Detail from Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. One of the book’s legitimate points is that Da Vinci’s John the Apostle, the blonde next to Jesus, looks like a woman.

[SPOILER ALERT: This post reveals plot details!]

But before we get to the three, let’s look at the two. Two secrets lie at the heart of The Da Vinci Code:

• Secret #1: Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and fathered a daughter, who was raised in secret in Gaul (modern France) to avoid Church persecution — and whose descendants live to this day. (The Holy Grail is not a cup but rather Mary Magdalene herself, who became a vessel for Christ’s blood by bearing his child.)
• Secret #2: The Church and the Priory of Sion (a pagan cult) know about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and they’ve been keeping the secret from the rest of the world for two thousand years. The Church wants to bury the secret and the Priory wants to preserve the evidence, to reveal the secret at some future date.

This double conspiracy theory has a lot of small problems, as well as three so gigantic that there’s no way around.

1. A Secret Known to Dozens or More in Every Generation for 2,000 Years Can’t Remain Secret: The Da Vinci Code tells us that the Church’s leadership and the Priory of Sion have known the Mary Magdalene secret since the time of the apostles, but they’ve kept it from the rest of the world. No way. Every time someone new learns a secret — every time you add someone to the conspiracy — you increase the chance of exposure. Time increases the risk too because more years means more chances to spill the beans. We don’t know how many members the Priory has or how many Church leaders know the secret, but it’s got to be dozens at a time for each organization — maybe hundreds. Even if you take a conservative number and guess 50 people know the secret in every generation, that would mean 3,500 people have learned it during the past 2,000 years. That’s just too many. Most governments and corporations can’t protect a secret known by ten people for more than five years. Every time someone has a falling out with the organization’s leaders — or gets drunk or sick, or falls in love with a non-member — you’ve got a chance of exposure. If you’re looking at 3,500 secret-keepers over 2,000 years, the chance of exposure is 100%.
2. The Priory’s Motivation Isn’t Possible; No One “Preserves” A Secret: Some conspirators try to bury secrets, so no one will find out. Others try to find and expose the evidence — to tell the world. The Priory of Sion, however, wants to “preserve” the Mary Magdalene secret, keeping the knowledge alive for thousands of years, but also keeping it from the world. An occasional mental patient might pursue contradictory goals in that way, but not large numbers of people.
3. There Would be no Reason for Jesus’ Daughter to Hide: The secret’s lynchpin is the idea that Jesus’ daughter hid from the Church, and so did all her descendants — because the Church would have killed them to wipe out the secret. But during the apostles’ time, the Church lacked the might, will, and motivation to kill anyone. It wasn’t the power center we now know; it was a small crew of humble and mostly poor people, with no long arm that could send assassins across the Mediterranean to wipe out its enemies. Plus, the early Church had no unified dogma, so alternate beliefs about Christ’s life could co-exist. The Mary/wife story would’ve been just one of many inconsistent stories surrounding the life of Jesus Christ. (It wasn’t until almost 200 C.E. that the Church began insisting that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were the only four gospels, and many Christians remained dedicated to alternate gospels for centuries after.) So Jesus’ daughter and the first several generations of her descendants would’ve had no reason to hide and no one to hide from. The Da Vinci Code’s secret bloodline would never have been secret in the first place.

The Da Vinci Code is a fun read, largely because the mystery springs from such a juicy, history-laden conspiracy theory. But please don’t take it seriously.

• He was poor, after giving away all his money.
• He was an advocate for reform of a Church plagued by allegations of corruption and impiety.
• He loved animals, calling them our brothers and sisters, and he’s the patron saint of ecology. (He also wrote about “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon,” so he was pretty free about appointing siblings.)
• He visited the Middle East and tried to make peace with Islam (virtually unheard of during the Middle Ages — and not at all successful). He may have expected to be killed and become a martyr (a reasonable prediction, though wrong in this case).
• He was erratic and suffered from severe bouts of depression.
• He had ecstatic visions (which would put him in the crazy column nowadays, but not during the Middle Ages).
• He wasn’t a priest and saw no reason ever to become one. (He was a wandering preacher, a.k.a. a friar, and founded an order of friars, though today’s Franciscans include many priests).

