The term “holodomor” (meaning “killing through famine”) has a morbid ring to it. Millions of Ukrainians died in 1932 and 1933 due to the man-made disaster known as the Holodomor. Those who made it through the ordeal will never forget what happened. Like Maria Katchmar, who, decades later, recalled what it was like to be a youngster in her town when the Holodomor struck:
“There was absolutely nothing to eat. We ate grass. Mostly, we ate pancakes made of leaves and frostbitten potatoes that our neighbor gave us. (…) Almost everyone died. Most of the time, there was only one man or woman left [from each family]. Almost all the youngsters perished. (…) There was a pit, and there they threw them in, like mud. The pit was big enough for the whole village.”
16 countries and 22 US states, including Minnesota, have officially designated the Holodomor a genocide.
Polyvka was a settlement in the Ukrainian region of Cherkassy Oblast where Maria Katchmar spent her childhood. Many people, including Maria Katchmar’s eight siblings, perished from starvation there and in other Ukrainian towns and villages about 90 years ago. Recent research estimates that between 1932 and 1934, around 3.9 million Ukrainians lost their lives. At the time, this amounted to 13.3 percent of Ukraine‘s total population. At the same time, the famine decimated whole villages throughout the Soviet Union, including in Kazakhstan (where the death toll was disproportionately high), the Volga region, the North Caucasus, and other areas.
Loss of life in southern Russia and the Ukraine between 1929 and 1933. The USSR did not include the white areas at the time. (Credit: Sergento, CC BY-SA 4.0)
It is now generally accepted that Josef Stalin’s (1878–1953) “revolution from above” was directly responsible for the Holodomor. Causes include Bolshevik industrialization and modernization goals that were enforced harshly, unachievable high levies, and the forced collectivization of farmland.
The Peasants Compelled to Work on Kolkhozes
It was official violence and escalation that led to the famine in Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe. The Bolsheviks, led by Stalin, have been cranking up the persecution of the peasants since 1928. Many peasants were coerced into selling their property and cattle to the government in 1929, when mandatory collectivization of farms (kolkhozes) was instituted. They were subject to food and meat quotas just like every other peasant.
When people rejected the Soviet government’s oppressive policies, they were labeled “kulaks,” a name from the tsarist period that referred to affluent farmers. That’s why Stalin said in a 1929 directive that they should be “liquidated as a class” since they were enemies of the revolution. And thus the “kulaks” were shunned, jailed, sent to harsh climates, or put to death.
The Soviet leader Stalin was complicit in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
Stalin’s plan with the search for the class enemy was to spread his state restructuring out into the countryside and disrupt the established order there. The Bolsheviks did not only see the peasants as a lower-class workforce necessary to feed the city dwellers. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks were also certain that the rural masses would eventually rise up in rebellion.
Situations for the Peasants Seemed Grim
Holodomor, 1933, photograph by Alexander Wienerberger.
In 1929, peasant Semen Ivanisov lamented the helplessness of his circumstances, writing that he would be labeled an enemy as a “kulak” if he worked hard and enlarged his property. Because otherwise, only the poverty that was sanctioned by ideology would survive. Therefore, the Soviet leadership eliminated all incentives for increasing grain production.
To go where he wanted to go, Stalin cheaply accepted the annihilation of his own people.
Official records originally reported an increase in grain yields in 1930 compared to 1929, a year when terrible weather persisted and people suffered from famine. This was despite the haphazard rearrangement of agriculture. The leadership in Moscow, however, was so confident in the success of collectivization that it made a disastrous decision: they increased the levy quotas for both the communal farms and the remaining independent farmers.
It was already clear that crops would fall well short of estimates by 1931. The Kremlin learned of the communal farms’ inefficient practices, poor yields, and malnourished people. Even though at that time, almost everyone knew that collectivization was to blame for decreased harvests, the program could not be questioned because of its association with Stalin.
The Communists Did Not Care About Human Life
Kharkiv, Starved peasants on a street during the Holodomor in 1933.
It didn’t take long to choose a victim. The failure to meet the quotas was blamed on the “kulaks,” who were subverting the system, and on the inept bureaucrats, who were not cracking down hard enough on the peasants. Moscow boosted quotas for 1932 despite knowing that many were already hungry, as Bolshevik reasoning dictated that this was necessary to offset the peasantry’s supposed anti-Soviet obstructionism.
In the eyes of the Communists, human life was not all that important. To get what they wanted, they were willing to take the cheap option of mass murder. The goal was to maximize resource extraction from the areas and maintain a steady rate of population growth.
Stalin’s opinion that nationalism and peasantism were intimately related influenced his decision to escalate the fight against the peasants. In 1925, Stalin said, “The peasant question is the basis, the quintessence of the national question,” adding that a strong national movement would always be supported by a peasant army and that if one wished to halt such a growth, one had to begin with the peasants. For this reason, Stalin saw the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, with its huge rural population, as a special threat. Stalin’s choice may have been influenced by the bloody conflicts that broke out between peasants and Bolshevik forces between 1918 and 1920.
The absurd targets were attempted to be met by authorities in the spring of 1932 by collecting massive quantities of grain, while being under severe strain. They sent troops to search the towns for supplies. In a letter, a Ukrainian farmer from Sobolivka described the process thusly: “The authorities do the following: they send the so-called brigades, who come to a man or a farmer and search everything so thoroughly that they even pierce the ground and walls with sharp metal tools, into the garden, into the thatched roof, and if they find only half a pound, they take it away on the horse and cart.”
As of August 1932, stealing even a little quantity of food was punishable by death or 10 years in a work camp in the Soviet Union.
A Ban Was Placed on the Farmers
Starving children at Samara Camp in 1921.
Punishment was similarly harsh for farms that fell short of their targets. Communities as large as farms, ranches, and even towns were singled out and punished monetarily for engaging in commerce. The government took all of the food, equipment, and possessions.
As a result of widespread famine, Ukrainians attempted to leave for cities and other countries, but the Bolsheviks blocked the borders and briefly halted the sale of railroad tickets. To begin with, towns instituted a passport system to exclude the sick and poor farmers. Fugitive hunters set out on patrol.
Due to extreme desperation in the spring of 1933, people started eating whatever they could get their hands on, including horses, turtles, cats, rats, frogs, dogs, and ants.
Stalin’s belief that “Ukrainian nationalism was to blame for the insufficient grain supply, that Ukrainians were therefore purposefully resisting the central power and should be punished once and for all” justified the brutality with which the regime knowingly and willingly drove people to starvation. Stalin wrote to his close friend Lazar Kaganovich on August 11, 1932, saying, “If we do not attempt to repair the situation in Ukraine now, we may lose it.”
If, as some historians believe, the hunger was not deliberate, the Bolsheviks nonetheless used it to further their own agenda. In a cynical way, the starvation served the purpose of dominance quite well. The people were regimented, opposition was crushed, and it was abundantly apparent who had the power over life and death.
The Holodomor Was a Time When Many Individuals Prioritized Themselves
As a result, starvation did not affect everyone equally. Even in the countryside, supply chains were organized in hierarchies, and states were not necessarily the ultimate arbiters of food distribution and rationing. It reminds many of the Soviet Union, when one person was in charge and everyone else just followed orders. However, the complexity of the problem became clear during the Holodomor. Decisions were influenced by the actors’ personal interests at every level. That included anything from favoritism in the allocation of food from communal fields to outright hostility against social outcasts.
Horses, dogs, cats, rats, ants, turtles, and frogs were all consumed by hungry humans in the spring of 1933. They ate moss, acorns, and tree bark, and fried pancakes made from leaves and grass. Some of the locals cooked the leather off their belts and shoes and ate it. Mykola Latyshko, a contemporary witness, told how every day in the spring of 1933, a hearse would drive through the streets and men would ask, “Did someone die over the night?” at the doors of random homes.
Another author, Pavlo Makohon, described the situation in his village in the Dnipropetrovsk region at the time: “I ran around collecting everything I could get—porcupines, meat from dead horses—and brought it home to them [the siblings],” he said in a video released by the Ukrainian Interest Group of Canada. “When there was nothing left and everyone had starved to death, I realized that I, too, would die. So I left and started wandering around the ‘khutory’ [homesteads]. Black flags were hanging on the homesteads because everyone had starved to death. In our village, two children were eaten, but the rajon [administrative unit] authorities closed the case.”
During the Holodomor, People Began to Eat One Another
Cannibalism incidents soared in the early spring of 1933. The Soviet OGPU recorded many cases of “starving family members killing weaker persons, usually youngsters, and using their flesh for food” in the region of Kharkiv. There were 9 instances of cannibalism in March of 1933, 58 in April, 132 in May, and 221 in June. During the Holodomor between 1932 and 1933, the Ukraine saw at least 2,505 people convicted of cannibalism. Those unfortunate enough to be spotted munching on human flesh were mercilessly thrashed by the mob, and some were even burned to death.
Ukraine’s social fabric was shattered along with the bodies and minds of its famished citizens by the severity of the crisis. Theft, homicide, and general lawlessness all rose. People in the same community or with the same family did not trust one another. Many individuals, according to those who saw this phenomenon, put their own concerns first and paid little attention to the plight of others.
Additionally, many people’s social connections were the sole reason they made them. Joining a communal farm and getting aid from family and friends might be the difference between life and death. Being close to the system boosted one’s chances of survival, therefore, very frequently, just one individual in a position of power could rescue a whole family.
The End of the Holodomor
The Soviet leader Stalin was complicit in the deaths of tens of millions of people. (Public Domain)
The Bolsheviks did not lessen their grip on the peasants until collectivization was officially finished in 1933, by which time there were almost no farmers remaining to bring in a harvest. The Holodomor ended in the autumn of 1933, when deaths began to slow down. The Soviet authorities suppressed information about the famine for a long time.
The Holodomor has become well known and recognized as an important aspect of Ukrainian history and national identity. Ukrainians usually remember the victims of the Holodomor on the last Saturday of November. The subject of whether or not Stalin actively sought the extermination of the Ukrainian people is a point of contention among experts. Ukrainian historians are in no doubt that Stalin committed genocide, although many Russian scholars emphasize the Soviet context of the famine, noting that not just Ukrainians but members of other ethnic groups inside and outside of Ukraine perished.
In the West, there is a range of professional views on this topic. The Holodomor famine’s aftereffects were unquestionably genocidal. There were a shocking number of fatalities. The Holodomor became a true genocide in certain areas. It’s always important to consider motive when discussing genocide. Both the legal evaluation and the historical context are important. Germany is only one of several countries that have expressed a desire to officially label the famine Stalin produced as genocide.
Yet, there is little doubt that Stalin intentionally starved the Ukrainian peasants to death by removing their access to their land and other sources of income, notwithstanding the ongoing debate about the legal evaluation in light of the UN Genocide Convention. Stalin used the Holodomor not only as a means to repress the peasantry, but also to crush forever any hope of independence or even partial independence for the Ukrainian people. Now we know that plan failed.
Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Moldova, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Ukraine, the Vatican City, and Romania are the countries that have acknowledged Holodomor as genocide.
Bibliography
Lubomyr Luciuk, Lisa Grekul, 1953. Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine. Kashtan Press. ISBN 978-1896354330.
Institute of National Remembrance (2009). Jerzy Bednarek, Serhiy Bohunov, Serhiy Kokin. Holodomor. The Great Famine in Ukraine 1932–1933 (PDF). ISBN 978-83-7629-077-5.
An estimated 6.5 million people from all over the globe visit the Palace of Versailles each year because it is a marvel of global heritage and one of the most visited historical sites in the world. As a symbol of the might of the Sun King and the France of the Grand Century, Louis XIV accomplished at Versailles his ideal of stone, gold, greenery, water, and light, combining all the energies of national industry. He may not have realized all the ways in which his choice to construct his castle would affect others. The departure of the government from Paris signaled a newfound freedom and boldness in the city.
History of Versailles before the Sun King
In 1038, in a charter of the monastery St. Père de Chartes, the word “Versailles” occurs for the first time. One of the people that signed the document was named Hugo de Versaillis. As the Hundred Years’ War came to a close, the tiny town was in a terrible situation, with dwellings destroyed and abandoned and the castle in ruins. In 1472, a minor settlement by the name of Versailles-aux-bourgs-de-Galie (Versailles in the town of Gally) was documented. After that, in 1475, Gilles de Versailles, lord of Versailles, ceded Trianon to the abbey of Saint Germain. In this context, the name Trianon appears for the first time. Louis XI purchased the little town and razed it in order to make way for his plans to construct a royal estate and resting palace there. It was the First Royal Caprice of Versailles, and the king’s goal was to go away from Paris and have some fun in a more relaxed environment.
When traveling from Paris to Brittany, Versailles was the first major attraction. On the other hand, the property was mostly marshy and bordered by uncultivated fields. It was a harsh environment with plenty of darkness and wildness. A combination of poor health conditions (a result of the persistent humidity) and widespread disease epidemics led to a rapid decline in the human population, which in turn led to the rapid repopulation of the animal kingdom. Domain sold to Charles IX’s financial secretary, Martial de Loménie, in 1561; he eventually expanded it to 150 hectares. On Saint Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, however, Loménie was allegedly strangled to death by Catherine de’ Medici so that the Count of Retz might inherit the Château de Versailles.
In the year following, Albert de Gondi, Count of Retz, paid 35,000 livres for the castle and land of Versailles. From this point on, we may assume that the future rulers of Europe had a genuine appreciation for Versailles. From July 7 to 9, 1578, Henry of Navarre resided there; he came back again in 1604 and 1609. Prince Louis, who would grow up to be King Louis XIII, went on his first hunt there in 1607, at the tender age of 6. In 1616, Albert de Gondi bequeathed the seigneury to his son, Jean François.
A few times later, King Louis XIII and his associates returned to the almost deserted estate after accompanying him on hunting expeditions. Getting sick of his uncomfortable sleeping arrangements, he set out in 1623 to construct a modest brick, stone, and slate home in the midst of the forest, on a hill surrounded by marshes. He came to consider this crude structure as a prime hunting spot. Louis XIII amassed a 40-hectare estate by purchasing the neighboring property.
The main structure of his little castle was 78 feet (24 m) in length and 20 feet (6 m) in depth, with two modest wings on each side. It was located at the end of the current Marble Courtyard (Cour de Marbre). The central chamber of Louis XIV’s residence was the king’s bedroom, which was surrounded by four rooms with tapestry walls. When the monarch finally got to spend his first night at Versailles with his subjects in March 1624, he was overjoyed. This was his safe haven, where he could just be himself.
The architect, Philippe Leroy, would construct a 108-by-46-foot (33-by-14-m) rectangular structure with 4.30-foot-thick (1.30 m) side walls, three galleries advertising the presence of a game inside, and an ashlar tile floor. During excavations in the Grand Commun’s courtyard, a crew from the Inrap uncovered these components, as well as the residence of the paumier (the room’s caretaker).
When Louis XIII was a young man, in April 1632, he purchased the Versailles estate from Jean François de Gondi, the uncle of Cardinal de Retz.
It was stated that “a miller governed where Louis XIV ruled,” referring to the legend that a windmill formerly stood at the summit of the Versailles plateau, where the modern château now stands.
The monarch purchased the castle with the intent of razing it to the ground in order to expand the grounds around the royal palace. He added to his hunting grounds by purchasing more property. Once it became clear that the initial pavilion would not be large enough, construction under Philibert Le Roy started in May 1631 and was finally finished in 1634. After moving into his new digs, Louis XIII settled down. From 1636 on, the king often visited, taking pleasure in his new home and the surrounding gardens, which were designed in the French style and ornamented with arabesques and intricate interlacing.
West of the castle, the earliest signs of the gardens date from the 1630s. A tiny round basin was surrounded by a parterre of compartmented boxwood needlework. The crew began planning the Bassin d’Apollon (The Apollon Pond) in 1639, when they laid out a main road from the castle terrace westward into the valley’s depression. The gentle slope of the ground was followed in this delightful garden. The primary axes, which made up the basic lines of the gardens, remained mostly unchanged until the renovations authorized by Louis XIV.
In 1643, Louis XIII made the following declaration: “If God gives me back my health, as soon as my dauphin is old enough to ride a horse and of age, I will put him in my place, and I will retire to Versailles with four of our fathers to talk about divine things.” The end of the world, he thought, was drawing near. It was on May 14 when he finally passed away. After almost eighteen years, the royal family no longer called Versailles home.
The Palace of Versailles in the 17th century
Versailles in 1668, painted by Pierre Patel.
Louis XIV became wary of Paris following the events of the Fronde and wished to retire elsewhere. So he set off in search of a large area in which to construct his fortress. In 1651, he paid Versailles his first visit and immediately became enamored with the palace. Louis XIV’s visit to the unfinished Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte (Palace of Vaux-le-Vicomte) in 1659 inspired him to create a château unlike any other in his kingdom or even Europe, one that would forever stand as a monument to his majesty and the magnificence of his reign.
The layout of the castle was meticulously crafted to draw attention to the monarch: the king’s private quarters were situated in the palace’s geometrical center, on a grand axis that ran from the king’s statue in the entry courtyard to the palace’s Green Carpet and Grand Canal. First visited by Louise de La Vallière, the king’s mistress at the time, this fortress was built for one purpose: to keep his affairs private. The “Château de Carte” would become the “Garçonnière Royale.”
It was not until 1660 that Louis XIV took his new wife, Queen Maria Theresa (Maria Theresa of Spain), there. From 1661 on, the expansion of Versailles started. The king dropped almost 1,010,000 livres between 1661 and 1662. He chose to create, in place of the hunting lodge of his father, one of the most spectacular palaces in Europe, which sparked criticism from the courtiers.
