Month: April 2014

Blood in French Revolution gourd isn’t Louis XVI’s

Modern(ish)

Spanish National Research Council researcher Carles Lalueza-Fox has sequenced the full genome of DNA recovered from a gourd said to have contained a handkerchief dipped in the blood of the guillotined King Louis XVI. The results indicate the blood was not Louis XVI’s.

The functional genome analysis was based on two main points, the genealogical line and the physical appearance, and in both cases the result was negative. According to the historical records that go back to his 16 great-great grandparents, Louis XVI had a very heterogeneous genealogical line in which central European ancestors predominated, mainly from the area that today is Germany and Poland, while the genome recovered from the pumpkin belongs to an individual with a clear French and Italian component. In terms of physical appearance, the sequenced DNA points to an average height in France at the time and brown eyes, while portraits and historical accounts describe Louis XVI as the tallest man on the court and with blue eyes.

Only one man in 16 generations of Louis XVI’s great-grandfathers had Northern Italian ancestry: Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy. Meanwhile, the history of the gourd itself places it in Italy for at least the past century, so the possibility that the genetic material inside the gourd was contaminated long after Louis’ death is not negligible.

Although the researchers cannot pin down a precise height from the gourd DNA, the genome suggests the individual was in the bottom 4 percentile for height. We can’t pin down Louis’ exact height either — people who described him as the tallest man at court could have been flattering him — but estimating from the 162-centimeter (5’4″) length of his coronation robe, Louis was around 185–190 centimeters (6′ – 6’3″) tall.

This will be another blow to forensic pathologist Philippe Charlier who first tested the dried blood on the inside of the intricately carved gourd and compared the Y-chromosome DNA to that recovered from a mummified head previously identified as the remains of King Henry IV. His results found that the DNA from the gourd belonged to a man with blue eyes with a rare genetic makeup that isn’t in any current databases of European DNA. The DNA recovered from the trachea of the mummified head shared multiple alleles from that rare haplotype.

Those results were called into question last year by a team of geneticists from the University of Leuven in Belgium who took a more direct approach. They compared the Y-DNA of the blood from the gourd and the mummified head to modern DNA extracted from three living male descendants of the House of Bourbon. The three men were found to share Y-chromosome DNA, as you would expect from their family connection to Bourbon men on the lineage between Henry IV and Louis XVI. Neither the gourd blood nor the head matched this established Bourbon variant. They also compared the mitochondrial DNA of the head to modern Bourbons down the female line and there was no match.

Casket of 12th c. Swedish king opened

Medieval

Uppsala University researchers and clerical officials from Uppsala Cathedral opened the reliquary casket of King Eric IX of Sweden, the patron saint of Stockholm, on Wednesday. There’s footage of the solemn opening in this Swedish-language video. The casket was opened as recently as 2000, but the remains weren’t studied or conserved at the time. This year is the 850th anniversary of the establishment of the Diocese of Uppsala as the archbishopric of Sweden and the Cathedral plans an unprecedented exhibition in honor of the jubilee. Since they wanted King Eric’s funeral crown as part of the exhibition, officials decided to amortize the opening by allowing the university to examine the remains.

Little is known about this king. There are many miracles attributed to him and his remains but not much in the way of historical or archaeological evidence. There is at least one surviving chronicle that mentions him in passing. Most of what we know of him comes from hagiographies that date to the 13th century at the earliest. According to them, Eric was a pious and just king who came to power in 1156 after the murder of King Sverker I. He wrote Sweden’s first law book, hence the nickname Eric the Lawgiver, traveled the country, which still had a significant complement of non-Christians, dispensing justice and founding churches.

According to these accounts, Eric was killed by nobles who resented his devout Christianity (and the 10% tithe his piety made him enshrine in law) who were in cahoots with Magnus, son of the king of Denmark. He was at church on Ascension Day, May 18th, 1160, when a messenger interrupted services to tell him an army of rebels were coming for him.