Saint Francis himself was named for the Franks: the Germanic barbarians who overran the Roman province of Gaul during the 500′s, turned Catholic, spent a lot of time killing each other and their neighbors, and gave their name to the Frankish Empire and ultimately to France. So one of the Church’s greatest saints and the new Pope get their name from some pretty gnarly warriors.

A Biblical Cherub — one of Maia Kobabe’s illustrations for The Jericho River

My book’s full title is: The Jericho River: A Magical Novel About the History of Western Civilization. It’s a story of centaurs and angels, priestesses and barbarians, kings and philosophers. But it’s also an exploration of our past, from the dawn of civilization to the age of computers and skyscrapers. In other words, The Jericho River is a young adult novel that uses fantasy to teach the history of Western Civilization, including with its roots in the ancient Middle East. It features twenty-six historical illustrations and three artistic maps, as well as countless surprising tidbits from history. You can see the cover in this blog’s sidebar, to the right (and there you’ll also find purchase links for Amazon and other sites).

Coincidentally, on the same day, The Jericho River received a five-star review from Reader’s Favorite Book Reviews!

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© 2013 by David Carthage.

• Can the Pope really resign? Several Popes have resigned, starting with Pontian in 235 C.E., who quit because the Roman Empire condemned him to labor in the mines. But the Church wasn’t sure about resignation until Pope Celestine V issued a decree authorizing it in 1294 — and then promptly quit. The next Pope, Boniface VIII, annulled almost all Celestine’s decrees, but not that one, and the two Popes’ concurrence resolved the question: Popes can quit. Boniface, however, still wasn’t taking any chances. He imprisoned Celestine to prevent a return to power, and he may have murdered him. (Celestine had the last laugh. In 1313 he rose to a position higher than Pope: he became a saint.)
  

  The coronation of Pope Celestine V, who went on to make papal resignation kosher

• When was the last time a Pope resigned? Until this year, no Pope had quit since 1415, when Gregory XII resigned to end the Great Schism (a.k.a. the “Western Schism”). The Church had been divided since 1387, with two and sometimes three men claiming the top job, some at Rome and others in southern France, at Avignon. After several attempts to resolve the schism, the Church convened the Council of Constance, which pressured all three current claimants to quit. Gregory XII was the Roman claimant, and before he quit, he authorized the Council to choose his successor. The modern Church sees Gregory’s two rivals as “antipopes” — illegitimate claimants — so it’s Gregory who’s remembered as the last man to become a living ex-Pope.
  
• Who chooses the new Pope? What’s a cardinal? The Pope is Bishop of Rome, and in the Church’s early days, the Christians of each diocese (district) elected their own bishops. By the Middle Ages, however, the German emperor (a.k.a. “Holy Roman Emperor”) had come to dominate papal elections. So in 1059, Pope Nicholas II decreed that Rome’s “cardinals” would elect the Pope, and he enacted rules to limit imperial meddling. “Cardinal” comes from the Latin word cardo, meaning “hinge.” In ancient times, it referred to a priests incardinated, or attached, to a church. Eventually, however, “cardinal” evolved to mean the high-ranking priests attached to one of the really important dioceses, like Constantinople, Ravenna, or Rome. The Roman cardinals of 1059 included both important local priests and the bishops of the small towns surrounding the city. In the 1100′s, however, the Popes began giving these local positions to priests and bishops from elsewhere in Europe, and most cardinals’ connection to the churches around Rome became theoretical. That’s how this group of local priests became an international body — a better fit for electors choosing an international ruler. To this day, however, almost every cardinal is technically the head of a church in or near Rome, or the bishop of one of the surrounding towns — though they’re just figureheads and don’t actually run the local churches. Most modern cardinals are also bishops (not figureheads) of some diocese elsewhere in the Catholic world. Today, there are roughly 200 cardinals, and the 120 or so younger than eighty can vote for Pope. They need a two-thirds majority to elect him. The cardinals wear red, symbolizing their willingness to bleed and die for the faith (though the job’s not so risky nowadays).
• What’s the deal with the chimney and the black and white smoke? Papal elections have been held in the Sistine Chapel since 1492, and it’s been the sole venue since 1870. Almost no one other than the cardinals can enter during the voting, but a chimney installed just for the election keeps the world up to date. After a vote without a two-thirds majority, the cardinals mix the ballots with damp straw (and nowadays with chemicals) and burn them. The resulting black smoke rising from the chimney tells the world that the vote hasn’t yielded a new Pope. Dry straw, on the other hand, produces white smoke and signals a new Pope.
• How does the Pope get his new name? In 532 C.E., a man named Mercurius was elected Pope. He’d been named after the god Mercury, and he didn’t think a Pope should have a pagan moniker. So he decreed that he’d be called John II. That launched the papal practice of adopting a new name, though it didn’t become really common until the 900′s. The last Pope to keep his own name was Marcellus II, who ruled for twenty-two days in 1555 before dying of exhaustion. Popes usually choose the name of a past Pope they admire, so the choice offers a peek into the new leader’s beliefs and priorities.
  

