Richard Cromwell (1658-1659 AD)

Richard was the third son of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. Born on the 4th October 1626, he served in the Parliamentary Army in his younger days, being admitted as a member of Lincoln's Inn in 1647. Upon his marriage to Dorothy Major, the daughter of a country squire from Hursley in Hampshire, he turned to the life of a gentleman farmer, representing Hampshire (1654) and then Cambridge University in Parliament (Nov. 1655 & 1656).

Richard was not brought forward into public life until the deaths of his elder brothers and the establishment of the second Protectorate in 1657. He succeeded his father as Chancellor of Oxford University and was made a member of the Council of State. He also received his own regiment and a seat in the House of Lords. Eventually, on his deathbed, Cromwell Senior nominated Richard as his successor.

On 3rd September 1658, Richard Cromwell was proclaimed Lord Protector of the Realm. His appointment, however, was resented by the military officers on the council who showed open animosity towards their civil counterparts. In order to raise money and settle such differences, Richard was forced to dissolve the Protectorate and reinstate the Rump Parliament in January 1659.

Anarchy ensued: bitter arguments between the men of substance and the military resulted in a break-away Army Council which took Richard into their power and forced him to dissolve the Rump in May. The Army Council then agreed with a reassembled Long Parliament on the Lord Protector's dismissal. Richard, passive throughout, submitted to Parliament's decision on 25th May 1659.

Many of the nobility, middle class tradesmen and army were disgusted with rule by force, while the generals found it impossible to unite behind a single policy. General Monck then became the chief mover behind a push to restore the monarchy. He marched his troops to London in support of the Rump, breaking the stalemate and reinstating the Rump for a third time. Monck entered London in February 1660 and opened the doors of Parliament in the following April to those members that were barred ten years earlier. The House of Commons set up a monarchist Council of State authorized to invite Charles II to take the crown. The Long Parliament finally dissolved itself following these actions and a Stuart once again sat on the throne.

Richard found it wise to leave England's shores in the Summer of 1660. He lived in France under the name of John Clarke for many years, before moving on Spain, Italy or possibly Switzerland. He was only finally allowed to return home, without recriminations in 1680. He paid ten shillings a week for lodgings at the house of one Sergeant Pengelly at Cheshunt near his Hertfordshire estate. It is said that, in old age dressed in his poor farmer's clothes, he once saw Queen Anne sitting on the very throne that he himself had once graced. No-one suspected the old farmer of ever having occupied such a high position. He died on 12th July 1712 at the age of eighty-five and was buried in the chancel of Hursley Parish Church.

Britannia: Monarchs of Britain

Oliver Cromwell (1649-1658 AD)

Oliver Cromwell, born in Huntingdon in 1599, was a strict Puritan with a Cambridge education when he went to London to represent his family in Parliament. Clothed conservatively , he possessed a Puritan fervour and a commanding voice, he quickly made a name for himself by serving in both the Short Parliament (April 1640) and the Long Parliament (August 1640 through April 1660). Charles I, pushing his finances to bankruptcy and trying to force a new prayer book on Scotland, was badly beaten by the Scots, who demanded £850 per day from the English until the two sides reached agreement. Charles had no choice but to summon Parliament.

The Long Parliament, taking an aggressive stance, steadfastly refused to authorize any funding until Charles was brought to heel. The Triennial Act of 1641 assured the summoning of Parliament at least every three years, a formidable challenge to royal prerogative. The Tudor institutions of fiscal feudalism (manipulating antiquated feudal fealty laws to extract money), the Court of the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission were declared illegal by Act of Parliament later in 1641. A new era of leadership from the House of Commons (backed by middle class merchants, tradesmen and Puritans) had commenced. Parliament resented the insincerity with which Charles settled with both them and the Scots, and despised his links with Catholicism.

1642 was a banner year for Parliament. They stripped Charles of the last vestiges of prerogative by abolishing episcopacy, placed the army and navy directly under parliamentary supervision and declared this bill become law even if the king refused his signature. Charles entered the House of Commons (the first king to do so), intent on arresting John Pym, the leader of Parliament and four others, but the five conspirators had already fled, making the king appear inept. Charles travelled north to recruit an army and raised his standard against the forces of Parliaments (Roundheads) at Nottingham on August 22, 1642. England was again embroiled in civil war.

Cromwell added sixty horses to the Roundhead cause when war broke out. In the 1642 Battle at Edge Hill, the Roundheads were defeated by the superior Royalist (Cavalier) cavalry, prompting Cromwell to build a trained cavalry. Cromwell proved most capable as a military leader. By the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644, Cromwell's New Model Army had routed Cavalier forces and Cromwell earned the nickname "Ironsides" in the process. Fighting lasted until July 1645 at the final Cavalier defeat at Naseby. Within a year, Charles surrendered to the Scots, who turned him over to Parliament. By 1646, England was ruled solely by Parliament, although the king was not executed until 1649.

English society splintered into many factions: Levellers (intent on eradicating economic castes), Puritans, Episcopalians, remnants of the Cavaliers and other religious and political radicals argued over the fate of the realm. The sole source of authority rest with the army, who moved quickly to end the debates. In November 1648, the Long Parliament was reduced to a "Rump" Parliament by the forced removal of 110 members of Parliament by Cromwell's army, with another 160 members refusing to take their seats in opposition to the action. The remainder, barely enough for a quorum, embarked on an expedition of constitutional change. The Rump dismantled the machinery of government, most of that, remained loyal to the king, abolishing not only the monarchy, but also the Privy Council, Courts of Exchequer and Admiralty and even the House of Lords. England was ruled by an executive Council of State and the Rump Parliament, with various subcommittees dealing with day-to-day affairs. Of great importance was the administration in the shires and parishes: the machinery administering such governments was left intact; ingrained habits of ruling and obeying harkened back to monarchy.

With the death of the ancient constitution and Parliament in control, attention was turned to crushing rebellions in the realm, as well as in Ireland and Scotland. Cromwell forced submission from the nobility, muzzled the press and defeated Leveller rebels in Burford. Annihilating the more radical elements of revolution resulted in political conservatism , which eventually led to the restoration of the monarchy. Cromwell's army slaughtered over forty percent of the indigenous Irishmen, who clung unyieldingly to Catholicism and loyalist sentiments; the remaining Irishmen were forcibly transported to County Connaught with the Act of Settlement in 1653. Scottish Presbyterians fought for a Stuart restoration, in the person of Charles II, but were handily defeated, ending the last remnants of civil war. The army then turned its attention to internal matters.

The Rump devolved into a petty, self-perpetuating and unbending oligarchy, which lost credibility in the eyes of the army. Cromwell ended the Rump Parliament with great indignity on April 21, 1653, ordering the house cleared at the point of a sword. The army called for a new Parliament of Puritan saints, who proved as inept as the Rump. By 1655, Cromwell dissolved his new Parliament, choosing to rule alone (much like Charles I had done in 1629). The cost of keeping a standard army of 35,000 proved financially incompatible with Cromwell's monetarily strapped government. Two wars with the Dutch concerning trade abroad added to Cromwell's financial burdens.

The military's solution was to form yet another version of Parliament. A House of Peers was created, packed with Cromwell's supporters and with true veto power, but the Commons proved most antagonistic towards Cromwell. The monarchy was restored in all but name; Cromwell went from the title of Lord General of the Army to that of Lord Protector of the Realm (the title of king was suggested, but wisely rejected by Cromwell when a furore arose in the military ranks). The Lord Protector died on September 3, 1658, naming his son Richard as successor. With Cromwell's death, the Commonwealth floundered and the monarchy was restored only two years later.

The failure of Cromwell and the Commonwealth was founded upon Cromwell being caught between opposing forces. His attempts to placate the army, the nobility, Puritans and Parliament resulted in the alienation of each group. Leaving the political machinery of the parishes and shires untouched under the new constitution was the height of inconsistency; Cromwell, the army and Parliament were unable to make a clear separation from the ancient constitution and traditional customs of loyalty and obedience to monarchy. Lacey Baldwin Smith cast an astute judgment concerning the aims of the Commonwealth: "When Commons was purged out of existence by a military force of its own creation, the country learned a profound, if bitter, Lesson: Parliament could no more exist without the crown than the crown without Parliament. The ancient constitution had never been King and Parliament but King in Parliament; when one element of that mystical union was destroyed, the other ultimately perished."

Britannia: Monarchs of Britain

The mysterious appearance of chapatis—loaves of an Indian unleavened bread—spooked the British administrators of the Raj shortly before the outbreak of rebellion in 1857.