After mass he recommended his soul to God, made the sign of the cross, and, to spare the blood of the citizens, who were ready to defend his life at the expense of their own, marched out alone before his guards. The conspirators rushed upon him, beat him down from his horse, and struck off his head with a thousand indignities in derision of his religion. His death happened on the 18th of May, 1151. God honoured his tomb with many miracles.

Eric was venerated almost immediately after his death, his remains collected as holy relics. They were kept at the Trinity Church (the current church by that name was built in the 13th century) in Uppsala where the king was martyred and used in processions every year on May 18th. His son Canute, undisputed King of Sweden from 1173 to 1195, strongly supported the cult of Saint Eric, but Pope Alexander III, who had created the archbishopric of Sweden in 1164, refused to canonize him. In an important (from a canon law perspective) letter he wrote to Canute in the 1170s, Alexander admonished the Swedish church for allowing veneration of a man who was drunk when he was killed by a bunch of other drunks, insisting that the determination of sainthood was solely in Rome’s purview. That may or may not be Eric he was talking about (he doesn’t name the saint in question), but he does say “a great many signs and miracles are wrought by him,” and since he’s addressing the king, it’s a strong possibility he meant Eric. The Swedish church still observes a saint day of May 18th for Eric, even though he never did get the official imprimatur.

The reliquary holding his bones and funeral crown was moved to the Uppsala Cathedral, built on the site of the original Trinity Church, after construction was completed in 1273. The current gilt silver reliquary was made in the 16th century. The original one is thought to have been worn out from all the handling during processions. The second was made in 1435 in the shape of a Gothic cathedral. It was melted down in 1573 by King John III to finance a war with Russia. He and his wife then had the current casket made from 75 pounds of gilded silver the next year.

The reliquary was opened and some bones distributed to other churches in the 14th century, so the skeletal remains are not complete. The skull, minus the lower jaw, is still there, however, as are the long bones of the legs and the remains of the collarbone in a special pouch. The new study will examine the cervical vertebra and collarbone for cutting marks. The bones will be measured, X-rayed and DNA extracted if possible. Isotope testing on the teeth will hopefully answer long-standing questions about his origin. (His name, Eric Jedvardsson (son of Edward), suggests he may have English heritage, but the hagiographies claim he was from Västergötland or Uppland, in southern Sweden.)

That’s all secondary to the main research project: an interdisciplinary study of osteoporosis. The project compares ancient remains to modern ones to study changes in bone density and joint damage from the disease. The Uppsala University team have examined other skeletons from the early Middle Ages as part of this project, but they were all regular folk. Information from an upper class individual will fill in an important blank.

The gilded copper crown with glass stone accents, Sweden’s oldest royal crown, will be conserved and then put on display for the first time in modern memory at the Heaven Is Here exhibition in Uppsala Cathedral from June 18th through November 16th. Celebrating the 850th jubilee, the exhibition features more than 50 historical religious artifacts from diocesan churches as well as installations by contemporary Swedish artists. It’s the first time so large an exhibition has been held in an active church in Sweden.

Celebrate St. George’s Day with an orgy of dragons

Medieval

If you, like me, are grumpy about the complete dearth of dragons in the past two episodes of Game of Thrones, the British Library is providing a healing unguent for that burning sensation in the form of gorgeous illuminations of dragons from Medieval manuscripts. The library’s always outstanding Medieval Manuscripts blog kicked off the homage to the winged serpents of lore with a selection of diverse representations.

Dragons were popular subjects in Medieval literature, making appearances in manuscripts from Bibles to bestiaries to histories to romances to hagiographies. Although St. George may be the saint most associated with dragon-slaying today, he was far from the only holy figure to have that claim to fame. Dragons in this tradition are symbols of demonic evil and paganism, and indeed like George, many of the saints whose legends have them fighting dragons lived in the fourth century when the battle between Christianity and the traditional polytheistic religions came to a head.