It was founded on a site that was both unforgiving and inaccessible, with terrain that was both sandy and swampy. The Trianon mansion had to be torn down, and the surrounding area had to be drained and leveled. As the saintly bishop Simon of Cyrene once put it, “Versailles is an ungrateful place, sad, without view, without wood, without water, without land, because everything is shifting sand and swamp, without air, therefore not good.”
The construction of the Palace of Versailles
Le Vau’s garden façade around 1675.
Louis XIV had the most talented architects, designers, gardeners, and fountain makers he could find recruited to make over the structures. Louis Le Vau oversaw the reconstruction of the Communs, while Charles Errard and Noël Coypel started the opulent interior design of the apartments by incorporating a motif based on the sun, a fixture throughout the Palace of Versailles. The Orangery and the Menagerie were both designed by Le Nôtre. Size-wise, the gardens expanded, and statues by Girardon and Le Hongre were added for flair. In those days, the Palace of Versailles served only as a place for social gatherings and leisure activities like garden parties.
Louis wanted his friends and family to have a good time at his home, which he took great pride in. A unique feature of his visitors’ flats was that they were fully furnished. For the first time in the history of royal households, Colbert boasted, “His Majesty has everyone fed, and has wood and lights in all the rooms.” Recalling Colbert’s famous letter, we read, “During the time that Your Majesty had spent such large amounts on this residence, she had ignored the Louvre, which was unquestionably the most splendid palace in the world.” It’s unfortunate that the greatest monarch was judged by the standards of Versailles.
The first celebrations were conducted in the castle in May 1664, and they were called “The Pleasures of the Enchanted Isle.” Mademoiselle de La Vallière was the intended guest, and they were presented to her in secret and lasted for 8 days. Louis XIV then had Versailles prepared for his use between 1664 and 1666 so that he could spend an extended period of time with his Council. He preserved Louis XIII’s old chateau. The size of the castle was increased by a factor of three by Le Vau. The first Orangery and the Menagerie were both constructed in 1665, but unlike them, the grotto of Thetis had not withered away. The Grand Canal wasn’t started until two years later. Le Nôtre was responsible for the landscaping, outdoor furniture, and layout of the expanded central alley. He enlisted the help of the sons of Italian engineers who were fluent in hydraulic systems—the Francines.
The second show in July 1668 would be the “Grand Divertissement Royal de Versailles.” Many of the courtiers couldn’t find a place to sleep because of the commotion caused by the festivities, and the modest castle became more unpopular. Le Vau then proposed two options for expanding the castle, one of which involved demolishing the original structure, and the other, which was built between 1668 and 1670, involved expanding the castle on the garden side with a stone envelope, which was in reality a second building enclosing the first. On each side of the original castle were two royal residences: the Grand Appartement du Roi to the north and the Queen’s to the south. A huge patio overlooking the greenery was built in the space between them. Rance marble columns, gilded wrought iron balconies, and marble busts adorned the façade. Marble slabs served as the floor of the courtyard. After being elevated, the Commons now included a peristyle of columns topped by sculptures and a succession of pavilions that led to the Louis XIII castle. A solid gold gate guarded the entrance to the Royal Court. A threefold increase in the domain’s surface area.
From Colbert’s report: “We have 566 men who labor here, and the costs of masonry were as follows: 335,000 livres in 1669, 586,000 in 1670, and 428,500 in 1671, the year the major construction was finished.” François d’Orbay picked up where Le Vau left off when he passed away in October 1670. In the city, Louis XIV was able to save his father’s fortress, but in the gardens, it was destroyed or obscured by construction. From that point on, the residence of Louis XIII was known as the “Old Castle,” while that of Louis XIV was known as the “New Castle.”
All stone, with long facades broken by outriggers, and a sizable terrace built between the two royal rooms, the Château Neuf was of Italian design. A great entryway, such as the Grand Degré du roi or Escalier des Ambassadeurs, was required to enter the opulent residence. The most luxurious castle entryway ever built required 6 years and a large budget. During the reign of Louis XV (1752–1783), this stairwell was demolished after having been in operation for barely 70 years.
Despite the basic Italian design, the French spirit was dominated by the existence of arched windows on the first floor, the presence of Ionic columns, niches, and high rectangular windows (arched by Mansart in 1669), the placement of statues in the niches, and the appearance of bas-relief above the windows. The second floor had a Corinthian style of decoration and was topped by a balustrade where trophies rested.
It was in 1670 that construction began on the Trianon de Porcelaine. At the same time, courtiers started constructing mansions in the area around the castle; in only two years, 14 massive hotels sprang up in Versailles (including the hotels of Luxembourg, Noailles, Guise, Bouillon, and Gesvres). Louis XIV finally completed the palace he had always envisioned as the symbol of his reign. The monarch wanted all of the ministers and their functions centralized. Intent on making Versailles his permanent home, he made plans to do so. Mansart was pressed into service to elaborate on plans for the construction of the Court. To many, the palace of Versailles represented centralized power and control.
Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors) in the Palace of Versailles, Versailles, France.
The Hall of Mirrors was built between 1678 and 1684 on what had been the new castle’s terrace. The lengthy galleries that served as passageways and connections between rooms were much liked by Louis XIV, who had them built at the Tuileries, the Louvre, and Fontainebleau. Le Brun was tapped to do the ornamentation. The Gallery, which measured 240 feet (73 m) in length and was bounded to the north by the Salon de la Guerre and to the south by the Salon de la Paix, would have far-reaching consequences, including the relocation of the king’s apartment to the Château Vieux, the transformation of the Appartement du Soleil into the Grand Appartement, and the hosting of receptions.
Building on the south wing, which was to accommodate the nobility, began in 1678. Work started on the pièce d’eau des Suisses and the Bassin de Neptune in the Cabinet des Bains, as well as the earthworks for the Parterre du Midi and the new Orangerie.
The terrace and the royal couple’s cabinets were afterwards replaced in 1679 by the Gallery of Glazed Cabinets (Galerie des Glaces), the Salon of War (Salon de la Guerre), and the Salon of Peace (Salon de la Paix). Floors topped the central structure on the side facing the marble court. To keep time, a clock was installed. To mirror the elegance of the Ambassadors’ staircase, a second staircase fit for a queen was erected. The only things that remained were the bust of Louis XIV and the two doors leading into the Grand Appartement. As soon as the wings for the Ministers were finished, work started on the Grandes and Petites Ecuries.
The Grand Apartments’ interior design was finished in 1681. Water from the Seine was pumped by the Machine de Marly. The French Gardens, embellished with marble and bronze sculptures, came to be after the excavation of the Grand Canal and the Swiss Waterworks, which allowed for the addition of more trees and fountains to the gardens.
Louis XIV moves to Versailles
Saint Cloud was no longer suitable as Louis XIV’s palace; therefore, on May 6, 1682, he uprooted his family and made the journey to Versailles. An eyewitness described the setup as follows: “On the sixth of May, the King left Saint Cloud to come and settle in Versailles, where he had wanted to be for a long time, even though it was full of masons, with the intention of staying there until after the birth of Madame La Dauphine, who was obliged to change apartments on the second day she arrived because the noise prevented her from sleeping. During construction, the King relocated to a new residence. Scaffolding littered the Hall of Mirrors, making it necessary to traverse the space by means of planks of wood. In terms of age, Louis XIV was 44. He broke with the itinerant tradition of the kings of France who went from castle to castle.
Salons and cabinets housing the king’s treasures and collections were built by architects in a private residence in 1683. The walls of the Cabinet aux Tableaux, Cabinet aux Coquilles, and Cabinet des Médailles (all illuminated by rock crystal chandeliers) were covered with paintings from the royal collections and other opulent oddities. These “curiosities” included, but were not limited to, vases lined with gold and diamonds, antique busts and figures, a large gold nave lined with diamonds and rubies, porcelain from China and Japan, vases of agate, emerald, turquoise, jade, jasper, and star stone, a large number of vases of pearl conch, statues of ancient animals, and a large jasper vase that was used at the baptism of Charles V.
In 1684, the Collectors’ apartment was expanded by including the Montespans’ previous flat, and the new space was turned into a small gallery with a ceiling painted by Mignard on the subject of Apollo and Minerva, a floor of valuable wood parquet, and walls covered in luxurious textiles. Louis XIV displayed the crown jewels of his art collection here, including the Mona Lisa.
The construction of the annex buildings
The Orangery, which stood in place of Le Vau’s and supplied annual supplies of 3,000 shrubs and 150,000 plants, the stables, the Grand Commun, and the north wing of the courtiers were all built between 1685 and 1689. The Hall of Mirrors was finished by Le Brun in 1686. To replace the porcelain Trianon, Louis XIV had a modest castle of marble and porphyry with gardens constructed there in 1687; this building is now known as the Grand Trianon.
Both the north and south wings were built as the façade progressed. The Princes, the Court, the Stables, the Carriages, the General Services, and the Servants all found their new homes in these two structures. At that time, the length of the façade was 2,200 feet (670 m).
Construction of the Saint Louis-dedicated Royal Chapel started in 1689, was halted by the war, resumed in 1699 under the direction of architect Peter Paul Mansart, and was finally finished in 1710. There were two stories in the building, the upper one allocated for the King and the lower one for the Court, in keeping with the palatine style. From the highest point of the tribune, the King observed the mass, while his courtiers, their backs to the altar and their faces turned upward, surveyed their ruler. The architecture had a Corinthian column design. The Italian influence Bernin brought to architecture would be lost. The King’s Apartments were unadorned by the beauty of multicolored marble. The middle of the nave was decorated with a pattern of the royal arms, and a crowned image of King “L” was hugged in front of the altar steps. The painted imagery on the vault contrasted the Old and New Testaments. The organ was placed above the altar.
The original grotto of Thetis, constructed in 1665 and destroyed in 1685, stood in what was now the chapel’s top vestibule. The white stone, Corinthian capitals atop the columns and pilasters, stucco medallions depicting the four corners of the globe on the ceiling, and arcades topped with sculpted statues of the Virtues above the doors and windows are all carried over from the Chapel’s design. This corridor connected the Great Apartments to the Chapel and provided access from the North Wing apartments to the theater.
The interior fittings
In 1689, the Queen’s apartments could be reached by the Queen’s stairway, which led to the Salon de la Paix via the Antechamber, the Grand Cabinet, and the Chamber. This enfilade faced the south side of Le Vau’s enclosure. The courtyard of Marbre was the center of the new royal quarters. There were seven individual rooms in all. The future bedroom of Louis XIV, the salon du Roi, was set up in the castle’s center, and the suite was finished with the cabinet du Conseil and the cabinet des Termes or des Perruques. During this time, there were between 22,000 and 36,000 people working on the different construction sites, along with 6,000 horses.
The Bâtiments’ supervisor, Louvois, exerted extreme pressure on contractors, laborers, and artists, threatening anyone who wasn’t fully committed with jail time. People were becoming hurt, disabled, and even killed as a result of the accidents that occurred due to the dangerous working circumstances. The following benefits were offered as compensation: Widows get 60–100 livres; 30–40 livres for a shattered limb and 60 livres for a punctured eye.
The construction site was often disrupted by strike movements (sometimes known as seditions). To discourage such behavior, Louvois laid out the compensation structure for the stonemasons: “for each toe of stone of Saint Cloud, 6.5 feet (2 m) high, polished, it returned to them 50 sols; for those from 20 to 21 inches (50 to 53 cm), 45 sols.” About the same time, a whole forest was planted. Jules Hardouin-Mansart, the architect and site manager, oversaw the entire construction of this impressive structure. In those days, the bill came to almost 80 million livres.
Originally a small town, Versailles was expanded into a proper metropolis around its namesake castle. Hotels were established by the castle’s nobility for their staff, and the town’s bars were a hub of activity. On the eve of the revolution, there were as many as 70,000 people living in Versailles.
The king’s chambers were relocated to the heart of the castle in 1701. The “Salon de l’il-de-boeuf” was a hybrid of the 1689 room and the antechamber of the Bassan family.
Saint Simon made the following remark: “We will not finish on the monstrous defects of a palace so enormous and so enormously expensive, with its accompaniments, which were even more so: an orangery, vegetable gardens, kennels, large and small stables, prodigious outbuildings, and finally a whole city.” Even yet, Louis XIV’s Versailles, a masterpiece in ruin and terrible taste, could not be finished.
The gardens of Versailles
After the scandal at Fouquet in 1662, Louis XIV turned his attention to Versailles. He enlisted Le Vau, Le Brun, and Le Nôtre, the architects and landscapers responsible for Vaux le Vicomte, to design and build an elaborate addition to the Palace of Versailles. At this point in time, the gardens were considered a part of the castle’s overall growth. The number of groves and parterres was increased, and brand-new ones were laid down. The Orangery and the Grotto of Thetis were also constructed around this period. Le Vau’s masterwork is the Orangery, which he built to the south of the castle to make use of the natural slope of the hill. For the winter, orange trees were kept in this area. The orange trees and bushes at Vaux le Vicomte were the first to be taken.
The grotto of Thetis, located to the north of the castle, served as a symbolic portion of the grounds that connected the Sun King to the solar metaphor. Dedicated to the mythical figure of Apollo, the grotto was finally finished in the year 1670. There were sculptures of the sun deity being cared for by Nereids, and there were shell decorations around the room. The pond of Clagny was pumped to a reservoir above the grotto, where it was stored until it was needed to irrigate the gardens and power the fountains that make up the musical gardens.
The gardens were formally opened in 1664 in honor of Anne of Austria and Maria Theresa of Austria, but were dedicated to Louise de La Vallière. The occasion was known as the “Fête Galante,” or delights of the Enchanted Island. From 1665 to 1668, the gardens had a renaissance, marked by the construction of fountains and the planting of additional trees, as well as the incorporation of symbolic elements inspired by the sun and Apollo. First topographical networks were developed when the Latone and Apollo basins were finished. The Labyrinth, located to the south of the Latone parterre and close to the Orangery, was a simple network of paths designed by Le Nôtre, and the Latone basin, located on the east-west axis, represented an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in reference to the revolutions of the Fronde that Louis XIV kept in mind.
The Bassin d’Apollon was built on what was formerly the site of the Bassin des Cygnes during the reign of Louis XIII and occupies the same general axis. It was the gardens’ main point and the passageway to the Grand Canal. The east-west axis is stretched by this Grand Canal, which was constructed between 1668 and 1671 and is 4,920 feet (1,500 m) in length, 203 feet (62 m) in breadth, and 23 hectares in area. For amusement purposes during the Ancien Régime (also known as the Old Regime), it was employed on boats.
A Little Venice was installed to house the caravels and yachts received from the Netherlands, the gondolas received by the Doge of Venice. Flowing from the gardens’ fountains upstream, the water eventually made its way into the Grand Canal. With the use of windmills and horse mills, this water was recirculated to the reservoir built above the grotto of Thetis, where it was used to replenish the water in the fountains. This setup was a closed-circuit system.
Exotic flowers such as Spanish jasmine and Turkish hyacinths and narcissus were brought in. It was imperative that only the most fragrant flowers be used.
During the years 1672–1677, the Labyrinth was renovated so that it could be used to teach Louis XIV’s son, the Dauphin, to read and write. Specifically, new fountains depicting Aesop’s tales were erected, and plaques were carved. The completed Labyrinth had 39 fountains and 333 lead animal statues.
The Parterre d’Eau, a castle terrace located over the Latona fountain, brought together the architectural and landscape design symbols from the expansive living quarters below.
Each of the 24 statues in the Parterre d’eaux musicales represented either one of the 4 elements (earth, air, water, and fire), one of the 4 seasons (spring, summer, fall, and winter), one of the four continents (Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas), one of the four types of poetry (pastoral, satyric, heroic, and lyric), one of the 4 times of day (morning, afternoon, evening, and night), and the 4 abductions: Boreas kidnapping Orithye, Saturn kidnapping Cybele, Pluto kidnapping Proserpine, Neptune kidnapping Coronis.
The Bassin des Sapins, located to the north of the château, was laid out on a north-south axis in 1676, and the Pièce d’Eau des Suisses, located in a marshy area to the south of the château, was finished in 1678. It covered an area of 15 hectares and was the second-largest canal in Europe after the Grand Canal.
The groves
Le Nôtre expanded the gardens by adding or enlarging 10 bosquets, including the bosquet du Marais in 1670, a rectangular basin with metal reeds around the perimeter, swans at the corners, and an iron tree in the middle; 1671: Water Theatre Grove (Bosquet du Théâtre d’Eau), Ile du Roi, Miroir d’Eau, Three Fountains Grove (Bosquet des Trois Fontaines); 1672: The bosquet de l’Arc de Triomphe was renovated in 1676 with a décor evoking military achievements. The year 1675 saw the creation of many notable trees: the bosquet de la Renommée or des Dômes, the bosquet de l’Encelade (a Titan doomed to a life of servitude beneath Etna), and the bosquet of 1678: the bosquet des Sources; 1680: new bosquet: the Gallery of the Antiques, an open-air gallery with antique sculptures; 20 statues on pedestals, each divided by three water jets; The Ballroom was constructed in 1681 and 1683 in a secluded area of the gardens, complete with a waterfall; and finally, in 1684 and 1685, the Colonnade was constructed on the site of the former Bosquet des Sources, featuring a peristyle of 32 arches and 28 fountains, as well as the current statue of Proserpine.
