Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2020 i National Geographic History

For a daughter to receive the same education as a son was rare in the mid-14th century, and Christine de Pisan’s childhood was one such exception. Born in Venice in 1364 and raised in France, Christine (also known as Christina) used the advantages of her early education to forge a prolific writing career to support herself and her family, an unprecedented achievement for the time. A poet and biographer, Christine celebrated remarkable female figures in her works, including an account of Joan of Arc written during her lifetime. Christine’s father was a Bolognese physician and astrologer, Tommaso da Pizzano. His reputation as an intellectual secured him employment as the court astrologer of King Charles V of France. Tommasso moved the family there when Christine was four. She had two younger…

1 Inspiration Three Virtues—Reason (holding a mirror), Rectitude (a ruler), and Justice (a vessel)—tell Christine to build a city for heroines. 2 Protection A wall is one of the first things to be built in the City of Ladies. Its bricks and mortar will provide strength and protection. 3 Habitation With the city now completed, the valiant and virtuous women of antiquity are invited to enter the city. 4 Consecration Justice, Christine, and the renowned women (right) welcome the Virgin Mary and the saints, crowned by golden halos (left), to the city.…

Appearing in the third millennium B.C. in Mesopotamia, early chariots were slow and heavy—designed for hauling, not fighting. The emergence of spoked wheels in the second millennium B.C. enabled the building of lighter, faster models. As well as military use, chariots were flaunted as displays of royal strength and power.…

THE RESEARCH VESSEL PETREL has located more than 30 historically significant shipwrecks in the Pacific, including the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Wasp, sunk by a Japanese submarine in September 1942. Petrel’s two deep-sea vehicles can survey craft at depths of three miles. One of these is equipped with long-range sonar equipment that can detect anomalies on the seabed. LYING ROUGHLY half-way between Tokyo and San Francisco, the Midway Atoll was claimed for the United States in 1859, and placed under the control of the U.S. Navy in 1903. Its two islands, together totaling less than three square miles, were vital staging areas in early transpacific aviation. State-of-the-art technology has probed thousands of feet below the Pacific to glimpse the wreckage of one of the most pivotal battles of the Second World War.…

1364 Christine de Pisan is born in Venice. At age four, she will move with her family to join the court of French king Charles V. circa 1389 After a 10-year marriage, Christine becomes a widow and chooses to support her family through her writing. 1400s Christine’s literary criticism centers on the literary portrayal of women. Her poems win her powerful patrons. 1405 The Book of the City of Ladies is published, in which Christine honors the role of notable women throughout history. circa 1430 A year after her “Tale of Joan of Arc” celebrates the Maid of Orleans, Christine dies, around age 65.…

Archaeologists working in London in 1912 might have been surprised. When they discovered a first-century A.D. Roman jug bearing the inscription “Londini ad fanum Isidis—London, next door to the Temple of Isis.” Best known as an Egyptian goddess, finding signs of Isis worship so far from North Africa might seem odd. But this goddess proved popular enough to transcend her original Egyptian centers of worship and expand to all corners of the known world. Isis was loved by ancient Egyptians for her fierce devotion to her husband Osiris and her son Horus. Her cult first began to spread around the Mediterranean following the establishment of Hellenist rule in Egypt in the fourth century B.C. Then as Roman power expanded, worship of Isis went even farther afield. By the second century…

14TH CENTURY B.C. The Amarna Letters, a series of correspondences between Egypt and its allies, address the problem of piracy. The king of Crete gives assurances he will punish marauders. 12TH CENTURY B.C. Ramses III crushes the Sea Peoples, the mysterious seaborne migrants whose marauding sows chaos in the Mediterranean. 6TH CENTURY B.C. Greek trade spans the Mediterranean. Greek cities act to protect their economy by eradicating maritime brigands. 167 B.C. The fall of Rhodes and its once powerful navy leads to a resurgence of piracy, which targets the growing wealth of Rome. 75 B.C. Julius Caesar is briefly captured by pirates. In the next decade, Pompey will declare all-out war on piracy. A.D. 14 Emperor Augustus dies. Nearly all the Mediterranean is under Roman control, and piracy wanes.…

