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Italian Long-Range Bombing Raids

Posted by Mitch Williamson in on Saturday, November 7, 2009


 

 

 

On July 9, 1940, three SM82s staged the first Axis air raid on Gibraltar, all returning safely from their 2,100-mile round trip (the first of seven such visits by summer 1941, none involving more than three aircraft). Perhaps their most remarkable mission was an attack by four SM82s against oil facilities on Bahrain and the Arabian mainland in October 1940, a 2,800-mile round trip launched from the Dodecanese, staging through East Africa. This particular operation was headed by Ettore Muti (known to the Arabs as the ‘green-eyed Djinn’), another living embodiment of the Fascist ideal of the ‘man of action.’ He had been a spy, a bodyguard for Mussolini’s sons while they themselves were serving as bomber pilots in the Ethiopian campaign, and a pilot flying literally hundreds of bombing missions over Ethiopia, Spain, and Greece.

A formation of four Italian Savoia Marchetti SM82 aircraft (one an unloaded pathfinder) of the 41st Group did actually bomb oil installations at Manama, near Bahrain on October 19th 1940. These were long range variants of a development of the SM 79.
The mission flew from Rhodes, via Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and the Persian Gulf to its target, returning via Saudi Arabia and the Red Sea to a refuelling point (pre-positioned by a fifth aircraft) in Zula, Eritrea. All aircraft then successfully returned to Rome. The aircraft flew 2400km in 15.5hrs before reaching Zula.


Six oil wells were set alight, and other installations damaged, each of the 3 loaded bombers having dropped 1500kg of light (15 - 50kg) incendiary and explosive bombs.

Gabriel Valencia (1799–1848)

Posted by Mitch Williamson in on Friday, November 6, 2009



A prominent Mexican general, Gabriel Valencia quarreled with General Antonio López de Santa Anna and was disgraced at the Battle of Padierna (Contreras) in August 1847.

Valencia, who was born in Mexico City, joined the Spanish army as a youth. After fighting various insurrections against the Spanish government, he joined the forces of Agustín de Iturbide in 1821. Continuing in the Mexican army, Valencia was soon a brigadier general and ally of General Antonio López de Santa Anna. Santa Anna and Valencia continued to work together to gain political advantage, including participating in the overthrow of President Anastasio Bustamante in 1841. Valencia also helped depose President José Joaquín Herrera in 1845 and aligned himself with new president Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga.

Valencia was stationed at San Luis Potosí in 1847, and he argued with Santa Anna about attacking General Zachary Taylor’s army in northern Mexico. Santa Anna instead ordered Valencia and his Army of the North to join the Army of the East in attempting to stop General Winfield Scott’s advance from Mexico City. Settling at Padierna against Santa Anna’s wishes, Valencia then refused to obey Santa Anna’s orders to pull back toward Churubusco. On the eve of the Battle of Padierna (Contreras), Santa Anna had advanced reinforcements toward Valencia, only to withdraw them. The following day, August 20, Valencia’s force was wrecked in a battle that lasted less than 30 minutes. Santa Anna’s refusal to help Valencia has been interpreted by some as an effort to disgrace Valencia with an embarrassing and costly loss. After the battle, Santa Anna issued orders to have Valencia shot on sight. Valencia retreated through the backcountry to safety.

Valencia died in Mexico City in 1848, shortly after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had been signed. U.S. soldier J. J. Oswandel recalled that “his death has caused a gloom and great mourning among the gentle portion of the community. At San Angel all the church bells tolled in sorrow at his death.... It is a well-known fact that if Gen. Santa Anna, with his twelve thousand troops who were in reserve, had supported. Gen. Valencia at the battle of Contreras...our army would not so easy have gotten into the city of Mexico....”

For further reading:
Alcaraz, The Other Side, 1850;
Costeloe, The Central Republic in Mexico, 1835–1846, 1993;
DePalo, The Mexican National Army, 1822–1852, 1997;
Oswandel, Notes of the Mexican War, 1885.

Battle of Contreras (August 20, 1847)

Posted by Mitch Williamson in



Battle of Contreras during the Mexican-American War, painting by Carl Nebel. Popular belief generally regarded this battle as a minor one, fought absurdly by the Mexican leadership. Even with the betrayals and quarrels dividing the leadership, there was no doubt as to the courage of the fighters in the field, and it was a battle that, if it had been well planned by the leadership of the Mexican side, could have changed significantly the last days of the war.



 

 


August 19 and 20, 1847-  At the battles of Contreras and Churubusco on the outskirts of Mexico City, the Mexicans sustain about four thousand casualties, while the United States has nearly one thousand. The surviving seventy-five members of the San Patricio Battalion, a Mexican army unit made up of U.S. Army deserters and other foreigners, are captured; fifty are sentenced to death by hanging while the rest are to be severely punished.

The 1847 Battle of Contreras (known to Mexicans as the Battle of Padierna), fought between General Winfield Scott’s Army of Occupation and General Gabriel Valencia’s Army of the North, lasted only approximately 20 minutes before the Mexican forces retreated in disorder.

After the fall of Veracruz and Cerro Gordo to General Scott’s advancing army, General Antonio López de Santa Anna deployed his troops about five miles outside Mexico City. Most of his men were placed at San Angel, Coyoacán, and Churubusco, a few miles from the city’s gates. From north of Mexico City, Santa Anna ordered General Valencia and approximately 6,000 men from the Army of the North to occupy San Angel. Without orders, Valencia took his men three miles further south to a position just west of the Indian village of Padierna (which the U.S. forces mistook for the nearby village of Contreras). On August 18, 1847, fearing that Valencia was too exposed, Santa Anna ordered him to fall back to Coyoacán and to send his artillery to Churubusco; Valencia refused.

Valencia believed that his position in the low hills overlooking Padierna could be assaulted only via the road between San Agustín and Padierna; any efforts to flank his army would be blocked by the pedregal, the jagged lava field in his front and to his left.

Scott’s army began to arrive at San Agustín on August 18. Careful reconnaissance by engineer Captain Robert E. Lee discovered a route through the pedregal that could be widened for wagons and artillery. Accepting Lee’s recommendations, Scott decided to attack Valencia the following day.

Five hundred men from General Gideon Pillow’s division toiled on August 19 to cut the road through the lava field that one soldier called a “raging sea of molten rock.” An artillery duel developed between Valencia’s 22 artillery pieces and U.S. guns under Captain John Magruder. Valencia let Pillow’s forces move cautiously forward to position themselves in his front. Meanwhile, Santa Anna advanced southward from Churubusco with a large force to assist Valencia and, at dark, stopped less than two miles from Padierna.

General Persifor Smith, the commander of the 5,000 U.S. soldiers in Valencia’s front, had decided to attack in the morning. A cold rain-storm swept across the hills that soaked both armies. For some unexplained reason, Santa Anna moved back toward Coyoacán, which completely demoralized Valencia’s men. (Santa Anna’s refusal to help Valencia is considered by many to be a result of their political and military rivalry.) The U.S. troops struck hard at daybreak on August 20, and the Battle of Contreras lasted about 20 minutes before Valencia’s soldiers were running northward in full retreat.

Valencia lost approximately 700 in killed and wounded, and 813 were taken prisoner, including four generals. Learning that an infuriated Santa Anna had ordered him shot on sight, Valencia escaped through the back-country. Smith’s victorious soldiers pursued the fleeing Mexican army relentlessly toward its defenses at Churubusco, about 5 miles north along the road. Santa Anna quickly decided to send as many of his soldiers as possible to Mexico City; the Battle of Churubusco, his delaying action, was fought a few hours later.