When it came to the groves, Louis XIV also requested certain changes. Since 1680, the green space between the Latone and Apollo basins has been known as Tapis Vert. The Parterre d’Eau was remodeled in 1684 to include bronze sculptures of the rivers of France. Between 1685 and 1686, the Parterre du Nord (North Parterre) was redesigned, and new and larger reservoirs were installed to the north of the Aile des Nobles; between 1704 and 1709, copses were redesigned and renamed, suggesting the austerity that marked the last years of Louis XIV’s reign, such as the copses of the Marai.
History of the Palace of Versailles after the death of Louis XIV
On September 9, 1715, after Louis XIV’s death, the new king’s guardian, Philippe d’Orléans, moved out of Versailles and into the Palais Royal. The young monarch at the time was just three years old. The Duke of Noailles advocated demolishing the fortress during this reign. However, he was unable to get enough traction because of his lack of backing.
Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, stayed in the Grand Trianon during his 1717 visit to Versailles.
In 1722, at the age of 22, Louis XV returned to Versailles and took up residence in his grandfather’s former chambers. While Louis XIV was preoccupied with historical traditions, the castle never again achieved its former glory. Louis XV did not like Versailles very much, so while he was there, he retreated to the Petits Appartements, the Trianon, Marly, Compiègne, or Fontainebleau.
In spite of this, he did make some changes, including demolishing the Baths’ apartment and the Ambassadors’ staircase, building the lounge of Hercules, the opera, and the Small Trianon, and remodeling the royal family’s quarters to make them more in keeping with contemporary tastes and more comfortable (all of which were Gabriel’s creations). He also decorated the Hercules lounge, which was a large room with walls covered in marbles selected by the king. There was a connection between the King’s quarters and the chapel’s anteroom via the Salon d’Hercule.
The Queen’s Chamber had a makeover beginning in 1729, with the project being finished in 1735. From 1729 until 1736, the Salon d’Hercule was under construction. It had been built atop what had been a chapel. The Apotheosis of Hercules was shown on the ceiling, and a massive painting by Veronese was presented to Louis XIV in 1664 for display on the rear wall. In 1739, during a gala honoring Louis XV’s oldest daughter, the monarch officially entered office. Both the wedding of the Duke of Chartres in 1769 and the birth of the Dauphin in 1782 were celebrated in this salon.
From 1738 to 1760, the apartment of the Collectors of Louis XIV was constantly redesigned. Then, in 1741, work was finally finished on the Bassin de Neptune. When Louis XV took power in 1750, he instituted a new kind of chamber: the dining room of the hunting lodges. That same year, he also had botanical gardens constructed and kept up in the area that is now known as the Queen’s Hamlet.
The King of England had the Ambassadors’ Staircase, the Small Gallery, and the Medals Cabinet destroyed in 1752. It was necessary to demolish these two “witnesses” to Louis XIV in order to make way for the room of the French monarch’s oldest daughter, Madame Adélade. Second renovations to the structure were started in 1755 by Louis XV, who merged the Cabinet du Roi (later renamed Cabinet du Conseil) and Cabinet des Thermes (later renamed Cabinet des Perruques) to create the Grand Salon du Conseil. The inner cabinets of the monarch were created on the upper level. There was no gilding on the woodwork in this area of the castle. The sculptures were given life by the use of vibrant and contrasting hues. A modest gallery that looked out into the marble court was the apartment’s defining feature.
Beginning in 1758 and continuing until 1770, the Royal Opera House was constructed at the end of the North Wing of the castle. Since Madame de Pompadour was a performer with a touring company, the initial theater rapidly became inadequate. The Royal Opera was inaugurated at the wedding of her grandson with the archduchess Marie Antoinette in May 1770.
As the princesses moved from the South Wing to the North Wing on the first floor of the Central Body over the years, Gabriel had to perform multiple tasks to make room for them all, including tearing down the Bathing Apartment, the Staircase of the Ambassadors, and the partitioning of the Lower Gallery. Some of the woodwork from these rooms, which Louis Philippe demolished, is a testament to the period’s lavishness.
As was customary during Louis XIV’s reign, the dauphin and his wife moved into one of the two rooms on the ground level (beneath the Queen’s apartment) and into the Hall of Mirrors. All of the palace was destroyed in the 1800s, except for the library and the room for the dauphin.
Gabriel worked on the Petit Trianon from 1761 to 1769, and in the same year that Princess Adelaide relocated, his apartment was linked with hers to create the King’s Room.
Gabriel’s “Grand Projet,” the rebuilding of the city-facing façade, got underway in 1772. The project was abandoned, with just the Louis XV Wing constructed. The “Grand Degré” inside was finished in 1785.
The palace was the most extravagant royal house in Europe towards the end of the Ancien Régime.
Under Louis XVI, the quality of living at Versailles steadily deteriorated, and the royal family and courtiers began to leave. Spending money on the castle was a bad idea. Due to the severe absence of conveniences like restrooms and heating, a complete refurbishment of the structures became necessary. Until the Revolution, work on the project had to be put on hold. Marie Antoinette’s involvement in the Petit Trianon’s construction led to substantial additional costs. Except for the Assumption on August 15 (when all the courtiers were required to be there), the major feasts at Versailles ceased. It was during this event in 1785 that King Louis XVI had the Cardinal of Rohan imprisoned for his involvement in the scandal surrounding the Queen’s Necklace.
Louis XVI, influenced by the Philosophers, had the gardens fully rebuilt in 1774 and 1775, transforming Le Nôtre’s French gardens into English-style gardens by removing trees and plants from the time of Louis XIV. However, the estate’s topography did not work in favor of the English-style gardens, since these gardens had unusual forms. Therefore, the gardens were redone in a French fashion. Louis XVI ordered that the palisades that had lined the fortifications be taken down and replaced with either lime or chestnut trees. He ordered the construction of the rock-cut grotto known as the Baths of Apollo.
Louis XVI had the Labyrinth of Louis XIV destroyed in 1778. An arboretum filled with rare plants now stands there. This section of the garden is where the Queen’s Necklace incident occurred, which put Marie Antoinette in danger.
Louis XVI had a special chamber, the Library, constructed and furnished for him upon becoming king. In 1777, Gabriel was entrusted with the decorating, Rousseau with the sculptures, and two globes, one of the earth and one of the heavens, finished off the room. After consulting with the Baron de Breteuil and the Garde des Sceaux Miromesnil, Louis XVI made the decision to place the Grand Chaplain under arrest while at this library. Before its restoration in 1783, the Cabinet doré served as a storage space for Louis XIV’s possessions, a showcase for Louis XV’s gold dinnerware, and a music chamber for Madame Adélade. Once again, Louis XVI displayed his treasures in this cabinet, and the name was changed to the Cabinet des Papillons.
The Estates General of 1789 were assembled at Versailles; therefore, the palace saw both the zenith and the nadir of the Bourbon dynasty.
Versailles in the tumult of the Revolution
When the Parisian populace, led by women, marched on Versailles in October 1789, the castle’s gates were locked, and a shootout ensued until the populace broke through and returned the royal family to Paris. A return to the castle’s former glory was impossible. At its peak in 1791, the population of Versailles was 51,000. By 1791, it had dropped to 39,000. The furniture in the castle was moved using furniture guards. The Ministry of the Navy now had Louis XV’s splendid desk.
Versailles was “de-royalized” in 1791 when artwork like paintings, mirrors, and royal insignia were taken from the walls and brought to the Louvre, which by 1792 had become the Central Museum of Arts. Versailles’ public library received the books and medals.
Later, in 1792, the Convention ordered the clearing of the Grand Parc and the sale of its acreage. The Botanical Gardens’ director pleaded with the new administration to spare the gardens. He was ultimately successful, but only on the condition that the beds be used for vegetable gardens and the orchards become community gathering places. The gardens were made accessible to the public, but the proposed washing facilities never materialized, so visitors instead found themselves doing laundry in the fountains and drying it on the bushes. The royal residence was converted into a cultural mecca, with the Natural History Museum taking up residence in the former Mesdames’ apartment on the first floor of the north wing, the Ecole Centrale de Seine et Oise moving into the former Ministers’ wing, the Salon d’Hercule becoming a school of life models for the future School of Fine Arts, and the Opera House becoming a music conservatory.
In 1793, the Convention sold at auction the furniture of the castle: 17,180 lots spread over the years 1793 to 1796, the most beautiful pieces went to England, furnishing Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle.
Napoleon considered making the castle his imperial residence for some time. He was fond of the adage “What is huge is beautiful,” yet he found Versailles to be too little and unsettling. The architect Fontaine was present when he made the following declaration to him one day: “Why the Revolution which destroyed so much, did not demolish the Palace of Versailles! I would not have today a wrong of Louis XIV on the arms, an old badly made castle, a favorite without merit to make bearable.” To save money, he avoided treating Versailles like an Imperial Palace and instead just repaired the damage that was visible. He liked Trianon, so in 1805 he conducted some renovations and furnished it. However, he continued to clear the bosquet around the Arc de Triomphe and the Trois-Fontaines of their trees. It was required to transplant trees after the erosion destroyed the originals.
The Royal Palaces of Versailles and Trianon were governed by Philippe Antoine de Noailles, Prince de Poix, beginning in 1815.
Louis XVIII considered putting money back into Versailles. When he weighed the cost and the ethics involved (returning the royal family to Versailles would be seen as a provocation), he decided to scrap the plan. King Louis XVIII of France “made his passage” in 1817 when he had the King’s Island and the Water Mirror’s groves combined to create the Jardin du Roi.
Versailles since the 19th century
Louis Philippe I, King of the France, was the only one who could preserve Versailles from certain destruction and any other potential dangers. He made the decision to give it to the French. In 1833, he issued a proclamation directing his minister, the Count of Montalivet, to turn the castle into a museum. From the time of Clovis to that of the Ancien Régime, from the French Revolution to the Empire and the Restoration, the museum would honor the triumphs of military might.
More than 23 million Francs were spent from the king’s own pocket to complete the restoration. And for his own use, he had the Grand Trianon renovated. Located in the South Wing, the 393-foot-long (120 m) and 42-foot-wide (13 m) Gallery of Battles was custom-built for Louis Philippe and has 32 paintings honoring famous military victories, ranging from the Battle of Tolbiac to the Battle of Wagram.
Museum opening ceremonies took place in June 1837, with the institution being dedicated at the time to “all the grandeur of France.” With almost 6,000 paintings and 3,000 sculptures, it would serve as the primary resource for studying French history. The French king had a political agenda established that aimed to unite the country. References to the past were often used to stress this point.
In the Hall of Mirrors and the salons of the enormous apartments, a meal for 1,500 guests was put up for the inauguration, after which the Misanthrope was performed and guests were delighted with a promenade with torches until 2:00 in the morning.
Let us quote the words of Victor Hugo on this occasion: “What King Louis Philippe did at Versailles is good. To have accomplished this work is to have been great as a king and impartial as a philosopher, it is to have made a national monument out of a monarchical monument, it is to have put an immense idea in an immense building, it is to have installed the present in the past, 1789 vis – vis 1688, the emperor in the king’s house, Napoleon in Louis XIV’s house, in a word it is to have given to this magnificent book that is called the history of France this magnificent binding that is called Versailles.”
A lot of the ancient trees that had stood since Louis XVI’s reign were lopped down and replanted in 1860. Because of the Franco-German war and the subsequent collapse of the Second Empire, replanting did not start until 1883.
While he did put forth some effort, Napoleon III refrained from continuing his uncle’s more lavish endeavors. During the 1867 World’s Fair, the renowned furnishings that had been removed from the castle were returned courtesy of Empress Eugenie, who had a cult following because of Marie Antoinette.
The fortress was used as the Prussian army’s command center during the siege of Paris in 1870. In January 1871, the Hall of Mirrors was the site of the proclamation of the German Empire. Thiers and his administration hid out there during the Commune and stayed there until 1879. The population of Versailles rose from 40,000 to 150,000 as it recovered its position as a government center.
For both the Third and Fourth Republics’ presidential elections, the castle served as the designated location. After World War I, the Allies and Central Powers met in Versailles, France, in June 1919 to sign the Treaty of Versailles.
Versailles was now a national palace available to the President of the Republic for use in entertaining visiting dignitaries and holding meetings of the Congress of the Parliament.
What is the surface area of the Palace of Versailles?
As the biggest castle in the world, the Château de Versailles surpasses even Windsor in size thanks to its massive surface area of almost 63,154 m2 and the 815 hectares of the adjacent park. The area is home to a wide variety of historical structures, including the Grand and Petit Trianon, as well as the Grand Canal and the Swiss water feature, both of which were designed by Le Nôtre.
How many rooms are there at the Château de Versailles?
The castle contains 2,300 rooms. There are also 67 staircases, 352 fireplaces, 2,153 windows, more than a hundred clocks, and the famous Hall of Mirrors is composed of 357 mirrors.
Bibliography:
Saule, Béatrix; Meyer, Daniel (2000). Versailles Visitor’s Guide. Versailles: Éditions Art-Lys. ISBN 9782854951172.
Spaworth, Anthony (2008). Versailles: A Biography of a Palace. Macmillan Publishers. ISBN 978-0-3123-5785-6.
Michelin Tyre PLC (1989). Île-de-France: The Region Around Paris. Harrow [England]: Michelin Tyre Public Ltd. Co. ISBN 9782060134116.
Dynasty of Frankish kings descending from Merovech, the Merovingians ruled over Gaul until 751. This foundational dynasty of the French monarchy has long been subject to a “dark legend,” propagated since the 6th century by Gregory of Tours and later by their successors, the Carolingians, through the writings of Einhard. The Merovingians thus became the “do-nothing kings” in the imaginations of students, a perception that persisted until the 19th century and beyond.
Aside from Clovis and for different reasons, Dagobert I, the Merovingian period was akin to a black hole in French history. Nevertheless, these kings and queens stood at the crossroads between the conclusion of “barbaric” antiquity and the Middle Ages, where the foundations of France were being laid.
The Mythical Origin of the Merovingians
“The lazy kings” (670-752) by E. Crété.
The Merovingian dynasty has its roots in a tribe of Salian Franks, stemming from a branch of the Frankish people settled between the Rhine and the Scheldt. Its name is derived from the legendary Merovech, the son or nephew of Clodion the Hairy, who purportedly ruled from 448 to 457 over a tribe of Salian Franks and allied with the Roman general Aetius against the Huns in the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. Initially, its power was confined to the realms of Cambrai and Tournai, situated between present-day France and Belgium. Following four more or less legendary rulers, who were merely tribal leaders, Clovis I, reigning from 481 to 511 and the son of Childeric I, emerged as the true founder through numerous conquests.
In 498, Clovis and his warriors were baptized by the Bishop of Reims, Remigius, thereby gaining the support of the Catholic clergy and the Pope of Rome. He subjected the Burgundians to tribute in 500 and, at the Battle of Vouillé in 507, crushed the Visigoths, forcing them into Spain. With mastery over almost the entirety of Gaul, he soon consolidated the Salian and Ripuarian Franks under his authority. As the supreme leader of Germanic tribes in Gaul, Clovis worked towards amalgamating Frankish customs with Gallo-Roman legislations, giving rise to the Salic Law of the Frankish Kings.
The Frankish Kingdom, One and Divisible
At his death in 511, Clovis bequeathed to his sons an immense kingdom, with Paris as its capital and Catholicism as its religion. What followed may have appeared paradoxical, especially when compared to the actions of the dynasties that succeeded the Merovingians: divided among Clovis’s sons, the Frankish kingdom nevertheless remained united. Claude Gauvard described it as a ‘simultaneously unified and divisible’ realm. It was this apparent paradox that allowed the Merovingians to continue expanding their territory, becoming a continental power, and resisting civil wars. Only for a time…
The division of 511 among Thierry, Clodomir, Clotaire, and Childebert is inspired by the Roman system of civitates, confirming the continuity between the Frankish kingdom and the imperial tradition. While territorially divided and possessing four capitals (Reims, Paris, Orléans, and Soissons), the political unity is genuine, primarily grounded in familial ties.
However, one should not idealize the situation; succession disputes quickly arise with the deaths of Clovis’s first sons. Firstly, Clodomir (524), whose son Cloud must flee and become a cleric before his death, lends his name to a well-known city. The rest of Clodomir’s kingdom is divided among the three surviving brothers. At the death of the eldest, Thierry, complications arise as his son, Théodebert, enjoys prestige surpassing that of his uncles. He seizes the opportunity to assert ambitions beyond Gaul, minting gold coins with his effigy and provoking the anger of Emperor Justinian. Théodebert died in 548 without achieving his goals, despite conquests in Alemannia and Bavaria.
The situation finally clears with the extinction of the senior branch and the demise of Childebert. This allows Clotaire I to reign alone until 561. Another division occurs upon his death, once again among his sons, now reduced to three by 567 (with the death of Charibert I). This marks the decisive moment when the Frankish kingdom is divided into three regions that will have a lasting impact: Austrasia (Rhine region, Champagne, and Aquitaine), Burgundy (former Burgundian kingdom and Kingdom of Orléans), and Neustria (Tournai region, “Normandy,” and the Paris region). This pivotal moment coincides swiftly with a genuine civil war erupting in 570. Before this, the Frankish kingdom had successfully asserted itself on the international stage.
Merovigians: An “International” Power
The sons of Clovis are determined to extend their father’s victories, despite internal divisions within the kingdom. United as the regnum francorum for foreign policy, they strategically exploited internal strife within the Burgundian kingdom, particularly religious disputes between Catholics and Arians.
The Merovingians make their first attempt in 523, facing resistance, and a subsequent try a year later results in the loss of Clodomir. With cautiousness, they waited for a decade before launching another campaign led by Childebert I, Clotaire I, and Theodebert I. This time, they emerge victorious, absorbing the Burgundian kingdom while dividing the spoils among themselves.
