Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2019 i National Geographic History

Picture the scene: It’s early summer in the Alps. A bearded, middle-aged man hikes up a glacier, some 10,500 feet above sea level, close to the modern border between Austria and Italy. He is dressed practically to protect him from the cold and wet conditions in the mountains: warm trousers and a long cape, snowshoes, and a furry cap. The man’s right hand has a deep cut from a recent skirmish that is just beginning to heal. He stops to rest and eat. He thinks he’s found safety here, but he’s wrong. The bearded man is unaware he is being followed. An enemy stands undetected a few feet away. Target in sight, he nocks an arrow, carefully aims, and fires. It is an excellent shot, piercing him in the back.…

In 60 B.C. Marcus Licinius Crassus was one of the most powerful men in Rome. A military commander who crushed a slave rebellion, Crassus had become a respected orator, patron, and politician, serving as consul twice among other positions. Through a combination of savvy and ruthlessness, he amassed the largest fortune in Rome. With Crassus’ money and connections, many men would have been content, but Crassus was not one of them. Crassus joined forces with two other men in 60 B.C. to form a political alliance that would come to dominate Rome: the so-called First Triumvirate. Alongside Crassus stood Gaius Julius Caesar, an ambitious military commander beginning a life in politics. Crassus had once been Caesar’s patron, and the two remained allies. The third member was the proud and powerful…

EMPRESS ELISABETH OF AUSTRIA The life of Elisabeth of Austria sounds like a romantic novel: A vivacious Bavarian princess captures the heart of the Austrian emperor. They marry and return to his palace in Vienna, where she confronts not only the stifling, ironclad rules of court but also her domineering mother-in-law. While the overarching themes may sound like fiction, they were very much the realities of Elisabeth’s life. Struggling to fit into court life, she clashed with Archduchess Sophie, her aunt and mother-in-law. Her husband’s civic duties kept the couple apart, which further isolated the young empress. She turned to many interests and pastimes to fill the hours. She read and wrote poetry, she traveled, and she studied the culture of her people, especially Hungary. Elisabeth’s life played out against…

AMONG THOSE AGENTS was Americanborn Virginia Hall (above left), who had aided Resistance groups in France for the SOE before fleeing to Spain in late 1942 to evade the Gestapo, whose officers knew she had a wooden leg, which made her conspicuous. In early 1944 she transferred to the OSS, dyed her hair gray, and returned furtively to France disguised as a lame old peasant woman to arrange by radio air drops of weapons to French guerrillas known as the maquis—a perilous assignment because Germans monitored radio transmissions and could trace them to their source. Although the Gestapo was on the lookout for Hall and considered her “one of the most dangerous Allied agents in France,” she avoided arrest and linked up after D-Day with one of the many Jedburgh…

Every year ancient Egyptians eagerly anticipated the coming of Akhet, the flooding season. Meaning “inundation,” Akhet was the all-important time when the Nile’s floodwaters replenished the land and restored Egypt’s fertility. This time of joyous renewal was also when ancient Egypt held one of its most spectacular and most mysterious festivals: the Feast of Opet. Opet was celebrated in the city of Thebes, and the centerpiece of the festival was a grand procession from Karnak to Luxor. In these processions, statues of the city’s most sacred gods—Amun-Re, supreme god, his wife, Mut, and his son, Khons—were placed in special barks and were then borne from one temple to the other. Opet’s formal name is heb nefer en Ipet, which translates to “beautiful feast of Opet.” The word opet or ipet…

82 B.C. Crassus commands a section of the army of Lucius Cornelius Sulla in the Battle of the Colline Gate against Gaius Marius’s supporters. Crassus manages to defeat the left wing of the rival army. 71 B.C. After a succession of defeats, the Roman Senate gives Crassus command to fight against Spartacus. Crassus stops the rebels by the Sele River and massacres them after a hard-fought battle. 70 B.C. Despite their public disputes, Crassus and Pompey share the consulate. The political tension allows only a few reforms, aiming to limit the Senate’s power, to be approved during their mandate. 56 B.C. On his return from Gaul, Caesar arranges a meeting of the triumvirs to formalize the distribution of the Roman world among them. A second consulate for Crassus and Pompey…