  Victor I, a (North) African Pope

• Has there ever been a non-European Pope? Yes, contrary to popular belief, several non-Europeans have led the Church. First of all, the original Pope, Saint Peter, was a Jew from Palestine: a Middle Easterner. Since his time, seven Popes have hailed from the eastern Mediterranean — mostly from Syria — and three from North Africa. That’s not surprising because those regions were part of the Roman-Christian world until the Muslim invasions of the 700′s. Interestingly, the first Pope to speak Latin, instead of Greek, came from North Africa: Victor I. Victor and the other North African Popes probably weren’t black, but they may have included dark-skinned Berbers. Anyway, religious hostility shut the doors between Europe and the Middle East after the 700′s. So since the death of Syrian Pope Gregory III in 741, all  Popes have been Europeans.
  
• Has a woman ever been elected Pope? Nope: “Pope Joan” is a myth. During the 1200′s, a story began circulating that one of the Popes from around 1100 was a woman. She kept her gender a secret until she accidentally gave birth in public, which led to her execution. Protestants particularly enjoyed Pope Joan’s tale centuries later, since it discredited the papacy. But there’s no evidence from the time — from the years around 1100 — so it’s almost certainly false.

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© 2013 by David Carthage.

Let’s start with the easy argument. The Canadians and most Europeans enjoy democracy and freedom without gun rights. So gun ownership isn’t necessary to prevent tyranny.

Incidentally, tyranny isn’t the gun lobby’s real concern. They know about Canada and Europe too. The lobby exists to protect the interests of men who like to fantasize that they’re warriors.

What about the other argument: the Second Amendment right to bear arms? Well, the Second Amendment doesn’t say everyone has the right to own a gun. It says, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” (italics added). In other words, it starts with an explanation for gun rights. It’s actually the Constitution’s only clause with an explanation. Why?

The Constitutional Convention, 1787. Many of these Founding Fathers went on to join the First Congress, which wrote the Bill of Rights in 1789 — including the Second Amendment.

If gun rights were unlimited and universal, the Second Amendment wouldn’t need an explanation. It would just read, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The Founding Fathers instead explained the purpose for gun rights — national security — to suggest that those rights only apply where they serve that purpose. The Amendment only protects potential militia-members’ rights to bear arms, and only to the extent that America needs militias for national security.

But if that’s the rule, why didn’t the Founding Fathers say so more clearly? Why rely on the explanation? Explanations generally appear in legal documents when the drafters worry a clause will be misused but can’t figure out a clarification, or agree on one. The First Congress apparently wanted to give potential militiamen gun rights but couldn’t come up with a fair-sounding qualification that excluded anyone else. So they fell back on the bluntest knife in the law-maker’s drawer: the explanation. It saved them from potentially unresolvable differences over gun rights, while still providing some kind of limit. (The Founding Fathers may have been history’s greatest political generation, but they weren’t immune to uncomfortable compromises, including on issues that mattered to them much more than guns. The Constitution enshrined slavery in American law through the dehumanizing “three fifths compromise,” which provided that each slave counts as three fifths of a human being for purposes of allocating Congressmen and Electors to the states.)