The successes of the Merovingians captured the attention of the emperor in Constantinople, with the primary objective being dominance over Italy, still under the Ostrogoths. Recognizing the Franks as both a threat and potential allies against the Byzantines, the Ostrogoths offered Provence to secure Frankish neutrality against the emperor. The Franks seized the opportunity and entered Provence in 537, gaining access to the Mediterranean. With this acquisition, they nearly re-established the unity of Roman Gaul, with only Septimania eluding their grasp from the Visigoths.
Moving northward, Thierry I and Clotaire I form an alliance with the Saxons, defeating the king of Thuringia and annexing the western part of his kingdom in the same year as the Provence conquest. Two years later, Theodebert I conquered Alemannia and Bavaria, briefly extending his influence into Northern Italy. It was not until the arrival of the Lombards in the 560s that the Frankish advance halted, partly due to internal conflicts and civil war.
The Civil War Hits the Kingdom of the Merovingians
The death of Charibert I, son of Chlothar I, in 567 led to a new division of the Merovingian kingdom, sparking a genuine civil war among the three brothers: Sigebert, Chilperic, and Gontran. This conflict was also a result of risky marital alliances between the Merovingians and their neighbors, the Gothic rivals.
Women played a central role in the political struggles of the late 6th century. The rivalry intensified between Brunehaut, wife of Austrasian king Sigebert I, and Fredegund, wife of Chilperic I, king of Neustria. Brunehaut, a Visigothic princess and daughter of King Athanagild, accused Fredegund of orchestrating the murder of her sister, Galswinthe, the previous wife of Chilperic I. The situation worsened as the king of the Visigoths died without an heir, intensifying ambitions, particularly those of Chilperic.
This triggered the faida, characteristic of Germanic peoples, and a downward spiral ensued. The intrigues of the two queens led to the assassinations of Sigebert I (575) and then Chilperic I (584). Gontran attempted to remain somewhat aloof from the conflict, which escalated into armed warfare in the early 570s. After her husband’s death, Brunehaut held the reins of power in Austrasia, championing her son, Childebert II. He quickly opposed Fredegund’s son, Chlothar II, reigniting the war despite peace attempts initiated by Gontran (Andelot Pact, 587).
The situation became more complicated with Gontran’s death in 592 and the entry of the sons of his nephew, Childebert II, who had succeeded him but died four years later. Theudebert II and Theuderic II continued the war against Chlothar II, who found himself in increasing difficulty.
Nevertheless, Queen Brunehaut faced growing opposition in Austrasia, leading her to seek refuge in Burgundy with Theuderic II. However, she incurred the wrath of the local aristocracy there as well. Additionally, the sons of Childebert II entered into rivalries, much to the delight of Chlothar II. Theuderic II confined his brother Theudebert II to a monastery, and he himself died in 613. Brunehaut then attempted to regain control and install one of her great-grandsons, but the aristocrats handed her over to her rival, who subjected her to a long torture before executing her.
The end of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages
A segment of contemporary historians, demarcate the end of antiquity with the death of Brunehaut, a Visigothic princess described as “still very Roman.” The ascension of Chlothar II, and particularly his son Dagobert, “[seals] the unity of the Frankish kingdom” (according to the chronicle of Fredegar) and likely signifies its zenith before the rise of the Pippinids.
The end of the conflict between Queens Brunhilda and Fredegund, and later their sons, allowed Chlothar II to ascend to the throne unopposed. During the early 7th century, both the king and, to a greater extent, his son Dagobert, played crucial roles in the zenith of the Merovingian dynasty.
However, troubles arose swiftly, starting with the successors of Dagobert, leading to the emergence of what was not yet a distinct dynasty, the Pippinids. Through their strategic influence over Merovingian authority, the Pippinids eventually surpassed it, notably under the leadership of Charles Martel.
Chlothar II and the Regna
Supposed to be king since 584, Chlothar II eventually ruled alone after the deaths of his Merovingian rivals and Queen Brunehaut in the early 610s. However, the Frankish kingdom remained divided into three regna: Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy, causing unrest among the aristocracy. Clotaire II needed to legitimize his power and “seal the peace.”
In 614, drawing inspiration from Clovis, he convened assemblies in Paris with both aristocrats and bishops, addressing both the religious and political issues of the kingdom almost simultaneously with the Edict of Paris, promulgated in October of that year. Chlothar II secured support from both the nobility and the clergy, solidifying his own authority. While personally reigning over Neustria, he remained the paramount sovereign of the regnum francorum, not hesitating to punish the aristocrats from other regna who showed tendencies toward independence, such as Godin, who attempted to force Chlothar II to appoint him mayor of the palace of Burgundy in 627.
Tensions persisted, and the king continually negotiated with the regna, especially Austrasia. The aristocrats of Austrasia persuaded the king to send his young son Dagobert to them, allowing them to leverage his youth to exert real power over this regnum, strategically significant in the struggle against the Avars and the Wends. Among these nobles was a certain Pepin I, known as Pepin of Landen.
The Reign of Dagobert I
Two years before his death, Chlothar II once again convened the assemblies, and in the enacted acts, the idea of a sacred monarchy began to emerge. He died in 629, and his son Dagobert succeeded him, leaving Austrasia for Neustria. Dagobert’s legitimacy does not seem to be contested by the nobles, whether from Austrasia, where he comes from or from the other two realms.
However, he has a brother, Caribert, whom he sends to Aquitaine, where he dies in 632. Dagobert I begins his reign with a journey to Burgundy to reassure the aristocracy about his intentions. He then settles in Paris. Saint Eloi, the goldsmith of his father, Chlothar II, and bishop of Saint Ouen, becomes his chief advisor.
The “Austrasian problem” remains. The regnum is powerful; its nobles are difficult to control, holding strategic positions such as mayor of the palace. Nevertheless, Dagobert managed to install his son Sigebert on the Austrasian throne in 632.
Two years later, he designates the kingdoms of Burgundy and Neustria for his newborn son, Clovis, thus ensuring his succession. Upon his death in 639, the Frankish kingdom was once again divided.
Dagobert’s reign coincides with the emergence of Islam, particularly the early Muslim conquests. The Byzantine emperor was interested in the Frankish king, just like his predecessors. However, past experiences have served as a lesson, and while there are embassy exchanges (as in 629), the time is no longer for alliances.
Nevertheless, it is known from Fredegar that the Franks were probably aware of the troubles of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius with the Arabs between 637 and 641.
The foreign policy of the Merovingians in the early decades of the 7th century is far removed from Byzantine concerns in the Near East. Dagobert’s focus is on consolidating the borders of the regnum francorum, primarily in Aquitaine (with Gascony) and Brittany.
He works on this around 635, but while he subdues the Basques, he must settle for a diplomatic agreement in Brittany without gaining control of the region.
To the East, Thuringia, Alemannia, and then Bavaria were subjected to tribute, and their rulers were appointed by the Franks. Here, Dagobert takes advantage of the threat from the Wends, Slavs settled in Pannonia; however, he does not succeed in subduing them. Finally, the Frankish king begins to take an interest in Frisia but cannot establish a real foothold.
The “Lazy Kings (Roi fainéant)” and the Mayors of the Palace
Upon the death of Dagobert in 639, his sons Sigebert III and Clovis II divided the Merovingian kingdom. As anticipated, the former became the king of Austrasia, while the latter assumed the kingship of Neustria, also supporting the increasingly autonomous Burgundy. However, challenges arose swiftly.
In Neustria, Clovis II was too young to rule. Power was shared between his mother Nanthilde, initially a servant married to Dagobert in 629 because Gomatrude had not produced a male heir, and the palace mayors, first Aega and later Erchinoald. The latter successfully arranged the marriage of the young king to Bathilde, an Anglo-Saxon slave, in 648. Exploiting her husband’s death in 657 and the subsequent demise of the mayor of the palace a year later, Bathilde seized power, attempting to reunify the regnum francorum amidst escalating rivalries with Austrasia.
In the Eastern realm, the influence of palace mayors began during Dagobert’s reign with Pepin I. Sigebert III, the new king, sought to sideline the Pippinids by favoring another family. Nevertheless, Grimoald, Pepin’s son, also rose to this strategic position, labeled by Bishop Didier of Cahors as the “rector of the entire court or rather of the entire kingdom.” The Pippinids’ role was already so significant that historians briefly considered Sigebert III’s death in 656 as potentially triggering a Pippinid “coup d’État.”
Ultimately, it was a matter of intricate succession and rivalry between the mayor of the palace and the queen. This underscores the decisive influence of individuals in this position, particularly the Pippinids. Neustrians and Bathilde’s intervention were necessary to sideline Grimoald and his protege Childebert, whom he had made king at the expense of Dagobert II, Sigebert’s son, exiled in Ireland. Nonetheless, it was Childeric II, Bathilde’s son, who became the king of Austrasia in 662.
Merovingian Rivalries Benefit the Pippinids
The challenges faced by the Pippinids proved to be temporary. The rivalry between Neustria and Austrasia, coupled with tensions among the nobility within the regna, ultimately facilitated their resurgence.
In Neustria, Ebroin, the new mayor of the palace, removed Queen Balthild of Chelles in 665 and asserted control over King Chlothar III. Tensions escalated with the nobility, particularly in 673, when Ebroin imposed Theuderic III, the son of Clovis II, and Bathilde, as the successor to Chlothar III. This move sidelined Austrasian King Childeric II, the favored choice among the aristocrats.
The situation was further complicated, leading Neustria into a civil war. Ebroin became one of its victims, assassinated in 682. However, even though successive kings faced challenges, the fundamental principle of the Merovingian dynasty remained unchallenged.
The issues in Neustria eventually extended to Austrasia, where Dagobert II was assassinated a few years after returning from exile. The instability and vacancy in the position of the mayor of the palace after the death of Wulfoad, Ebroin’s rival, paved the way for the return of the Pippinids—a family still powerful but under scrutiny by other aristocrats.
Duke Pepin II of Herstal, among them, became the mayor of the palace of Austrasia in the early 680s. In 687, he defeated his rivals from Neustria, who were allied with the Burgundians, at the Battle of Tertry, simultaneously seizing the treasury of Theuderic III.
The End of the Merovingians
The rise to power of the Mayor of the Palace, Pepin of Herstal, marks the beginning of the end for the Merovingians. However, the mayor of the palace allows the king to remain, merely stripping him of the essence of his power. The true authority rests in the hands of those who then bear the title “princes,” the mayors of the palaces of Neustria and Austrasia, exclusively from the Pippinid family.
This influence solidified further with the successors of Pépin II, despite attempts at rebellion by other nobles upon his death in 714. His son, Charles, prevails against the Neustrians under Rainfroi in the 720s, as well as against external foes, the Arab-Berbers at Poitiers (Battle of Tours) in 732, and the Frisians two years later.
Nevertheless, Charles Martel does not assume the title of king, even upon the death of the last Merovingian, Theuderic IV, in 737, when he bypasses the successor, Childeric III. The last descendants of Clovis, from the reign of Pepin II onward, have been labeled by Carolingian historiography (heirs of the Pippinids) as “do-nothing kings.” They are placed on the throne by the mayors of the palaces, tossed about by winds of politics and rivalries (as seen in the struggle between Rainfroi and Charles with Chilperic II), and no longer wield real power.
However, it was not until 751, with the ascension of Charles’s son, Pepin the Short, that the Merovingian kings effectively made way for a new dynasty, that of the Carolingians.
The List and Chronology of the Merovingian Kings
During the Merovingian reign, the kingdom was often divided among the heirs of a king. With the succession of rulers, the Frankish kingdom was primarily divided into three territories: Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy. Thus, it is common for several kings to rule during the same period. Here is the list of Merovingian kings:
Childeric I (458 – 481) – First of the Merovingian kings.
Clovis I (481 – 511) – Ruled in Neustria and Austrasia.
Clodomir (511 – 524) – Ruled the kingdom of Orléans.
Theuderic I (511 – 534) – Ruled in Austrasia.
Childebert I (511 – 558) – Ruled in Burgundy.
Chlothar I “le Vieux” (511 – 561) – Ruled in Neustria, then Austrasia and Burgundy.
Theudeber I (534 – 548) – Ruled in Austrasia and Burgundy.
Thibaut (548 – 555) – Ruled in Austrasia.
Charibert I (561 – 567) – Ruled in Paris.
Sigebert I (561 – 575) – Ruled in Austrasia.
Chilperic I (561 – 584) – Ruled in Neustria.
Gontran (561 – 592) – Ruled in Burgundy.
Childebert II (575 – 596) – Ruled in Austrasia, then Burgundy.
Theudebert II (595 – 612) – Ruled in Austrasia.
Theuderic II (595 – 613) – Ruled in Burgundy.
Sigebert II (613 – 613) – Ruled in Austrasia.
Chlothar II “the Young” (584 – 629) – Ruled in Neustria, then Austrasia and Burgundy.
Dagobert I (623 – 639) – Ruled in Austrasia, then Neustria and Burgundy.
Charibert II (629 – 632) – Ruled in Aquitaine.
Sigebert III (639 – 656) – Ruled in Austrasia.
Clovis II (639 – 657) – Ruled in Neustria and Burgundy.
Childebert the Adopted (656 – 662) – Ruled in Austrasia.
Chlothar III (657 – 673) – Ruled in Neustria and Burgundy.
Childeric II (662 – 675) – Ruled in Austrasia, then Neustria and Burgundy.
Theuderic III (675 – 691) – Ruled in Neustria and Burgundy, then Austrasia.
Clovis III (675 – 676) – Ruled in Austrasia.
Dagobert II (676 – 679) – Ruled in Austrasia.
Clovis IV (691 – 695) – Ruled in Neustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy.
Childebert IV (695 – 711) – Ruled in Neustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy.
Dagobert III (711 – 715) – Ruled in Neustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy.
Chilperic II (715 – 721) – Ruled in Neustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy.
Chlothar IV (715 – 719) – Ruled in Neustria and Austrasia.
Theuderic IV (721 – 737) – Ruled in Neustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy.
Interregnum of Charles Martel (737-741), mayor of the palace.
Interregnum of Pepin the Short (741-743), mayor of the palace.
Childeric III (743 – 755) – Ruled in Neustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy.
Key Dates In The Merovingian Era
December 25, 496 — Baptism of Clovis
Driven by his wife Clotilde, a Catholic Burgundian princess, Clovis is baptized by Bishop Remi, surrounded by his army. As the other kings were Arians, he became the first Catholic sovereign of the West.
November 27, 511 — Death of Clovis
The Frankish king died in Paris at the age of approximately 46. His kingdom is divided among his four sons: Theuderic I (Reims), Chlodomer (Orléans), Childebert I (Paris), and Chlothar I (Soissons). He is buried in the Basilica of the Holy Apostles in Paris.
January 19, 639 — Death of Dagobert I
The Frankish king, Dagobert I, is buried in the Basilica of Saint-Denis, which he had expanded in anticipation of his funeral. His reign, lasting for 10 years, was marked by the unification of the Frankish kingdom, to which he gave Paris as the capital. Austrasia, Neustria, Burgundy, and Aquitaine were united in 632. After his death, this unity will be broken: the illegitimate son of Dagobert, Sigebert III, will become the king of Austrasia, and his legitimate son, Clovis II, will ascend to the throne of Neustria and Burgundy.
December 16, 714 — Death of Pepin the Younger
Pepin of Herstal or Pepin the Younger, sovereign of the Frankish kingdoms of Neustria and Austrasia, dies, designating his 26-year-old illegitimate son, Charles Martel, as his sole successor. His wife, Plectrude, disagrees and bestows sovereignty over both palaces to her grandson, Theodebald. Charles Martel will have to contend with Plectrude’s ambitions and the uprisings of the Neustrian nobility before being able to reign supreme over the Frankish kingdom.
October 22, 741 — Death of Charles Martel
Although he was never king of the Franks, the mayor of the palaces of Austrasia and Neustria is buried in the Basilica of Saint-Denis among the kings. The Frankish kingdom is divided between his two sons, Carloman and Pepin the Short.
November 751 — Pepin the Short, King of the Franks
Having gained the support of the Pope, Pepin the Short deposed Childeric III and proclaimed himself king of the Franks in Soissons. His accession to the throne marks the end of the Merovingian dynasty and the birth of the Carolingian dynasty.
Linen and wool were the primary components of the Viking wardrobe. The wool came from domesticated long-fleece sheep, and the weaving was done on a giant vertical loom in the house. Simple stones with holes are used to stretch the warp threads, while the weft thread is pushed through using a hand-operated shuttle and packed with a fuller (pick).
How did the Vikings produce their clothes?
The production of wadmal, a thick and toasty fabric, required this labor, which was traditionally the domain of women. This fabric had many practical uses, including but not limited to garments, tents, and sails, but it also served as a medium of exchange in legal cases and as cargo during Viking voyages.
In the Icelandic saga, The Story of Burnt Njal, the poem Darradarljod describes this craft within the setting of clan warfare. After the fight, on a Friday morning, a man named Daurrud set off. His curiosity piqued, he made his way to the pavilion and peered inside, where he observed ladies working at a loom. Men’s skulls served as the weights, their intestines as the weft and warp, a sword as the fuller (pick), and an arrow as the shuttle. Afterward, they sang out a couple of verses:
This woof is y-woven With entrails of men, This warp is hardweighted With heads of the slain, Spears blood-besprinkled For spindles we use, Our loom ironbound, And arrows our reels; With swords for our shuttles This war-woof we work; So weave we, weird sisters, Our warwinning woof
The Vikings had no problem dressing up for special events, even if it meant donning silk. Trade and theft were the means by which the silk was obtained. It was brought in by Rus’ traders from Constantinople and distributed across the major markets of northern Europe.