For further reading:
Alcaraz, The Other Side, 1850;
Brooks, A Complete History of the Mexican War, 1846–1848, 1849;
Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 1885;
Smith, To Mexico with Scott, 1917.

WEAPONRY OF THE WARS OF THHE ROSES

Posted by Mitch Williamson in , on Thursday, November 5, 2009


During the WARS OF THE ROSES, English MEN-AT-ARMS carried various types of weapons into battle, including thrusting and stabbing implements, such as swords and daggers, and powerful battering weapons, such as maces and poleaxes.


For close-quarter combat, the fifteenth-century knight usually carried a sword that could be used for both cutting and thrusting. Such weapons varied greatly in length and width, from a broad, single-handed sword that was about two and a half feet in length to a narrower, two-handed version that was almost three and a half feet long. Swords meant solely for thrusting tended to have longer, narrower blades and longer hilts. When not in use, a sword fit into a scabbard that hung from a hip belt in such a way as to position the point a little to the rear where it could not trip its owner. From the other hip usually hung a rondel dagger, which was used to exploit gaps in an opponent's ARMOR or to pry open the visor of a downed enemy, who was then dispatched by a thrust to the eye or throat. The rondel was characterized by a disk- or cone-shaped guard between hilt and blade and a similarly shaped pommel at the other end of the hilt. Because it was used for stabbing, the rondel had a straight, slender blade that was triangular in shape and up to fifteen inches in length to allow for maximum penetration of an enemy's body.


Because the stronger, fluted armor used in the fifteenth century could deflect sword and spear thrusts, many knights began carrying new types of heavy weapons, often with hooks or spikes, which were designed to crush or puncture plate armor. Perhaps the most deadly of these weapons was the poleax, which consisted of a wooden shaft, four to six feet long, topped by a long spike that was flanked on one side by an ax head and on the other by a spiked hammer or fluke (a curved, beaklike extension for hooking an opponent to the ground). The spike could puncture plate or damage armored joints and rob a man of mobility. The ax and hammer could crush both armor and the flesh it covered. Against unarmored opponents, a skillfully wielded poleax was devastating.


While the poleax was used only for combat on foot, such other battering weapons as the battle-ax, the mace, and the war hammer were carried primarily by horsemen, who swung their weapon with one hand and held their reins with the other. RICHARD III supposedly led his famous cavalry charge at the Battle of Bosworth Field while wielding a battle-ax. Weighing from two to five pounds, the war hammer was serrated and usually carried a fluke opposite the hammerhead. Of a similar weight, the mace had a head composed of six interlocking serrated edges or some similarly formidable configuration of spikes and points. Like the poleax, these weapons were used to deliver crushing blows to armored opponents.


Besides the more formally trained and heavily armored men-at-arms, most civil war armies contained sizable contingents of billmen, foot soldiers who carried any of a wide variety of shafted weapons that could be used to drag enemies to the ground, to cut armor straps, and to frighten horses. Such weapons derived from the billhook, a common agricultural implement used for cutting and pruning that consisted of a blade with a hooked point attached to a long wooden shaft. Characterized by some type of blade, hook, or spike topping a pole that ranged in length from six to ten feet, a bill weapon could be raked, stabbed, or swung at an enemy. Depending on the type of head they employed, such weapons were known by various names, such as the halberd, which carried a spiked ax head and had to be swung at an opponent to be used most effectively. Because they required little training to use and, unlike bows, were easy to maintain, various forms of bills were the weapons usually carried by common soldiers and most often found in rural cottages and houses for protection against intruders.


Further Reading: Boardman, Andrew W., The Medieval Soldier in the Wars of the Roses (Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1998); DeVries, Kelly, Medieval Military Technology (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1992); Goodman, Anthony, The Wars of the Roses (New York: Dorset Press, 1981).

BASTARD FEUDALISM

Posted by Mitch Williamson in




The term "bastard feudalism" refers to a society in which titled noblemen, and some members of the GENTRY, developed networks or affinities of sworn RETAINERS who provided political, legal, domestic, and military service in return for money, office, and influence. Because the system allowed the raising of large bands of armed men, bastard feudalism enabled wealthy members of the PEERAGE to disrupt law and order and conduct private feuds in their localities, and even to contend for control of the national government. For these reasons, bastard feudalism was once considered a primary cause of the WARS OF THE ROSES, although most historians today view it as a useful and neutral social system that merely became susceptible to abuses during periods of royal weakness, such as occurred during the personal rule of HENRY VI and the first reign of EDWARD IV.


Charles Plummer coined the term bastard feudalism in 1885 to describe what he believed was a degeneration of feudalism, the early medieval social system that was based on a lord's granting of land (by heritable tenure) to a vassal in return for military or other services. Plummer blamed bastard feudalism for the disorder and instability that for him characterized the late fifteenth century. Plummer's phrase came into wide use in the 1940s when the influential historian K. B. McFarlane employed it to describe the functioning of English political society between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.

McFarlane viewed bastard feudalism not as an illegitimate offshoot of an earlier, purer system but as a natural response to societal changes that was, through individual abuses and royal incapacity, employed for disruptive and illegal purposes.

Because they were rarely kept under arms for long periods, noble retinues were not private armies. Although it could be seriously threatened by the military forces of dissident noblemen, as occurred to Henry VI in the 1450s, the Crown never sought to abolish retaining, only to control it through statutes passed by PARLIAMENT. Lacking standing armies, kings relied on noble retinues for the military forces they required to conduct foreign wars or crush internal rebellions. Once Edward IV destroyed the house of LANCASTER and secured himself on the throne, armed forces raised by bastard feudal relationships tended to support rather than threaten the Crown. However, under an inept monarch like Henry VI, or an insecure one like Edward IV before 1471, ambitious or disaffected magnates, like Richard PLANTAGENET, duke of York, in the 1450s and Richard NEVILLE, earl of Warwick, in the 1460s, could use their networks of retainers to defy or even control the Crown. Although bastard feudalism did not cause the disorder and instability of these decades, it did provide powerful men with the means to take advantage of royal weakness and their own ambition.


Men recruited under the bastard feudal system were not exclusively employed for military purposes; many were household servants, while others bound themselves by indenture (contract) to supply various services. Only those recruited in emergencies, as when Warwick summoned retainers to repel Edward IV in 1471, were meant solely for military employment. In return for money and "good lordship," which might mean using influence to obtain an office or bribing or intimidating a judge or jury in a lawsuit (known as embracery), retainers often wore their lord's BADGE or livery (uniform) and took their lord's part (except, technically, against the king) in any political or military dispute. Although both Edward IV and HENRY VII limited retaining, bastard feudalism continued as the basis of English political society until the late sixteenth century.


Further Reading: Bean, J. M.W., From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989); Bellamy, J.G., Bastard Feudalism and the Law (Portland, OR: Areopagitica Press, 1989); Hicks, Michael, Bastard Feudalism (London: Longman, 1995); McFarlane, K. B., "Bastard Feudalism," in England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1981).