The Second Amendment’s explanation tells us that gun rights apply only to the extent that they support a “well regulated militia” “necessary to the security of a free state.” That was an easy qualification for the Founding Fathers because it wouldn’t restrict gun rights much in their time, if at all. It’s possible they didn’t even give it much thought, which would explain the lack of records on the Amendment’s meaning. In Eighteenth Century America, a militia was, literally, a bunch of average Joseph’s who owned flintlock rifles. Almost any free man could be a member. Militias of these men had played a vital role in winning the War of Independence, and they could be counted on to defend the new nation. So even as qualified, the Second Amendment protected gun rights for just about every free man.

Today, however, a bunch of average Joe’s with guns might, at best, form a scattered guerrilla movement, not a “well regulated militia.” So the portion of gun owners falling outside the Second Amendment’s protection has soared from almost none to almost all. In other words, the landscape has changed, and the Second Amendment, by its own terms, offers almost no protection to modern gun ownership.

It’s possible some American states can point to a few individuals who play a role in their National Guards thanks to their own guns. If so, the states could protect those people’s guns from federal interference. And if a modern state created a militia made up of average Joe’s with their own weapons brought from home, it could use the Second Amendment to protect all their able-bodied citizens’ guns. But that citizen army would have to be real. The state would have to spend millions organizing and training this “well regulated militia,” or forfeit any argument that it’s relevant to modern warfare — that it’s “necessary to the security of a free state.” As of today, no state has such a force, so the Second Amendment gives almost no one the right to own a gun.

That doesn’t necessarily mean we have to get rid of all the guns. It just means there’s no active Constitutional right, and America’s legislatures can decide whether and when to allow firearm ownership.

In my opinion, the legislatures should leave hunters their rifles (and maintain laws protecting animals from cruelty and extinction). But there’s no excuse for handguns or assault rifles. A man who wants to play warrior should buy a beautiful replica sword or suit of armor — or even an Eighteenth Century flintlock rifle (which wouldn’t do much as a tool for crime or massacre, since it’s hard to conceal and slow to reload). And anyone who wants to be a real warrior should join the military or the police. The fantasies of overgrown children aren’t worth the lives of real children.

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SOURCES

• Painting, 1856, by Junius Brutus Stearns, Washington at Constitutional Convention of 1787, signing of U.S. Constitution

© 2013 by David Carthage.

Highclere Castle in Hampshire, England: the Victorian mansion serving as TV’s fictional Downton Abbey

The Downton story begins in 1912, but the family’s problem has its origin centuries earlier, in the High Middle Ages. Most European monarchies and noble families operated under the primogeniture system, where the eldest son inherits the title, even if he has an older sister. In many versions of primogeniture, daughters couldn’t inherit their father’s title even if they had no brothers. And in some, the daughters’ sons and grandsons couldn’t even inherit. The title had to pass to and through men. (Another wrinkle: all men in the line of descent had to be legitimate sons, with married parents. No bastards!)

France’s King Charles IV, for example, died in 1328, leaving only daughters. French primogeniture denied them the throne. The king’s closest male relative was his nephew, Edward: his sister’s son. But nephew Edward was disqualified too, since his claim ran through a woman. So the throne went to the king’s cousin, the son of his father’s younger brother, who became King Philip VI. (Actually, the French nobility hastily adopted the rule against men claiming through their mothers to make sure nephew Edward couldn’t inherit, since he happened to be king of England. Edward didn’t agree, and the result was the Hundred Years’ War.)

Downton Abbey reveals that Earl Robert inherited from his father, who presumably got the title from his father — in a line of succession stretching back to the first Earl of Grantham, based on a strict male-only version of primogeniture. The system keeps Robert from leaving the title to one of his daughters. If Robert had a younger brother, he’d be next in line, and his sons (Robert’s nephews) would follow. But no such luck. Who then? Somewhere further up the line, one of those historic earls had a younger son who didn’t inherit the title. If that younger son has a living descendant through an all-male line, he becomes the earl after Robert. That’s Matthew.

But what about Robert’s real estate, as opposed to his title? What about Downton Abbey and the surrounding farmland? That’s where the entail comes in. An entail (a.k.a. “fee tail”) is basically a will that sets up a primogeniture system for real estate. A lord or other landholder leaves his house and land to his son “and the male heirs of his body.” It ensures that a single male descendant gets all the family’s real estate. Where the family has a noble title, the entail follows the title, so the same man gets the real estate and the lordship. Earl Robert’s family has an entail, so Matthew gets the earldom, the farmland, and Downton Abbey.

