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Byzantine Emporia Profile picture
@byzantinemporia
Jul 17, 2023 • 8 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
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Most of the adventures in the Arabian Nights take place around the Indian Ocean, stories with Persian or Indian origins. But at least one of them comes from Byzantine tales of the exotic. Thread. https://t.co/32qnrzdCOK https://t.co/KeoZXWzYnftwitter.com/i/web/status/1…

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In the 4th century, an Egyptian Greek visited the island of Taprobane (usually identified as Sri Lanka, based on Ptolemy’s description). He reported that magnetic rocks on the island prevented ships made with iron nails from departing. https://t.co/WsdwqjNOsAtwitter.com/i/web/status/1…
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This story was embellished over the ages. In the 6thcentury, Procopius related a legend circulating in his time that the entire Indian Ocean was filled with magnetic rocks that shipwrecked vessels with iron—this was said to explain why shipwrights there did not use nails. Image
Indian Ocean ships did not in fact use nails until much later. Instead, planks were stitched together with palm fiber.

Marco Polo thought this was because of the hardness of the wood—the preferred teak is indeed very hard, but is not impossible to nail.
https://t.co/HU4TffFv1C

Pictures from this excellent account of sewn boats in India: https://www.einesaite.com/blog/einesaite/2013/11/26/sewing-boats
Pictures from this excellent account of sewn boats in India: https://www.einesaite.com/blog/einesaite/2013/11/26/sewing-boats
There are several other possible explanations for this: the scarcity of iron in the Indian Ocean (as Procopius believed), the abundance of palm fiber, or to make the hull more flexible when they get beached on the many coral reefs and sandbars.
https://t.co/KUFwfh5sZS
Photo from Qatar's annual dhow festival: https://www.marhaba.qa/dhow-boats-in-qatar/
The legend got embellished even more by the time it made it into the Thousand and One Nights. In the Third Qalandar’s Tale, one of the oldest in the collection, a ship is blown by a storm toward the Magnet Mountain, causing the nails to fly out and the ship to sink. https://t.co/BRp18pBE00twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
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There may also be a faint echo in Sindbad’s sixth voyage: when he is shipwrecked on Serendib (i.e. Sri Lanka, or Taprobane), his ship is dashed against a cliff where many other merchant vessels have been wrecked.
It seems strange that characters from Harun al-Rashid’s Baghdad were sailing around in iron-nailed ships in the first place. But the oldest manuscripts of the Nights are Egyptian and Syrian—Mediterranean people like the Byzantines, telling tales of the exotic far-off East. https://t.co/EGGvmGADWttwitter.com/i/web/status/1…
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More from @byzantinemporia

Byzantine Emporia Profile picture
Aug 18, 2024
Ottoman borders in the 15th century looked a lot like Byzantium during its ascent: for similar geographic reasons they faced an ongoing state of war along their eastern frontier. But once they turned their full attention to the problem, they solved it much more dramatically.🧵
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Anatolia was the Ottomans’ base of power, where they welded together the Turkic beyliks that formed in the wake of Byzantine retreat. This was a gradual process, and by the 15th c. several retained varying degrees of independence.

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One of these was the Karamanids in southern Anatolia, who often tried to expand this during periods of Ottoman weakness or disunity. One of these attempts came in 1444, when the so-called Crusade of Varna was attacking their Balkan possessions. Image
Read 21 tweets
Byzantine Emporia Profile picture
Jul 8, 2024
Quotes are from a superb pair of essays by @Scholars_Stage, Luttwak's book on Byzantium gives a similar misreading of their strategic culture (but cast in a positive light). In truth, the Byzantines were very eager to fight, diplomacy and bribes were only used as stop-gaps when occupied on another front, and the caution advised by their military manuals was tactical and operational—not strategic.
@Scholars_Stage On the first point, it was a matter of simple geography. They campaigned aggressively whenever threatened, but their two primary theaters were separated by an enormous distance.
The caution urged on frontier commanders by the manuals (e.g. On Skirmishing) has to be interpreted in light of the larger strategic picture. Prematurely forcing a battle risked leaving all of Anatolia exposed before the imperial army could mobilize.
Read 4 tweets
Byzantine Emporia Profile picture
Apr 4, 2024
When the Seljuks arrived in the Middle East, they played a very similar role to the Franks in Dark Age Europe: protectors of an enfeebled religious authority and the enforcers of orthodoxy.🧵 Image
The Franks who expanded into Gaul in the 6th century were unique among the barbarian kingdoms of Western Europe. Their king Clovis converted to Nicene Christianity, aligning himself with the surviving elite of the post-Roman West. Image
This stood in contrast to the Visigoths of Spain, Burgundians of southeast Gaul, Ostrogoths of Italy, and Vandals of North Africa, all of whom practiced Arianism and remained aloof of their subject populations. Image
Read 12 tweets
Byzantine Emporia Profile picture
Feb 10, 2024
It took a decade for a 17th-century financial crisis to travel from Spain to China.

The Spanish Crown suffered a pair of fiscal disasters in 1627-28 which eventually forced it to cut silver exports to the Far East, hammering a Ming China already teetering on the precipice. Image
The flood of New World silver into Asian markets in the 1500s crushed the value of metal currency, but also supercharged trade as new markets were opened for exports. The effect was the same from Syria to China.
By the second half of the century, the Far East was receiving about a third of the Spanish Crown’s silver (already 80% of the world’s supply).

Adding to this, new mines in Japan began producing large quantities in the middle of the century. Image
Read 9 tweets
Byzantine Emporia Profile picture
Jan 3, 2024
The Spartans drilled.

This is a ridiculous reading of the sources mentioned, and it neglects a few other important ones.

Thread.
To start with, one thing he gets right is that the classical Greeks deprecated the value of individual skill at arms—if anything, that would detract from their willingness to hold the line. Here’s a wonderful passage from the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, who is mentioned: Image
Maintaining formation—παρ᾿ ἀλλήλοισι μένοντες—is seen as the chief martial virtue. So how did they learn to do it?

Let’s look at the quote from Laches. Nicias suggests that young men should prepare for war by training at arms.Image
Read 21 tweets
Byzantine Emporia Profile picture
Oct 19, 2023
Easy to underestimate how thorough the breakdown of a centralized system can be. To put it in modern perspective, here's what it takes just to get the right 𝘸𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘵𝘩 for the lasers in lithography machines used to etch the most advanced microchips (from "Chip War")...


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That's a staggering amount of material, intellectual, and economic infrastructure required just to sustain one part of a very complicated process. Sustaining that infrastructure depends in turn on maintaining the process. If any one of several highly-centralized nodes is disrupted for any length of time, it becomes disproportionately more expensive and difficult to get it back online.
Systems are resilient and can recover from freak catastrophes. But anything that is likely to majorly disrupt one node is bound to introduce many other complications. Just as a hypothetical: a war over Taiwan that takes out TSMC, which manufactures 90% of advanced chips...
Read 10 tweets

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