The late 4th century bishop Mercurialis of Forlì, the first bishop of the city, slew a dragon and saved the Forlians from a fate worse than death (ie, their own pre-Christian beliefs). Early 4th century Saint Theodore of Amasea (aka St. Theodore of Tyro), who burned down a temple of Cybele was martyred for refusing to join in pagan sacrifice while a soldier in the Roman army, killed a dragon with a cross. Saint Margaret of Antioch (d. 304), daughter of a pagan priest who disowned her when she became a Christian and dedicated her virginity to God, slew a dragon from the inside out. Tortured by a Roman governor and would-be suitor, Margaret was swallowed by Satan in the form of the dragon only to burst out of its belly holding after making the sign of the cross. St. George himself defeated the maiden-devouring dragon after crossing himself, and the grateful population of “Silene” (it’s uncertain which city the legend refers to) convert to Christianity in response.

This association of saint-slain dragons with victory of paganism is made explicit in many of the hagiographies. Here’s an instructive passage from the Life of Saint Silvester in the Golden Legend, a popular compendium of the lives of saints compiled by Jacobus de Voragine in 1275:

In this time it happed that there was at Rome a dragon in a pit, which every day slew with his breath more than three hundred men. Then came the bishops of the idols unto the emperor and said unto him: O thou most holy emperor, sith the time that thou hast received christian faith the dragon which is in yonder fosse or pit slayeth every day with his breath more than three hundred men. Then sent the emperor for S. Silvester and asked counsel of him of this matter. S. Silvester answered that by the might of God he promised to make him cease of his hurt and blessure of this people.

Then S Silvester put himself to prayer, and S. Peter appeared to him and said: Go surely to the dragon and the two priests that be with thee take in thy company, and when thou shalt come to him thou shalt say to him in this manner: Our Lord Jesu Christ which was born of the Virgin Mary, crucified, buried and arose, and now sitteth on the right side of the Father, this is he that shall come to deem and judge the living and the dead, I commend thee Sathanas that thou abide him in this place till he come. Then thou shalt bind his mouth with a thread, and seal it with thy seal, wherein is the imprint of the cross. Then thou and the two priests shall come to me whole and safe, and such bread as I shall make ready for you ye shall eat.

Thus as S. Peter had said, S. Silvester did. And when he came to the pit, he descended down one hundred and fifty steps, bearing with him two lanterns, and found the dragon, and said the words that S. Peter had said to him, and bound his mouth with the thread, and sealed it, and after returned, and as he came upward again he met with two enchanters which followed him for to see if he descended, which were almost dead of the stench of the dragon, whom he brought with him whole and sound, which anon were baptized, with a great multitude of people with them. Thus was the city of Rome delivered from double death, that was from the culture and worshipping of false idols, and from the venom of the dragon

Aside from those in the lives of saints, I think my favorite dragons from the Medieval Manuscripts selection are the ones battled by Alexander the Great. Alexander became a chivalric hero in the Medieval romances and as such had several confrontations with fantastical creatures. In the French illuminated manuscript Le livre et la vraye hystoire du bon roy Alixandre (c. 1420 -1425), which you can browse in glorious high resolution here, he fights dragons with large emeralds embedded in their heads, dragon with ram horns and dragons with two heads, eight legs and multiple eyes on their torsos.

The mythologizing of Alexander the Great started in antiquity, with the source of many of these fantastical stories in the Medieval romances going back to a Greek language biography by Pseudo-Callisthenes, an unknown author from the 3rd century. Another ancient source the Medieval writers relied on heavily was the Historia Alexandri Magni by Quintus Curtius Rufus, a 1st century historian who used the character Alexander to teach lessons about proper kingship versus tyranny, a subject people who lived under Julio-Claudian rule obviously had a strong personal interest in exploring.

The Historia Alexandri Magni is incomplete, with the first two books and parts of the remaining eight lost, but that didn’t stop authors like Walter of Châtillon in the 12th century and the Archpriest Leo in the 10th century from writing epic poems and prose in Latin based on the Historia. They just filled in the blanks with bits from other sources (like the Greek version of a heavily mythological Persian history of Alexander that was translated by Simeon Seth, an 11th century Jewish doctor and chamberlain to Byzantine Emperor Michael VII Doukas) and from their own fertile imaginations. Le livre et la vraye hystoire du bon roy Alixandre is a French treatment of Archpriest Leo’s Historia de preliis Alexandri Magni.