The show throws in another complication. Lord Robert married a rich American, Cora, and her money is vital to the family. Why can’t the couple’s daughters inherit their mother’s cash? The two families signed legal documents adding Cora’s fortune to the entail.

What if there’s no one left with the necessary all-male descent? If we’re talking about a kingdom, the parliament or nobles will pick someone — they’ll bend the rules — because you’ve got to have a king or queen. A noble title, on the other hand, will often die out without a proper heir. There won’t be a new earl or duke or whatever. [SPOILER ALERT: SKIP THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED SEASON 3.] At the end of Downton Abbey Season 3, Matthew dies, and if he’d left no son, the Earldom of Grantham could go extinct. We don’t know if the Downton family has some more distant male-descended cousin. Happily, the family faces no such trouble. Matthew married Earl Robert’s eldest daughter, Mary, and fathered a son. The baby is the heir — through his father Matthew, ironically, not through his maternal grandfather, the actual earl.

Unlike titles, real estate never dies. So in most cases the entail will just end if there is no male-descended heir, and the owner can decide who inherits his land and house.

England outlawed the entail in 1925, and most U.S. states have too. But that only applies to real estate. England still allows male-only primogeniture for aristocratic titles, and an only slightly less sexist version still governs the throne. (Princesses can inherit if they’ve got no brothers. Thus, Queen Elizabeth.) The government, however, plans to install a newfangled gender-neutral primogeniture system for kings and queens, starting with the next generation. So if Kate Middleton’s first child is a daughter, the little princess will be heir to the throne after her father, Prince William, even if the next genetic shuffle deals her a brother.

By the way, Downton‘s creator, Julian Fellowes, is married to the niece of an English earl. If not for primogeniture, his wife would have inherited the title when the old earl died childless in 2011. Instead, the title died with the earl because there was no all-male descended heir. So Fellowes is  intimately familiar with primogeniture — and he’s argued for imposing the gender-neutral version on the British aristocracy.

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SOURCES

• Photo: Highclere Castle (April 2011), by Richard Munckton from  Windsor, Melbourne, Australia — provided through Wikimedia Commons

© 2013 by David Carthage.

Dense, artistic Florence

The explanation for urban power seems to be that cities foster creativity—more than any other institution. According to urban researcher Geoffrey West, city-dwellers produce more patents per person than their rural counterparts. In fact, the city’s advantage in patents per capita increases by 15% every time the population doubles, leading to exponential jumps as urban populations get really big. That data squares with less measurable evidence that city-dwellers produce more art, literature, and technology per capita than country-folk. What’s the source of this advantage? Crowding. The more we interact with other people, the more their practices, cultures, and off-beat ideas lead us to creative leaps. And the better a city is at fostering idea-exchanges across networks, the greater its creative output. That networking effect explains why some cities stand out above their peers, like Classical Athens for philosophy, Hellenistic Alexandria for science, Renaissance Florence for art and architecture, Elizabethan London for literature, Belle Époque Paris for the arts, and today’s Silicon Valley (a tightly connected uber-metropolis) for information technology.

The result of all this creativity? Cities get rich, despite all their disadvantages. That wealth and cities’ creative energy draw immigrants from the country.

If you’ve read much ancient history, that explanation probably resonates. The moment cities appear in places like Sumer, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica, you get explosions of technology, architecture, governance, literature, and art—and innovations like writing systems, number systems, wheels, sailboats, bureaucracy, ziggurats, pyramids, palaces, statuary, epic mythology, tomb painting, business records, and much more.