Springfield native devised plan to defeat Japan in World War II

Posted by Mitch Williamson in on Wednesday, November 4, 2009

And Clarence Williams did it years before Pearl Harbor

By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer 

When his son donated retired Adm. Clarence S. Williams’ naval uniforms, medals, swords and other effects to the Clark County Historical Society in 1956, he highlighted as his father’s most notable service the command of an international fleet of 48 ships assembled in 1927 to protect foreigners along China’s Yangtze River from the effects of a brewing civil war.
Half a century later, historians may beg to differ.
Since the 1991 publication of Edward S. Miller’s “War Plan Orange,” the elder Williams is best remembered for the far-sighted and brilliant work he did from 1900 to the mid-1920s creating the fundamental plan the United States would use to win a war against a nation that at the time wasn’t even considered an enemy.
By the time Williams left the Navy’s War Plans Division in 1922 for a three-year stint as president of the Naval War College, “he and his supporters had bequeathed to the nation a sound war plan for advancing at least halfway across the Pacific” in an anticipated war against Japan, Miller said.
What the author calls “history’s most successful war plan” both undergirded the entire island-hopping fight against Japan in World War II and established Williams as “one of the finest strategists of the century.”
A 1992 New York Times review of the book went so far as to say that more than 50 years after the admiral’s retirement, “Miller’s research has given the Navy a new hero in Rear Adm. Clarence S. Williams.”

Home-grown talent
Williams was born Oct. 7, 1863, in Springfield to Orson Bennett and Pamela Floyd Williams. His father at the time worked for T.B. Peet & Co., a stove dealer, and the family lived on High Street.
Educated in Marysville and Springfield schools, Williams graduated from Springfield High School in 1880, and was appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy by recommendation of Gen. J. Warren Keifer, at the time the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Graduating in the top 10 percent of his Class of 1884, Williams was sharp enough to teach mathematics, mechanics and navigation at the Naval Academy. At the turn of the century, he also was considered sharp enough to be included on the short list of officers the Navy assembled for its strategic planning team.
Having commanded the torpedo boat U.S.S. Gwin in the Spanish American War, Williams by then was a seasoned commander. He also was familiar with the geography of the Pacific, having done a 1900 hydrological survey of a small island that would play a big role in World War II: Midway.
Among the “rising stars” of the Navy, Miller writes “Williams had the right temperament for a war planner: analytical, mature in judgment, unswayed by eloquence, yet a good listener who demand facts and asked penetrating questions.’’
“On the (planning) board, they called him ‘The Oracle’ for his grasp of the future,” Miller writes. “His classmates had dubbed him ‘Parson’ for his sober demeanor, yet his eye had a twinkle when he spun a sailors’ yarn.”

No islands to man
But it wasn’t a yarn that Williams focused on when he envisioned a war against Japan: It was a string of far flung Pacific Islands the United States had claimed — islands that sat thousands of miles from its mainland and much closer to Japan.
The practical indefensibility of those islands was foremost in his mind.
Although others in the Navy were in favor of trying to build installations to make the islands and atolls easier to defend, Miller says Williams understood “that politicians would never underwrite a chain of Pacific bases.”
Long before Japan’s rise to power, the plan would have seemed an unnecessary expense to taxpayers and an act of aggression by the international community.
Miller said the mood of the time was such that even the U.S. Department of State “kept a wary distance from the idea of war planning,” leaving Williams and the Navy to go about the work themselves.
Although they might have enjoyed a feeling of broader support for their work, Miller writes, Williams said the strategy and plan they produced “was so predictable and the strategic situation in the Pacific so clear that the Navy could independently and confidently decide its best lines of action.”
With the blessing of the secretary of the Navy, it did.

Sea power vs. land power
Assuming most of the Japanese territorial ambitions in the far East would require a large standing Army, Williams early on concluded the United States would win “by waging a maritime war” against Japan’s land-based army, Miller writes.
Miller said that single insight “became an indelible strategic axiom of War Plan Orange,” in which Orange represented Japan and Blue the United States.
Phase I of the strategy called for the United States to do what necessity eventually required at the outbreak of war: To surrender its distant islands, pull back, and then mount a patient counteroffensive to take the islands back one by one and advance its base of operations.
Williams’ initial strategy was unpopular among a group of so-called “thrusters” who would have preferred to rush across the ocean to immediately and heroically retake the land in the event of an attack.
History rendered the debate moot when Japanese war planes destroyed the United States’ only means of doing that in their attack on Pearl Harbor.
Thus opened what Williams had already envisioned as Phase II of the conflict, the island-hopping war driven by the basic insight that “Japan would gain no advantage from its massive army” in such a war.
“Only small garrisons could be sustained on small islands, where control of the sea would assure (the United States) of an overwhelming concentration of force,” Miller writes.
This strategy required the Japanese to defend the indefensible islands, which it had no choice but to do because of the larger and obvious American strategy: To push the Japanese back to the mainland and cut off their shipping lanes before laying siege to the mainland and reducing their industries to rubble by massive bombing strikes of Phase III.
Just how far-sighted Williams and his fellow planners were is seen not only by their realization of the important part air power would play in the war, writes Miller, but in their forecast of specifics of how the fight would unfold.
“Superimposed on the three-phase concept was the expectation of a single great naval encounter that would determine control of the sea,” writes Miller — an encounter Williams expected the United States to win because, by the time it came, the nation’s superior manufacturing capabilities would have put a stronger force on the seas.
That the battle eventually took place at the very island Williams surveyed in 1900 makes his foresight seem prescient.

Role reversal
Two other aspects of Williams’ thoughts on the war against Japan are interesting to consider in retrospect.
Fifteen years before the war against Japan began, writes Miller, “the prime uncertainty (among strategists) was whether the American public would tolerate a lengthy war, say of a year or two years duration, for (islands) not (seen as) vital to national security.”
When war came, the already worldwide scale of the conflict coupled with the American public’s outrage over the attack of Pearl Harbor ensured public support for the longer war.
A second assumption of Williams and his planners also shines a different light on the end of the war with Japan.
“It was an article of faith among all planners that the United States need never invade Japan,” Miller writes.
“To make their studies complete, however, the professional strategists of the 1920s considered the possibility,” Miller reports.
Williams concluded in 1922 that there was “almost no prospect of success” in an invasion of the Japanese homeland, Miller reports.
Unlike on the smaller islands, “the enemy can always concentrate forces greatly superior to the successive expeditions into which our land forces must be organized for overseas transportation,” Williams wrote.
Williams saw the vessels that might be sent ashore as perhaps the smallest, most indefensible islands in the battle for the Japanese homeland.

An admiral’s thoughts
Martin said the quality of the work Williams and others did in their plan is reflected in the remark by World War II Adm. Chester Nimitz, who was at the Naval War College when Williams was its president, that “the war unfolded just as predicted in naval war games.”
Although he retired in 1927, Williams received a commission as an admiral on the list of the navy’s retired officers July 29, 1942, and watched War Plan Orange unfold out in news dispatches from the Pacific.
But one can’t help but wonder whether War Plan Orange also was on his mind when he was in China in 1927 commanding the international fleet with a list of allies that included the target of the plan he had devised: Imperial Japan.
 

BRIDGES AND BURHS

Posted by Mitch Williamson


The most successful way to thwart the Vikings was to build fortifications; even the Great Army was incapable of taking strongly held defences. However, this required the mobilization of manpower and the overcoming of local apathy. Charles the Bald concentrated on blocking the Seine, which led to the heart of his kingdom. In 862, he began work on a fortified bridge at Pont de l'Arche near Pîtres, consisting of a wooden superstructure and bridgehead forts of wood and stone. In 865, Vikings were still able to reach Paris, so Charles went to Pîtres with workmen 'to complete the fortifications, so that the Northmen might never again be able to sail up the Seine'. Yet in 868 'he measured out the fort into sections ...and assigned responsibility for them to various men of his realm', and the next year men were detailed 'to complete and then guard the fort' (Annals of St Bertin). The work seems finally to have been completed by 873. This was part of a campaign of fortification. In 864, Charles ordered that men too poor to campaign were to work on and garrison fortifications, and in 865 bridges were rebuilt to block access to the Oise and Marne. The monastery of St Denis near Paris was walled in 869, and a fortified bridge was built at Paris. He also ordered the restoration of walls at Tours, Le Mans, and Orleans in 869, and a bridge was built at Pont-de-Ce to block the Loire. Before Charles went to Italy in 877 he showed continuing concern by issuing instructions for garrisons and the inspection of defences. However, in 885 the Great Army sailed up the Seine to Paris. Since the death of Charles in 877, royal power had declined, and Pont de l'Arche was probably no longer garrisoned. At Paris, effective resistance was led by the local commanders abbot Gauzlin and count Odo. During the 88Os, defences were constructed throughout the area between the Seine and Rhine, but now it was on local rather than royal initiative.