When the fourth Mongol great khan, Möngke, died in 1259, his brother, Kublai, never doubted who was his rightful successor. While Möngke had been expanding Mongol rule into Syria in the far west, Kublai had proved to be a brilliant general, conquering a swath of what is now southwestern China as well as modern-day Vietnam. He had proved his mettle, but there were others who sought to rule. News reached Kublai that another of his brothers, Arigböge, also wanted to proclaim himself emperor. Kublai, then age 45, hastily made his way to his residence at Shangdu (later immortalized as Xanadu in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem “Kubla Khan”) to decide what to do next. Kublai knew that whoever succeeded Möngke would need formidable diplomatic as well as military skills to…

ARTIST LIU GUANDAO, also known by the name Zhongxian, was a prominent painter known for his technical skill and realistic depictions of traditional Chinese subjects. His portrait of Kublai Khan’s son earned him a position at court, where he went on to create many other works for the great khan. Among them is a piece now in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan. Painted on yellow silk, the work shows Kublai Khan (dressed in a white coat over a red robe) and his empress with a hunting party. The attendants’ different skin tones and ethnic features indicate that the khan’s companions came from outside China. Along for the hunt are a hawk, a cheetah, a white falcon, and a dog to assist the archer in bringing…

The human mind,” observes the narrator of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, “is naturally drawn to grandiose notions.” And notions do not come much more grandiose than those dreamed up by that narrator’s creator, considered the father of science fiction. From the center of the Earth to the surface of the moon, Jules Verne described environments where no one had been, but that everyone wanted to see. Despite not being much of a traveler himself, Verne unleashed the adventurousness and versatility of his own imagination to describe some of the greatest expeditions in literature across an astonishing output of 60 novels. He reached the peak of his career in 1872, when an avid readership awaited the next plot twist in his novel Around the World in 80 Days. First…

PIERRE-JULES HETZEL was Verne’s publisher for over 20 years, following the author’s first success with Five Weeks in a Balloon in 1863. Hetzel was the brainchild behind the Extraordinary Journeys series of stories, which made Verne’s name and both of their fortunes, and when Hetzel died in 1886, Verne’s stellar career was undisputed. A veteran of the 1848 revolution and the short-lived republic that followed it, Hetzel was a man of progressive views and an atheist. Even so, he exercised strict control over Verne’s works, doing all he could to veto overtly political or religious content, which Hetzel felt might alienate the mass audience that he wanted to cultivate. Despite some forays into pessimism and social criticism, Verne largely respected Hetzel’s business instinct. The question of whether Hetzel improved or…

VERNE’S NOVELS OFTEN portray science as a straightforward benefit to mankind, a wondrous tool in the hands of his characters. But across his astonishingly prolific output, Verne sometimes sounds a more nuanced, skeptical note. A good example of when the idea of progress brings out his pessimistic streak is The Begum’s Fortune (1879), in which two scientists, one French and the other German, each found a city in the United States. The Teutonic city is a sinister, militaristic place, dedicated to the production of the materials of war. Thirty-five years before the outbreak of World War I, Verne wrote about the use of poison gas and bombardment from the air. The reason why this dark vision of technology—so different from the optimistic tone of much his other work—did not play…

FOR THE LAST two decades of his life, Jules Verne lived and worked in the impressive Tower House in Amiens, which today serves as the city’s Jules Verne Museum. Although his publisher Hetzel’s contracts were never overly generous, they did allow Verne to live in some style at this stage in his life. True to the writer’s fascination with all things technological, the glass and iron of the tower represented, at the time, the height of architectural sophistication. From this vantage point, Verne could brood on both the wonders and the dangers of his century’s scientific progress. Propeller Island (1895), written during this late period, examined the destruction of native cultures in the South Pacific—passages which would later be cut from the English edition for fear of offending either American…

East of the Turkish city of Kars lies a complex of lonely medieval churches. Octagonal towers, crumbling walls, and fallen columns lay scattered across vast grasslands. In the gorge that drops away to the Akhuryan River—which forms Turkey’s border with the modern state of Armenia—is an ancient bridge, broken in the middle. These ruins are all that remain of Ani, the cosmopolitan capital of medieval Armenia, one of the earliest kingdoms to adopt Christianity as its state religion in the early A.D. 300s. The site of a fifth-century fortification, Ani was chosen to be Armenia’s capital in the 10th century. It became home to as many as 100,000 people, and was so richly endowed with sacred buildings that it came to be known as the “city of 1,001 churches.” Its…