Woolen clothes could be found in a variety of neutral tones, including brown, black, and gray. However, the materials could also be colored as a sign of wealth and success.
Blue was one of the most popular color choices. The Scandinavian woad plant was used to produce it. It had a revered shade that called to mind the deep blue of Odin’s robe. It was also common to see red among Viking clothes. It was made from madder (Rubia tinctorum plant), which could be purchased in bulk from major European trade stations.
Colors like green and yellow were also included. The yellow might come from a variety of sources, including the onion (which is grown in Scandinavia), broom, or ramie (a native Eastern Asian plant). Green was a blend of yellow and pastel.
Because it was more challenging to dye linen, it frequently retained its natural color. The Vikings’ wardrobe also included a wide variety of furs, both domestically sourced and imported, including bear, reindeer, sable, and marten.
Dress of the Viking men
Aesthetics were important to the Vikings. They washed or showered every Saturday. On this day, both sexes took long, soapy baths to clean themselves from head to toe.
During this time, the Viking men shaved. After a quick rinse in the tub, they were ready for the ovens. A change of clothes allowed them to do the washing.
A Viking’s underwear was comprised of a basic linen shirt and warm woolen underpants, perfect for the frigid Scandinavian winter. The Vikings then put on a long-sleeved garment with a length that reached about halfway down their thighs and was held in place by a leather belt that could be embellished with bronze plates.
Then they donned a pair of trousers, which might be short and floaty, long and sticky, or short and puffy. Socks fastened with staples or straps rounded off the ensemble in the latter situation.
A long cloak, lined with fur or down, and fastened on the right shoulder with a penannular fibula, was a common way to conceal the blouse.
That way, the Vikings could simply draw the sword that’s fastened to the left side of the belt without having to use their right arm. The more well-off could be identified by the braids, embroidery, and gold and silver threads that adorn their tops and capes.
A Viking man wore leather shoes or boots, both of which had a strap that went around the ankle and folded over the instep. Carefully maintaining their beards and long hair with combs crafted from cetacean bone or elk antlers was a hobby of theirs.
It was possible that they could wear a variety of woolen caps and felt hats. When it was cold out, Viking men would be wearing mittens and large wool to keep their hands warm.
Dress of the Viking women
On top of her sleeved or sleeveless tunic, a Viking woman wore a chasuble garment of pleated wool, which was kept in place by a pair of frequently oval fibulae at shoulder height.
The Viking women fastened their sewing tools to the left side of this chasuble frock, which was embellished with braids and embroidery. A Viking woman wrapped herself with a shawl that she could tie around the waist or the lower back with her fibula.
As a rule, a young girl’s hair was left down, whereas a married Viking woman’s hair was pulled back into a bun, ponytail, or braid. The back of the neck was shielded by a scarf that was fastened there. She had a penchant for pearl, amber, and gold bracelets, earrings, and necklaces.
The Viking bride traditionally wore a linen veil on her wedding day, either to ward off the evil eye or because the groom had the honor of being the first to see his future wife without her veil. Since she was the head of the Viking household, she always had the keys to the house’s treasure and food storage boxes on her belt.
The military dress of the Vikings
(Image: Jack Keay)
The standard Viking warrior’s arsenal included a sword, axe, spear, knife, and bow and arrows. You could protect yourself with a shield, a helmet, and a brooch. The Viking sword had two sides, and its magical strength came from the runic inscriptions that adorned them.
This wooden scabbard had fur inside and leather outside. There were several varieties of Viking axes. As the Vikings’ standard weapon, it was a fearsome one, whether short or long in the handle, with the iron more or less broad, bent, and perhaps terminated with points. It could be thrown or used as a weapon in combat.
You can think of the Viking spear as a javelin or a spear. The first was a projectile weapon, while the second was a thrusting weapon that could be used with more power thanks to the addition of stirrups.
The diamond-shaped iron was secured to the handle with nails that have spiritual and legal significance. About a meter in circumference, the Viking shield had a circular shape. It was constructed from painted wood and had a metal frame. The handle was shielded by the iron shield boss (umbo) in the middle.
The Vikings’ go-to protective gear consisted of a leather or wool cuirass and a boiled leather hat. However, a metal helmet was another option. Then, a nose extended it into a conical shape. Instead of a leather helmet, a Viking could wear a brooch, or a collection of metal plates strung together.
In the second Punic War (Punic Wars), on August 2, 216 BC, a Roman army and Hannibal’s army fought a bloody battle near the city of Cannae (Apulia) called the Battle of Cannes. In the summer of 216 BC, after crossing the Alps, the Carthaginian general’s troops set up camp on the banks of the Aufidus River near Cannes. The Roman army led by consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro tried to destroy them, but the Carthaginians won the battle, which was very bloody. Even though the Roman army was bigger, this battle was a terrible loss for them. It also put the Carthaginian general Hannibal on the map as one of the best military strategists. His strategies are still taught in some military schools.
Towards the Four-Way Pass
Hannibal’s route of invasion.
Hannibal took up arms in 218 BC. He crossed Spain and southern Gaul, then the Alps, and poured his armies into Italy. He surprised the Romans in the Po Valley, won the battles of Ticino and Trebia, and then joined the Celts, who had just been defeated by the Romans. In 217 BC, he did it again without waiting for the winter to end. He caught his opponents by surprise. At the Battle of the Trasimene Lake, he beat the Roman army by taking advantage of the terrain and weather.
Rome paid a very high price for these three fights. More than 30,000 people died, and Rome’s reputation with its allies was hurt. Hannibal, on the other hand, tried to show himself as the new Alexander. He was a great tactician in the military, and he also played on the political chessboard, promising to bring “freedom” to the Italian cities that were under the control of the Romans. After that, Rome used a strategy called “temporization,” which meant avoiding frontal attacks and constantly harassing the Punic army in an “attrition war.” Still, it decided to stop Hannibal from doing what he was doing, which was destroying Apulia, Samnium, and Campania.
In 216 BC, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, also known as Paulus, and Gaius Terentius Varro, also known as Varro, became the new consuls. Paulus liked to harass and wear out the African troops, while Caius Terentius Varro, also known as Varro, wanted direct confrontation. Meanwhile, the common people were getting tired of the fighting. Polybius, a Greek historian, said that the Punic troops were facing off against no less than eight legions, which was “a number that had never been reached before.” Together with its allies in Italy, the Roman army had close to 80,000 men. On his side, Hannibal’s army of about 50,000 men was still raiding in southern Italy. They raided the warehouses of corn for the Roman army in a small city in Apulia called Cannes, which was now called Canne della Battaglia.
Battle of Cannes: Hannibal reaching the top
On August 2, 216 BC, the two armies would have their most important meeting. The Roman army was then led by Varro, who made each consul take charge of one day every two. He also made each soldier take on the most traditional form. Paulus was in charge of the right wing, while the allies’ cavalry took care of the left. At the level of the infantry in the center, there was nothing new in terms of strategy. The hard core was formed by the Roman legions, which were known to be the best trained, and the wings were formed by the allied legions later.
Hannibal came up with the most daring plan which was characterized by its will to fight a battle of encirclement and annihilation. In the middle, facing the Roman legions, he put the Gallic infantry. On either side, he put its best troops, the African heavy infantry, which he commands himself. The cavalry was on the wings. Hasdrubal Barca was in charge of the Iberians and Gauls on the left, and Hanno was in charge of the Numidians on the right.
The Carthaginian general’s plan was to move his center (the Gallic infantry) forward. The Romans, however, rushed to the attack and quickly pushed the Gallic infantry back. The cavalry fights on the wings, quickly turning in favor of the Punic. Hasdrubal wiped out the Roman cavalrymen and came to help Hannon by pushing the Italian allies’ cavalry back. He then went backwards. It was then too late for the Roman infantry, which could see that the enemy was getting closer and closer while it thought victory was close. In fact, if the Gauls in the middle moved back, they didn’t give up. This let the heavy Punic infantry gradually surround them on the left and right by conversion, while the horsemen, freed from their Italian opposite, stopped any possible retreat and completely closed the trap. The trap worked perfectly, and the rest of the battle of Cannes was just a massacre.
Battle of Cannes: The Roman army’s mortuary field
One of Rome’s biggest armies was wiped out in combat. Despite discrepancies in survivor counts, it was widely accepted that 45,000 Roman troops were killed and 20,000 were captured. Only around 15,000 males managed to escape. The bleeding was so bad that even Roman senators and high-ranking magistrates were afflicted. Military tribunes, former consuls, bankers, and quaestors were among the dead, as was Lucius Aemilius Paullus. Varro escaped with a young soldier called Scipio, who at the time was not recognized as African but who would soon surpass the master since he was an excellent pupil. Only roughly 6,000 of Hannibal’s troops were killed, but they were mostly Gallic, an unstable and disorderly bunch.
Despite Rome’s best efforts, it seemed they were going to lose the battle with Carthage, one of their most difficult conflicts. One of Hannibal’s subordinates was said to have informed Titus Livius, “You know how to win, Hannibal, but you don’t know how to exploit your triumph.” In any case, Rome would have had to concede defeat and respond with military and political measures. You could still win the war even if you lost a battle.
The Indus culture remains the most enigmatic of the great sophisticated civilizations due to its indecipherable writing, astonishingly contemporary cities, and massive empire, the end of which is just as unknown as its commencement. Little is known about it, despite the fact that it influenced a large area about 5,000 years ago.
Many people are unaware that the Indus civilization is one of the three major early sophisticated civilizations. Indeed, little is known about these people despite the fact that their dominion was once greater than that of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia put together. The only thing we know for sure is that they had a profound impact on the whole region, which is now Pakistan, as well as on sections of India and Afghanistan, beginning approximately 2800 B.C.
The reasons for this culture’s emergence and subsequent fall, some 700 years apart, remain unknown. Also, nobody knows for sure what language the locals spoke, and nobody has been able to understand the writing, which does not seem to be connected to any of the established scripts.
The Indus civilization’s early years
Early human settlement and the domestication of animals and plants started in the Indus River area, where Stone Age artifacts indicate people began to dwell some 10,000 years ago. They were a typical agricultural society from around 6500 B.C. forward, when they began raising cattle and growing wheat, among other crops.
At about 2600 B.C., however, everything changed. Huge cities home to thousands of people sprung up all throughout the Indus basin. Harappa and Mohenjo-daro are two of these cities that have provided archaeologists with their first glimpses of these mysterious people and their way of life.
The Indus city plans are very similar, giving the impression that they were all drawn out at the same time. Buildings and streets inside them, as shown by excavations, adhered to a rigorous geometric layout, startlingly comparable to the districts of contemporary towns. Broad avenues ran along north to south, while narrower streets intersected at right angles, much like the squares on a chessboard.
A standardized architecture
A majority of the residences in the neighborhood were large rectangles. Mohenjo-daro and Harappa had a very consistent exterior look; unlike the colossal structures typical of Mesopotamia, they were designed with functionality in mind. Not even enormous temples or palaces were built. The majority of the structures were made from burned mud bricks, and they all followed the same design: Typically, after passing through a vestibule, one would enter a courtyard that the rest of the rooms would be organized around. Some of the homes included lofts or roof decks that could be used as extra living space.
Researchers have speculated that the Indus civilization may have been the first to have advanced urban planning because of its remarkably practical, cohesive structure and design.
Water from the tap and central sewerage
Furthermore, the remainder of the infrastructure in these Bronze Age towns was remarkably advanced for its time. Mohenjo-daro, for instance, had a public bath and a central well about 4,000 years ago. Many people, however, had their own very modest wells dug into the mud brick walls of their homes in order to get potable water. Some structures may have even had running water piped in via these underground networks. According to the excavations, the sewage from the homes was carried through clay pipes into the municipal sewer system, which consisted of sewers covered with bricks and ran down the main streets.
Much of Mohenjo-daro was constructed on a plateau to prevent it from flooding, with watchtowers and fortifications along its southern side to ward off invaders. Raw materials for jewelry production and a large number of beads point to the existence of workshops in addition to residential structures in these cities. Some of these raw minerals could only be sourced from Central Asia or farther afield, indicating the sophisticated trading network that the ancient Indus society had.
Fixed units of measurement and reference weights
One such indicator of the Indus culture’s sophisticated level 4,500 years ago is its unified and astoundingly exact system of units of measurement. Buildings, plazas, and even the mud bricks themselves all seem to adhere to consistent proportions, according to surveys of Indus towns. These may all be reduced to 0.69 inches (17.6 mm), the putatively fundamental measuring unit of the Indus civilization.
Precise rules
In 2008, researchers unearthed the clay crossbeam of a scale with lines cut into it at regular intervals—every 0.69 inches—in the Indus city of Kalibangan. Subunits of this measurement, called angulam, were reportedly recognized by many smaller markings in between. It is already clear to Indus specialists that the builders at Harappa adhered to strict standards of proportion and beauty, rather than relying on chance.
Early on in the excavations at Mohenjo-daro in 1931, researchers uncovered a number of cube- and cuboid-shaped blocks of limestone of varying sizes, proving that the people of the Indus empire were also methodical when it came to weight. Extensive digging has uncovered similar blocks from other cities, each one looking like an egg next to the originals. What were they, though?
Reference weights for trade
Clues might be gleaned from the places where the blocks were unearthed, since they often turned up with artifacts associated with commerce such as seals and merchandise. These blocks have now been identified as reference weights and utilized in the commerce sector for the purpose of measuring items. The tiniest bricks weighed 0.89 grams (0.031 ounces), which is lighter than the gram unit.
Within a certain weight category, there is only roughly a 6% variation in Indus weights.
The Indus script, which has yet to be deciphered
A depiction of the single horned bull in an Indus seal with Indus hieroglyphs.
The Indus people’s writing looks like a blend between Egyptian hieroglyphics and Sumerian cuneiform, with its use of triangles, circles with cross-like letters, and plant-like symbols. Neither of those things has anything to do with it, and the meaning of its characters is still a mystery.
One explanation is that, unlike the lengthy Mesopotamian text tablets, Indus characters often occur in clusters of no more than six. They are often affixed to clay seals, miniature tablets, and talisman-like amulets. They are often mixed with animal representations, particularly on the seals.
Mysterious signs and animal symbols
It is possible that the animals’ emblems denoted certain people or clans, and that the names or legitimacy of the owners were indicated by the text. Clay jars, metal implements, and even gold jewelry have all been unearthed with the mysterious writing. Names found in that area may also date back approximately 5,000 years to the people who lived in the Indus Valley.
However, the Indus script remains as mysterious as it was when first found, despite decades of efforts to translate it. Not only is it unclear what language the strings were written in, but it’s also possible that the same script was used for more than one language. While some in the academic community are convinced that it is a genuine script, others see the symbols not for what they are, but for what they represent, such as religious or political iconography.
Mathematical aid
But Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Basic Research researcher Mayank Vahia disputes this. A few years ago, he utilized mathematics to crack the code of the puzzling characters and found evidence that they were, in fact, a legitimate script with a set canon of symbols and an underlying grammar.
The research conducted by Vahia and his coworkers is founded on the so-called Markov model, a statistical technique for forecasting the likelihood of an occurrence based on its antecedents. Insights into the Indus script’s underlying grammatical structure can be gained using the statistical approach. Any meaning attributed to a symbol during the decipherment process using such a model must be consistent with the meanings of the symbols that came before and after it.
A specific sequence
The studies verify the existence of meaning in the string of characters. If researchers randomly switched characters in their model or transplanted a hieroglyph from one set of characters to a sequence on another artifact, the likelihood of the new sequence matching the predicted language and its patterns dropped quickly. These findings provide more evidence that Indus writing follows a consistent set of rules.
It seems to be adaptable as well. Given that seals with sequences of these characters have been uncovered in both the Indus and Mesopotamian regions. However, the signs there are ordered differently from those from the Indus Valley, suggesting that the identical symbol sequences may have had a distinct meaning in that region. The possibility that the Indus script may have been used to express a variety of themes in western Asia is an intriguing finding. The concept that the hieroglyphs were only religious or political symbols is hard to square with the available evidence.
The meaning of the mysterious symbols, and whether or not they represent actual writing, are still mysteries. In this case, archaeologists and linguists are banking on luck in the shape of fresh discoveries that may provide more insight. Nothing will be certain until a multilingual tablet, a type of Indus Rosetta Stone, is discovered.
How peaceful was Indus Valley Civilization?
Archaeological digs in the town remnants have uncovered no indications of conflict or violence, neither in the destruction of structures nor in combat scenes on art items or pottery, which has long been one of the most remarkable elements of the mysterious Indus civilization. No signs of a superior or subordinate caste or a governing elite were to be found.
Therefore, it was theorized that the Indus civilization was structured more like a “grassroots government,” in which the populace gave political and religious leaders little power and the social order was relatively flat. As a result, it was assumed that very little physical force was required to maintain order in society.
However, throughout the summer of 2012, archaeologists discovered objects that broke, or at least severely rattled, the picture of the empire as a place of peace. 160 corpses from three Harappan tombs were analyzed by a team of experts headed by Gwen Robbins Schug of Appalachian State University in Boone. Numerous traces of severe injuries were discovered, most notably in bones dating to the late Indus civilization era (ca. 1900–1700 BC).