In England, Alfred's contemporary biographer Asser wrote of 'the cities and towns he restored, and the others he constructed where there had been none before'. The Burghill Hidage, an early tenth-century document, lists thirty West Saxon burhs (fortresses) and the number of hides (a measure of land for assessing taxes and dues) attached to each to provide manpower. Each hide was to send one man with responsibility for four feet of rampart, and where the walls survive their length often corresponds closely to the allotted garrison. Although changes had occurred by the early tenth century, there is little doubt that the system originated in the 880s. The burhs had several functions. They were refuges for the local population, their garrisons ensured the Vikings could not seize them, and men from the burhs were a mobile reserve which could be used against raiders, as in 893. They had various origins: reused Roman walls, earthworks from the Iron Age and later, and new foundations. Some were small forts close to existing sites, but others like Wallingford were founded as new towns with planned layouts. The Burghill Hidage arrangements required the mobilization of 27,000 men - perhaps one-fifth of the adult male population of Wessex. Unsurprisingly, there was some apathy in face of such a demand: in 892, the Great Army overran a half-made burh (probably the lost Eorpeburnan in East Sussex) which contained an incomplete garrison. Yet generally the system worked. Whereas in the 870s the Great Army seized existing forts at will, from 884, when it vainly besieged Rochester, it was unable to penetrate the heart of Wessex.

IRELAND’S VIKING TOWNS - DEFENCES

Posted by Mitch Williamson


Evidence for town defences has been found at Dublin, Waterford and Limerick. The Dublin evidence for town defences is the earliest and most complete found to date. It is clear that Dublin was enclosed by an earthen bank in the 10th century and that a larger second bank was built outside this around the 11th-century town. It also appears that according as the latter bank was being enlarged, especially by the addition of layers of estuarine mud in the 11th century, a stone revetment was placed in front of it. It seems that in places this wall was more than a facade and was a free standing town wall. Both Dublin and Waterford were encircled by such walls in the Hiberno-Norse period. Limerick’s bank may have been stone-faced; Wexford appears to have been defended by a stone wall at the time of the Norman Invasion.



The most extensive series of defences were excavated at Fishamble Street, Dublin among a succession of nine waterfronts along the south bank of the River Liffey. These waterfronts included two possible flood banks and two definitely defensive embankments which date from the Viking period and a stone wall of about 1100. The earliest embankments were low and non-defensive and were located above high-water line. They were not more than 1m high and do not appear to have been palisade. It is not clear how much of the settlement they encircled. Their primary function was to keep dry the properties on the sloping ground above the foreshore where there is some evidence for the accumulation of possible yard detritus before the construction of the embankments. Some time later in the 10th century an extensive embankment was erected along the high-water line. This appears to have been built in a number of sections although probably conceived as a unit and probably erected by royal authority. It was built on top of dumped organic refuse and was established by a pre-existing fence. The bank was bonded in mud and its location on a naturally rising slope made its external aspect higher than its internal. It was protected from the erosive action of the tidal river by a breakwater which was secured in a channel cut into the rocky foreshore. A cobbled stone pathway existed inside and parallel to the bank along the western stretch and towards Fishamble Street. A ditch, 1.6m deep and 2m wide, was cut into the natural limestone immediately outside part of the bank. A series of planks were set edge-to-edge on the outer slope of this part of the bank, each with a large mortise through which they were probably originally pegged to the bank. These planks appear to have been intended to provide a smooth beaching/docking slipway for ships or, less likely, they may have been the surviving lowest part of a palisade erected on the forward slope of the bank. This first defensive Viking embankment seems to have encircled the whole town because it appears also to be represented in Ross Road on the south side.



Little time elapsed between the abandonment of the first bank and its replacement by its successor, which in places incorporated the earlier structure. A second larger embankment was built in at least four different stages and erected at the river - ward side of its predecessor, probably around the year 1000. Gravel, stones and earth were used in its construction, the dumped layers being rein forced by discarded post-and-wattle screens and by layers of brushwood. At one stage in its history this bank was crowned by a post-and-wattle palisade; later, when the bank was heightened, a more robust stave wall, anchored from behind, was placed on top. In its final phase, this bank was covered over with estuarine mud brought from the bed of the river; this dried out and formed a firm surface. This second defensive embankment also encircled the whole town. It too appears at Ross Road as well as on two sides of Dublin Castle, in the Powder Tower, where the eastern ramparts of the Viking town were unearthed with a short southern stretch west of the Birmingham Tower. Part of its eastern stretch may also have turned up in Parliament Street, where the defences overlooked the west bank of the Poddle. It seems that an even higher bank was erected before the construction of the stone wall.



It is likely that for a considerable part of the Hiberno- Norse period Dublin was encircled by the earthen embankments just described. Towards the end of the 11th century a stone wall about 1.5 m wide and possibly as much as 3.5 m in original height was built outside these embankments. The average surviving height of the wall was about 2 m along Wood Quay, across which over 100 m of wall was uncovered. The wall was composed of a rubble fill within mortared stone facings. A number of splits in the coursing of the inner face of the wall indicated that the outer face might have been built first and the wall completed on the inside. It seems that the wall was not meant to be completely free-standing and that its lowest part may have been a revetment or quay wall which fronted a bank of organic and mud layers dumped behind it. The recent discovery of a long stretch of this wall at Ross Road in the southern part of the Hiberno-Norse town strongly suggests that this wall also encircled the whole town. It is possible that the reason the Dún of Dublin was marvelled at as one of the wonders of Ireland in a poem about 1120 in the Book of Leinster was because this stone wall was a relatively new feature at that time.



The development of Waterford’s defences seems to parallel the Dublin experience. However, it was only after the expansion of the town that embankments were added and this was well into the 11th century. About 35 m of the 11th-century earthen bank have been exposed in four separate excavations. This bank was accompanied by a ditch, which varied in depth between 2 and 2.5 m and was 2.5 m wide at the base. The bank is described as ‘substantial’ and was made of turfs interleaved with clay and was up to 4 m in width, the original height probably being in excess of 3 m (surviving to a height of 1.65 m). The bank was built in sections by gangs of workmen under the control of some municipal authority. Interestingly, oak beams ‘may have formed some sort of superstructure on the bank’ and these have been dated to 1070-90. Planks on the front face of the first defensive bank at Fishamble Street, Dublin present a possible parallel.



In the second quarter of the 12th century the bank was demolished and the ditch backfilled to accommodate a substantial stone wall of which 22 m survived to a maximum height of 1.65 m or 8 courses of construction. The wall was built as a revetment against the eastern half of the bank and, according to the excavator, was never entirely free - standing. Like the Hiberno-Norse wall around Dublin, it had a projecting footing and was slightly battered. It had a rubble core and was built in different sections with vertical joints appearing between these sections; all of this finds parallels in the Dublin wall. There was a cobble pathway outside the wall.



