From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 2423
Date: 2000-05-16
----- Original Message -----From: John CroftSent: Monday, May 15, 2000 11:16 AMSubject: Re: [TIED] Re: The Tin Islands.Good points, John. We tend to look at ancient northern Europe automatically adopting the perspective of Greek or early Roman historians and geographers with all their bias and ignorance. To the Greeks, the upper course of the Danube was as mysterious as the headwaters of the Nile were to 19th-century European explorers. They couldn't tell apart barbarian tribes and languages, and all they really knew about the origin of commodities like tin and amber was that they came from someplace far away. The Gaulish tin road "entered [Classical] history" when the Massiliot Greeks gained control over it, which is why our reference books romantically credit them with "establishing" the route. Of course, as archaeology shows, northern Europe was busy with all sorts of human activity -- including long-distance trade -- already in the Neolithic (salt, flint and obsidian, copper, pottery, shells, etc.); it only lacked its own historians to report it to posterity. Tin and amber "roads" were not blazed by pioneers cutting their way through virgin forests but emerged from a network of previously existing roads and exchange routes in lands that had their own civilised communities integrated into regional structures.
Being an eastern European barbarian myself, I know what it means to live on the fringes of the civilised world, near to Cimmerian darkness. The Myth of the Pripyat Marshes was discussed here when Cybalist was young. Now, this is what the MS Encarta Encyclopedia, one of the most popular reference sources of our time, has to say of the Teutonic Knights:In 1210 Hermann von Salza assumed the leadership of the Knights, and under his vigorous administration they began to expand more quickly. The Knights also moved their primary field of operations from Palestine to eastern Europe. At first, the King of Hungary invited the order to participate in a crusade against the Slavs, a large non-Christian tribe that inhabited most of the Baltic region of eastern Europe. The order soon took up permanent residence in the area.
[Poles are confused with Hungarians here, and "Slavs" with Prussians and Sudovians. The author evidently has no idea who the Balts are or were.]
... In 1409 the King of Poland invited all enemies of the Teutonic Knights to participate in a campaign against the order. On July 15, 1410, the armies of Poland together with recruits of Czechs, Hungarians, Tartars, Lithuanians, and Cossacks defeated the order at Tannenberg in Prussia.
["Cossacks" ?? There were some Smolensk reinforcements, but not all eastern Slavs are Cossacks.]
Although the order’s 20th-century presence is modest, its historical importance is large. For several centuries the Knights waged a Crusade in eastern Europe and converted the Slavic peoples to Christianity. In that process they also supported German settlement in the region. The legacy of these historical events is twofold. On the one hand, the Teutonic Knights’ influence persists indirectly in the strong Roman Catholicism of Poland and other eastern European states. On the other, the order’s heritage has continued to endure in the ethnic tensions between German and Slavic peoples in that region.
[They didn't convert a single Slav for the very good reasons that the local Slavs had been converted a few centuries before the Teutonic Knights arrived in eastern Europe. The position of the RCC in Poland has nothing to do whatsoever with the Teutonic Knights. This passage implies here that Roman Catholicism is widespread in eastern Europe in general -- a strange opinion, to say the least.]
The Encarta article was written by Philip M. Soergel, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, Arizona State University, author of Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria. From the title of the book it seems that Prof. Soergel is some kind of expert on things Central European, with emphasis on religious conflicts. Had he shown similar ignorance of French or British history, he would be torn apart by his colleagues.
Piotr
John writes:I have heard that on lead content (Cornish Tin has a specific signature), bronze found in Western Europe long before the Carthaginian hegemony in the Western Mediterranean-Atlantic, shows evidence of a Cornish source (unfortunately I cannot remember my source, I'll try to hunt it up).
The sea route from Britanny to Cornwall, up the Irish Sea, to the Hebrides and across the top of Scotland is a particularly ancient one dating back to Neolithic times. The spread of Dolmens and Megaliths from a source in Britanny across the Loire and Dordogne regions, into the Massif Central, down the Rhone Valley to the Gulf of Lyons, shows there was movements of religious ideas, burial practices and trade items along this route from 4,300BCE if not before. Certainly from 2,600 BCE the distribution of Bell Beakers shows the route was underway. So when you write ["The land route you describe was established in the 3rd c. BC by the Massiliots, and became THEIR jealously guarded secret...."] it is only a case that the Massiliots were "Johnny come latelies" who
capitalised on a trade route that was in existence long before.