from Britton’s
    Meteorological Chronology
    are for the years 536, 540, 548, 550, and 555. The 545 entry in Britton’s work is derived from
    Natural Phenomena:
    And Chronology of the Seasons
    by Edward J. Lowe (London, 1870). The 554 entry derives from Roger of Wendover. Another key entry, from the reign of the Kentish King Ochte, derives from
    The History of England
    by John Seller (London, 1696), who presumably was quoting from a now lost medieval source.
  3. They were written by Welsh monks in the tenth century, utilizing older, now unknown sources.
  4. Directed by Jacqueline Nowakowski of the Cornwall Archaeological Unit.
  5. In the Irish kingdom of Raithliu.
  6. Excavated in 1966–1990 by Philip Barker, University of Birmingham.
  7. A site that until around
    A
    .
    D
    . 300 had been the exercise hall of the city’s public baths complex.
  8. The interpretation of events at Wroxeter is based on archaeological evidence provided by, and discussions with, Roger White of the University of Birmingham, who has made an in-depth study of the structural history of the site. The north wall of this ancient chapel is now known as the Old Work, the only piece of imposing masonry surviving at Wroxeter.
  9. The only fairly well documented medieval plague epidemic in England was the Black Death. In the peak eighteen-month mortality period in the late 1340s, 47 or 48 percent of the population is thought to have died (estimate in
    The Black
    Death,
    translated and edited by Rosemary Horrox). That, however, is an average figure. In some areas much higher percentages perished. Indeed, Horrox says that the most common contemporary claim—presumably derived from severe local experiences—was that scarcely a tenth of the population survived.
 
CHAPTER 14
 
  1. Up till now, virtually all academics have taken the view that the concept of the “Waste Land” in the Arthurian romances was pure literary invention or at best inspired by myths.
  2. Sometimes referred to, erroneously, as the
    Mabinogion.
  3. The name
    Annals of Ulster
    is the English translation of the Latin name
    Annales
    Ultoniensis
    —the title arbitrarily given by the English in the seventeenth century to a late-sixteenth-century chronicle called the
    Annale Senait.
    The work consists of material copied from at least two earlier manuscripts—the probably tenth-century
    Liber Cuanach
    and a probably eighth- or ninth-century chronicle of unknown name, neither of which are now extant. Those manuscripts were derived in turn from long-lost annals written by Irish monks on the Scottish island of Iona between 550 and 740 and then by later monks in Kells in Ireland between 740 and 1000.
  4. The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation,
    edited by Norris J. Lacy, published by Garland, 1993/96, volume 4, page 65.
  5. From
    The Mabinogion,
    translated by Jeffrey Gantz, Penguin, 1976.
  6. As implied in the twelfth-century
    Story of the Grail,
    by Chrétien de Troyes.
  7. Dyfed in the
    Mabinogi.
  8. First mentioned in the
    History of the Kings of Britain,
    it originally may have referred to the west Midlands.
  9. The History of the Kings of Britain,
    by Geoffrey of Monmouth, translated by Lewis Thorpe, published by Penguin, 1996.
  10. From page 87 of
    The Story of the Grail—The Contes del Graal or Perceval,
    translated by William W. Kibler, and published by Garland, 1990.
  11. From
    The High Book of the Grail: A Translation of the 13th-Century Romance of
    Perlesvaus,
    translated by Nigel Bryant, and published by D. S. Brewer/Rowman and Littlefield, 1978, page 90.
  12. From
    The Elucidation,
    translated by Sebastian Evans in
    Sources of the Grail,
    selected and introduced by John Matthews.
  13. From page 65 of
    The Lancelot-Grail in Translation,
    volume 4, translated by E. Jane-Burns and published by Garland, 1995.
  14. From pages 212–214 of
    The Post-Vulgate in Translation,
    volume 4, translated by Martha Asher, published by Garland, 1995.
  15. The identification of Waste Land material from the Arthurian romances in this chapter is based on research carried out for this book by a specialist in medieval Arthurian romance, Elspeth Kennedy of Oxford University.
 
CHAPTER 15
 
  1. Translation as published in
    The Age of Arthur,
    by John Morris, 1973. The name Cynddylan is pronounced “Kinthullen.”
  2. Certainly the settlement discontinuity phenomenon that hit the southwest in the mid–sixth century did not affect the Anglo-Saxon east until sometime in the first half of the seventh century.
  3. From
    Gildas: Arthurian Period Sources,
    volume 7, translated by M. Winterbottom, Phillimore, 1978.
  4. The
    Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
    text covering this period was written in the ninth century, utilizing earlier sources that are now lost.
  5. Translation as published in
    The Age of Arthur,
    by John Morris. The river name Dwyryw is pronounced “Dwiry-oo.”
  6. Translation as published in
    The Age of Arthur,
    by John Morris. The place name Catraeth is pronounced “Katrithe.” Mynydawc is pronounced “Minoothog.”
  7. Translation as published in
    The Age of Arthur,
    by John Morris.
  8. Contrary to common assumption, the word
    Bretwalda
    has nothing to do with the word
    Britain.
    It was derived from the title Brytenwalda, meaning “wide ruler.” It was only later misspelled and therefore misinterpreted as Bretwalda, that is, “ruler of the Britons.” However, as “wide ruler,” the Brytenwalda was indeed “ruler of Britain”!
 
CHAPTER 16
 
  1. From
    The Annals of Ulster,
    edited by Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill and published by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983.
  2. The Irish tree-ring record for this period is described by Mike Baillie on pages 212–217 of the journal
    Holocene,
    volume 4, 1994.
  3. The Irish chronicle called the
    Cronicum Scotorum
    is a seventeenth-century copy of an original of unknown name written sometime between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. That is in turn derived from annals written down by Irish monks on the Scottish island of Iona between 550 and 740, and then by later monks in Kells in Ireland between 740 and 1000.
  4. Because dates in the various Irish annals often conflict with each other and events in some annals even appear twice or three times under different dates, I have used the annals-derived synchronized chronology recently worked out by the Irish chronologist Dan McCarthy of Trinity College, Dublin, and published by him on the Internet at: http://www.cs.tcd.ie/Dan.McCarthy/Chronology/synchronisms/annals-chron.htm. His analysis of Irish chronological data appeared in an article entitled “The Chronology of the Irish Annals” in the
    Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy,
    section C (1998), pages 203–255.
  5. Estimated by Matthew Stout, author of
    The Irish Ringfort,
    published by Four Courts Press, Dublin. Ring forts were not the only defensive structures built at this time. Many communities built fortified artificial islands in the middle of lakes. Known as crannogs, these manmade island fortresses must have been virtually impregnable. Of the hundreds of Irish crannogs that survive, only around fourteen have ever been precisely dated (using dendrochronology)—and nine were built in the period 550–620. The dates for seven of these were published in
    Tree Ring Dating and Archaeology,
    by M. Baillie, Croom Helm, London, 1982.
BOOK: Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World
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