Uniquely to date, the Waterford excavations also produced evidence for a pre-Norman gateway. This was at Peter Street, where the outer face of a 1.72 m wide gateway in the town wall exposed. It consisted of ‘two ashlars built jambs… above projecting plinths’ which survived to a height of 3 and 4 courses.



What was described as a 10.1 m stretch of a ‘clay bank riveted by a limestone wall’ turned up at the King John’s Castle site, Limerick. It had a maxi - mum surviving height of 1.7 m and had a 1m wide pathway on a berm at its base, beyond which was 2.8 m deep ditch. It is thought that these features may represent the south side of a ‘massive stone-riveted earthen rampart which, from the associated finds, may date to the 12th century.’ That this ‘earlier structure was utilised in the Norman defences for a limited duration’ was confirmed by the discovery of its being bonded to the later, mortared east curtain wall of the castle.



There is no archaeological confirmation to date for the Viking Age defensive embankment pro - posed for Wexford. The Bride Street excavations revealed no trace of a bank. The absence of banks from the relatively closely located Bride Street and Oyster Lane excavations could mean that Wexford was not defended by a bank along its 11th-century waterfront. The surviving walls of Wexford seem to date much later. Giraldus Cambrensis uses the term murum for Wexford’s defences, a term he also uses for the town walls of Dublin, Waterford and Limerick which implies that the towns in quest - ion were each defended by stone walls before the coming of the Anglo-Normans in the 12th century.


LINK


PETER THE GREAT

Posted by Mitch Williamson in



Peter I interrogating his son Alexei, a painting by Nikolai Ge (1871)


(1672–1725)
Russian czar
Peter I (czar of Russia 1682–1725) was a modernizer who inspired Russia’s rise as a major world power. The son of Czar Alexis I (reigned 1645–1676), Peter ruled jointly with his elder half-brother Ivan until the latter’s death in 1696. During the regency of their sister Sophia (1682–1689), Peter pursued hobbies that informed his later reforms, learning to sail and drilling his “play” regiments. In 1686 Russia joined the Holy League against Turkey and in 1697–1698, seeking aid for that war, Peter became the first Russian ruler to visit western Europe. For Peter it was also a voyage of self-education. His experience of Western cultures prompted him to force his nobles to shave off their beards (attributes of piety for Orthodox Christians) and adopt Western dress.
Following peace with the Turks, in 1700 Peter embarked upon the Great Northern War with Sweden. After early defeats, victory at Poltava in Ukraine in 1709 freed him to capture Sweden’s eastern Baltic ports. In 1711 Russia was defeated by the Turks, but a lenient settlement allowed Peter to pursue the Swedish war to a successful conclusion in the Treaty of Nystad (1721). He accepted the titles Emperor, the Great, and Father of the Fatherland.
War was a determining factor in Peter’s reforms. He improved the army and founded a fleet, using foreign technical expertise. His goal was to train Russians in new skills and develop private enterprise, but the state remained the chief producer and customer. Peter’s government reforms aimed to improve administrative efficiency. In 1711 he founded the senate, in 1717–1720 new government departments known as colleges, and in the 1700s–1710s organs of provincial government based on Swedish models. To rationalize and improve the military and civil service he created the Table of Ranks (1722), comprising a ladder of fourteen grades. Men from the hereditary elite continued to enjoy prominence, although some newcomers made their fortunes, most famously Peter’s favorite Aleksandr Menshikov (c. 1670–1729).
Peter successfully established technical schools, such as the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation (1701), but new elementary schools (1714) generally failed to attract pupils. The Academy of Sciences (founded 1725), initially staffed entirely by foreigners, was his major achievement in this field. The Orthodox Church also ran schools. In 1721 Peter replaced the patriarchate (the last patriarch died in 1700) with a state-monitored committee of clergymen called the Holy Synod to run the church. He restricted entry into monasteries and requisitioned church funds for the war effort.
In 1703 Peter founded Saint Petersburg on former Swedish territory, as a base for the Baltic fleet and a port for foreign trade. From about 1712 it replaced Moscow as the capital. Saint Petersburg became Russia’s “window on Europe.” Its main buildings were designed by foreign architects and its inhabitants had to follow European fashions. In the seventeenth century upper-class Russian women had lived in semi-seclusion; Peter now forced them to socialize with men. Many Russians, however, resented being uprooted from Moscow to these alien surroundings.
Peter was a practical man. He studied many crafts, including ship-building, wood-turning, and dentistry. He began his army and naval careers from the lowest ranks as an example to others. But this man with a common touch remained an absolute ruler with an ambitious vision: to make Russia the equal of other European nations and to win their respect. He faced serious problems. More than 90 percent of his subjects were peasants and half of these were serfs. Peter had to extend and intensify serfdom to meet the demand for army recruits, labor, and tax revenues. The nobles, too, found lifelong service burdensome. They had no corporate rights or institutions and they were subject to Peter’s numerous regulations, devised “in order that everyone knows his duties and no-one excuses himself on the grounds of ignorance”—as it was stated in many edicts. These principles extended to Peter’s heir, Alexis Petrovich (1690– 1718), the son of his first marriage. Alexis opposed many of his father’s ideas and in 1718 he was condemned to death for treason. In 1722 Peter duly issued a law that required the reigning monarch to nominate an heir, to reduce the risk of an “unworthy” successor. However, Peter failed to make a nomination. He was succeeded by his widow, Catherine I (reigned 1725– 1727), a Livonian peasant whom he married in 1712.
An enduring view of Peter the Great is that he singlehandedly transformed Russia from a backward fringe nation into a major modern power, even though some of his policies originated with his predecessors. At 201 centimeters tall, he was larger than life. Both Lenin and Stalin admired Peter for “accelerating” Russia’s economic and military development. Opinions are divided about the “balance sheet” of his activities, however. Critics question the heavy cost of his schemes, his use of force, the dangers of excessive imitation, and the split he created between a westernized elite and the peasant masses. He remains a controversial figure in Russia today.
Further Reading
Anderson, M. S. (1995). Peter the Great. London: Longman.
Anisimov, E.V. (1993). Progress through coercion: The reforms of Peter the Great. New York: M. E. Sharpe.
Bushkovitch, P. (2001). Peter the Great: The struggle for power, 1671–1725. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Cracraft, J. (2003). The revolution of Peter the Great. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hughes, L. A. J. (1998). Russia in the age of Peter the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

SUDEBNIK OF 1497

Posted by Mitch Williamson in on Monday, November 2, 2009




The 1497 Sudebnik was Russia’s first national law code. Unlike earlier immunity charters, which pertained only to a private landholder and his land, and the Dvina Land Charter (1397) and White Lake Charter (1488), which pertained only to particular localities, it promulgated rules of general application for Muscovite courts. Adopted after Ivan III had gathered in the lands of Novgorod, Tver, and other principalities, the Code is usually interpreted as part of Ivan’s policy of nationbuilding. The short preamble states that the Code was adopted by Grand Prince Ivan with his children and boyars. Thus, unlike some of Muscovy’s other legislation, it was not associated with an assembly of important prelates and servicemen.

A single copy of the Code has come down to us, which was found and published by Pavel Stroev in 1817. Most modern editors divide it into sixtyeight articles, but the original also contains thirtyseven chapter headings. Articles 1 through 25, in general, concern courts presided over by boyars and okolnichy, the two highest service ranks, with some attention also to the court of the grand prince. Clerks (dyaki) were to sit with the boyars and okolnichy in these courts, and were to prepare not only a written trial record but also a written judgment. These courts were to exercise jurisdiction over major crimes, such as murder, robbery, and theft, and the death penalty was provided for certain crimes. Articles 26 through 36 concern judicial documents such as summonses, warrants, and default judgments, as well as the duties of judicial officials such as bailiffs. The bailiffs were charged not only with serving such judicial documents but also with interrogating suspected criminals. Articles 37 through 45 concern the courts of the namestniki and volosteli, the grand prince’s vicegerents in rural areas. The jurisdiction of these courts depended on whether the judge was granted full jurisdiction. Many of the provisions of the first section are repeated in the third.