Signs of beatings and fightings
15 percent or more of the skulls in a tomb from this time period showed signs of violence, such as cracks or fractures in the top of the skull from a hit from a blunt weapon or other damage to the bones. A male in his mid-30s had a broken nose and a cut across his forehead from a sharp weapon, and a lady had been battered to death, judging by the fractured skull.
The skull trauma does not seem to have resulted from an accident or to be consistent with postmortem trauma. Experts say the evidence points inexorably to violent interactions between people. They claim that women and children were disproportionately affected by such violence at that period. The researchers concluded that the level of violence in Harappa was very high, even by city standards, and was the highest of any Southeast Asian region at the time. That begs the question, why?
Turmoil and violence
By comparing them to tombs and corpses from previous eras of the Indus civilization, researchers were able to deduce that signs of violence were, in fact, exceedingly uncommon. It seems that murder and manslaughter were very rare even when Harappa had more than 30,000 residents. However, something shifted about 1900 B.C., and the Indus civilization started to crumble.
This era was a time of social upheaval all throughout the known world, as many towns were abandoned and people moved out of the countryside. The rise in hostility and violence may be traced back to this period of change and the stress and uncertainty it produced among the populace.
The inhabitants of Harappa’s metropolis clearly experienced regular bouts of war and hardship. This shows that, at least during this time period, the Indus Empire was not a very peaceful one.
What caused the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization?
The fall of the Indus civilization is baffling, as is the fall of many other early great civilizations. Why did this civilization, which once occupied 390,000 square miles (1 million square km) and accounted for up to 10 percent of the world’s population, go away over time? What caused people to abandon the Indus Valley’s major cities and, in many cases, the whole area after 700 years?
There are many proposed explanations for this mystery, but there are only a few solid pieces of evidence. Social upheaval, invasions by neighboring peoples, and a reduction in commerce are all possible explanations that have been proposed by some experts. While some believe that internal strife or external threats to civilization led to its demise, others point to the weather as the likely culprit.
Floods and dry seasons
The Indus Valley and its tributaries were very fertile at the period of the Indus culture, providing abundant opportunities for proper agriculture to feed even bigger towns. Nonetheless, the glacial meltwater from the Himalayas and a considerably less predictable factor: the monsoon, were responsible for this fertile soil and water supply.
In the upstream areas, near the rivers’ sources, the rain was heaviest during the wet season. This water then rolled down the rivers again, generating floods, as it does to this day in Bangladesh and Pakistan, in the form of flash floods and high tides. As was the case with the Nile at the same time, the fertile soil along the riverbanks was made possible by the river’s periodic flooding.
However, unlike ancient Egyptians and even Mesopotamian societies, those who lived in the Indus Valley reportedly didn’t try to manage and regulate these floods by means of irrigation systems. A traditional irrigation farming system has not left any traces that we can find. Could this have been the beginning of the downfall?
Did the monsoon contribute to the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization?
How did weather contribute to the demise of the Indus civilization? After all, other sophisticated cultures like the Maya and the Khmer Empire at Angkor Wat fell victim to dry seasons, too. In fact, in 2012, researchers uncovered Indus culture-related data supporting the same thing.
The researchers began by developing a computerized topography model of the Indus Valley, which was done by Liviu Giosan of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and his colleagues. The researchers dug pits and sifted through the silt to piece together the history of the region and the river movements within it. University College London co-author Dorian Fuller discusses how the discovery of this geological data allowed the team to integrate prior knowledge of Indus communities, climate, and agricultural practices.
Climate-friendly, at least initially
The results of the analysis showed that the climate had a major impact on the development of the Indus civilization. Several centuries passed before the first settlements were established in this area, and the environment gradually became drier as a result. The researchers estimate that the height of this dry era occurred about 3200 B.C., which is also when the Indus civilization started to develop.
They believe this is not a coincidence, since climatic change during this period reduced the severity of flash floods along the Indus and its tributaries, but still caused sufficient flooding to enrich the soil in the areas close to the rivers. In particular, the fertile soil and plentiful water supply in the plains where the Indus meets its three connected tributaries—the Jhelum, the Chenab, and the Ravi—made for abundant crops.
Harappa, too, called this place home, since it was nestled within a chain of hills not far from the river’s lush floodplains. Further to the northeast, in the Ghaggar-Hakra river system’s basin, a second population center emerged. The monsoon rains were the primary supply of water for these rivers, not the melting snow. That’s why experts say there weren’t any devastating spring floods, but there was plenty of water throughout the rainy season.
The Himalayas provide a safe haven
Unfortunately, this paradise did not endure. Actually, the drought became much worse. As the monsoon moved east, the Ganges area began receiving more precipitation than the Indus basin. Around 1900 B.C., the Indus River and its tributaries became less prone to catastrophic floods, and large swaths of the southern Ghaggar-Hakra river system were without water for months at a time.
“The expansion of Indus Civilization-era communities near the Ghaggar-Hakra system’s birthplace can also be explained by this,” Giosan says. It’s because even at the foot of the Himalayas, there were still modest floods that permitted at least one harvest a year. However, this repeated climatic change proved disastrous for the tens of thousands of people living in the lowlands’ megacities. As a result, the fields’ ability to provide for the ever-increasing food needs of the populace was severely compromised by the arid weather.
Time to emigrate
If water was becoming more limited, then why didn’t the people of Harappa and the other settlements at least create an irrigation system? Because they could have done something far less difficult. The people of the Indus were able to expand into the wetter lands to the east, towards the Ganges River, whereas the people of Mesopotamia and Egypt were hemmed in by deserts and arid plains. Nonetheless, this movement reduced the overall population density in the Indus Valley.
As the water supply dwindled, people increasingly stopped living in cities and instead settled in smaller communities. It’s likely that society at the time was particularly susceptible to various forms of disruption because of the severity with which the environment had changed. But even this doesn’t explain all that went wrong with the Indus civilization in a single, deterministic explanation. Therefore, it is still not officially known what caused the Indus civilization to collapse.
Hitler’s personal physician was waiting for him when he awoke in the wee hours of the morning. Hitler rolled up the sleeve of his pajamas and moaned, “Doctor, I’m very delighted when you arrive in the morning.” He had, as usual, stayed up all night and only fallen into a narcotic slumber early in the morning after taking barbiturates.
The doctor administered the daily “vitamin” cocktail through injection. Its energizing effects were felt right away. Adolf Hitler was grateful for it. Since the conflict was still raging outside, crucial choices had to be taken.
Hitler believed his personal physician, Berlin urologist Dr. Theodor Morell, had supernatural abilities. Hitler’s secretary, Traudl Junge, said thereafter that Hitler had been “downright hooked on Morell,” and Hitler himself believed the drug had saved his life several times.
To the extent of becoming hooked, like a fixer who awaits his dealer’s daily arrival.
Vitamin cocktail, or so they said
At the very least, there were valid reasons to dispute Morell’s claim that the “Vitamultin A” ampoules he gave Hitler every morning contained nothing but vitamins. Crystal meth, or pervitin, was added to the supposedly vitamin-rich concoction, lending further credence to the claim.
It was discovered in the 1979 research “Medical Casebook of Adolf Hitler” by U.S. psychiatrist Professor Leonhard Heston of the University of Minnesota and his nursing wife Renate Heston that vitamins alone did not work as energy boosters. Hitler’s Germany had only Pervitin, a mild stimulant, at its disposal.
Theodor Morell and Hitler.
The Hestons concluded through interviews with eyewitnesses, reviews of medical literature, and analysis of Morell’s legacy that Hitler was likely prescribed a combination of vitamins, pervitin, and caffeine by his personal physician to augment the effects of methamphetamine.
General Building Inspector Albert Speer, a close friend of Hitler’s who passed away in 1981, found the Hestons’ research to be “the first scientific medical examination of Hitler’s medical history,” thus the argument must have some merit.
Chocolate for housewives
Japanese scientist Nagai Nagayoshi first synthesized methamphetamine in liquid form in 1893. Research on a private method of making the psychoactive compound started in 1934 in Germany, and Temmler-Werke GmbH was granted a patent for it in 1937.
It wasn’t until a year later, under the brand name Pervitin, that the medication finally made its way into pharmacies, and at first, it was completely free. “Housewife’s chocolate,” or chocolate mixed with Pervitin, was a huge hit. The firm advertised it as “Pervitin makes housewives happy.”
The stimulant’s euphoric and disinhibiting effects, together with its ability to boost focus and performance while simultaneously dulling the sensations of pain, fear, hunger, and thirst, quickly piqued the attention of the Wehrmacht.
Soldiers are pepped up with “Panzerschokolade”
Millions of doses of Pervitin were distributed, especially during the “Blitzkrieg” attacks on Poland and France in 1939 and 1940. “Tank chocolate” (Panzerschokolade), “Stuka tablets” (Stuka-Tabletten), “Pilot’s marzipan” (Flieger-Marzipan), and “Hermann Göring pills” (Hermann Göring-Pillen) were some of the street names that the armed forces used to refer to the substance.
Between April and June of 1940, the Wehrmacht received 35 million tablets of methamphetamine, which they purchased from both Temmler-Werke (who had the rights to Pervitin until 2015) and Knoll AG (which was situated in Ingelheim and had released their own formulation, Isophan).
Every single German soldier, from infantrymen to fighter pilots, carried about a supply of “Wachhaltemittel” (as the company named it). Substance dependence developed in several of them.
A future Nobel Prize winner puts in a request for Pervitin
On November 9, 1939, a young soldier wrote to his “dear parents and siblings,” explaining that “the service is tight and you must understand if subsequently I write to you only every two to four days.” “Today I write mainly for Pervitin.”
May 20, 1940: “Perhaps you could obtain me some more Pervitin for my supply,” a 22-year-old Polish soldier from occupied France wrote. This time, he wrote on July 19, 1940, “Send me some more Pervitin soon, if possible.”
The young private went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, having become an author. Heinrich Böll was his name.
Doctors on the front lines detected a pattern of widespread drug use. Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti told the National Socialist German Medical Association in Berlin on March 19, 1940: “Whoever wants to eliminate fatigue with Pervitin can be sure that the collapse of his efficiency must come one day.”
The message he was trying to send was not yet heard. Only after a sex scandal broke did the Ministry of the Interior feel compelled to place Pervitin and other methamphetamine preparations under the Opium Act on July 1, 1941, effectively banning them. A drug distributor in Berlin unlawfully obtained significant amounts of Pervitin and distributed it not just to pharmacies but also to a brothel.
What Hitler now faces
Hitler and his physician had a lot of trouble with the new legislation. While it’s true that Hitler had immunity from prosecution, the control authorities now had a direct line of sight to every pill of methamphetamine being distributed.
Hitler’s personal doctor, Morell, now had his “Vitamultin” produced in his own Hamma factory to prevent the news of Hitler’s drug addiction from spreading.
Gold-wrapped pills were readily available to Hitler at all times. There were reports of his consuming up to 12 of them daily. For the most part, but especially in times of crisis. Indeed, right up to the moment of his death.
The Hestons believe that by early 1942 at the latest, Hitler was now receiving the stimulant through intravenous injection in addition to oral medication. As a result, Hitler’s personal physician had to make a daily trip to the Reich Chancellery.
Known as the “Reich Master of Injections”
The overweight celebrity doctor Theodor Morell was not well-liked by Hitler’s inner circle. Morell was referred to as the “Reich Master of Injections” by Luftwaffe leader Hermann Göring (who was himself addicted to morphine) and the “unsavory, obese crank” by Colonel General Heinz Guderian.
Eva Braun, Hitler’s wife, complained to her partner that the doctor Morell was unclean. Hitler told her that Morell was not there to be touched but rather to maintain his health.
By his own admission, Hitler made a promise to his “beloved doctor” in November 1944: “If we both come through the war happy, then you shall see how much I will pay you.”
There, Adolf Hitler had a methamphetamine dependency. Many of his men, including a future Nobel laureate, used “Hitler Speed” to get psyched up before heading into war.
Bibliography
Ohler, Norman (2017) Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-1-328-66379-5
Archaeologists in Israel have discovered a crucial missing piece in the puzzle of the history of writing: letters that are preforms of today’s alphabet and provide a connection between hieroglyphics and the alphabet. Recognizable symbols on a fragment of a vessel dating back 3,450 years demonstrate the evolution of writing systems from hieroglyphics, a visual script, to the alphabet, a more abstract and flexible system. However, they also provide credence to the theory that the southern Levant was an important center for alphabet creation.
Despite the widespread use of the alphabet and written language today, their histories remain shrouded in mystery. Examples include the mysterious symbols left behind by the Indus people about 5,000 years ago, yet it is not known whether these symbols ever developed into a true script. Around the same period, the Sumerians created their cuneiform script, the Egyptians began using hieroglyphs, and the Minoans used not one but two essentially untranslated writing systems.
Where did the alphabet originate?
While these writing systems existed, they were not alphabets.
Typically, they were visual or symbolic representations of words or concepts. The Egyptians laid the groundwork for a notation that would employ a small set of standardized symbols to reflect the vastness of the human linguistic repertoire.
A shortened set of characters was constructed about 4000 years ago as part of their hieratic alphabet, although it was not fully developed at the time.
Nonetheless, the Levant, Egypt’s eastern neighbor, is where the alphabet was born. Inspired by the writing systems of Egypt and the West, early Semitic societies created the world’s first real alphabet there. This was a system of abstract letters based on symbols that are still used in modern Hebrew. Even today, the roots of the word “alphabet” may be traced back to the Hebrew letters Aleph and Bet. The Phoenicians played a vital role in the subsequent diffusion of this concept over the whole Mediterranean region.
Letters on a shard
The map of Lachish, with the excavation areas. (Credit: A. Woitzuck, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
This early alphabetic symbol was found on a fragment of a vase that has been dated to 1450 BC by archaeologists. During excavations in southern Israel at Tel Lachish, the artifact was discovered by Felix Höflmayer and his crew from the Austrian Archaeological Institute. This location has long been recognized as a cultural center throughout the Bronze Age, and it is even referenced in letters written by the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III.
The 2018 Tel Lachish ceramic piece was found between the foundations of a city wall and a bigger structure. It is just under four centimeters in length. Some black paint characters can be made out on the interior. Two columns of three characters are shown. Along with these three, there are two more figures on each side, and a fourth in the space between the two sets of three.
Earliest proof of the alphabet
Its letters can be recognized as alphabetic characters. The first line has the letters Ayin, Bet, and Dalet. This might be rearranged to form the term “slave,” as “slave” was a common name suffix in ancient Semitic. The second line of the string produces the letters Nun, Pe, and Tav. The term for honey or nectar or a form of the verb “to turn” are both possible outcomes here, depending on the interpretation.
One of the first instances of alphabetic lettering in Israel, this clay sherd dates back to a period when its age could be confidently established. This discovery bridges the gap between more recent evidence and artifacts with contested ages and inscriptions, such as the Lachish Dagger from the 18th century BC. That’s why the shard might be a crucial piece to the puzzle of how the alphabet got where it is now.
A reappraisal of the past
The very fact that it exists compels us to reconsider the original development and dissemination of the Near Eastern alphabet. This is because, until recently, it was believed that Egyptian rule in the 14th or 13th century BC was responsible for the dissemination of the early alphabet in the southern Levant. Due to this discovery, scientists can now situate the spread of the alphabet far earlier in history.
This new discovery establishes the existence of the alphabet one hundred to two hundred years before the Egyptian conquest of the Levant. Instead, it might be from the Hyksos era, when Semitic monarchs from Asia Minor or the eastern Levant reigned over sections of Egypt and the Levant. Therefore, the dissemination of the alphabet must be understood independently of the setting of Egyptian dominance, since the latter occurred much later, according to the researchers.
In order to understand more about this pivotal time in the development of the early alphabet, the archaeologists are looking for more digs and findings at Tel Lachish.
One of the first known examples of the alphabet and the first full statement using the letters found in Israel by archaeologists. The text was discovered on an ivory comb in Tel Lachish that is around 3,700 years old. The inscription reveals new information on the origins of the alphabet and the language of the ancient Canaanites. The term also suggests that lice were traditionally treated with an ivory comb.
Our alphabet’s origins may be traced back to the Levant. Around 1,800 BC, members of Semitic civilizations established the basis for alphabetic writing. They used abstract letters similar to our own today rather than pictorial-symbolic ones like the Egyptian hieroglyphs or syllabic sounds as the Sumerian cuneiform script did. The roots of the word “alphabet” may be traced back to the two initials of this script: Aleph and Bet. The Phoenicians played a pivotal role in the dissemination of the alphabet across the Mediterranean.
From the Canaanite city, an ivory comb
Tel Lachish, an old Canaanite settlement, was located on these hills. (Credit: Fourth Expedition to Lachish)
Pottery fragments and a bronze blade with individual words etched on it are the sole surviving evidence of the first stages of alphabet creation. The team of archaeologists led by Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has found an inscription for the first time that has a full phrase written in the ancient alphabet. During excavations in Tel Lachish, Israel, the team uncovered the discovery. Tel Lachish was a major Canaanite city-state in the 2nd millennium BC. This location is widely recognized as a nexus of early written communication.
An ivory comb, estimated to be 3,700 years old, was discovered. The comb has two rows of tines, one with coarser tines and one with finer tines, and measures around 3.5 by 2.5 cm. For taming head and beard hair, the coarser side of the comb was likely put to use. Conversely, the smaller one was put to use as a nit and lice comb and is still in existence today. A fossilized louse nymph discovered in the crevice between the teeth of this comb supports this conclusion.
It is seven words long
Notably, 17 shallowly engraved letters are visible on the middle, smooth area of the comb, aligned in two rows of heads. Archaeologists say that the seven words formed by the one- to three-millimeter-high letters are consistent with an early variant of the Canaanite alphabet. The Canaanite inscription means, “May this comb remove lice from hair and beard.”