Another Alexander romance with a particularly juicy dragon treatment is Les faize d’Alexandre, a French translation of the Historia Alexandri Magni done by Vasco da Lucena for Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, between 1468 and 1475. It didn’t make the Medieval Manuscripts blog entry, but its author, Sarah J. Biggs, has been tweeting additional dragons today and one from Les faize d’Alexandre is a stand-out:

Who is that lady in bed with the dragon while a crowned man watches? That is Olympias, mother of Alexander, and the dragon is his real daddy. The voyeur is his, let’s just say adoptive, father Philip II of Macedon. This is what happens when the first two books of an ancient source go missing. Things get a tad fanciful and that version spreads far and wide. The Medieval Alexander romances all start with a dragon impregnating Olympias. There’s a less naughty version in the Le livre et la vraye hystoire du bon roy Alixandre where the dragon is just flying in through the window rather than actively making out with her.

Here’s the story in a nutshell. Egyptian pharaoh and sorcerer Neptanabus takes refuge in Macedonia after the gods tell him he’s about to be defeated by the Persian king Ochus. He bills himself as an astrologer and becomes a regular at court while the king is abroad fighting. Neptanabus becomes infatuated with Olympias and conceives a cunning plan to get in her bed through deception. He tells her the god Ammon will soon come to her chambers and together they will conceive a child. He then either changes himself into a dragon or tricks her into thinking he’s a dragon (there is some variety in the retelling) and they have sex, Olympias certain the whole time that she’s being impregnated by the god Ammon.

Neptanabus then sends Philip a dream about Ammon getting his wife pregnant, so when he returns he’ll accept the demi-god foster son rather than, say, slaughter the baby and his mother for her adultery. Philip isn’t happy about it, but he takes it. Later magical occurrences confirm the accuracy of the prophecy, and so little Alexander is set on his path to greatness.

He does eventually find out about the deception. Alexander is 12 years old and doing military maneuvers when he playfully pushes Neptanabus into a ditch and breaks his neck. As any smartass would, Alexander tells Neptanabus he should have known that was going to happen,. The pharaoh replies that nobody can avoid their fate, and that his fate was to be killed by his own son. He then explains the true circumstances of the conception. Alexander takes it improbably well, as does Olympias. Alexander buries Neptanabus with all honors due a king, sorcerer, rapist, liar who conned his mother, father, country and himself into believing he was the son of a god.

Happy 100th birthday, Wrigley Field!

Modern(ish)


Chicago’s iconic ballpark Wrigley Field turns 100 years old today. It is the second oldest Major League Baseball park after Boston’s Fenway Park (opened April 20, 1912). Although it is the home field of the Chicago Cubs, they’ve never actually won a World Series there. The famously benighted club’s glory days took place at the long-defunct West Side Park where in 1906 the Cubs scored the most victories (116) and the best winning percentage (.763) in Major League history. The lost to the White Sox in the World Series that year, but won the next two. The subsequent World Series dry spell is the longest in history.

Wrigley Field has seen a championship, however, just for a team in a league that stopped existing right after they won. It wasn’t called Wrigley Field then. When it opened its doors, it was called Weeghman Park after Charles Weeghman, the “Quick Lunch King,” owner of a chain of lunchrooms. Weeghman’s diners served only cold sandwiches, and instead of tables and chairs or stools and a bar, they were packed with school-style chairs where a single arm curves around into a table. No hot food = no wait, and eating like you’re taking a test = no lingering. He was able to cram so many people into his diners and get them out the door so quickly that at its peak, the main lunchroom served a mind-boggling 35,000 people a day.

Weeghman was never one to rest on his laurels or focus narrowly on his business, a lack of focus that would ultimately lead to his downfall. One of the side-interests he pursued avidly was baseball. He founded a Chicago team of the Federal League, an upstart organization that from 1914 to 1915 challenged the National League and American League as the “third major league.” First known as the Chicago Federals or ChiFeds, the team name was changed for the 1915 season to the Chicago Wales.

