The wealth of medieval England

 

This week we took advantage of an almost early spring day to explore the landscapes and little stone villages of the Cotswolds – bright sunshine, rooks cawing in the trees, small fast flowing rivers that form the headwaters of the Thames. This was a landscape made rich by wool, which was packed away across England on good straight routes left by the Romans, shipped to Flanders, Genoa, Venice and beyond. Merchants in Cairo wore Cotswold wool; so did the Janissaries, the crack troops of the Ottoman Empire. The grazing hills of the Cotswolds produced this wealth, and the villages and churches, built out of oolitic limestone, ranging in colour from pale grey to warm honey, contain a unique heritage of medieval architecture and art.

The church of East Leach Martin

 









 

 

'Take only what you can carry'

Thinking about refugees - and not a day goes by but the displacement of people gets worse and the tales more traumatic - I've just written a post for the interesting Museum of Marco Polo blog on the expulsion of the Greeks from the Ottoman Empire, particularly from the Black Sea region, and the massive population exchanges of 1923.

Visit the Marco Polo Museum site to read here.

A warning to us all

Seen in a country churchyard recently - the memorial to the unfortunate William Beames, aged 22.

 

                                   ' A warning peice to all young men
                                    Who in their blooming age
                                    Mispend their time and know not when
                                    They must go off the stage.'
I wonder what he could possibly have got up to in rural Gloucestershire in the late eighteenth century. I'm interested in the 'ei' spelling in 'peice' - it seems to have been quite common at the time.

Shakespear of Arabia

I was fascinated by a story on the BBC today about this man, Captain William Shakespear (no 'e') - the Lawrence of Arabia before Lawrence - proper looking British army officer, fluent Arabic speaker and photographer.



Shakespear was in the Arabian desert before the First World War, living with the Bedouin, hunting with hawks, forging a British alliance with Ibn Saud, head of the House of Saud, against the Ottomans, mapping the desert - and photographing it.

He left a remarkable legacy of pictures.

In 1914, with the outbreak of war, the stakes in the Arabian peninsula were raised. The British were keen to work with Ibn Saud to drive the Ottomans out, but Shakespear was shot dead during a battle between Ibn Saud and an Ottoman backed rival - whilst trying to take photographs - an early casualty of war photography, and perhaps the man who could have inherited the fame that passed to Lawrence of Arabia had he lived.

 

Read the full story here.

Ibn Saud and his followers





Ibn Saud's army on the march

 

 

 

 

The blog in hibernation

I'm shocked how long the blog has been in hibernation over the past few months, whilst book finishing goes on. I have, at last, a finished, edited manuscript, I also have a title - 'Conquerors: How Portugal seized the Indian Ocean and forged the First Global Empire' - perhaps slightly different in the US, and I have a publication date, at least in the UK - for September.

Early starts have given me the chance to see the winter dawn coming up over the frosty Gloucestershire hills...I'm very much a morning writer, hopeless at night:

And I managed an interview with Shanghai Review of Books (in English I hasten to add), as my books have been translated into Chinese recently. In the process they reproduced my photo in flatteringly remastered form and looking mysteriously benign - though I'm not sure about the plastic silver wig.

And I hope to crank the blog up properly again soon. Happy New Year.

 





'We are watching in awe and deep emotion'

The blog has been silent for a while, whilst I hurtle to the finishing line on a book. I've now sent the manuscript off to the publishers and am enjoying a short lull before they remind me of all the things I have not supplied - bibliographies, source notes, map briefings etc etc. For the past three years I've been living with the deeds of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. The first people to establish a sea route to India, and the first conquistadors. It's been a long and fascinating voyage for me too - leaving the Mediterranean for once for the seas beyond: a tale of ingenuity and endurance, sea battles and, at times, terrible brutality - all paving the way for the global world in which we live today.

Meanwhile, scanning the news, I've been fascinated by the discovery of a royal tomb in Greece, dating back to the time of Alexander the Great, that has temporarily distracted the Greeks from their modern woes:



As the archaeologists patiently burrow their way into an extraordinary mausoleum, the Greeks dream that it's the tomb of Alexander himself and the nation holds its breath: "We are watching in awe and with deep emotion the excavation in Amphipolis,"said the Greek culture minister. You can read the story here. 

Candles in the dark

 

'The lights are going out all over Europe.' People in Britain have been asked to turn off their lights for an hour between 10 and 11pm this evening in memory of the time an exact century ago that the country declared war on Germany. And so I'm writing this by candlelight. It's a beautiful, tranquil August night here in the countryside, the moon clear in the sky, an atmospheric time to remember. And historians still seem unable to come to a consensus as to exactly why the people of Europe needed to churn their continent into the mud.