The Code thus either established or confirmed the previous existence of at least three levels of courts: that of the grand prince, that of the boyars and okolnichy, and that of the vicegerents. These were probably not permanent or standing courts in the modern sense, because the officials serving as judges had substantial other administrative and military duties. All courts used documents at nearly every stage of judicial proceedings: to initiate the lawsuit, to summon the defendant, to procure attendance of witness, and to record the judgment. The first three sections of the code are largely devoted to the procedural and more specifically the financial side of litigation. No less than thirty-six articles deal with fees and payments to be made to the court, and another fifteen concern damages and payments to private persons. Prohibition of bribery is mentioned several times. Plainly one of the priorities of the Code was to prevent bribery and the exaction of excessive fees. There are also numerous provisions on judicial duels, but actual court records indicate that such duels were seldom used to resolve litigation. Eyewitnesses and torture are also prescribed to resolve certain types of matters. The 1497 Code thus represents the transition, albeit incomplete, from so-called archaic law, characterized by composition (bloodwite), no judicial officials, and irrational modes of proof (trial by ordeal and combat), to a modern system of criminal penalties, judges and other judicial officials, and the use of witnesses and documents as evidence. The Code was also significant in introducing or confirming a document-based system of litigation.

The fourth section, starting at article 46, contains miscellaneous rules of substantive versus procedural law, the most famous of which is article 57, which requires a peasant to pay his lord a certain fee in the week before or the week after St. George’s day if he is to have the right to move elsewhere. There are also various provisions on inheritance, manumission of slaves, loans, and boundaries. The fourth section, however, does not contain all of the substantive rules of law that would be necessary to administer justice. For example, most of the reported cases of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries deal with title to and ownership of land, but the Code contains virtually no rules or standards for deciding such cases. Because the Code is primarily a procedural statute and contains only an incomplete listing of substantive rules of law, one might ask where the judges would look to find the substantive rules. Commentators have suggested that the judges would look to customary law or to certain Byzantine law manuals. Another possibility is that, in most cases, judges simply applied their own rough sense of justice, and that litigation was not generally conceived as the application of published or even customary rules.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dewey, Horace W. (1956). “The 1497 Sudebnik: Muscovite Russia’s First National Law Code.” The American Slavic and East European Review 15:325–338.
Dewey, Horace W., ed. (1966). Muscovite Judicial Texts, 1488–1556. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literature.

Book Review: Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz.

Posted by Mitch Williamson

Shlomo Venezia. Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz. In collaboration with Béatrice Prasquier. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. xv + 202 pp. $22.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7456-4383-0.
Reviewed by Jeff Rutherford (Department of History, Wheeling Jesuit University)
Published on H-German (October, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher


"Nobody ever really gets out of the Crematorium"
 
Between April 13 and May 21, 2006, Béatrice Prasquier conducted a series of interviews with Shlomo Venezia, a survivor of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando. These sessions form the extraordinary core of the somewhat strangely packaged volume under review. Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz centers on Venezia's chilling recollection of his life at the National Socialist death camp. His discussion highlights the incomparable, day-to-day brutality of the extermination camp system. Even more interestingly, he wrestles with his own conscience: did his activities in the crematorium constitute a type of collaboration with the Germans? Venezia's recollections are extremely powerful and thought-provoking; however, two historical essays curiously tacked on to conclude the volume fail to measure up to the survivor's tale.

The book opens with Venezia's detailed reminiscences about his life before Auschwitz. Descended from the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain during the late fifteenth century, Venezia's ancestors passed through Italy, where they stayed for a time, before settling in Greece. In Italy, his family picked up an Italian name as well as Italian citizenship, a status that initially provided him with some protection during the Axis occupation of Greece. The link to Italy meant that his family benefited from Mussolini's attempt to export the virtues of fascism during the 1930s. Venezia writes of attending Italian schools instead of Jewish ones, and there, he and his peers "got everything free, we didn't have to pay for our books, we could eat in the canteen ... we wore really smart uniforms" (p. 4). Though his family was plagued by poverty and hunger, Venezia visited Italy twice and received new shoes from the Italian consulate. Despite this Italian heritage, Venezia's mother spoke Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language of Sephardic Jews, while he spoke Greek when out in society. His discussion of this time period provides further evidence of the multicultural mosaic that existed in eastern and southeastern Europe even after the accelerated construction of national states following the First World War. In recent years, historians have emphasized the cultural plurality of states such as Poland, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine when investigating the impact of German occupation and the Holocaust; as Venezia's discussion shows, such issues should also be considered during any such examination of Greece.

Venezia moves on to discuss life under Axis occupation, but the bulk of the volume covers his time in Auschwitz. He emphasizes several important themes. First, he reconstructs in graphic detail the violence and cruelty endemic to the extermination camp system. From his very first introduction to the camp when "our captors started hitting people as soon as we arrived" (p. 35) to the first shower where a "young German ... amuse[d] himself at our expense ... quickly chang[ing] from scalding hot to freezing cold water" (p. 41), German brutality was on display. Even when Jews were waiting nervously in the gas chamber, not knowing what to expect, a German guard would flicker the lights to pass the time until the Zyklon-B pellets were dropped into the room; this was done purely to torment the Jews during their last few moments of life. Venezia identified two related causes for such behavior. On the one hand, the guards' continuous exposure to the camp system combined with their ideological beliefs to create a mindset in which "they'd lost all respect for the human person" (p. 58). In a later passage, he tellingly notes that in the eyes of the Germans, the prisoners "were merely Stücke" (p. 83); the constant dehumanization of Jews by the Nazis had led the guards to seen them as mere "pieces" without a shred of humanity. On the other hand, this attitude was part of a concerted effort by the Germans to terrorize the Jews into submission. Describing the SS men at Auschwitz as "vicious animals," Venezia stated that "they killed without compunction. They created a huge chaos to frighten people and disorient them ... nobody knew how to react other than by keeping in line" (pp. 87-88).

The ability to transform such individual cruelty into a comprehensive system of brutality marked the Nazi camp system. The Germans came extremely close to perfecting the mass murder of whole groups of people and this attention to detail permeated the entire machinery of destruction. Degradation was purposefully built into the system, a fact that the establishment of Sonderkommando units made particularly clear. The Sonderkommando units were comprised of Jews who cleaned up the gas chambers after a group of prisoners had been murdered. After its personnel dragged the corpses out of the chamber--as Venezia states, this in and of itself was an extremely disturbing process, as it was initially difficult to disentangle the bodies--the room had to be cleaned. All traces of blood and excrement had to be washed away in order to present a clean, sterile, and hence worry-free environment to the next batch of victims. After completing this task, the men of the Sonderkommando then moved through the corpses, clipping hair or pulling out gold teeth before disposing of the bodies in industrial furnaces. The expertise that the Germans acquired in carrying out mass murder was soon passed on to the men manning the Sonderkommando units. In one particularly disturbing passage, Venezia noted that the more experienced men collected the fat from the burned corpses in a basin and then poured it on the flames when they began to wane. The Sonderkommando men also learned that cold water needed to be poured onto the metal stretcher before sliding a corpse into the furnace. Failure to do so resulted in the bodies burning onto the stretcher, and removing leftover pieces of skin and flesh proved quite time consuming. Any delay, of course, was interpreted by the Germans as sabotage, so the men of the Sonderkommando were forced to master their "jobs" in order to survive.

