The Flagellants

Two years into the Black Death and Europeans were going bat shit crazy in a desperate attempt to halt the worst epidemic to have ever hit the planet.

And seeing that European medical technology was about as advanced as owning an Atari in 2014, it’s no wonder that people turned to quack cures and religious fanaticism. Anything to make the oozy welts go away!

As panic spread, (and with 50-90% death rates, who wouldn’t panic), many people turned to God to save them. Convinced that the plague was God’s punishment for their sinful ways, communities of religious zealots began to form.

This charming group of nutjobs, belonged to The Order of the Flagellants, and they became famous for parading through the cities of Germany, France, and Switzerland flogging themselves bloody with the same kind of whip that the Romans had used on the back of Jesus. They thought they were cleverly making a personal connection with the savior. Sorry, but apparently Jesus wasn’t impressed because your little group died like everyone else–in a whole mess of pain and gore.

The Flagellant movement had been around since the 1200s, but it really got fired up during the height of the Black Death.

Groups ranging in size from fifty to five hundred would just roll into town, with drums beating and singing hymns to God. The noise was so loud that you could hear a Flagellant parade coming long before you could see them. Of course, that was the whole point. By the time the fanatic parade arrived the whole town had turned up to welcome them.

This was a show that you didn’t want to miss, especially since Reality TV wouldn’t be making an appearance for another eight hundred years.

Dressed only in simple white robes with a red cross across their chest, they would walk barefooted— even in the snow, to the nearest church, all the while crying out for God’s mercy. Then the fun would begin. The Flagellants would strip down to the waist and begin circling the church, the whole time beating themselves with leather whips spiked with tiny metal shards.

After each lash they would confess their sins to the crowd and then the flagellant master would administer another lash to their bared backs. Each lash tore away their flesh, leaving them bruised and bloody. But that was the whole bloody point. (insert your best British accent here)

The flagellant’s believed that only through pain and penance would God forgive them. But before you get the impression that the Order of the Flagellants were just a bunch of religious extremists who had lost their minds, the Flagellants had proof of God’s wrath.

So where did the Flagellants get the crazy idea that God was giving orders from behind the scenes? Well, from God himself of course. A letter written by God himself conveniently happened to turn up on in 1343 on the altar of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. In the letter God angrily tells the world “O ye children of men, ye of little faith, Ye have not repented of your sins nor kept My holy Sunday.” God supposedly then goes on to list all of the horrible things that he was about to unleash upon the world from earthquakes to a rat infestation.

Some town leaders were so impressed with the flagellants that they invited them to stay on for a weekly show.

Like a bad Las Vegas act the flagellants would tour for 33 days (to coincide with the number of years that Christ had lived) before moving on to the next stop on the tour. But not everyone was impressed with their act. Pope Clement VI condemned the movement as heretical and began actively trying to stop put an end to the whole bizarre spectacle. It worked. Soon the movement died out almost as quickly as it began.

The Real Plymouth Landing

Plymouth, Massachusetts 1620.

Forget that bullshit that you learnt about Plymouth Rock. The place where the Pilgrims chose to make land did have a big-ass rock but it certainly wasn’t important enough to be written about until the 19th century.

The place that was soon to be transformed into Plymouth Plantation was hardly anything to write home about. A sandy beach, dense forest, rocky soil, and a harbor too shallow for even a small ship like the Mayflower to sail into. If the Pilgrims needed to resupply they would have to row a mile into Cape Cod Bay. But at least the place had fresh water and no sign of hostile Indians. Yet.

But what they don’t tell you is that this ragged bunch of religious nonconformists had chosen to set up their colony in the midst of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Of course, the Pilgrims had no way of knowing that their new home was on the very spot where a plague– introduced by English fisherman, most likely smallpox– had killed off 90% of the Patuxet people. But, it certainly didn’t hurt their chances of survival either.

The Pilgrims didn’t even have to dig to find the gruesome evidence. The bones, long picked clean by predators, were lying right there on the beach. The survivors had left in such a hurry that they hadn’t bothered to bury their dead. After poking around for a bit, William Bradford led the Pilgrims in a quick prayer and then got down to business . But you can excuse the Pilgrims for not giving a shit. Death was now stalking them.

Here they were, December 21, 1620, facing a wilderness full of wild animals and “savages”. So far, the Pilgrims had been lucky not to have lost a single soul crossing the Atlantic, but their luck had run out. A lack of food and fresh water were beginning to take their toll. Every day since landing, someone new had died– including William Bradford’s wife, Dorothy who fell overboard and drowned. Some suggest that she committed suicide, unable to bear the isolation of their new home.