“There is a most mysterious affair going on throughout the whole of India at present,” Dr. Gilbert Hadow wrote in a letter to his sister in Britain in March 1857. “No one seems to know the meaning of it.… It is not known where it originated, by whom or for what purpose, whether it is supposed to be connected to any religious ceremony or whether it has to do with some secret society. The Indian papers are full of surmises as to what it means. It is called ‘the chupatty movement.’ ”

The “movement” that Hadow was describing was a remarkable example of rumor gone wild. It consisted of the distribution of many thousands of chapatis—unleavened Indian breads—that were passed from hand to hand and from village to village throughout the mofussil (interior) of the subcontinent. The chapatis were real, but no one knew for sure what they were for. Most Indians thought they were the work of the British, who—through the East India Company—had ruled over large portions of the country for almost a century (and were, according to one well-known prophecy, due to be unseated at that century’s end). The British, who had nothing to do with the mysterious transmission, guessed the breads were a piece of mischief-making on the part of the Indians, though opinion was divided as to whether the breads came from the east, near Calcutta (Kolkata), from the north, in the province of Oude (Avadh) or from Indore, in the center of the country. Extensive inquiries into the meaning of the breads produced plenty of theories but few facts; even the runners and watchmen who baked them and carried them from village to village “did not know why they had to run through the night with chupatties in their turbans,” though they took them just the same.

India at the time of the 1857 rebellion. Click to view in higher resolution. Map: Wikicommons.

The chupatty movement first came to British attention early in February 1857. One of the first officials to encounter it was Mark Thornhill, magistrate in the little Indian town of Mathura, near Agra. Thornhill came into his office one morning to find four “dirty little cakes of the coarsest flour, about the size and thickness of a biscuit” lying on his desk. He was informed that they had been brought in by one of his Indian police officers, who had received them from a puzzled village chowkidar (watchman). And where had the chowkidar got them? “A man had come out of the jungle with them, and given them to the watchman with instructions to make four like them and to take these to the watchman in the next village, who was to be told to do the same.”

Thornhill examined the chapatis in his office. They bore no message, and were identical to the breads cooked in every home in India, a staple part (even today) of the locals’ diet. Yet discreet inquiries soon revealed that many hundreds of chapatis were passing through his district, and through other parts of India as well—everywhere from the Narmada river in the south to the border with Nepal several hundred miles to the north. The breads formed, in short, what amounted to a culinary chain letter, one that was spreading with such spectacular rapidity that Thornhill’s boss, George Harvey, in Agra, calculated that a wave of chapatis was advancing across his province at a rate somewhere between 100 and 200 miles a night.

That rate was particularly disconcerting because it was vastly swifter than the fastest British mails, and urgent inquiries were made as to the source and meaning of the “movement.” They yielded the information that the breads were being distributed far more widely than anyone in Agra had yet realized, and that the Indians who received them generally took them as some sort of a sign. Beyond that, however, opinions remained divided.

Rumors spread with great rapidity before and during the mutiny—not least because of the large number of British women and children at the mercy of the rebels in towns such as Delhi and Kanpur.

From the North-West Provinces:

I have the honour to inform you that a signal has passed through numbers of the villages in this district, the purport of which has not yet transpired…

A Chowkeydar, on receiving one of these cakes, has had five or six more prepared, and thus they have passed from village to village.… An idea has been industriously circulated that the Government has given the order.

From the interrogation of an official at the King of Delhi’s court:

I did hear of the circumstance. Some people said that it was a propitiatory observance to avert some impending calamity; others, that they were circulated by the Government to signify that the population throughout the country would be compelled to use the same food as the Christians, and thus be deprived of their religion; while others again said that the chupatties were circulated to make it known that Government was determined to force Christianity on the country by interfering with their food, and intimation of it was thus given that they might be prepared to resist the attempt.

Q. Is the sending of such articles about the country a custom among the Hindoos or Mussulmans; and would the meaning be at once understood without any accompanying explanation?

A. No, it is not by any means a custom; I am 50 years old, and never heard of such a thing before.

From Delhi:

It was alluded to [in the native newspapers], and it was supposed to portend some coming disturbance, and was, moreover, understood as implying an invitation to the whole population of the country to unite for some secret objective afterwards to be disclosed.

From Awadh:

Some time in February 1857, a curious occurrence took place. A Chowkeydar ran up to another village with two chupatties. He ordered his fellow-official to make ten more, and give two to each of the five nearest village Chowkeydars with the same instructions. In a few hours the whole country was in a stir, from Chowkeydars flying around with these cakes. The signal spread in all directions with wonderful celerity. The magistrates tried to stop it, but, in spite of all they could do, it passed along to the borders of the Punjab. There is reason to believe that this was originated by some intriguers of the old Court of Lucknow.

From the confidential physician to the King of Delhi:

Nobody can tell what was the object of the distribution of the chupatties. It is not known who first projected the plan. All the people in the palace wondered what it could mean. I had no conversation with the King on the subject; but others talked in his presence about it, wondering what could be the object.

A chowkidar–an Indian village watchman. All Indian villages had one, and it was these men, running between their homes and the nearest neighboring settlement with chapatis, who so effectively raised panic among the ruling British.

Numerous explanations were considered. A few suggested that the chapatis might conceal “seditious letters” that were “forwarded from village to village, read by the village chief, again crusted over with flour, and sent on in the shape of a chupatty, to be broken by the next recipient,” but examination of the breads revealed no hidden messages. Some of the more knowledgeable British officials linked the spread of the chapatis to an effort to prevent the outbreak of cholera in central India and added that, since incidence of the disease was associated with the movement of the Company’s armies, “there was a widespread belief that the British were in fact responsible for the disease.” Another official suggested that the chupatty movement had been initiated somewhere in central India by dyers, anxious that their dyes “were not clearing properly,” or were the product of some spellwork aimed at protecting crops against hail.

All in all, the British were extremely spooked by the spread of the chapatis. Vital though their Indian empire was to them, they controlled the subcontinent with a comparative handful of men—about 100,000 in all, less than half of whom were soldiers, ruling over a population of 250 million—and they were all too aware of just how inadequate these numbers would be in the event of any serious rebellion. That, combined with a declining number of British officers who  understood India, spoke Indian languages fluently or had any real sympathy for the people whom they ruled, meant that the colonial hierarchy remained perpetually jittery. Tall tales, panic and misapprehension spread readily in such a climate, and plenty of people felt a certain disquiet in the early months of 1857. The British officer Richard Barter wrote:

Lotus flowers and bits of goats’ flesh, so it was rumoured, were being passed from hand to hand, as well as chupatties. Symbols of unknown significance were chalked on the walls of towns; protective charms were on sale everywhere; an ominous slogan, Sub lal hogea hai (‘Everything has become red’) was being whispered.”

A cartridge for the new Enfield rifle. Indian soldiers in the East India Company's armies believed they risked defilement because the new rounds were being issued greased with the fat of pigs and cows–untrue, but sufficient to spark the most dangerous uprising against British imperial rule since the American Revolution.

It is no surprise, the historian Kim Wagner notes, that, faced with such a plethora of portents, “the British regarded with deep suspicion, bordering on paranoia, any type of communication in India which they could not understand.” The colonial administration well understood that rumors, however unfounded, could have serious consequences, and there were plenty of notably more dangerous urban legends about. One popular story, widely believed, suggested that the British were attempting the mass conversion of their subjects to Christianity by adulterating their flour with bone meal from cows and pigs, which was forbidden to Hindus and Moslems, respectively. Once defiled, the theory went, men who had consumed the forbidden meal would be shunned by their co-religionists and would be easier to bring into the Christian fold, or could be sent as soldiers overseas (crossing the “black water” being forbidden to Hindus of high caste). And, historically, much the same thing had happened before in times of trouble. Coconuts had passed at great speed from village to village in central India in 1818, at a time when the mofussil was being ravaged by large bands of merciless looters known as the Pindaris. Most worryingly of all, some very similar rumors had once been recorded far to the south, in the Madras Presidency in 1806, at the time of a serious outbreak of mutiny among Indian soldiers stationed at Vellore. As John Kaye wrote a few years later:

Among other wild fables, which took firm hold of the popular mind, was one to the effect that the Company’s officers had collected all the newly-manufactured salt, had divided it into two great heaps, and over one had sprinkled the blood of hogs, and over the other the blood of cows; that they had then sent it to be sold throughout the country of the pollution and desecration of the Mahommedans and Hindoos, that all might be brought to one caste and to one religion like the English.

It is not surprising that one of the many subsidiary rumors that accompanied the chupatty movement was that the breads were being carried and distributed, the eventual trial of the King of Delhi noted, “by the hands of the very lowest caste men that can be found; and the natives say that it is intended by Government to force or bribe the headmen to eat the bread, and thus loose their caste.” Hence the consumption of food supplied by the British was, notes Tapti Roy, commonly “considered as a token that they should likewise be compelled to embrace one faith, or, as they termed it, ‘One food and one faith.’ ”

Indian soldiers in the service of the East India Company-who outnumbered British troops in India five to one–loading cartridges.