To give his new team a place to play, Weeghman leased land on the corner of Clark and Addison from the Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary and hired Zachary Taylor Davis, architect of Comiskey Park, to build a new concrete and steel baseball field. Work began on February 23, 1914, with an official groundbreaking on March 4th. You read those dates right. Weeghman Park was built in two months. It cost $250,000.

On April 23rd, 1914, Weeghman Park opened with a game between the Chicago ChiFeds and the Kansas City Packers. Future hall of famer Joe Tinker managed the home team, and the Chicago crowds came out to support him and the new team. In an auspicious beginning that sadly would not be bourne out in the long-term, the ChiFeds won handily. You can read the Chicago Tribune’s review of the opening game here. The ChiFeds lost in the finals of the league championship that year, but they won the title the next year, making them the Federal League’s most successful club.

That wasn’t enough to save the league. It folded shortly after the season ended, but Weeghman bounced back, acquiring the National League’s Chicago Cubs and bringing them over from the fire-prone wooden West Side Park to his two-year-old Weeghman Park. To fund the record-setting $500,000 acquisition of the team, Weeghman enlisted investors from the Chicago business community, including gum magnate William Wrigley, Jr.

Wrigley’s company was going great guns, while Weeghman’s began to stumble. His investments in film production and theater ownership were failures that sucked support from the diners that had made his fortune. With many of his demographic (ie, young working men) heading off to war, the lunchrooms began to suffer. No sooner had the boys come home than the Spanish Influenza struck. It would claim 20 million lives worldwide before it ebbed. Meanwhile, nobody was keen to lunch in established jam-packed with people coughing their potentially lethal pathogens all over each other.

Weeghman tried to shore up his bottom line by borrowing money from Wrigley with shares in the Cubs as collateral, or by selling shares outright. Wrigley took an increasingly direct interest in the club, moving their spring training grounds from Florida to Pasadena where he had a mansion and a large plot of land downtown easily converted into a ball field. By 1918, Weeghman was finished at the park he built. Wrigley owned most of his stock and finally demanded that in return for yet another loan, Weeghman retire as president of the Chicago Cubs and devote himself solely to his business.

Wrigley didn’t immediately rename Weeghman Park after himself. It kept its original name for a couple of years, then changed to Cubs Park in 1920. Six years later, in November of 1926, the park was renamed Wrigley Field. It owns many historical firsts. The Star Spangled Banner was first played there before games. Wrigley was the first field to allow fans to keep foul balls they caught (elsewhere they had to hand them over to ushers). It was the first baseball field to have an organist playing. The first televised baseball game was the Cubs versus the Dodgers on July 13th, 1946. It was the last field to host night games because it was the last to install lights in 1988, believe it or not. Babe Ruth made his famous “Called Shot” (if it actually happened) at Wrigley Field in the 1932 World Series, his last year in the game.

While almost all of the old parks have been demolished to make way for stadiums with high-tech amenities, Wrigley Field carries on with all its myriad problems and disadvantages. A half-billion dollar renovation is slated to begin in the offseason this year, although there are obstacles, mainly the owners of the rooftop bleachers whose prize locations will be endangered by the refurbishment.

Today, Wrigley Field is celebrating its birthday in grand style. The Cubs will play the Arizona Diamondbacks with both teams wearing throwback jerseys of the Chicago Federals for the Cubs and the Kansas City Packers for the Diamondbacks. The first 30,000 fans to arrive at the park will get a free replica 1914 Chicago Federals jersey (WANT!) and will be greeted by ushers wearing period costumes in 1914-style. The ground crews will also enjoy some vintage styles: 1914 Weeghman Park jackets. Even the concessions stands are get into the spirit of things, offering 1910s specials like a breaded pork sandwich with slow-cooked onions and spicy mustard on a toasted roll and a Reuben Dog, a beef hot dog topped with corned beef, sauerkraut, Thousand Island and Swiss cheese.

Before the game begins, visitors will enjoy historic photographs and videos on a right field board. Charles Weeghman’s grand-niece Sue Quigg will throw the first pitch using a 100-year-old ball first thrown at a ChiFeds game by her grandmother Dessa Weeghman.