THE MAP ABOVE shows the slow expansion of the Allied beachhead in Normandy from D-Day (June 6, 1944) to July 24. To the west, troops of the U.S. First Army—led by Omar Bradley and later part of his 12th Army Group—fought their way in June up the Cotentin Peninsula to the deepwater port of Cherbourg. To the east, British and Canadian forces of Montgomery’s 21st Army Group met with stiff opposition from German panzer divisions around Caen. American soldiers encountered similar resistance as they pushed south from Carentan, below Utah Beach. Although the tangled hedgerows impeded their progress, they took the town of Saint-Lô on July 18. From here, Operation Cobra was launched on July 25, which successfully broke through the German lines.…

At the request of Ludovico Sforza, the future Duke of Milan, in 1482 Leonardo da Vinci began working on a sculpture that would be the largest equestrian statue in the world. Leonardo made a clay model that stood 24 feet high and planned to cast it in bronze. In 1499, however, war engulfed Milan, and the clay horse was destroyed. Leonardo’s drawings and plans survived, but the artist died before “Il Gran Cavallo” could be built. Roughly five hundred years later, inspired by a 1977 National Geographic article, “The Horse That Never Was,” American art patron Charles C. Dent made it his life’s work to erect the statue. Following Dent’s death in 1994, sculptor Nina Akamu carried out Leonardo’s plans and in 1999 completed a fullsize bronze sculpture of the…

Mystery surrounds the rituals that were undertaken once the barks arrived in procession at the Temple of Luxor. The illustration depicts Opet during or after the reign of Ramses II. The barks of Amun, Mut, and Khons have passed through Ramses’ monumental first pylon into the first court. From here, it is believed the procession entered the second court, and from there made its way into the innermost sanctuary for secret and sacred rituals.…

THE ARMY COMMANDED by Crassus totaled 43,000 men, who arrived at Carrhae exhausted from crossing the desert. Surenas, the Parthian commander, awaited them on the outskirts of this city, but he only ordered a fraction of his 11,000 men to leave the cover of the dunes and provoke the Romans into attack. After the initial skirmishes, Crassus ordered his legions to adopt a square formation, with the cavalry, led by his son Publius, covering the sides. Surenas then ordered his thousands of archers on horseback to attack, but avoiding direct contact after every barrage. Meanwhile, the heavy cavalry of the cataphracts (horses and horsemen protected by armor) surrounded the legions. PUBLIUS TRIED TO COUNTERATTACK, but the cataphracts drew back and managed to isolate the Roman cavalry, picking them off one…

The Allied invasion of German-occupied France that began in the early hours of June 6, 1944, was long in the making. By gaining supremacy in the Atlantic in 1943, the Allies had cleared the way for a huge buildup of American troops and equipment in Great Britain. Between January and June 1944, nine million tons of supplies and 800,000 soldiers crossed the Atlantic from the United States to bolster the invasion, designated Operation Overlord. Meanwhile, Allied pilots exploited their hardwon superiority over the diminished German Luftwaffe by blasting French railways and bridges to keep their foes from rushing reserves to Normandy when troops landed there. Anglo-American commanders battle tested in North Africa and Italy, including American Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bernard Montgomery of the United Kingdom, prepared to lead invasion…

THE ALLIES’ meticulous plans to invade Normandy in 1944 were overseen by Dwight D. Eisenhower, appointed supreme commander in Europe the year before. In addition to a formidable military record, the future 34th president of the United States inspired his troops with his warmth and rousing addresses. Second in command was Britain’s Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, who defeated German forces, under the command of Erwin Rommel, in North Africa, a major turning point of the war. Hitler later entrusted Rommel with defense of France’s channel coast, where, as D-Day dawned, he and Montgomery once again faced one another as the war’s dramatic endgame began.…

FROM TRIUMPHS TO TRAGEDY CELEBRATIONS of military victories, called triumphs, were a Roman commander’s ultimate goal. Piqued that his rival Pompey had once been granted three, Julius Caesar mounted four within a month—three for victories in Gaul, Egypt, and Turkey, and a fourth for crushing Pompey himself. When this quadruple triumph was staged in Rome in 46 b.c., the splendor could not quiet whispers of unease at this ostentatious display, which would swell in the next two years, culminating in an assassination plot. THE BEAUTY OF BOTTICELLI BORN TO A HUMBLE FAMILY, Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi is known to the world by his nickname Botticelli—Little Barrel. His prodigious talents attracted the Medici of Florence, whose patronage was rewarded with paintings of such sublime power as “The Birth of Venus.” These…