By the time of the chupatty movement, no more than a handful of aged India hands could remember such long-ago events as the Vellore Mutiny. But those who did would not have been surprised by what happened next, for some very similar beliefs were spreading in the early months of 1857. A rumor that spread like wildfire among the sepoys (Indian soldiers) stationed at cantonments throughout the north of the country was that the British had come up with yet another diabolical contrivance for breaking their caste and defiling their bodies: the greased cartridge.

It was no secret that the Company’s armies had been making preparations for the introduction of a new sort of ammunition for a new model of Enfield rifle. To be loaded, this cartridge  had to be torn open so that the powder it contained could be poured down the barrel of the muzzle-loading gun; because the soldier’s hands were full, this was done with the teeth. Then the bullet had to be rammed down the rifled barrel. To facilitate its passage, the cartridges were greased with tallow, which, in the U.K., was made of beef and pork fat. The greased cartridges thus posed precisely the same threat to observant sepoys as would flour adulterated with the blood of pigs and cows, and though the British recognized the problem early on, and never issued a single greased cartridge to any Indian troops, fear that the Company was plotting to defile them took hold among the men of many Indian regiments and resulted in the outbreak of rebellion in the cantonment of Meerut in April 1857.

Scottish Highlanders charge during the suppression of the rebellion of 1857.

The revolt of 1857, which the British call the Indian Mutiny but many Indians prefer to think of as the First War of Independence, was the defining event in British imperial history. It came as a greater shock than the loss of the American colonies, and prompted reprisals far more hysterical and vicious than those visited on rebellious subjects elsewhere in the Empire. In one sense, this was not surprising; since India had a large and settled British population, there were more women and children around for the rebels to kill. In another, however, the appalling atrocities visited by the Company’s armies on the people of northern India were far from justified, since the British proved to be just as prone to rumors and panics as their Indian subjects. Wild stories circulated freely in the panic-stricken atmosphere of 1857, and there were enough real massacres and murders to make almost anything seem possible. Thousands of entirely blameless Indians who found themselves caught up in the hysterical aftermath of the rebellion were flogged, or blown from cannon, or forced to clean bloodied paving stones using only their tongues before being summarily hanged.

By the time the British came to examine the causes of the rebellion, therefore, the chupatty movement had assumed a fresh significance. It was generally believed, in retrospect, that the circulation of the breads had been a warning of trouble ahead, and that the wave of chapatis must have been set in motion by a cunning group of determined conspirators who had begun plotting the rising months, if not years, in advance. The rapid spread of disorder in 1857–when regiment after regiment had mutinied, and revolts against British rule had sprung up throughout most of northern and central India–made it almost impossible to believe that the rebellion could have been spontaneous (as most modern historians concede it was), and considerable effort was made to chronicle the movement and trace the spread of the anomalous chapatis.

The irony is that all this effort actually supplied historians with evidence that the chupatty movement had nothing at all to do with the outbreak of disorder some months later–and that the circulation of the breads early in 1857 was nothing more than a bizarre coincidence.

Kim Wagner, who has made the most recent study of the phenomenon, concludes that the movement had its origins in Indore, a princely state still nominally independent of British rule, and that it began as an attempt to ward off the ravages of cholera:

The geographic circulation of the chapattis was not systematic or exponential; their transmission was erratically linear and different ‘currents’ moved at different speeds. Some currents simply ran cold, while others moved in parallel, or paused before continuing. Thus, long after the chapattis reached their northern-most point of Meerut, there was another northwards distribution from Cawnpore to Fattehgarh, which was widely reported in the newspapers… The circulation took place along well-established routes of transmission, which followed the main trade and pilgrimage routes between the bigger cities.

At some point the chapattis passed beyond the limits of their meaningful transmission and simply continued through the country as a “blank” message. This allowed different meanings an interpretations to be attributed to them, and the chapattis became an index of people’s thoughts and worries.

Furthermore, the superstitious impulse that still encourages the transmission of chain letters clearly applied in 1857:

Although the original specific meaning of the chapattis had been lost early in the distribution, the dire consequences of breaking the chain of transmission remained, and thus ensured their successful circulation over an immense area. In the event, the chapattis were not ‘harbingers of a coming storm.’ They were what people made them into, and the significance attributed to them was a symptom of the pervasive distrust and general consternation amongst the Indian population during the early months of 1857.

Seen from a distance of 150 years, the chupatty movement can appear a quaint anomaly, a strange and colorful rumor of interest mostly to historians and psychologists. And yet it’s just as possible to see the bloody results of the mutual incomprehension between the British and native communities in India as a potent reminder that mistrust and panic can have serious consequences.

These are deep waters that we trawl in, and dangerous ones, too.

Sources

Richard Barter. The Siege of Delhi. Mutiny Memoirs of an Old Officer (London: Folio Society, 1984); Troy Downs. ‘Host of Midian: the chapati circulation and the Indian Revolt of 1857-58.’ Studies in History 16 (2000); Christopher Hibbert. The Great Mutiny: India 1857 (London: Penguin, 1978); House of Commons. “Proceedings of the Trial of Badahur Shah.” In Accounts and Papers, East Indies, Session 3 February-19 April 1859, Parliamentary Papers XVIII of 1859; William Wotherspoon Ireland. History of the Siege of Delhi (Edinburgh: A&C Black, 1861); John Kaye. History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857-58 (London, 3 vols.: WH Allen, 1864); Tapti Roy. The Politics of a Popular Uprising: Bundelkhand in 1857 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994); Mark Thornhill. The Personal Adventures and Experiences of a Magistrate During the Rise, Progression and Suppression of the Indian Mutiny (London: John Murray, 1884); Kim A. Wagner. The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010); Andrew Ward. Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (London: John Murray, 2004).

Pass it on: The Secret that Preceded the Indian Rebellion of 1857 | Past Imperfect

There is a story, regrettably apocryphal, about Napoleon and the Great Pyramid. When Bonaparte visited Giza during his Nile expedition of 1798 (it goes), he determined to spend a night alone inside the King’s Chamber, the granite-lined vault that lies precisely in the center of the pyramid. This chamber is generally acknowledged as the spot where Khufu, the most powerful ruler of Egypt’s Old Kingdom (c.2690-2180 BC), was interred for all eternity, and it still contains the remains of Pharaoh’s sarcophagus—a fractured mass of red stone that is said to ring like a bell when struck.

The Great Pyramid–built for the Pharaoh Khufu in about 2570 B.C., sole survivor of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and still arguably the most mysterious structure on the planet. Photo: Wikicommons

Having ventured alone into the pyramid’s forbidding interior and navigated its cramped passages armed with nothing but a guttering candle, Napoleon emerged the next morning white and shaken, and thenceforth refused to answer any questions about what had befallen him that night. Not until 23 years later, as he lay on his death bed, did the emperor at last consent to talk about his experience. Hauling himself painfully upright, he began to speak—only to halt almost immediately.

“Oh, what’s the use,” he murmured, sinking back. “You’d never believe me.”

As I say, the story is not true—Napoleon’s private secretary, De Bourrienne, who was with him in Egypt, insists that he never went inside the tomb. (A separate tradition suggests that the emperor, as he waited for other members of his party to scale the outside of the pyramid, passed the time calculating that the structure contained sufficient stone to erect a wall around all France 12 feet high and one foot thick.) That the tale is told at all, however, is testament to the fascination exerted by this most mysterious of monuments–and a reminder that the pyramid’s interior is at least as compelling as its exterior. Yes, it is impressive to know that Khufu’s monument was built from 2.3 million stone blocks, each weighing on average more than two tons and cut using nothing more than copper tools; to realize that its sides are precisely aligned to the cardinal points of the compass and differ one from another in length by no more than two inches, and to calculate that, at 481 feet, the pyramid remained the tallest man-made structure in the world for practically 4,000 years—until the main spire of Lincoln Cathedral was completed in about 1400 A.D. But these superlatives do not help us to understand its airless interior.

The interior of the Great Pyramid. Plan by Charles Piazzi Smyth, 1877. Click to view in greater definition.

Few would be so bold as to suggest that, even today, we know why Khufu ordered the construction of what is by far the most elaborate system of passages and chambers concealed within any pyramid. His is the only one of the 35 such tombs constructed between 2630 and 1750 B.C. to contain tunnels and vaults well above ground level. (Its immediate predecessors, the Bent Pyramid and the North Pyramid at Dahshur, have vaults built at ground level; all the others are solid structures whose burial chambers lie well underground.) For years, the commonly accepted theory was that the Great Pyramid’s elaborate features were the product of a succession of changes in plan, perhaps to accommodate Pharaoh’s increasingly divine stature as his reign went on, but the American Egyptologist Mark Lehner has marshaled evidence suggesting that the design was fixed before construction began. If so, the pyramid’s internal layout becomes even more mysterious, and that’s before we bear in mind the findings of the Quarterly Review, which reported in 1818, after careful computation, that the structure’s known passages and vaults occupy a mere 1/7,400th of its volume, so that “after leaving the contents of every second chamber solid by way of separation, there might be three thousand seven hundred chambers, each equal in size to the sarcophagus chamber, [hidden] within.”