CHRISTINE DE PISAN helped craft the beautifully illustrated manuscripts of her literary creations. Using her experience as manager of a scriptorium, she oversaw the work of skilled miniaturists to produce these detailed images. In some editions she is often the subject of the illustrations. In a 15th-century edition of her 1405 work One Hundred Ballads of a Lover and a Lady, she is shown working in her study (left). As in this image, she is often shown wearing a long blue dress and a white wimple, the standard attire across many other portraits of her.…

Chariots are only as good as the animals that draw them, making a supply of healthy, well-trained horses a priority to the Hittites. A fascinating text on equine management, dated to the 13th century B.C., was found at the ancient site of the Hittite capital Hattusa. It begins with the words “Thus [speaks] Kikkuli, the horse trainer of the land of Mitanni.” An immigrant in the service of the Hittite king, Kikkuli’s vocabulary is of great interest to historians: a mixture of Hittite, his native Hurrian, as well as a smattering of other words from the Middle East. The text is divided into three parts. First, Kikkuli explains the four-day process of selecting the right animals. Then, he details a training method that begins in autumn and lasts for 184…

3RD MILLENNIUM B.C. The Pyramid Texts establish the role of Isis as protector of her consort Osiris, her son Horus, and of the pharaoh in the afterlife. 4TH CENTURY B.C. Under the new regime of the Greek Ptolemy pharaohs, Isis acquires Greek traits. Her cult travels well beyond Egypt’s borders along trade routes. 1ST CENTURYB.C. The Isis cult has extended across the Mediterranean in the form of the Isis Mysteries, a Roman-era rite centered on the afterlife. 30 B.C. Rome conquers Egypt. The Isis cult in Rome survives persecution to flourish through the next centuries of the imperial period. 6TH CENTURY A.D. The Christian Byzantine emperor Justinian closes the Temple of Isis at Philae, ending the worship of the goddess in Egypt.…

1215 Kublai Khan is born, the son of a Christian princess. His father, Tolui, is the fourth son of the Mongol Empire’s leader, Genghis Khan. 1251 Möngke, Kublai’s brother, becomes the great khan. While focusing on western expansion, he entrusts rule of northern China to Kublai. 1260 Following Möngke’s death in 1259, Kublai proclaims himself the great khan. He must defeat another brother, Arigböge, for the title. 1271 Intensifying the war to unite the whole of China under his rule, Kublai styles himself as the head of a new Chinese dynasty, the Yuan. 1279 The Song dynasty of southern China falls to Kublai. His rule takes on a distinctly Chinese flavor, creating tensions with Mongol nobles. 1281 Kublai undertakes a second, failed attempt to invade Japan. Despite other lackluster military…

Compared to other cultures, Mongol women during the time of Kublai Khan enjoyed higher social status within their society. They enjoyed more rights, including the ability to own and inherit property. Historians attribute their position to the Mongols’ nomadic origins. When warriors were away on horseback, women organized and ran the camps. From commoners to nobility, women were encouraged and expected to be capable administrators. Kublai’s mother, Sorghaghtani, raised her sons to value education and the lessons of other cultures. Kublai’s wife, Chabi, was no different. A woman of intelligence, independence, and open-mindedness, her traits complemented Kublai’s priorities as a leader, and the two became a power couple. Chabi’s ability to navigate Chinese and Mongol culture helped her husband to do the same.…

1828 Jules Verne is born on February 8, in Nantes, a bustling port city on the Loire River in western France, the son of a lawyer. 1847 He moves to Paris to study law. There, he witnesses the revolution of 1848, meets literary figures, and decides to become a writer. 1863 Five Weeks in a Balloon is Verne’s first hit. With P.-J. Hetzel as his publisher, in 1869-1870 Verne will publish 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. 1870s Verne’s readers are taken to the moon, Africa, and the Arctic with Around the Moon, Dick Sand, and Michael Strogoff. 1880s The Green Ray blends science with romance. The Purchase of the North Pole recounts a bid to stop the Earth tilting on its axis. 1905 Jules Verne dies, age 77. His 54-novel…

JULES VERNE’S NOVEL FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON(1865) and its sequel, Around the Moon (1870), describe the launch of a spaceship and its orbit around Earth’s only satellite. There are curious similarities to the Apollo 8 mission, which nearly a century later, became the first crewed craft to orbit the moon in 1968. Both expeditions had a three-man crew; the rockets were of a similar size and weight; and both followed a similar trajectory before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. Verne made detailed calculations of the time needed to reach the moon and the effect of orbit on the spacecraft. He worked out that the optimal starting point would be close to the 28th parallel as this would give the most direct trajectory, which informs his choice of…