The issue of survival also plays a prominent role in the volume. In general, the men who filled out the ranks of the Sonderkommando led short lives. The Germans, not wanting their genocidal activities to become common knowledge, routinely murdered entire Sonderkommando units and refilled them with new prisoners. Venezia survived only due to the chaotic evacuation of Auschwitz in January 1945. He recalled that during the forced evacuation to Austria, SS troopers periodically wandered through the marching prisoners asking whether anyone had worked at Auschwitz in the Sonderkommando. He wisely kept silent, knowing that he would be shot immediately if identified. Common sense and tough-minded attitude, according to Venezia, allowed one to survive in the camp. He believed that his hardscrabble youth gave him the required skills at dissembling and labor necessary for survival. He also points to another trait he believed necessary to emerge from the camps: selfishness. Venezia emphasizes the breakdown of social solidarity of prisoners in the naked game of survival. He declares that "for those who didn't have enough to eat, solidarity was no longer an option. So even when you had to take something from someone in order to survive, many people did so" (p. 101).

While physical survival was nearly impossible, Venezia faced an even more challenging obstacle: how to remain human while carrying out the task of continuously disposing of murdered human beings. He acknowledges that his own humanity was endangered by his position. At first, he was "constantly stunned by the enormity of the crime," and he could not eat as he felt "sullied by those deaths" (p. 65). "Little by little," however, he became accustomed working in the crematoria; as it became "a kind of a routine," he no longer had to focus on it (p. 65). In other words: "quite simply, you stopped thinking!" (p. 103). At several different places in the text, Venezia refers to himself as a "robot" (pp. 59, 62, 102). His discussion of this term is interesting as he notes "we had turned into robots, obeying orders while trying not to think, so we could survive a few hours longer" (p. 59).

Venezia's attempts to completely divorce himself from the process, however, proved impossible, and his knowledge of what he was doing sparked an inner conflict around the dirtiest word to emerge from the wreckage of war and genocide: collaboration. The word pops up at various points throughout the volume. In one instance, Venezia states that members of the Sonderkommando actually lifted the cement door on the ceiling of the gas chamber so the SS man could drop in the Zyklon-B pellets, adding, "this is painful to admit" (p. 68). He also describes how he sometimes comforted people as they undressed in the hallway outside of the gas chamber. Realizing that attempts to calm people corresponded exactly to the Nazi's objective of a methodical and orderly industrial murder, he wrestled with his action: "I don't know whether we can call it 'collaboration' when we were trying to reduce, to however small a degree, the suffering of people who were about to die" (p. 74). The idea of the members of the Sonderkommando as collaborators was, according to Venezia, common in the camps. Unlike his previous mentions of the term--which are brief and rather open-ended--he vigorously refutes this charge, correctly arguing that "only the Germans killed. We were forced, whereas collaborators, in general, are volunteers" (p. 101). Surrounded by constant death and misery and plagued by his own inner demons, Venezia came to believe that "the dead were perhaps luckier than the living; they were no longer forced to endure this hell on earth, to see the cruelty of men" (p. 62).

Venezia's own account concludes with a brief examination of the revolt of the Sonderkommando (in which his unit did not participate), evacuation from Auschwitz to various camps in Austria, and eventual liberation. His description of these chaotic events provides a fitting coda to the terror he experienced at Auschwitz. In what appears to be an attempt at providing context to Venezia's story, however, the publishers have attached two essays at the end of the volume. The first, by Marcello Pezzetti, provides a thirteen-page overview of the Holocaust before devoting seventeen pages to Auschwitz and its Sonderkommando units. The contribution is too short to provide anything more than the most cursory of examinations and important details are omitted. For example, Pezzetti makes it seem as if ghettoization was part of a well-conceived, orderly process that emanated from the top, when in fact it began as a local development in response to events on the ground. While the essay could be a starting point for an undergraduate class, it certainly does not provide any real insight. The second essay, by Umberto Gentiloni, is ostensibly about "Italy in Greece: A Short History of a Major Failure." While the essay is indeed short--a total of eight pages--instead of examining Italian policy in Greece (a subject which, outside of Mark Mazower's magisterial Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experiences of Occupation 1941-44 [2001] has been quite neglected in English-language historiography), it focuses on the anti-Jewish policies of Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria during their occupations of Greece. More thorough editing would also have helped, as the essay states that "two thousand, five hundred [sic] people died as the result of the occupation of Greek territory" (p. 196), when the actual number is closer to 300,000.

In short, while the two concluding essays are disappointing, the body of the volume based on Venezia's experiences during the war is at once both fascinating and disturbing. His description of prewar Salonika and his complicated ethnic/national background certainly help illuminate our picture of the multicultural societies of Europe that the Second World War nearly completely eliminated. He also captures the violence and brutality of Auschwitz in a very readable fashion. His descriptions of the inhumanity of the camp will remain with me for quite some time. Finally, he agonizingly details the effects on the individual of living in such a setting. Though Venezia married after the war and had three children, the experiences of those eight months in Auschwitz marked him forever. He describes its impact as "a disease that gnaws away at [me] from within and destroys any feeling of joy. I have been dragging it about with me ever since I spent that time suffering in the camp. This disease never leaves me a moment of joy or carefree happiness; it's a mood that forever erodes my strength" (p. 154). Venezia ends the interview by simply stating "nobody ever really gets out of the Crematorium" (p. 155). This statement effectively captures the pain of this book.

CRUSADES IN THE EASTERN BALTIC

Posted by Mitch Williamson in , on Sunday, November 1, 2009


The German troubadour Tannhäuser (ca. 1220-ca. 1270) is depicted in this 14th-century manuscript as a Teutonic knight, wearing the order’s uniform of a white cloak with a black cross. The knights of the Order of the Hospital of St. Mary of the Teutons (Teutonic Order) were essentially tough warriors, but even those who hated and feared them respected their skill, piety, dedication and discipline. The order’s Prussian masters and grand masters practiced power politics, but backed their diplomacy with fasts, processions, and continual prayer, and made periodic inspections of the spiritual life of their convents. When not on campaign the order devoted much time to peaceful business encouraging agriculture and trade.


Central and east-central Europe were the scene of much crusading activity: the Wendish Crusade along the west Baltic coast; crusades in Prussia) Livonia) and Lithuania; the Hussite Crusade in Bohemia; and the march of the Children’s Crusade up the Rhine river and over the Alps into Italy.

The crusade against the Wends set a precedent for later attacks on Baltic pagan peoples by Christian rulers such as Waldemar I of Denmark (1157-82). The Poles also strove to impose their influence in the area, while further east the Swedes moved into pagan Finland. In 1171 Pope Alexander III declared all wars against the pagans of the north equal to crusades to the Holy Land. Later popes attempted to control these wars by sending legates, but even then legates and bishops could call crusades without obtaining specific papal approval in advance. This enabled Danish kings to create a Baltic empire and supported Polish expansion into Prussia and Russia, while the Teutonic knights exploited it for their ongoing crusading operations.