But if the thinking behind the pyramid’s design remains unknown, there is a second puzzle that should be easier to solve: the question of who first entered the Great Pyramid after it was sealed in about 2566 B.C. and what they found inside it.

It’s a problem that gets remarkably little play in mainstream studies, perhaps because it’s often thought that all Egyptian tombs—with the notable exception of Tutankhamun’s—were plundered within years of their completion. There’s no reason to suppose that the Great Pyramid would have been exempt; tomb-robbers were no respecters of the dead, and there is evidence that they were active at Giza—when the smallest of the three pyramids there, which was built by Khufu’s grandson Menkaure, was broken open in 1837, it was found to contain a mummy that had been interred there around 100 B.C. In other words, the tomb had been ransacked and reused.

The subterranean chamber in the Great Pyramid, photographed in 1909, showing the mysterious blind passage that heads off into the bedrock before terminating abruptly in a blank wall after 53 feet.

The evidence that the Great Pyramid was similarly plundered is more equivocal; the accounts we have say two quite contradictory things. They suggest that the upper reaches of the structure remained sealed until they were opened under Arab rule in the ninth century A.D. But they also imply that when these intruders first entered the King’s Chamber, the royal sarcophagus was already open and Khufu’s mummy was nowhere to be seen.

This problem is one of more than merely academic interest, if only because some popular accounts of the Great Pyramid take as their starting point the idea that Khufu was never interred there, and go on to suggest that if the pyramid was not a tomb, it must have been intended as a storehouse for ancient wisdom, or as an energy accumulator, or as a map of the future of mankind. Given that, it’s important to know what was written by the various antiquaries, travelers and scientists who visited Giza before the advent of modern Egyptology in the 19th century.

Let’s start by explaining that the pyramid contains two distinct tunnel systems, the lower of which corresponds to those found in earlier monuments, while the upper (which was carefully hidden and perhaps survived inviolate much longer) is unique to the Great Pyramid. The former system begins at a concealed entrance 56 feet above ground in the north face, and proceeds down a low descending passage to open, deep in the bedrock on which the pyramid was built, into what is known as the Subterranean Chamber. This bare and unfinished cavern, inaccessible today, has an enigmatic pit dug into its floor and serves as the starting point for a small, cramped tunnel of unknown purpose that dead-ends in the bedrock.

Above, within the main bulk of the pyramid, the second tunnel system leads up to a series of funerary vaults. To outwit tomb robbers, this Ascending Passage was blocked with granite plugs, and its entrance in the Descending Passage was disguised with a limestone facing identical to the surrounding stones. Beyond it lies the 26-foot-high Grand Gallery, the Queen’s Chamber and the King’s Chamber. Exciting discoveries have been made in the so-called air shafts found in both these chambers, which lead up toward the pyramid’s exterior. The pair in the Queen’s Chamber, concealed behind masonry until they were rediscovered late in the 19th century, are the ones famously explored by robot a few years ago and shown to end in mysterious miniature “doors.” These revelations that have done little to dampen hope that the pyramid hides further secrets.

The forced tunnel in the north face of the Great Pyramid, supposedly dug on the orders of Caliph Ma'mun early in the ninth century.

It is generally supposed that the Descending Passage was opened in antiquity; both Herodotus, in 445 B.C., and Strabo, writing around 20 A.D., give accounts that imply this. There is nothing, though, to show that the secret of the Ascending Passage was known to the Greeks or Romans. It is not until we reach the 800s, and the reign of an especially curious and learned Muslim ruler, the Caliph Ma’mun, that the record becomes interesting again.

It’s here that it becomes necessary to look beyond the obvious. Most scholarly accounts state unequivocally that it was Ma’mun who first forced his way into the upper reaches of the pyramid, in the year 820 A.D. By then, they say, the location of the real entrance had been long forgotten, and the caliph therefore chose what seemed to be a likely spot and set his men to forcing a new entry—a task they accomplished with the help of a large slice of luck.

Popular Science magazine, in 1954, put it this way:

Starting on the north face, not far from the secret entrance they had failed to find, Al-Mamun’s men drove a tunnel blindly into the pyramid’s solid rock…. The tunnel had progressed about 100 feet southward into the pyramid when the muffled thud of a falling rock slab, somewhere near them, electrified the diggers. Burrowing eastward whence the sound had come, they broke into the Descending Passage. Their hammering, they found, had shaken down the limestone slab hiding the plugged mouth of the Ascending Passage.

It was then, modern accounts continue, that Ma’mun’s men realized that they had uncovered a secret entrance. Tunneling around the impenetrable granite, they emerged in the Ascending Passage below the Grand Gallery. At that point, they had defeated most of Khufu’s defenses, and the upper reaches of the pyramid lay open to them.

That’s the story, anyway, and—if accurate—it adds considerably to the mystery of the Great Pyramid. If the upper passages had remained hidden, what happened to Khufu’s mummy and to the rich funerary ornaments so great a king would surely have been buried with? Only one alternate route into the upper vaults exists—a crude “well shaft” whose entrance was concealed next to the Queen’s Chamber, and which exits far below in the Descending Passage. This was apparently dug as an escape route for the workers who placed the granite plugs. But it is far too rough and narrow to allow large pieces of treasure to pass, which means the puzzle of the King’s Chamber remains unresolved.

The granite plug blocking access to the upper portion of the Great Pyramid. It was the fall of the large limestone cap concealing this entrance that supposedly alerted Arab tunnelers to the location of Khufu's passages.

Is it possible, though, that the Arab accounts that Egyptologists depend on so unquestioningly may not be all they seem? Some elements ring true—for instance, it has been pointed out that later visitors to the Great Pyramid were frequently plagued by giant bats, which made their roosting places deep in its interior; if Ma’mun’s men did not encounter them, that might suggest no prior entry. But other aspects of these early accounts are far less credible. Read in the original, the Arab histories paint a confused and contradictory picture of the pyramids; most were composed several centuries after Ma’mun’s time, and none so much as mentions the vital date–820 A.D.— so confidently stated in every Western work published since the 1860s. Indeed, the reliability of all these modern accounts is called into question by the fact that the chronology of Ma’mun’s reign makes it clear he spent 820 in his capital, Baghdad. The caliph visited Cairo only once, in 832. If he did force entry into the Great Pyramid, it must have been in that year.

How can the Egyptologists have got such a simple thing wrong? Almost certainly, the answer is that those who spend their lives studying ancient Egypt have no reason to know much about medieval Muslim history. But this means they do not realize that the Arab chronicles they cite are collections of legends and traditions needing interpretation. Indeed, the earliest, written by the generally reliable al-Mas’udi and dating to no earlier than c. 950, does not even mention Ma’mun as the caliph who visited Giza. Al-Mas’udi attributes the breaching of the pyramid to Ma’mun’s father, Haroun al-Rashid, a ruler best remembered as the caliph of the Thousand and One Nights—and he appears in a distinctly fabulous context. When, the chronicler writes, after weeks of labor Haroun’s men finally forced their way in, they:

found a vessel filled with a thousand coins of the finest gold, each of which was a dinar in weight. When Haroun al-Rashid saw the gold, he ordered that the expenses he incurred should be calculated, and the amount was found exactly equal to the treasure which was discovered.

It should be stated here that least one apparently straightforward account of Ma’mun’s doings does survive; Al-Idrisi, writing in 1150, says that the caliph’s men uncovered both ascending and descending passages, plus a vault containing a sarcophagus which, when opened, proved to contain ancient human remains. But other chroniclers of the same period tell different and more fantastical tales. One, Abu Hamid, the Andalusian author of the Tuhfat al Albab, insists that he himself entered the Great Pyramid, yet goes on to talk of several large “apartments” containing bodies “enveloped in many wrappers, that had become black through length of time,” and then insists that

those who went up there in the time of Ma’mun came to a small passage, containing the image of a man in green stone, which was taken out for examination before the Caliph; when it was opened a human body was discovered in golden armor, decorated with precious stones, and in his hand was a sword of inestimable value, and above his head a ruby the size of an egg, which shone like fire.

What, though, of the earliest accounts of the tunnel dug into the pyramid? Here the most influential writers are two other Muslim chroniclers, Abd al-Latif (c.1220) and the renowned world traveler Ibn Battuta (c.1360). Both men report that Ma’mun ordered his men to break into Khufu’s monument using fire and sharpened iron stakes—first the stones of the pyramid were heated, then cooled with vinegar, and, as cracks appeared in them, hacked to pieces using sharpened iron staves. Ibn Battuta adds that a battering ram was used to smash open a passage.