I think urban creativity has implications for the future, too. Creativity research suggests the urban advantage requires in-person interactions, not virtual connections. One study, for instance, found that teammates working together in person solve problems faster than teams connected via the Internet. Another found that the most influential scientific papers tend to be written by researchers located close together. If in-person interaction does carry a major advantage, there’s a flaw in widely discussed predictions of a grim future for Western economies. In his 2005 book The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman argues that technology is flattening the world—that the Internet and other communications systems make location unimportant. So jobs will continue to flee wealthy countries like the U.S. to lower-cost workers in India and other developing countries, connected to distant centers of innovation via the Internet. But if creativity thrives where innovators connect in person—in cities—the world will never be flat. The best jobs and the greatest productivity will remain in the creative cities that power the world economy, including Western centers of innovation like New York, the Silicon Valley, London, and Munich. Perhaps Americans and other Westerners should worry about competition from cities overseas. But we don’t need to worry quite so much about foreign workers taking the best jobs produced by our cities. Creativity requires frequent, regular in person interaction—just as much in the Twenty-First Century as during distant antiquity, when cities began their march across the globe.

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SOURCES

• Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works (2012).
  
• Photo: Overview of Florence from Campanile di Giotto, by Scott Raymond of Kansas City, USA — provided through Wikimedia Commons

© 2013 by David Carthage.

The body louse, Pediculus humanus corporis

Body lice belong to the same species as head lice, but they have their own subspecies. They’re Pediculus humanus corporis, while head lice are Pediculus humanus capitis. Body lice have claws adapted to grasping fabric and other materials, rather than hair, and they secure their eggs to clothing. So they need clothes and can’t have evolved from head lice until our ancestors got dressed. Scientists think the bloodsuckers would’ve exploited the new environment pretty quickly after it appeared, so body lice must have split off from head lice around the time clothes came along. Genetic analysis can tell us when two species diverged: when their last common ancestor lived. The answer from studies of Pediculus humanus DNA? Lice split into two subspecies—and people started wearing cloths—sometime between 80,000 and 170,000 years ago.

Interestingly, the Homo sapiens who lived eighty-plus thousand years ago weren’t quite … us. They’re called “anatomically modern humans” because their bodies matched ours (roughly), but their brains apparently didn’t. Anthropologists think they lacked real language. In other words, our ancestors started getting dressed before they could talk.

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© 2013 by David Carthage.

Modern linguistic analysis reveals that the Indo-European mother tongue comes from southern Russia and the Ukraine (or possibly Turkey). It spread from there between 4000 and 2500 B.C.E. White people do speak many of the daughter tongues, but that’s probably not because white genes spread with the Aryan language. It’s more likely the Aryans developed a useful package of cultural institutions, like horse-herding and client/patron relationships, and their language spread with their culture—in the same way American culture and language are spreading today. And even if Aryans did conquer this or that country, they must have been a small group, and they must eventually have mixed with the larger native population. So their genes wouldn’t dominate modern populations. That means the white skin found in places like England, Germany, and Iran probably comes from the natives who adopted the Aryan languages, not from the Aryans themselves.

So we don’t  know what color skin the Aryans had. But their likely homeland isn’t far from areas currently populated by Asians, Middle Easterners, and Indians. And ethnic groups regularly move around. The upshot is that Hitler and his successors pledged their Aryan allegiance to a tribe that may have sported Chinese or Mongolian features, or dark skin.

Incidentally, the term “Aryan” comes from the languages of Northern India, and we no longer use it for those prehistoric language-spreaders. Researchers today call the mother tongue “proto-Indo-European.” And they use an elegant name for the people who spoke it: “people who spoke proto-Indo-European.”

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SOURCES:

• Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (2010).
• Malhotra, European Misappropriation of Sanskrit led to the Aryan Race Theory, Huffington Post (2011).

© 2012 by David Carthage. All rights reserved.

(c) 2012 by David Carthage

(You can see a version with better resolution here, at my Picasa album. Click on the magnifying glass in the upper right corner to expand the copy.)

BTW, as some have pointed out, it’s been quite a while since I’ve actually posted any history–as opposed to Jericho River updates. I’ve just had too much to do getting the book ready. But the history posts will return!

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CREDITS: The shorelines and the rivers com e from maps provided by d-maps.com at the following URL: http://d-maps.com/carte.php?lib=wide_mediterranean_sea_map&num_car=3137&lang=en. The compass roses come from fuzzimo.com, though it’s been modified from the fuzzimo original. David Carthage drew all other map features.

© 2012 by David Carthage. All rights reserved.