Western Europe
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The Affair of the Poisons
Court is treacherous place full of back biting nobles who would sell their own mothers to get ahead. The Affair of the Poisons was an episode in the court of Louis XIV that exemplified exactly how far one would go to get where they needed to be in court. It all started with the arrest of the wife of a minor noble, the Marquise de Brinvilliers. As with most noble marriages, the Marquise did not marry for love. In fact, she disliked her husband the Marquis enough to attempt to murder him. She apparently didn’t do a very good job because she didn’t succeed and got caught. However, this was…
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The Eleanor Crosses
Edward I of England and his queen, Eleanor of Castile, were deeply devoted to one another. Their marriage, like most marriages at the time, was pure rooted in pragmatic politics. Henry III, Edward’s father, was having a dispute with Eleanor’s half brother Alphonso over claims to the duchy of Gascony. A deal was struck that Alphonso would cede his claims to his half-sister’s new husband after the marriage. They were married at Burgos in Castile in August 1254 in a lavish ceremony. Although the two had not known each other previously, there seems to be a real affection that grew up between them. From the time of the marriage, they…
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The Lost Roman Legion of Crassus
Marcus Licinius Crassus was one of the richest men in the Roman World and part of the First Triumvirate with notables such as Pompeius Magnus and Julius Caesar. He had made his money through picking up the property of those killed in Sulla’s proscriptions at firesale prices. Indeed, he was accused of adding the name of a particularly rich man just so he could pick up his property at bargain basement prices. Combine that through slave trafficking and silver mines, gave Crassus a fortune estimated by Pliny at 200 million sestertii, or about 8.5 billion in today’s dollars. If his name sounds familiar, you may have heard in the old…
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Green children of Woolpit
The village of St. Mary’s of the Wolf Pits, or Woolpit for short, was a quiet little place in Suffolk, East Anglia. In the Middle Ages, the village belonged to the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, which had great wealth and power in the area. It was in a very densely populated agricultural area of England. So imagine the villager’s surprise when they came out to work their land and found two green children. A strange story, one that was told by two 12th century chroniclers- Ralph of Coggestall and William of Newburgh. The place the story of the green children within the reign of either King Stephen or…
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A German Texas- Mainzer Adelsverein
When most people think of Texas they think of wide open spaces, cowboys and oil rigs. They do not think of oompah bands. However, that is what you will find in the German Belt of Texas. This is an area of towns founded by the The Mainzer Adelsverein at Beibrich am Rhein or Adelsverein for short. This was a society set up to fund the immigration of Germans to Texas to start a New Germany. Wait, Germans in Texas? How does this work? Germany in the 19th century was divided into more than thirty independent kingdoms, principalities, and free cities. Adding to this chaos was the birth of the industrial…