Nothing in either of these accounts seems implausible, and the Great Pyramid does indeed bear the scar of a narrow passage that has been hacked into its limestone and which is generally supposed to have been excavated by Ma’mun. The forced passage is located fairly logically, too, right in the middle of the north face, a little below and a little to the right of the real (but then concealed) entrance, which the cunning Egyptians of Khufu’s day had placed 24 feet off center in an attempt to out-think would-be tomb robbers. Yet the fact remains that the Arab versions were written 400 to 500 years after Ma’mun’s time; to expect them to be accurate summaries of what took place in the ninth century is the equivalent of asking today’s casual visitor to Virginia to come up with a credible account of the lost colony of Roanoke. And on top of that, neither Abd al-Latif nor Ibn Battuta says anything about how Ma’mun decided where to dig, or mentions the story of the falling capstone guiding the exhausted tunnelers.

Given all this, it is legitimate to ask why anyone believes it was Ma’mun who entered the Great Pyramid, and to wonder how the capstone story entered circulation. The answer sometimes advanced to the first question is that there is a solitary account that dates, supposedly, to the 820s and so corroborates Arab tradition. This is an old Syriac fragment (first mentioned in this context in 1802 by a French writer named Silvestre de Sacy) which relates that the Christian patriarch Dionysius Telmahrensis accompanied Ma’mun to the pyramids and described the excavation that the caliph made there. Yet this version of events, too, turns out to date to hundreds of years later. It appears not in the chronicle that De Sacy thought was written by Dionysius (and which we now know was completed years before Ma’mun’s time, in 775-6 A.D., and composed by someone else entirely), but in the 13th century Chronicon Ecclesiasticum of Bar-Hebraeus. This author, another Syrian bishop, incorporates passages of his predecessor’s writings, but there is no way of establishing whether they are genuine. To make matters worse, the scrap relating to the pyramids says only that Dionysius looked into “an opening” in one of the three monuments of Giza—which might or might not have been a passage in the Great Pyramid, and might or might not have excavated by Ma’mun. This realization takes us no closer to knowing whether the caliph really was responsible for opening the pyramid, and leaves us as dependent on late date Arab sources as we were before.

As for the story of the falling capstone–that remains an enigma. A concerted hunt reveals it first appeared in the middle of the 19th century, published by Charles Piazzi Smyth. But Smyth does not say where he found it. There are hints, which I still hope to run to ground some day, that it may have made its first appearance in the voluminous works of a Muslim scientist, Abu Salt al-Andalusi. Abu Salt likewise traveled in Egypt. Very intriguingly, he picked up much of his information while held under house arrest in an ancient library in Alexandria.

The problem, though, is this: even if Smyth got his story from Abu Salt, and even if Abu Salt was scrupulous, the Muslim chronicler was writing not in the 820s but in the 12th century. (He was imprisoned in Egypt in 1107-11.) So while there may still be an outside chance that the account of the falling capstone is based on some older, now lost source, we certainly can’t say that for certain. It may be equally likely that the story is a pure invention.

You see, the forced entry that has been driven into the pyramid is just a little too good to be true. Put it this way: perhaps the question that we should be asking is how a passage dug apparently at random in a structure the size of the Great Pyramid emerges at the exact spot where the Descending and the Ascending Passages meet, and where the secrets of the upper reaches of the pyramid are at their most exposed.

Coincidence? I hardly think so. More likely someone, somewhere, sometime knew precisely where to dig. Which would mean the chances are that “Ma’mun’s passage” was hacked out centuries before the Muslims came to Egypt, if only to be choked with rubble and forgotten—perhaps even in dynastic times. And that, in turn, means something else: that Khufu’s greatest mystery was never quite as secret as he’d hoped.

Sources

Jean-Baptiste Abbeloos & Thomas Lamy. Gregorii Barhebræi Chronicon Ecclesiasticum... Louvain, 3 volumes: Peeters, 1872-77; Anon. ‘Observations relating to some of the Antiquities of Egypt…’ Quarterly Review XXXVIII, 1818; JB Chabot. Chronique de Denys de Tell-Mahré. Quatrième partie. Paris, 2 vols: É. Bouillon, 1895; Okasha El Daly, Egyptology: The Missing Millennium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings. London: UCL, 2005;  John & Morton Edgar. Great Pyramid Passages. Glasgow: 3 vols, Bone & Hulley, 1910; Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne. Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte. Edinburgh, 4 vols: Constable, 1830; John Greaves. Pyramidographia. London: J. Brindley, 1736; Hugh Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs: the Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004; Ian Lawton & Chris Ogilvie-Herald. Giza: The Truth. London: Virgin, 1999;  Mark Lehner. The Complete Pyramids. London: Thames & Hudson, 1997; William Flinders Petrie. The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh. London: Field & Tuer, 1873; Silvestre de Sacy. ‘Observations sur le nom des Pyramides.’ [From the “Magasin encyclopédique.”]. Paris: np, 1802; Charles Piazzi Smyth. Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. London: Alexander Strahan, 1864; Richard Howard Vyse. Operations Carried Out at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837. London, 3 vols: James Fraser, 1840; Robert Walpole. Memoirs Relating to European and Asiatic Turkey. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818; Witold Witakowski, The Syriac Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiskell International, 1987; Witold Witakowski (trans), Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre Chronicle (Also Known as the Chronicle of Zuqnin). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996.

Inside the Great Pyramid of Giza | Past Imperfect

King Charles I was his own worst enemy. Self-righteous, arrogant, and unscrupulous; he had a penchant for making bad decisions. His troubles began the moment he ascended the throne in 1625 upon the death of his father James I. Charles simultaneously alienated both his subjects and his Parliament, prompting a series of events that ultimately lead to civil war, his own death and the abolition of the English monarchy.

Charles I and family

Charles' problems revolved around religion and a lack of money. His marriage to the Roman-Catholic French princess Henrietta Maria in 1625 did not please his Protestant subjects and led to suspicions of his motives. In 1637 he totally misgauged the sentiments of his Scottish subjects when he attempted to impose an Anglican form of worship on the predominantly Presbyterian population. Riots escalated to general unrest; forcing Charles to recall Parliament in 1640 in order to acquire the funds necessary to quell the Scottish uprising. This so-called "Short Parliament" refused Charles' financial demands and disbanded after only one month.

The continuing civil unrest in the north forced Charles to again convene Parliament in December 1640. The following year the Irish revolted against English rule while the determination of King and Parliament to assert their authority over the other led to open conflict between the two in 1642.

The tide of the Civil War ebbed and flowed for the next six years, culminating in the defeat at the Battle of Preston of Charles' army in August 1648 by Parliamentary forces under the command of Oliver Cromwell. The King was charged with high treason against the realm of England. At his trial, Charles refuted the legitimacy of the court and refused to enter a plea. Not withstanding the absence of a plea, the court rendered a verdict of guilty and a sentence of death declaring:

"That the king, for the crimes contained in the charge, should be carried back to the place from whence he came, and thence to the place of execution, where his head should be severed from his body."

Three days later, the king was led to the scaffold erected at Whitehall, London.

" I go to where no disturbance can be"

January 30, 1649 was a bitterly cold day. Charles went to his execution wearing two heavy shirts so that he might not shiver in the cold and appear to be afraid. The following account of the event comes from an anonymous observer and begins as the doomed King addresses the crowd from the scaffold:

"[As for the people,] truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever; but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consist in having of government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in government, sirs; that is nothing pertaining to them; a subject and a sovereign are clear different things. And therefore until they do that, I mean that you do put the people in that liberty, as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves. Sirs, it was for this that now I am come here. If I would have given way to an arbitrary way, for to have all laws changed according to the power of the sword, I needed not to have come here; and therefore I tell you (and I pray God it be not laid to your charge) that I am the martyr of the people. . .

And to the executioner he said, 'I shall say but very short prayers, and when I thrust out my hands - '

Then he called to the bishop for his cap, and having put it on, asked the executioner, 'Does my hair trouble you?' who desired him to put it all under his cap; which, as he was doing by the help of the bishop and the executioner, he turned to the bishop, and said, 'I have a good cause, and a gracious God on my side.'

The bishop said, 'There is but one stage more, which, though turbulent and troublesome, yet is a very short one. You may consider it will soon carry you a very great way; it will carry you from earth to heaven; and there you shall find to your great joy the prize you hasten to, a crown of glory.'

The king adjoins, 'I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown; where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.'

The bishop: 'You are exchanged from a temporal to an eternal crown, - a good exchange.'

The execution of Charles I

Then the king asked the executioner, 'Is my hair well?' And taking off his cloak and George [the jeweled pendant of the Order of the Garter, bearing the figure of St. George], he delivered his George to the bishop. . .

Then putting off his doublet and being in his waistcoat, he put on his cloak again, and looking upon the block, said to the executioner, 'You must set it fast.'

The executioner: 'It is fast, sir.'

King: 'It might have been a little higher.'

Executioner: 'It can be no higher, sir.'