For a wonderful series of retrospective articles, see the Chicago Tribune’s Wrigley 100 page. The Chicago Cubs have a site dedicated to the centennial as well. You can purchase tickets there, although I don’t see where they tell you if tickets are still available for today’s game.

Only extant Revolutionary War mine tunnel opened

Modern(ish)

The only mine tunnel from the Revolutionary War known to survive has been opened and explored by a firefighter in the first stage of its preservation. The 125-foot tunnel was designed by Polish humanist, engineer and Revolutionary War hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko during the 1781 siege of the earthen Star Fort in the town of Ninety Six, South Carolina. The plan was for the tunnel to extend underneath the Star Fort so that it could be mined from below and blown up. British reinforcements arrived before the tunnel was finished, which is why it, unlike its more successful brethren, managed to survive the war.

The earthworks of Star Fort are still in existence and the entire site is now a National Park. The Park service and experts from the University of South Florida sent Greenwood firefighter Russel Cline down into the tunnel with breathing equipment since they had no idea what kind of air quality he would encounter. He found that it was remarkably good, considering the three-and-a-half foot high tunnel is more than 230 years old. The video records that the vaulted tunnel is lined with brick and mortar which at first glance, at least, still impressively sound, a testament to Kosciuszko’s skill and attention to detail.

Now that the path has been cleared, researchers will fully map and measure the tunnel with 3D imaging, laser scanning and remote sensing technology. This will give archaeologists a detailed understanding of the tunnel’s condition, and, since the it can’t be opened to the general public for its own good and ours, it will allow researchers to create 3D models to bring the tunnel to life for park visitors.

The village of Ninety Six (the origin of the name has been lost in the mists of time) played a significant role in the Revolution. A frontier town in western South Carolina, Ninety Six was the site of several battles of the Anglo-Cherokee War (1758–1761), when the Cherokee fought against the British during the French and Indian War. Its strategic importance was undiminished 15 years later when Revolution came. In 1775, Ninety Six was the site of the first Revolutionary War battle south of New England. The year after that a casualty of another battle fought in Ninety Six claimed another first. Francis Salvador, a recent immigrant from London, prominent landowner and the first Jew to hold elected office in what would become the United States, was shot three times at the Battle of Twelve Mile Creek on August 1, 1776. Before the American militia could rescue Salvador from the battlefield, the Loyalists’ Cherokee allies scalped him. He was the only one to receive this treatment, and he died from his wounds a few hours later making Francis Salvador the first Patriot Jew to die in the Revolutionary War.

In 1780, the British army — in this case experienced Loyalist troops organized into regular army regiments rather than militias — decided to fortify Ninety Six. The Provincial regiments and their slaves built a fort in the shape of an eight-point star, with earthen walls 14 feet high. Two stockade walls would keep attackers busy to give the 550 troops under the command of Lieutenant Colonel John Cruger the chance to defend.

On May 22nd, 1781, Patriot Major General Nathanael Greene laid siege to the Star Fort. He had almost twice the number of troops and Colonel Kosciuszko on his side, but Star Fort proved a tough nut to crack nonetheless. The siege lasted 28 days, the longest siege of the Revolutionary War. First the Patriots dug an approach trench, but te defenders attacked during the construction giving Kosciuszko the only wound he ever experienced in the seven years he fought for the Patriot side: a bayonet to the buttocks.

Next Kosciuszko built a Maham Tower, a 30-foot-high siege tower with a covered platform at the top. From that height, sharpshooters could pick off the fort’s defenders, but not for long. Cruger had sandbags stacked above the parapet, protecting his troops from the sharpshooters. When the Greene’s troops tried shooting flaming arrows into the fort to set it on fire, Cruger had all the roofs removed from the buildings inside the fort making it hard for anything to catch fire.

The mine tunnel was Kosciuszko’s last engineering attempt to win the siege. It stopped short when news that 2,000 British troops were marching to Ninety Six from Charleston. On June 18th, tried a frontal assault on the fort. They reached the sandbags before they were outflanked on both sides by Cruger’s men and retreated to the trenches. With the British reinforcements just 30 miles away and having lost 150 troops in the assault, Greene ordered a full retreat.