According to Garfinkel, “this is the earliest Canaanite sentence ever unearthed.” “The comb’s inscription provides the first hard proof of the alphabet’s practical use 3,700 years ago. An important step forward in the evolution of the written word.” Some of the letters, such as mem, tav, and shin, had the exact same shape as they do in modern Hebrew, while others are simplified versions of the letters that would eventually be utilized.
Several ways it sheds light on things
Scientists say this discovery proves the Canaanite city of Tel Lachish was instrumental in the creation of the alphabet. One of the earliest and longest examples of writing in this area is the statement on the ivory comb. At the same time, this is the earliest inscription ever discovered that explicitly states the object’s function (in this instance, getting rid of lice).
The fact that this particular lice comb was crafted from an elephant tusk provides further evidence that its previous owner belonged to the upper class. The only people who could afford imported luxury items like those were the wealthy. It looks like life was all the same after all.
Charles V (1500-1558) is famous for being one of the most powerful rulers in Europe, reigning over the Netherlands, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire. Master of an immense empire over which “the sun never set,” the history of Charles V is unlike any other. Not only was he the first monarch to have a colonial empire in the newly discovered Amerindian continent, but he also benefited from a series of inheritances that placed him at the head of an immense domain in Europe. Throughout his reign, Charles V had to fight against France in the Italian Wars, the Ottoman Empire which invaded Eastern Europe, and the Protestant Reformation emerging in Germany.
The Inheritances of Charles V
The future Charles V was born in 1500 in Ghent, Flanders, not favored by nature but with a silver spoon in his mouth. French-speaking, he was steeped in the Burgundian tradition of the wealthy states of his father, Philip the Handsome, Duke of Burgundy, whose inheritance he received in 1506—Belgium, Artois, Luxembourg, southern Holland, and Franche-Comté. His maternal grandparents were none other than Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, the “Catholic Monarchs,” renowned for completing the Reconquista of Spain from the Moors, ruling over the Mediterranean, and overseeing the conquest of the New World initiated by Christopher Columbus in 1492.
Charles V definitively inherited their lands in 1518, adopting the title Charles I of Spain. After sidelining his depressive mother, Joanna the Mad, he also faced resistance from the Spanish, who were not pleased with the arrival of a Burgundian ruler.
To top it all off, upon the death of his grandfather, Emperor Maximilian I, he became Archduke of Austria, paving the way for his succession to the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, a crown he secured through considerable bribes to the prince-electors in 1519. His rivals, Francis I of France and Henry VIII of England, clearly saw the danger that this too well-born Charles posed to the balance of power in Europe and did not give him much respite.
Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire
Undoubtedly the most powerful ruler in Christendom, Charles V dominated a vast territory including the Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, the Italian states of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, the conquered territories in the Americas and Africa, the Netherlands, Flanders, Artois, Alsace, Franche-Comté, as well as the entire Habsburg possession. Faced with this new Habsburg power, the French ruler feared for his encircled lands.
In reality, the unity of such an empire was only theoretical, as Charles, whose education was steeped in French and Catholic tradition, remained a foreigner in Spain, and even more so in Germany. This difficulty in uniting such vast possessions under one name was quickly understood by Francis I, who sought to exploit Charles V’s weakness.
Charles V versus Francis I
Charles V, who married Isabella of Portugal in 1526, ruled both the New World and the Old. His possessions and origins made him, above all, a European monarch. It was said that he spoke to men in French, to women in Italian, to God in Spanish, and to his horse in German.
Crowned Emperor in 1520 in Aachen, likely dreaming of a universal empire based in Europe, with his motto—”Always further”—reflecting his ambition. However, his ambition was soon thwarted by numerous obstacles.
To begin with, there was the obstacle of Francis I of France, a “thorn in his side,” as Charles had to traverse exhausting land and sea routes to reach his empire or move his armies. A fierce struggle ensued between the encircled French sovereign and the ambitious Emperor, lasting four decades. Despite some military victories—such as Pavia in 1525—the tenacious king of France did not give in, despite signing the Treaty of Madrid (1526), and both sides exhausted themselves in a series of wars that brought no lasting advantage to either.
Francis I did not relent, and he struck back at Charles V by allying with Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who posed a serious threat to Habsburg possessions by besieging Vienna in 1529. Charles found solace in adding Bohemia, Milan, and the Netherlands to his possessions but failed in his attempts to establish a foothold in North Africa against the Turks. In 1529, a precarious peace (known as the “Ladies’ Peace”) was negotiated by Louise of Savoy on behalf of the French king and Margaret of Austria for the Emperor, and signed in Cambrai.
During each conflict with France, Charles V sought to hasten peace to focus on defending the Empire from the Ottoman threat, in addition to dealing with internal religious wars. Sultan Suleiman I, after subjugating the Balkan Peninsula, declared war on Hungary in 1526 and won the Battle of Mohács the same year. Three years later, the Turks besieged Vienna. In 1535, the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria, in the service of Charles V, led an expedition in Africa, routing the Turks in Tunis and liberating approximately 20,000 Christian slaves.
In 1538, the Holy League was formed by Pope Paul III and the Republic of Venice. The alliance did not last, and in 1547, Ferdinand I, king of Bohemia and Hungary, Charles V’s brother, had to sign a peace treaty with the Turks.
Another threat to the unity of his empire was the religious Reformation, which began and spread under his reign. Since 1517, the ideas of Martin Luther, followed by Calvin, had been spreading throughout Europe, aiming to profoundly change the practices and dogmas of the Church. The Reformation found support among German princes eager to resist the Emperor, who was constantly eroding “Germanic liberties.” They united in 1529 in the Schmalkaldic League. As Holy Roman Emperor and a devout Catholic, Charles V fought fiercely against the Reformation.
Despite a military victory at Mühlberg (1547) over the rebellious Lutheran princes, who were conveniently supported by Francis I, Charles V was powerless to stop the spread of the Reformation in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. This was even more true because papal authority was very weak at the time, an issue to which Charles himself contributed in his continuous struggles against France in Italy (the sack of Rome in 1526 during the pontificate of Clement VII).
Ultimately, during Charles V’s reign, only the Netherlands experienced a period of growth, largely due to the commercial expansion of port cities such as Amsterdam and Antwerp. A political evolution also took place, with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 recognizing the existence of the Seventeen Provinces as an “indivisible and inalienable” entity.
During his reign, Charles V ruled his territories in the spirit of humanism, with figures like Erasmus, Andreas Vesalius, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. However, a dark episode occurred when a revolt broke out in Ghent in 1539, incited by the French monarch, and was followed by harsh repression.
A Difficult End to the Reign of Charles V
Little by little, Charles V sees his dream of a Universal Christian Empire fade away. Despite the fabulous riches his ships bring back from the Americas, France prevents him from geographically unifying his empire, whose borders are threatened in the Balkans by the Turks, and he watches helplessly as religious division takes permanent root in Europe. In 1555, weary and worn out by the incessant wars he must fight on all fronts, sick and embittered, Charles V shocks the entire European continent by announcing his intention to abdicate.
It is a rare event, with the last precedent dating back to the Roman Emperor Diocletian. Clear-headed, he divides his vast empire between his brother Ferdinand and his son, the future King of Spain, Philip II. Having left his mark on the 16th century, he withdraws from world affairs to the Monastery of San Jerónimo de Yuste in Extremadura. He dies there on September 21, 1558, of malaria, taking his dream with him…
As a side note, Emperor Charles V almost married Renée of France, daughter of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, in his youth. One wonders what the fate of Europe might have been if, through the fortune of another fortunate inheritance, Charles V had added France to his collection of crowns through this union…
KEY DATES OF CHARLES V
March 11, 1517: The Emperor Maximilian, Charles of Habsburg, and Francis I Ally in the Treaty of Cambrai
On March 11, 1517, Emperor Maximilian I of the Holy Roman Empire signed the Treaty of Cambrai with King Francis I of France and Charles V, King of Castile. This alliance stipulated that they would mutually guarantee their possessions and that they would fight together against the Turks. However, the latter clause remained very vague, indicating that none of the three sovereigns were ultimately willing to commit to a war that would have proven very costly against the Turks.
August 3, 1518: Opening of the Diet of Augsburg
The Imperial Diet held in Augsburg began on August 3, 1518, under the reign of Maximilian I. During this session, the emperor unsuccessfully attempted to have his grandson, Charles V, elected King of the Romans. He died a year later, in 1519, and was therefore unable to propose this idea again at subsequent Diets. Emperor Maximilian wanted to propose his grandson because his only son, Philip I of Castile, had died in 1506, apparently of typhoid fever.
June 28, 1519: Charles V Becomes Emperor
Charles I of Spain, aged 19, was proclaimed Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, under the name Charles V. This event marked the beginning of a long rivalry between the Kingdom of France and the Habsburg Empire. The emperor, who ruled an immense territory on which “the sun never set,” would abdicate in 1556 and retire to the monastery of Yuste (Spain). His empire would then be divided between his brother Ferdinand, who would become Emperor of Germany, and his son Philip, who would become King of Spain.
June 7, 1520: The Meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold
King Francis I of France and King Henry VIII of England met near Calais (Pas-de-Calais). This meeting was mainly about maintaining the balance of power in Europe and deciding what stance to take regarding the Holy Roman Empire, with Charles V having been elected emperor a year earlier. Now encircled by the emperor’s possessions, Francis I hoped to convince the King of England to form an alliance with France. To achieve this, he displayed all possible luxury and prestige to receive him at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. However, Henry VIII’s rapprochement with Charles V two weeks later erased all the benefits Francis I hoped to gain from this encounter.
February 7, 1522: Treaty of Brussels
On February 7, 1522, the Treaty of Brussels was signed, complementing the Treaty of Worms signed the previous year (1521). This treaty, initiated by Charles V, King of Castile and the Holy Roman Empire, recognized his brother Ferdinand’s possession of the five Habsburg states (Austria, Carinthia, Carniola, Tyrol, and Styria). Ferdinand was then appointed governor of Southern Germany, Tyrol, and Upper Alsace.
The troops of Francis I, under the command of Lautrec, were defeated by the forces of Charles V at Bicocca. France was then forced to abandon the Duchy of Milan to its worst enemy.
June 19, 1522: Treaty of Windsor
On June 19, 1522, the Treaty of Windsor was signed between Charles V, King of Castile and the Holy Roman Empire, and King Henry VIII of England. This treaty came at the height of the Sixth Italian War (1521-1525), mainly pitting the Kingdom of France against Italy, Spain, and England. It revealed an agreement between the two signatories to invade France.
October 26, 1524: Francis I Takes Milan
The French army, led by King Francis I of France, seized Milan, which belonged to Charles V. The next day, the French laid siege to Pavia, where Francis I would be taken prisoner on February 24, 1525.
February 24, 1525: Francis I is Captured at Pavia
While the French cannons of Genouillac severely damaged the Spanish enemies at Pavia, the king, in his haste and impatience to win, charged at the enemy ranks on horseback. Fearing to injure the king, the French artillery immediately ceased firing. The Spaniards took advantage of this and surrounded the monarch. Francis I’s army was completely massacred, while the king was taken prisoner along with several of his generals. Francis I was imprisoned at the Charterhouse of Pavia and then transferred to Spain, where he became a hostage of Charles V. Thanks to the signing of the Treaty of Madrid on January 14, 1526, he was released in exchange for Burgundy and after renouncing Italy.
January 14, 1526: Francis I Signs the Treaty of Madrid
Prisoner of Charles V since February 1525, Francis I signed the Treaty of Madrid to gain his release. He agreed to cede Burgundy and renounce all his claims to Italy. However, the day after his release, in March 1526, the King of France would disregard all the treaty’s clauses, even though he had left his two sons as hostages in Spain.
March 17, 1526: Francis I’s Release
Prisoner of Charles V since his defeat at Pavia, the King of France was released from his prison in Madrid. The treaty negotiating his release required him to cede Burgundy to the emperor and to send his two sons, Francis and Henry, as hostages. Francis I would quickly renounce this agreement and ally with the Italian princes and the pope in the League of Cognac against Charles V. The war would immediately resume until the Peace of Cambrai in 1529.
May 22, 1526: League of Cognac
On May 22, 1526, under the initiative of Louise of Savoy, mother of King Francis I, who was then imprisoned, a league was formed against Emperor Charles V. This league included Pope Clement VII and Henry VIII of England, as well as the cities of Florence, Milan, and Venice. The League of Cognac marked the beginning of the Seventh Italian War, which would last nearly four years.
May 6, 1527: The Sack of Rome
The troops of Emperor Charles V invaded Rome in retaliation for Pope Clement VII’s alliance with Francis I. For eight days, the city was looted and pillaged.
August 3, 1529: Signing of the Peace of Cambrai
To end the war between France and the Habsburgs, Louise of Savoy, mother of Francis I, and Margaret of Austria, aunt of Charles V, signed the Peace of Cambrai, or “Ladies’ Peace.” To seal this agreement, Francis I, a widower for several years, agreed to marry Eleanor of Habsburg, the emperor’s sister. Additionally, he regained Burgundy but again promised to renounce Italy. Finally, in exchange for a large ransom, the king’s two sons were released. However, the king’s resentment would lead to another conflict in 1536.
January 1, 1530: Meeting between Titian and Charles V
Titian was introduced to the emperor during one of his stays in Italy. He then painted his first portrait of the emperor. This meeting marked a turning point in the artist’s career. It was during this period that he devoted himself to creating many portraits, with great innovation and talent. He also had the immense honor of being appointed Count Palatine (the “Counts Palatine” were the only nobles of the Holy Roman Empire with the right to vote in the election of the emperor) and Knight of the Golden Spur by Charles V.
February 23, 1530: Charles V is Crowned by the Pope
On February 23, 1530, Pope Clement VII presented Charles V with the Iron Crown, one of the symbols of the kings of Italy. The next day, Charles V was crowned Emperor of the Romans in Bologna, and he would be the last Roman emperor to be crowned by the pope following the Carolingian tradition. A year later, in January 1531, his brother Ferdinand of Habsburg would be elected King of the Romans.
June 25, 1530: Augsburg Confession
On June 25, 1530, the Augsburg Confession was presented to Charles V during the Diet of Augsburg (the Imperial Diets in Augsburg were assemblies of various leaders of the Holy Roman Empire). This confession was a text that laid the foundations of Lutheranism, initiated by the monk Martin Luther, which gave rise to Protestantism. Written by Philip Melanchthon and Camerarius, the Augsburg Confession contained 28 articles. It was ultimately rejected on August 3, 1530, by Catholic theologians who refuted the text.
February 27, 1531: Formation of the Schmalkaldic League
The Schmalkaldic League was formed on February 27, 1531. The German Protestant princes, led by Philip of Hesse and later by Elector John Frederick of Saxony, revolted against Charles V and the implementation of the Edict of Worms, which sought to ban Lutheranism. Francis I, the great rival of Charles V (allied with the Turks against Austria), signed an alliance treaty with this league, which would lead to the Schmalkaldic War in 1545.
July 23, 1532: Signing of the Peace of Nuremberg
On July 23, 1532, the Peace of Nuremberg was signed, symbolizing victory for the Protestants of the Holy Roman Empire. These Protestants, united under the Schmalkaldic League, obtained Charles V’s agreement not to impose the Edict of Worms, thanks to this peace treaty. Signed at the end of the Diet of Regensburg, this peace agreement was intended to maintain the unity of the empire against Turkish invasions. This was yet another political compromise that had to be made by Charles V.
February 4, 1536: Francis I Allies with Suleiman the Magnificent
The King of France signs the treaty known as the “Capitulations” with the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. At war against Emperor Charles V for the possession of Savoy and Turin, Francis I relies on this unprecedented alliance—between a Christian nation and a Muslim nation at the time—to confront his enemy on the Central European front.
June 18, 1538: Peace between Francis I and Charles V
Pope Paul III signs the Peace of Nice on June 18, 1538, between Francis I and Charles V. The King of France and the Emperor of Spain had entered into conflict to seize the lands of the Duchy of Milan after the death of Francesco II Sforza. Paul III urges the two sovereigns to form a bond and launch a crusade against England and the Turks.
January 2, 1553: The Setback of Charles V in Metz
January 2, 1553, marks the failure of Charles V and his defeated army in Metz. Charles V had laid siege to the city of Metz since September 1552, aiming to reclaim it from the King of France, Henry II, who had made his formal entrance into the city on April 18, 1552. However, Charles V is defeated by the resistance led by François de Guise. This is a bitter setback for the Holy Roman Empire’s army, 60,000 strong, which is forced to retreat to Thionville.
October 25, 1555: Charles V Abdicates
On October 25, 1555, the German Emperor, King of Spain and Sicily, and Lord of the Netherlands, Charles V decides to abdicate. The ceremony takes place in the Coudenberg Palace in Brussels. He bequeaths the County of Burgundy and the Netherlands to his son, Philip II. Afflicted by gout and worn down by his conquests, Charles V had begun his gradual withdrawal from power starting in 1540. He retires to a monastery and dies of malaria in 1558.
September 21, 1558: Death of Charles V
As Emperor of Germany, Prince of the Netherlands, and King of Spain, Charles V dies at the age of 58 in Yuste, Spain. Since his abdication in favor of his son Philip II, he had lived in seclusion in the monastery of the Order of Saint Jerome in Extremadura. Son of Philip the Handsome and Joanna the Mad, he had inherited Spain and Latin America through his mother and the territories of the Holy Roman Empire through his father. He ruled this vast empire “where the sun never set” from 1519 to 1556, while waging incessant struggles to impose his hegemony and ensure the triumph of Catholicism.