Prussia and the Teutonic Order

In the twelfth century the Baltic coast was sparsely populated and Poland’s rulers assumed that they could easily conquer and convert the pagan tribes of Prussia. King Boleslaw IV’s (1146-73) campaign in 1173 began well, but support for it among the Polish nobles ebbed away after his death. Furthermore, the Polish church lacked missionaries to proselytize among the Prussians, and it was not until after 1215 that the newly appointed bishop of Prussia- supported by Conrad of Masovia, Poland’s most powerful duke-began a mission that it was hoped could convert the entire region. Such an approach had succeeded in Pomerania, but it failed in Prussia, probably because there was no single local ruler to work through. In the 1220S Prussians overran Culm, the one Prussian province Conrad had been able to conquer, and attacked Polish villages and abbeys, seizing people to be sold as slaves or put to work on the warriors’ farms.

Conrad approached several military orders for aid, offering them lands if they would build castles, provide garrisons, and bring in farmers to produce food. He would help as much as he could, especially in raising crusader forces to assist them. The Templars, Hospitallers, and even the Spanish order of Calatrava sent small units, and Conrad founded a military order of his own-but they were all ineffective. The Prussians could be pacified only by larger and better organized armies, and then held down by permanent garrisons. To this end, in 1225 Conrad invited in the Teutonic Order, which had close ties to the emperor Frederick II. When the order was invited to Prussia, Frederick gave it generous grants of rights and all the lands its knights could conquer. The church encouraged them as well and attempted to protect the rights of Prussian converts.

The first units deployed, in 123 I, were small, and had to raise additional forces in Poland, Germany, and Pomerelia (West Prussia). By the end of the thirteenth century the Teutonic Order had conquered all of East Prussia. Polish and German migrants eventually outnumbered the Prussian converts, and behind the dense wilderness that divided Prussia and Poland an autonomous state was set up. The order subsequently defended its independence from both Polish and papal efforts to influence its military and political decisions.

The Teutonic Order relied largely on Germans for its crusading armies, but Poles and even Russians aided the order in crusades against pagan Lithuania. This cooperation ended in 1309, after a dispute over the order’s occupation of Pomerelia and Danzig (Gdansk), which the Poles claimed. The ensuing conflict with Poland disrupted the Lithuanian crusade until the Peace of Kalish in 1343.

Around this time the Polish kings and the archbishops of Riga called for the Teutonic Order to be suppressed. However, unlike the Templars, who were subject only to the pope, the Teutonic knights were subject to both the pope and the emperor. By skillfully playing off one overlord against the other, the order succeeded in avoiding a similar fate to the Templars. The refusal of the Prussian regional masters of the order to deal with papal legates meant that subsequent generations heard only one side of the order’s quarrels with the Poles and the archbishops of Riga. As a result, the order acquired an exaggerated reputation for brutality.

Under grand master Winrich von Kniprode (1352-82), the crusade against the Lithuanians became a spectacle of chivalry that attracted nobles from all parts of the Holy Roman empire, as well as from France, England, and Scotland. The climax of every campaign, apart from raids and sieges (there were very few battles), was the celebration of the Round Table, a magnificent-chivalric display involving the most important knights. They compared themselves to the Arthurian knights and heaped praise upon the noble chosen to bear the banner of St. George into battle.

Climate and practical considerations determined the seasons for campaigning. High summer and fall were the best times for crusaders to travel overland and by sea. But in December and January crusader armies could also march across the frozen rivers, lakes, and swamps of the uninhabited frontiers; consequently, winter became the favorite time of year for expeditions up the Nemunas (Memel) river into Lithuania, despite short days, unpredictable storms, and dangerous thaws.

In 1386-87, following the marriage of Duke Jogaila (Jagiello) of Lithuania to Jadwiga of Poland, Lithuania underwent conversion, bringing this “eternal” crusade to an end. In 1399 the Poles and Lithuanians joined the Teutonic Order in pacifying the Samogitians, the last Lithuanian pagans. But eleven years later relations between these regional rivals had deteriorated into war. The conflict reached a climax at the battle of Tannenberg (Grunwald) in 1410, where the Poles and Lithuanians crushed a seemingly invincible crusader army led by the Teutonic knights. The order soon recovered its lost territories, but its power was severely dented.

Livonia and the Swordbrothers

Further north, Livonia, roughly the region occupied by modern Latvia and Estonia, was ethnically diverse and had no single powerful ruler who could lead its Christianization. By the end of the twelfth century Russians were moving in from the east and Lithuanians raiding from the south, while pirate ships of pagan Estonians and Kurs were plaguing the villages and shipping of Germany and Scandinavia.

In 1188 an elderly German Priest, Meinhard travelled on a mission of conversion of conversion to Livonia’s Daugava (Düna, Dvina) river. He was subsequently made the first bishop of the region (his successors became archbishops of Riga), but conversion was slow and in 1195 Pope Celestine III authorized a crusade, reaffirmed in 1198 by Innocent III. The first crusaders to Livonia, led by the second bishop, Bertholt, were merchants from the Baltic island of Gotland. They returned home before ice closed the Baltic Sea, and the third bishop, Albert, despite having a good base in Riga, was unable to garrison his castles properly. By establishing a military order, the Swordbrothers, in 1202, he made possible a rapid expansion of his domains. The bishop was supported by native peoples seeking revenge on traditional enemies, and by crusaders from Germany and Denmark. They crushed the pagans in Estonia, warded off Russian and Lithuanian attacks, then made a peaceful conquest of Kurland.

In time the Swordbrothers saw that the bishop intended to cast them aside once their task was accomplished and they ceased to cooperate with him. Albert appealed to the pope, and a compromise in 1227 divided Livonia between the bishops and the Swordbrothers - but left the key issue of the order’s sovereignty unresolved. After the Swordbrothers were defeated in Samogitia in 1236, they were absorbed into the Teutonic Order as the semiautonomous Livonian Order. Albert’s successors sought to assert their authority over the order. The pope upheld the verdicts against it, but did not enforce them, seeing the order as Livonia’s only effective defense against Orthodox Russians or pagan Lithuanians. In effect, Rome treated the order as de facto rulers of Livonia.

The Livonian Order assisted the campaigns of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia by striking into Lithuania and Samogitia from castles along the Daugava and in Kurland. There were also conflicts with the Russian cities of Novgorod and Pskov, including a crusade (see sidebar on page 128), especially after 1300, when these commercial states were usually governed by hostile Lithuanian princes.

After the battle of Tannenberg, the Livonian Order invaded Lithuania repeatedly, but in 1435 the order’s army of Lithuanians, Germans, Russians, and Tatars was routed by its Polish and Lithuanian opponents. Afterward power in Livonia was exercised by the Livonian Confederation, an assembly composed of the master of the Livonian Order, the bishops, three abbots, and delegates of the cities of Riga, Dorpat (Tartu), and Reval (Tallinn).

In 1500 the Livonian Order won a tough victory at Pskov over Ivan the Great of Russia (1462-1505). But with the coming of the Reformation the order’s days were numbered.

THE LATER HISTORY OF THE TEUTONIC ORDER

Following the disaster at Tannenberg in 1410 there were proposals to relocate the Teutonic Order to the Ukraine or along the Danube River, but the grand masters found it impossible to support garrisons at such a distance from their Prussian and German bases. In 1525 the last grand master in Prussia, Albrecht von Hohenzollern, Margrave of Brandenburg-Anhalt and duke of Prussia (1525-68), became a Protestant and secularized the Prussian lands. He made some knights and prelates into vassals, let others leave for German convents, and pensioned off the rest. This was the end of the Teutonic Order in Prussia.

When Prussia became a Protestant state the Livonian knights lost their most valuable ally and source of recruits. Dependent on mercenaries, the order declined in numbers and vigor. In 1557 the Russian armies of Ivan the Terrible invaded Livonia and in 1559 the order’s small army was defeated. When Sweden, Denmark, and Poland entered the war, Livonia was divided among them.