King: 'When I put out my hands this way, then - '

Then having said a few words to himself, as he stood, with hands and eyes lift up, immediately stooping down he laid his neck upon the block; and the executioner, again putting his hair under his cap, his Majesty, thinking he had been going to strike, bade him, 'Stay for the sign.'

Executioner: 'Yes, I will, and it please your Majesty.'

After a very short pause, his Majesty stretching forth his hands, the, executioner at one blow severed his head from his body; which, being held up and showed to the people, was with his body put into a coffin covered with black velvet and carried into his lodging.

His blood was taken up by divers persons for different ends: by some as trophies of their villainy; by others as relics of a martyr; and in some hath had the same effect, by the blessing of God, which was often found in his sacred touch when living."

References:
   The anonymous account of Charles' death appears in Robinson, James Harvey, Readings in European History (1906); Schama, Simon, A History of Britain vol. II (2001); Wedgwood, C. V, A Coffin for King Charles; the Trial and Execution of Charles I (1964).

The Execution of Charles I, 1649

Father John Gerard was a spy. In November 1588 he was among a team of four Jesuit priests sent from Rome and secretly landed on the shores of England with the mission of making contact with and ministering to that country's Roman Catholic community. He joined a clandestine network of Catholic operatives controlled from their headquarters in London.

Born in England, Father Gerard mingled easily among English society, passing himself off as a gentleman of leisure. It was a dangerous existence; as evidenced by the fact

that Father Gerard's three companions in the landing party were eventually discovered and executed. Gerard remained undetected for six years until his betrayal by a servant in a household in which he was staying.

After three years in captivity he was taken to the Tower of London where he was subjected to torture in an effort to force him to confess that his mission was to overthrow Queen Elizabeth and to reveal the identity of the leader of the spy ring. Despite the pain, he refused to divulge any information. On the night of October 4, 1597 he made a daring escape from the Tower with the help of friends on the outside. He slipped into the English countryside and remained undiscovered for another eight years.

Finally, with the attempt to blow up Parliament and the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, the political atmosphere became too dangerous. Father Gerard slipped out of the country and sailed to the European continent disguised as a member of the Spanish diplomatic mission.

Torture

Father Gerard wrote a book detailing his adventures shortly after his escape to Europe. He describes his torture in the Tower of London:

"We went to the torture room in a kind of procession, the attendants walking ahead with lighted candles.

The chamber was underground and dark, particularly near the entrance. It was a vast place and every device and instrument of human torture was there. They pointed out some of them to me and said I would try them all. Then he asked me again whether I would confess.

'I cannot,' I said.

I fell on my knees for a moment's prayer. Then they took me to a big upright pillar, one of the wooden posts which held the roof of this huge underground chamber. Driven into the top of it were iron staples for supporting heavy weights. Then they put my wrists into iron gauntlets and ordered me to climb two or three wicker steps.

My arms were then lifted up and an iron bar was passed through the rings of one gauntlet, then through the staple and rings to the second gauntlet. This done, they fastened the bar with a pin to prevent it from slipping, and then, removing the wicker steps one by one from under my feet, they left me hanging by my hands and arms fastened above my head. The tips of my toes, however, still touched the ground, and they had to dig the earth away from under them. They had hung me up from the highest staple in the pillar and could not raise me any higher, without driving in another staple.

Hanging like this I began to pray. The gentlemen standing around me asked me whether I was willing to confess now.

'I cannot and I will not,' I answered.

But I could hardly utter the words, such a gripping pain came over me. It was worst in my chest and belly, my hands and arms. All the blood in my body seemed to rush up into my arms and hands and I thought that blood was oozing from the ends of my fingers and the pores of my skin. But it was only a sensation caused by my flesh swelling above the irons holding them.

The pain was so intense that I thought I could not possibly endure it, and added to it, I had an interior temptation. Yet I did not feel any inclination or wish to give them the information they wanted. The Lord saw my weakness with the eyes of His mercy, and did not permit me to be tempted beyond my strength. With the temptation He sent me relief. Seeing my agony and the struggle going on in my mind, He gave me this most merciful thought: the utmost and worst they can do is to kill you, and you have often wanted to give your life for your Lord God. The Lord God sees all you are enduring - He can do all things. You are in God's keeping.

With these thoughts, God in His infinite goodness and mercy gave me the grace of resignation, and with a desire to die and a hope (I admit) that I would, I offered Him myself to do with me as He wished. From that moment the conflict in my soul ceased, and even the physical pain seemed much more bearable than before, though it must, in fact, I am sure, have been greater with the growing strain and weariness of my body...

Sometime after one o'clock, I think, I fell into a faint. How long I was unconscious I don't know, but I think it was long, for the men held my body up or put the wicker steps under my feet until I came to. Then they heard me pray and immediately let me down again. And they did this every time I fainted - eight or nine times that day - before it struck five...

A little later they took me down. My legs and feet were not damaged, but it was a great effort to stand upright..."

References:
   Father Gerard's account appears in Gerard, John, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan (1951); Dods, A.H., Elizabethan England (1973); Youings, Joyce, Sixteenth Century England (1984).

Torture in the Tower of London, 1597

In the latter part of the fifth century the barbarian hordes overwhelmed the last vestiges of the Roman Empire sinking Europe into what would come to be called the "Dark Ages." In defense, and under the influence of the Italian monk St. Benedict, monasteries spread throughout Europe. They provided islands of intellectualism as the world around them devolved into anarchy. The monasteries preserved the intellectual legacy of Rome as well as the text of the Bible while simultaneously nurturing scholarship and the desire to maintain moral values.

It was a harsh life. St. Benedict established the Benedictine Rule that reflected the two primary principles of monastic life - Ora et labora or prayer and work. The monks lived by a strict timetable of prayer, labor and study. Much of their day was spent in transcribing the Bible and ancient texts left from the Roman Empire, preserving these sources of knowledge for future generations.

The Consequences of Breaking the Rules

Pope Gregory I (known as "the Great") served as head of the Church from 590 to 602. Prior to his elevation to this post he was abbot of St. Andrew's, a monastery on the outskirts of Rome. He wrote of his experience and provides us insight into daily living in a monastery and the moral structure that governed monastic life.

One of the rules set forth by St. Benedict specified that the monastery was to be a commune in which all possessions were held in common and personal property forbidden. Gregory recalls an incident in which a monk was found to have 3 gold pieces and describes the consequences of this transgression:

"There was in my monastery a certain monk, Justus by name, skilled in medicinal arts. . . . When he knew that his end was at hand, he made known to Copiosus, his brother in the flesh, how that he had three gold pieces hidden away. Copiosus, of course, could not conceal this from the brethren. He sought carefully, and examined all his brother's drugs, until he found the three gold pieces hidden away among the medicines. When he told me this great calamity that concerned a brother who had lived in common with us, I could hardly hear it with calmness. For the rule of our monastery was always that the brothers should live in common and own nothing individually.

Then, stricken with great grief, I began to think what I could do to cleanse the dying man, and how I should make his sins a warning to the living brethren. Accordingly, having summoned Pretiosus, the superintendent of the monastery, I commanded him to see that none of the brothers visited the dying man, who was not to hear any words of consolation. If in the hour of death he asked for the brethren, then his own brother in the flesh was to tell him how he was hated by the brethren because he had concealed money; so that at death remorse for his guilt might pierce his heart and cleanse him from the sin he had committed.

When he was dead his body was not placed with the bodies of the brethren, but a grave was dug in the dung pit, and his body was flung down into it, and the three pieces of gold he had left were cast upon him, while all together cried, 'Thy money perish with thee ! ' . . .

When thirty days had passed after his death, my heart began to have compassion on my dead brother, and to ponder prayers with deep grief, and to seek what remedy there might be for him. Then I called before me Pretiosus, superintendent of the monastery, and said sadly: 'It is a long time that our brother who died has been tormented by fire, and we ought to have charity toward him, and aid him so far as we can, that he may be delivered. Go, therefore, and for thirty successive days from this day offer sacrifices for him. See to it that no day is allowed to pass on which the salvation-bringing mass is not offered up for his absolution.' He departed forthwith and obeyed my words.

We, however, were busy with other things, and did not count the days as they rolled by. But Io, the brother who had died, appeared by night to a certain brother, even to Copiosus, his brother in the flesh. When Copiosus saw him he asked him, saying, 'What is it, brother? How art thou?' To which he answered: 'Up to this time I have been in torment; but now all is well with me, because today I have received the communion.' This Copiosus straightway reported to the brethren in the monastery.

Then the brethren carefully reckoned the days, and it was the very day on which the thirtieth oblation was made for him. Copiosus did not know what the brethren were doing for his dead brother, and the brethren did not know that Copiosus had seen him; yet at one and the same time he learned what they had done and they learned what he bad seen, and the vision and the sacrifice harmonized. So the fact was plainly shown forth how that the brother who had died had escaped punishment through the salvation-giving mass."