The Linear script A is the earliest writing system in Europe, with its symbols appearing on clay tablets, jewelry, and sacrificial offerings as early as 4000 years ago. But what these signs meant and what language the Minoans used is still a mystery. There is a plethora of speculation, but thus far no one has been able to decipher it.
As early as 2,500 BC, the Minoans had already constructed the first palace complexes on Crete, and their fleet controlled the whole eastern Mediterranean. During this historical period, the Minoans developed not one but two distinct writing systems: the hieroglyphic script and the more abstract Linear A script. Neither writing system, however, has been cracked, and even the Minoan language remains a mystery.
Findings in the domain of Minos
This is a Minoan Linear script A that has never been deciphered. (Credit: Chania Museum, Greece)
There is a lot of mystery and mythology surrounding the Minoans. Starting approximately 2,500 BC, they controlled marine commerce across the eastern Mediterranean for centuries, developed one-of-a-kind pieces of art, and constructed beautiful palaces like Knossos and Phaistos on Crete. No one knows for sure where they came from or what language they spoke. The unexpected collapse of this highly developed Bronze Age culture has also baffled researchers.
The Minoans of the Bronze Age invented not one but two distinct writing systems at once: the Cretan hieroglyphs and the Linear A script. This may be the greatest secret of this technologically accomplished society. As far as we know, these are the earliest writing systems in Europe. To this day, however, none of the Minoan scripts has been deciphered. There have been generations of linguists, archaeologists, and historians who have attempted, and failed, to decipher Minoan writing and language.
Confounding pictograms
A Minoan jasper seal with Cretan hieroglyphs, 1800 BC
British archaeologist Arthur Evans was one of the first and most well-known to study Minoan writings. As early as 1894, he set out for the island of Crete in quest of evidence of a lost Minoan civilization. He kept finding broken pots and seal stones covered in cryptic symbols. Modern-day islanders routinely perforated these old seals and wore them as amulets.
Evans later unearthed additional examples of the mysterious hieroglyphs as he progressively explored the palace of Knossos, beginning in 1900. The earliest of these pictographic signs were penned as far back as 2100 BC, according to dating efforts. Like Egyptian pictographic writing, they depict stylized humanoid figures, animal symbols, or hybrids of the two. Evans made a comprehensive list of the artifacts on which Minoan hieroglyphs had been discovered and the many permutations in which they had been found in 1909.
What do hieroglyphics mean?
By compiling this list, the archaeologist intended to get a better understanding of the hieroglyphs. After some preliminary comparisons, he guessed that some repeating pairs of letters were official titles or the insignia for Minoan dynasties. One of the most common permutations is associated with the male head on a seal, lending more credence to the personal significance of the word. Possibly a portrait of a Minoan ruler.
However, archaeologists have only conjectured about what the Minoan hieroglyphs meant. The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that most of the 137 Minoan hieroglyphs seem to stand for particular syllables, and 10 signs are regarded as word symbols. The remaining 23 symbols likely indicate some kind of numerical value. Most hieroglyphic writings are merely a single or two characters long, and are thus difficult to understand. These inscriptions are generally found on seals or tiny clay bars. This makes it difficult to infer their meaning from the surrounding material. Unlike with Egyptian hieroglyphs, there is no Rosetta stone to help decipher these symbols.
No explanation for its beginnings
Comparison of Minoan and Egyptian hieroglyphs by Arthur Evans in his “Scripta Minoa” by 1909.
Evans speculates that the Minoans created their own hieroglyphs but borrowed them from the Egyptians, noting that the Egyptian hieroglyphic system may have had a certain formative influence on the Minoans. It’s possible that one or two Egyptian signs were adopted. However, more evidence for or against this connection is still needed.
There are also parallels with the picture writing used by the Hittites and Cypriots in the Bronze Age. Therefore, some scholars believe that all hieroglyphs of these early societies have a common ancestor: a form of primordial pictographic writing of the Middle East, of which no traces have been preserved. This is just conjecture at this point.
The discovery of the Linear A script
From Arthur Evans, “Scripta Minoa” 1909, a Knossos Linear A inscription inside of a cup.
Crete’s Bronze Age inhabitants, the Minoans, created not just the mysterious hieroglyphic script but also the Linear A script, which is even more abstract. This is the earliest known European script and was used in tandem with hieroglyphs. From 1900 BCE on, its characters could be seen all across the region under the sway of the Minoan civilization.
Linear A’s letters, which are characterized by strokes and curves, are more akin to the early versions of the alphabet or the cuneiform scripts of Mesopotamia than they are to the pictographic Minoan hieroglyphs. The Minoan scribes carved their writing into the writing surface, as opposed to the more common practice of impressing lettering into damp clay with the edge of a stick. These linear glyphs can be discovered on both clay and stone, as noted by British archaeologist Arthur Evans in 1909.
Small clay tablets, which could be used for accountancy, have been discovered bearing Linear A inscriptions, but the writing has also been discovered in cave sanctuaries and the grand palaces of Phaistos and Knossos. There were several seals with hieroglyphics in one of the chambers at Knossos, but one specific specimen stood out to Evans: “Between them lay two bowls, which were inscribed in ink with these linear signs all around on their insides,” he writes. Before the clay pots were burned, the characters were reportedly inscribed using a reed pen.
Visual representations of syllables and words
Linear A tablet, Chania Archaeological Museum.
To date, archeologists have discovered around 1,362 artifacts that use the Linear A script. Linear A inscriptions are mostly associated with Crete, but have also been found on the Greek mainland, in the Aegean, the Levant, and on the western coast of Turkey. Certain regional characteristics may be reflected in these discoveries. Evans argued that there was strong reason to think that there were provincial or colonial styles of writing at the time, but that they had not been discovered. That’s because local scribes may have favored some indicators of primitive ancestors over others, thereby fostering their survival.
About 70 of the recorded characters are syllabic, while the other 100 or so are either entire words or connecting devices. At least, that’s what experts in linguistics have deduced based on character count and distribution. The following are examples of characters often cited as essential to understanding Linear A: These symbols are well attested from all Linear A discoveries, and they can be retrieved from a wide range of locations in Crete and the Aegean islands.
The number of characters who qualify as “core characters” is unknown at this time, says University of Cambridge archaeologist Ester Salgarella. According to her estimation, there are somewhere between 70 and 80 of these rudimentary signs. Additionally, there are indicators that seem to be unique to a certain location.
Fractional and decimal notation
Minoan numerals by Arthur Evans, “Scripta Minoa” 1909.
Also, the Minoan script has clusters of strokes and circles that are taken to be number symbols. Archaeologists believe the Minoans utilized a decimal system for mathematics based on the signs’ placement and meaning. It seems like dots or horizontal dashes represent tens, circles represent hundreds, and circles surrounded by dashes represent thousands.
In 2020, an Italian research group headed by Michele Corazza of Bologna University found evidence that the Minoans employed decimal fractions in their calculations and measurement systems. Linear A seems to include 17 characters that stand for fractions. The fractions use basic symbols that are either triangular or semicircular, and one or more dots to represent a fraction of a whole. But the underlying system of the fraction symbols remained unknown for a long time. The underlying logic of this notation could only be discerned with the use of computational analysis.
Although we know the basics of the numerical system in Linear A, most of the rest of the script is still a mystery. Is there a special reason why deciphering them is so hard?
Mystery surrounding the Minoans’ language and ancestry
Minoan queens fresco. (Credit: W. Commons).
Despite scientists’ best efforts over the course of a century, they have been unable to decipher the Minoan Linear A script, maintaining the document’s aura of mystery.
The fact that we still don’t know what language the Minoans spoke or which of the major language groups it belonged to is a key contributing factor. We don’t even know what this first sophisticated European society called itself. In 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans gave them the name “Minoans,” concluding that the society shown in the palace paintings, which included bull images, must have been that of the legendary Greek king Minos.
From where did the Minoans first arrive in Crete?
If we understood the language underlying Linear A, it may also provide us a clue to the beginnings of this civilization. Can anybody shed light on the Cretan colonizers’ identities? From where did they first appear? We can only speculate that new inhabitants arrived on the island some 5,000 years ago, which would explain the abrupt uptick in the population at the time. The first significant structures, including palaces, soon followed. Crete’s formerly simple peasant culture developed into a sophisticated and innovative society.
Historians like Arthur Evans and others have speculated that people fleeing Egypt or one of the other early great civilizations in the Middle East were responsible for this sudden burst of progress. According to Jeffery Hughey of California’s Hartnell College, he based this on startling parallels between Minoan and Egyptian art. The circular graves of the early Minoans were strikingly similar to the burial constructions popular in the Middle East at the period, and the two cultures shared a common written language in the form of hieroglyphics.
However, DNA studies conducted in 2013 debunked this theory by finding no resemblance between the genetic makeup of Minoan-era corpses and that of modern-day North Africans or Levantines. Nonetheless, no other Bronze Age group could be confidently attributed to the DNA samples. The origins of the Minoans are therefore still debated.
Foreign language
Neopalacial period, 1600 – 1450 BC. Minoan frescoes are reminiscent of Egyptian art. (Credit: Carole Raddato)
Here means that the Minoan language is still a mystery. We are unable to read the Linear A script without language. However, it is very difficult to recreate a language if you are unable to understand the writing or are unfamiliar with the cultural foundations of the people who spoke it. Archaeologist Brent Davis from the University of Melbourne likens the difficulty to walking a tightrope with one end dangling in the air. It’s really challenging, and every move you make will test your trust.
It is still a matter of conjecture among linguists as to which family of languages Minoan originally belonged to. While some argue that it is a Semitic language, others believe it to be an outdated variety of Phoenician or Etruscan. The connection to the languages of Asia Minor is also examined.
However, other archaeologists, like Davis, argue that Minoan is best understood as an isolated language, comparable to modern-day Basque, which does not belong to any of the main linguistic groups. This theory proposes that the Minoan language originated with Stone Age Cretans and flourished on the island mainly apart from the languages of the peoples to its north, south, east, and west. It is presumed that the Minoans borrowed terms from other civilizations throughout time, but their language as a whole retained its distinctiveness.
Minoan frescoes are reminiscent of Egyptian art.
However, this is only one of many potential explanations, and solid proof is still lacking. Only the fact that the Minoan language is not an early variant of Greek can be said with any certainty at this point. Davis thinks this adds a layer of difficulty, but not impossibility, to deciphering the situation.
The deciphering of the Linear script B
Comparable and yet very different. 100 years ago, when archaeologist Arthur Evans was compiling a list of the letters and symbols found on Crete, he made an interesting observation regarding the Linear scripts: Especially at the palace of Knossos, it seems that a second system of linear characters existed alongside the generally short strings of Linear A characters.
Evans noted in 1909 that most of the clay tablets found in the chambers and storage areas of the structures fall into this category. They were written in a style that was prevalent during the period of this culture’s tragic demise, around the 15th or 14th century BC. It looks to be a mixture of syllabic and word characters, like Linear A. In addition, there are certain correspondences between the characters and Linear A.
Mycenaean instead of Minoan
Yet there are also a great deal of contrasting characters, and the order of these seems to be radically altered. The characters of Linear B are easier to learn and memorize, and their layout and design seem more “European,” to use Evans’ term. Therefore, at first look, it seems that Linear B is really an improved version of Linear A. Although both Linear scripts were clearly utilized in Minoan Crete, the archaeologist feels that there is more to Linear B than a direct successor of Linear A.
This is borne out by the fact that Linear B is found not just on the island of Crete but also in the major urban hubs of the Mycenaean civilization that formed on the Greek mainland to succeed the Minoan period in the eastern Mediterranean. In Mycenae, Sparta, and the Mycenaean royal capital of Tiryns, archaeologists have uncovered several clay tablets and other items containing Linear B inscriptions. There are inscriptions here that are older than the first Linear B texts discovered on Crete.
Kober’s triplets
Mycenaean clay tablet dated to between 1300 and 1250 BCE and inscribed in the Linear B script.
However, at first, it is still not apparent whose language these signs belong to or what they imply, even with Linear B. This didn’t alter, though, until American historian Alice Kober started looking into Linear B in the 1930s. This ancient calligraphy captivated her. She was so intrigued by the mystery surrounding this ancient writing that she spent her free time painstakingly cataloging the character sequences on index cards. As part of this process, she arrived at a method for tracking down where and when certain symbols emerge.
In the process, Kober makes a significant discovery: certain signs create groups in which the first two symbols stay the same, but the third is modified or swapped. Kober, drawing on her previous linguistic experience, surmises that they are words with ends that have been grammatically inflected to indicate whether the reference word is feminine, masculine, or in a plural form. These “Kober triplets” demonstrate that inflectional grammar was present in the language used to create Linear B.
Now the question is, which one? The vast family of Indo-European languages, as well as several Semitic languages, belong to this category of inflectional languages. She passed away at the young age of 43, before Kober could resolve the linguistic issue. She has left behind almost 40 notebooks and a library of 200,000 cards with Linear B strings.
Place names for deciphering
The key advance in understanding Linear B is predicated on Kober’s research and her legacy. Michael Ventris, a young British architect, manages to do this. The mystery of the Minoan language and writing has attracted the linguistically bright young man ever since he was 14 and attended a lecture by Arthus Evans. In his leisure time as a young man, he starts to research Alice Kober’s character lists.
Ventris draws parallels between the Linear B strings discovered in Crete and those discovered on the Greek mainland. He finds that certain sign combinations are exclusively found on Cretan tablets, while others are only seen elsewhere. It seems likely to Ventris that they are geographical names, but he isn’t sure which ones.
With much deliberation and help from figures in nearby Cyprus, Ventris was able to determine the order of events. He recognized Ko-no-so as the combination for Knossos and Ko-no-si-ja and Ko-no-si-jo as the inflected variations for male and female residents. For other place names, Ventris has the same level of success. Now that he understood the syllabic sounds of the basic Linear B letters, he could begin to piece together the meaning of longer stringings of characters. He could read the signs for specific commodities like wine, olives, and grain, and was working his way up to whole phrases.
Written in Greek
“Although it contradicts all I have claimed in the past, I am now nearly entirely persuaded that the Linear B tablets are written in Greek,” says Ventris to a colleague after discovering that the transcribed Linear B portions are not written in a language he does not know.
Linear B, like Linear A, was thought to have been written in Minoan for decades, but this is now being shown to be incorrect, thanks to the work of Evans, Ventris, and other experts. “It’s a difficult and archaic Greek, considering the fact that these tablets are 500 years older than Homer,” Ventris remarked in a 1952 BBC interview. Also, it’s plainly Greek, but written in a rather truncated manner.
Meanwhile, archaeologists have hypothesized that the Mycenaeans used the earlier, Minoan Linear A script to create the Linear B script. They used the Minoan signs to write down their own, early Greek language. People on Crete started doing this about the time the Mycenaeans were dominant in the eastern Mediterranean and the Minoan empire collapsed. Though they continued to employ the same signals, their meaning had changed.
What does this imply, however, for the mystery that is the Linear A script?
Linear A compared to Linear B
Minoan clay stelae with linear script B. (Credit: Arthur Evans, “Scripta Minoa,” 1909)
The fact that the Minoan Linear A script has not yet been deciphered is puzzling. After all, the characters and language of the seemingly related Linear B script have been deciphered. In addition, we are aware of the presence of a few characters who are mentioned in both versions.
By comparing the two scripts, we have been able to learn the names of a few Linear A words. When comparing Linear A and Linear B, there are certain strings that are the same, “usually geographical names or human names,” notes Ester Salgarella of the University of Cambridge. There is also evidence that the corresponding characters were pronounced identically or similarly. Some of the products on the Knossos clay tablets have also been transcribed phonetically.
However, as University of Melbourne linguist and archaeologist Brent Davis puts it, “We can speak the Linear A inscriptions, but what comes out sounds like total gibberish.” Davis has also shown that there are significant grammatical differences between Linear A and Linear B Greek, particularly with regard to sentence construction. In fact, the Minoans presumably used the same verb-subject-object sentence structure as the ancient Egyptians, rather than the subject-object-verb sequence seen in ancient Greek and Sumerian.
A further complication in deciphering Minoan Linear A is the paucity and linguistic inefficiency of Linear A findings. The majority of these lists are quite brief inventory takes that use just a few characters and have drastically shortened grammar. Narrative writings, diplomatic communications, monumental inscriptions, or personal letters have not been discovered. That makes any cryptographic deciphering of Linear A very difficult, if not impossible.
Davis writes, “Mathematicians tell us that we need 10,000 to 12,000 separate text samples to break Linear A using such approaches.” In contrast, just a little more than 7,000 Linear A inscriptions have been discovered so far. The researcher estimates that there are three to four complete A4 pages’ worth of information. Though the basic phrase structure is there, additional data is required to unlock the language.
We need the Rosetta Stone of the Minoans
The discovery of a Minoan “Rosetta Stone,” a larger inscription with the same text written in both Linear A and Linear B, would be even more exciting. This might be the key to unlocking the mystery of the Linear A script and understanding the Minoan language, much like the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Salgarella argues that “one should never say never,” since it is possible that such a priceless artifact may be discovered during archaeological excavation someday. Until then, we must use our ingenuity and new ways of thinking to assess the limited data. Salgarella and her crew are working on a digital encyclopedia of all the Linear A characters right now. Because of this, script analysis with the help of computers should be possible. They are holding out hope that this will be the breakthrough that allows them to decipher the Minoan language and writing system for good.