References:
   Gregory's account appears in Robinson, James Harvey, Readings in European History (1906); Evans, Joan (ed.), The Flowering of the Middle Ages (1985).

Life in a Christian Monastery, ca. 585

10. Rongorongo

While many people know of the Moai of Easter Island, not that many people know of the other mystery associated with Easter Island. ‘Rongorongo’ is the hieroglyphic written language of the region’s earlier inhabitants. Rongorongo is strange in that no other neighbouring oceanic people used a written language. It appeared around the 1700s, though was unfortunately lost after the early European colonizers banned it because of its ties to the native islanders’ pagan roots.

9. Lost City of Helike

In the late 2nd century AD, the Greek writer Pausanias wrote an account of how (4-500 years earlier?) in one night a powerful earthquake destroyed the great city of Helike, with a Tsunami washing away what remained of the once-flourishing metropolis. The city, capital of the Achaean League, was a worship centre devoted to the ancient god Poseidon, god of the sea. There was no trace of the legendary society mentioned outside of the ancient Greek writings until 1861, when an archeologist found some loot thought to have come from Helike – a bronze coin with the unmistakable head of Poseidon. In 2001, a pair of archeologists managed to locate the ruins of Helike beneath the mud and gravel of the coast, and are currently trying to peice together the rise and sudden fall of what has been called the “real” Atlantis.

8. The Bog Bodies

This mystery may even be a problem for those legendary investigators from CSI and the like! The bog bodies are hundreds of ancient corpses found buried around the northern bogs and wetlands of Northern Europe. These bodies are remarkably well preserved, some dating back 2,000 years. Many of these bodies have tell-tale signs of torture and other medieval “fun”, which have made some researchers postulating that these unfortunate victims were the result of ritual sacrifices.

7. Fall of the Minoans

The Minoans are best known for the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, but it is in fact the demise of this once-great civilisation that is more interesting. While many historians concentrate on the fall of the Roman Empire, the fall of the Minoans, who resided on the island of Crete, is an equal, if not greater mystery. Three and a half thousand years ago the island was shaken by a huge volcanic eruption on the neighbouring Thera Island. Archeologists unearthed tablets which have shown that the Minoans carried on for another 50 years after the eruption, before finally folding. Theories of what finally ended them have ranged from volcanic ash covering the island and devastating harvests to the weakened society eventually getting taken over by invading Greeks.

6. The Carnac Stones

Everyone has heard of Stonehenge, but few know the Carnac Stones. These are 3,000 megalithic stones arranged in perfect lines over a distance of 12 kilometers on the coast of Brittany in the North-West of France. Mythology surrounding the stones says that each stone is a soldier in a Roman legion that Merlin the Wizard turned in to stone. Scientific attempts at an explanation suggests that the stones are most likely an elaborate earthquake detector. The identity of the Neolithic people who built them is unknown.

5. Who Was Robin Hood?

The historical search for the legendary thief Robin Hood has turned up masses of possible names. One candidate includes the Yorkshire fugitive Robert Hod, also known as Hobbehod or Robert Hood of Wakefield. The large number of suspects is complicated further as the name Robin Hood became a common term for an outlaw. As literature began to add new characters to the tale such as Prince John and Richard the Lionheart the trail became more obscure. To this day no one knows who this criminal really was.

4. The Lost Roman Legion

After the Parthians defeated underachieving Roman General Crassus’ army, legend has it that a small band of the POWs wandered through the desert and were eventually rounded up by the Han military 17 years later. First century Chinese historian Ban Gu wrote an account of a confrontation with a strange army of about a hundred men fighting in a “fish-scale formation” unique to Roman forces. An Oxford historian who compared ancient records claims that the lost roman legion founded a small town near the Gobi desert named Liqian, which in Chinese translates to Rome. DNA tests are being conducted to answer that claim and hopefully explain some of the residents’ green eyes, blonde hair, and fondness of bullfighting.

3. The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript is a medieval document written in an unknown script and in an unknown language. For over one hundred years people have tried to break the code to no avail. The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript suggests that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling details of illustrations have fueled many theories about the book’s origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended. The document contains illustrations that suggest the book is in six parts: Herbal, Astronomical, Biological, Cosmological, Pharmaceutical, and recipes.

2. The Tarim Mummies

An amazing discovery of 2,000 year old mummies in the Tarim basin of Western China occurred in the early 90s. But more amazing than the discovery itself was the astonishing fact that the mummies were blond haired and long nosed. In 1993, Victor Mayer a college professor collected DNA from the mummies and his tests verified that the bodies were all of European genetic stock. Ancient Chinese texts from as early as the first millennium BC do mention groups of far-east dwelling caucasian people referred to as the Bai, Yeuzhi, and Tocharians. None, though, fully reveal how or why these people ended up there.

1. Disappearance of the Indus Valley Civilization

The ancient Indus Valley people, India’s oldest known civilization had a culture that stretched from Western India to Afghanistan and a populace of over 5 million. le—India’s oldest known civilization—were an impressive and apparently sanitary bronze-age bunch. The scale of their baffling and abrupt collapse rivals that of the great Mayan decline. They were a hygienically advanced culture with a highly sophisticated sewage drainage system, and immaculately constructed baths. There is to date no archaeological evidence of armies, slaves, conflicts, or other aspects of ancient societies. No one knows where this civilization went.

Top 10 Most Overlooked Mysteries in History - Listverse

By Richard Cavendish

Richard Cavendish remembers the events of October 9th, 1934.

A cameraman happened to be at exactly the right spot when King Alexander, in Marseilles at the beginning of a state visit to France, was being driven through the streets in a car with Louis Barthou, the French foreign minister. He was only a few feet away when a gunman jumped out of the crowd and shot both the king and the chauffeur dead. The car stopped, with the king slumped in the back, while the cameraman continued filming.  Louis Barthou was shot, too, and mortally wounded, possibly by mistake by a French policeman in the general confusion.

The assassin, Vlado Chernozemski, was struck down with a sabre by a French mounted officer and beaten to death by the crowd or shot by the police or both, according to varying accounts. He was a 36-year-old Bulgarian who belonged to a Macedonian revolutionary organisation, which wanted to secede from Yugoslavia, and was allegedly in league with Croatian separatists, the Ustashas, who were backed by Benito Mussolini’s Italy. Sentenced to death for killing the leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1924, but later freed in an amnesty, he had fought in numerous battles in Macedonia against the Serbian police.

Alexander I of Yugoslavia

The kingdom of Yugoslavia had been created by the Paris peace conference after the First World War, at first as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. It was made up of territory from the former Ottoman and Austrian empires, including Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia, and its deeply divided collection of nationalities made it almost impossible to hold together. It was dominated by the Serbs and ruled by their Karageorgevic dynasty. Alexander, the second king, succeeded his father on the throne in 1921. In 1929, after years of turmoil and violence, he abolished the original constitution, made himself dictator and renamed the country Yugoslavia. He was 45 years old when he was killed.

Alexander I of Yugoslavia assassinated | History Today

By Nick Hawton | Published in History Today Volume: 59 Issue: 8 2009 

In the baking heat, the teenage boy was screaming and crying at the same time. I could see his rotten teeth as his face creased up in pain. At one point, his legs gave way and he grabbed the white tombstone next to him for support. He was shouting in a language I did not yet understand but there were two words that he kept repeating, two words that I did understand. They were ‘Radovan Karadzic’.

Radovan Karadžić in Moscow on 3 March 1994. Mikhail Evstafiev.

It was July 11th, 2002, the seventh anniversary of the worst atrocity of the Bosnian War, the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces near the town of Srebrenica which, just two years before the massacre, had been declared a United Nations Safe Area. Years after the killings, the mass graves were still being discovered, their contents disinterred and the relatives invited to the mass reburials.

The boy was just one of the thousands who had come to the new memorial cemetery at Srebrenica. He was screaming the name of the person he blamed for the murder of his relatives: Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb president and the man at the top of the UN War Crimes Tribunal’s most wanted list.

The Bosnian War was one of the most destructive of the late 20th century. Of a population of around four million people in 1992, two million were made refugees. In the three and a half years of conflict, more than 100,000 were killed. Sarajevo suffered the longest siege of any city in modern times, spanning the duration of the war. Ten thousand of its citizens were killed.

The war had been characterised by acts of unspeakable cruelty – rape, torture, mutilation and indiscriminate murder. When the guns fell silent in the dying days of 1995 and the Dayton Peace Agreement finally brought peace, Bosnia slowly began to slide off the international news agenda.

The journalists left for newer conflicts around the world. But one of the few issues that seemed to retain the interest of editors was the strange case of Dr Karadzic. Everyone wanted to know where the bouffant-haired, former psychiatrist, the poet-turned-warlord, was hiding. Despite being wanted for so long, Karadzic had managed to evade capture by thousands of international peacekeepers, aided by western and local intelligence agencies and investigators from the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

I had been in Bosnia for the BBC less than a month when I saw the teenage boy at the tombstone. But the more I learned about the country, about its political and social situation, the more I realised that the issue of Karadzic was hanging over Bosnia like a large black cloud.

As leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Karadzic had been one of the chief architects of the conflict. He was president of the self-proclaimed Republika Srpska, the Serbian territory carved out of Bosnia, and Supreme Commander of the Bosnian Serb military. For many Serbs he had become a hero, a leader who fought to protect Serb interests as Yugoslavia disintegrated. After the war, he had become a symbol of resistance against the ‘perfidious’ West, as many Serbs saw it. Perhaps he would return one day and ‘save the Serbs’ again.

For the victims of Serb aggression, he was the epitome of evil, the mastermind of ethnic cleansing and the siege of Sarajevo. None could understand why he had not been arrested. Conspiracy theories abounded that he had made some secret deal to secure his freedom. The people of Bosnia were utterly divided in their views of the historical legacy of Karadzic.

I began to look into why he had managed to evade capture despite the hand-wringing promises of international politicians and generals that they were ‘doing everything we can’ to track him down. No one seemed to have any idea as to where Karadzic was hiding. There were many rumours: he was living in forests in remote southeast Bosnia, he was disguised as a Serbian Orthodox Priest and flitting from monastery to monastery, he was criss-crossing the borders of Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro protected by a horde of bodyguards. But no hard evidence ever came to light.

But with Karadzic roaming free, would the full truth about the causes of the war ever be revealed: the secret deals allegedly done and the conspiracy theories swirling around the conflict? How could the history of the war be told without the contribution of one of its major figures? One rumour even suggested the real reason why Karadzic had not been arrested was because those in power feared that embarrassing secrets would be revealed if he ever made it to an international court of law.

As I searched for Karadzic, I became absorbed in the politics and history of the region. I realised that ‘truth’ was like ‘beauty’ – it was in the eye of the beholder. There were so many truths, so many interpretations, not only about what had actually caused the last war but what had happened during it. It was so difficult to come up with absolute hard facts, unquestioned ‘truths’. The truth of what happened was coloured by conspiracy, hidden agenda and interpretation of the past. For instance, extremist Serbs saw the Muslims as the simple inheritors of the Ottomans, trying to create an Islamic Republic in the heart of the Balkans. Many Muslims accused the Serbs of following in the tradition of the Chetnik royalist and nationalist militias of the early 20th century in trying to create a Greater Serbia at the expense of other ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia.

Karadzic had seen himself as some heroic Serbian leader with a destiny (although his wife, Ljiljana told me during an interview at her house in the small town of Pale near Sarajevo, he was a reluctant leader and only accepted the post after persuasion). He dabbled in poetry and even won some awards for his writing. He surrounded himself with minor literati of dubious distinction. He quoted his poems on the hills above as Sarajevo burned and snipers blew out the brains of children in the streets below. For Karadzic and for many others, of all ethnicities, it was not just a war about now, it was a war about how the past should be interpreted.

Karadzic was one of those who opened the Pandora’s box of Yugoslav history, reintroducing the ghosts and crimes of the past and turning them into the fears of the present. One of the most potent examples of this occurred in 1988 when nationalists in Serbia paraded the remains of the Serbian medieval Prince Lazar around Yugoslavia. Lazar had been the heroic leader defeated and killed by the Ottomans at the battle of Kosovo in 1389. If anything was likely to lift the lid on dormant Serbian nationalism, this was it.

By the time the 1992-95 war broke out, historical labels had been attached once again by those wanting to simplify and exacerbate the conflict to the three peoples of Bosnia. The Muslims were the ‘Turks’, a reference to the 500 years of Ottoman domination of the region. The Serbs were labelled the ‘Chetniks’. The Croats were labelled the ‘Ustasha’, the name given to members of the Croatian Revolutionary Movement. Offering a mixture of fascism, extreme nationalism and hard-line Roman Catholicism, they had ruled a part of Yugoslavia occupied by Axis forces labelled the Independent State of Croatia (and emphatically not independent).

Karadzic warned that the Serbs were once again under threat, harking back to the days of the Second World War and raising the spectre of the Serbs being targeted by their enemies. Fear of what might happen was the engine for war and, ultimately, war crimes. Leaders of the other ethnic groups in Bosnia were not far behind in their rhetoric.

Karadzic’s daughter, Sonja, also lives in Pale, where the Bosnian Serbs had their capital during the war. In an interview in her home she once told me that many Serbs simply regarded the 1992-95 Bosnian War as a continuation of the Second World War, as if there had been just a short interlude between then and now. Some other Serbs I spoke to went further: strongly suggesting that the atrocities of today were justified by the atrocities of the past.

Whenever I used to question Serbs about their views of the Srebrenica massacre, I was immediately asked for my views on the concentration camp of Jasenovac (south-east of Zagreb), where thousands of Serbs, Jews, Roma and others were murdered by the Croatian Ustasha during the Second World War. The memories of Jasenovac were used, if not exactly as an apologia for Srebrenica, then at least as a possible explanation.

Likewise, if I spoke to a Croat or a Muslim about the 1992-95 conflict, the discussion would rapidly transform into a discussion about other conflicts in the last 50 years, or 200 years, or 500 years. Like nowhere else I have visited, history lived and lives vividly in the minds of the people. The power of history or family or community folklore is overwhelming. At one point in August 2004 I witnessed the creation of legend and myth. I attended a ceremony to mark the 200th anniversary of the first Serbian uprising against the Turks in 1804, a conflict that lasted almost a decade. A two-day celebration culminated in the unveiling of a four-metre high bronze statue of the leader of the uprising, Karadjordje Petrovic. The event took place on a hill above the Serbian monastery at Dobrun in southern Bosnia. Karadzic was still on the run.

I arrived late at night as the celebrations were drawing to a close. The stalls selling Serbian nationalist emblems were still open, purveying, among other things, t-shirts of Karadzic and Ratko Mladic and the hero of the Second World War, Draza Mihailovic. In the main bar, as the beer flowed, a band was singing songs praising the heroic deeds of the former president, delighting in the fact that he was still free, that no one could find him, that he represented the best of the Serbs. The crowd sang along and cheered. Was this a song that would be repeated in the decades to come? Was it  the birth of a folk hero?

Karadzic was gaining an almost mythical status as a sort of Serbian equivalent of Bonnie Prince Charlie, flitting from one hiding place to the next, his pursuers always one step behind. Of course it would ultimately end on a more anti-climactic day, in July 2008, when he was finally picked up on a decrepit city bus in the faceless outskirts of Belgrade.

With competing truths, interpretations and justifications, this was an incredibly complicated environment to understand and report objectively. What historical truth was I to adopt, if any? Perhaps I always avoided the big decisions and, instead, tried to simplify matters. All around were the physical and human results of the conflict. History was living around me. When I looked into the eyes of a person who had lost 40 members of their family, butchered and slaughtered and dumped into a mass grave, or into the eyes of a woman who was serially raped in front of her children by her former school headmaster, I realised that there is a simpler historical truth. There is simple right and wrong. Responsibility does lie somewhere.

Karadzic managed to remain free for so long for a number of reasons: the support of those who still believed in him or, at least, the idea that Serbs should not be ‘persecuted’ by The Hague Tribunal; by living in the anonymous urban sprawl of New Belgrade; by adopting the bizarre but surprisingly successful disguise of a New Age healer; and by relying on the inability and, at times, incompetence of those trying to track him down.

Many of the victims and neutral observers had actually given up hope that he would ever be caught. Some even questioned the point of devoting resources to searching for him when there were more important conflicts to be dealt with in places like Iraq or Afghanistan. As one diplomat once said to me: ‘What is more in Britain’s interests, to track down someone who is on the run, in hiding and has been for years and is of no threat whatsoever to Britain, or search for someone who may be planning suicide attacks on the London Underground?’ There was only one answer, although Britain was one of those countries that did devote significant resources to the hunt for Karadzic.

But surely there was also an imperative to seek him for two important reasons. First, not to do so would have made a mockery of justice. Karadzic was charged with genocide. Justice itself would have been undermined and the next would-be warlord emboldened if he was not made to face his day in court. Truth had to be established and responsibility apportioned.

But there was also another reason, a practical one. The region and the people, of all nationalities, had to be allowed to move on. To a certain extent Bosnia was in a state of suspended animation. A line needed to be drawn between the past and the present and the capture of Karadzic has gone some way to drawing this line.

Now it is for The Hague Tribunal to determine Karadzic’s precise role in a war that affected so many people. And many hope that the trial itself will finally help in the writing of the definitive history of one of the darkest chapters of late 20th-century European history.

Nick Hawton was the BBC’s correspondent in Sarajevo and Belgrade from 2002 to 2008, and is the author of The Quest for Radovan Karadzic (Hutchinson, 2009).

Conflicting Truths: The Bosnian War | History Today