The Mayflower was turned into a makeshift hospital as patients fell ill from colds, pneumonia and even worse scurvy– a potentially fatal illness caused by vitamin C deficiency. If they didn’t find food and shelter fast the Plymouth crew would end up as a grisly reminder of the dangers that all first colonists faced.

Plymouth Colony almost hadn’t lasted long enough to become anything more than a historical ghost story. That first winter of 1620-21 Plymouth Colony was hit hard. The Pilgrim’s had not bothered to bring extra food because they assumed (wrongly) that they would just show up and trade beads for choice Indian chow. But that smallpox apocalypse really threw a monkey wrench in that plan.

Instead Squanto sauntering up to the Pilgrims with a hearty “welcome illegal white people”, the local Pokanokets were playing it safe by watching these foreigners from a distance.

It was December 23rd before the stormy weather had eased up enough to give the Pilgrims an opportunity to start building their new settlement. A work party armed with axes and saws began the backbreaking task of felling trees and dragging them to the site. After two weeks, they had built their first house. It wasn’t much to look at. The walls were logs stacked and stuffed with branches and “cemented” together with mud. The windows were covered by oiled parchment. The chimney was little more than a hole in the thatched roof.

The inside of a colonial home wasn’t much compared to modern standards; dark and smoky with their Keurig machine four hundred years in the future. But to appreciate what had been accomplished we have to consider that these individuals were working their tails off, weak from hunger, in the freezing cold of a New England winter.

That winter, half of the 102 original Pilgrims would die of a deadly combo: hunger, disease, and exposure to the cold and wet. Plymouth settlement came to a standstill– with only seven of the nineteen houses built– as every healthy person was on nursing duty. But, considering the horrors of Jamestown, they got off easy. After all, not a single Pilgrim turned cannibal.

The Pilgrims weren’t the first English settlers to come to the New World, nor were they even the first successful settlement. So why do we devote so much time to their story?

The Pilgrims were the first wave of a new type of colonist. In contrast to the isolated plantation culture of the South, the New England colonies grew up around small farming communities and towns. Their towns grew into cities like Boston, Hartford, and Providence which by the 19th century had become centers of the industrial revolution–turning southern cotton into expensive cloth.

The Puritans who came to New England were more educated than the average colonist. It was New England that passed America’s first laws for public schools. You can thank the Puritans for Harvard and Yale.

It also was in New England where colonists first began electing the local assembly and judges. It was in New England where the revolt over “”big government” led to the American Revolution.

Basically, you could say that the New England way of life shaped modern America. The entire American Civil War was nothing more than a contest between two ways of life. The plantation slave society that began in Jamestown and the industrial urban America that was planted in Plymouth back in 1620. It took 600,000 deaths but the Civil war decided which of these two cultures would go on t shape the modern United States.

Roman Gladiators

If there’s one thing you should know about the ancient Romans it’s that they loved their blood sport. When Claudius wanted to blow an entire day watching unadulterated violence he couldn’t reach for GTAV, and so, had to settle for an action packed day filled with criminal executions, lions munching on Christians, and gladiators turning one another into meat pudding. For Romans, death was a part of proving your manhood and nothing was more manly than sticking ones gladius into another man’s parmula. Seriously people? Get your mind out of the gutter; we’re talking about a sword and shield.

The empire was built on the backs of the masses of poor citizens and slaves who made up the vast bulk of the Roman masses. And, seeing that ones options for advancement in the ancient world were limited to say the least, it is no wonder that the badasses of society saw their best option in selling themselves into gladiatorial slavery.

Gladiators came from all over the Roman Empire: free men, debtors, POW’s, convicted criminals, unruly slaves– they were all forced to do battle for the amusement of the bloodthirsty Roman masses. Despite what Russell Crow may have taught you, gladiators started (and ended) their short lives at the bottom of the social ladder. The rare superstars might have risen to become heart throbs and maybe, just maybe, would have, through sheer badassery, built up enough street cred a to buy their freedom and retire a comfortable Roman life. But these were the exception, not the rule.

A gladiator was bought and owned by his ludus (gladiator school). Even free men who chose to join had to sign a contract (auctoramentum) gave up his freedom for a certain amount of years (if he lived that long) in return for token pay. For the remiainder of his contrat he lived in a simple cell- no bigger than a small bedroom with his army-style cot to sleep on. His meals were eaten in a canteen with the rest of his cohorts. These men were his familia gladiatoria. Family that he would one day have to try and stab to death. But on the bright side, if you did receive a nasty but non-fatal blow, you were treated with some of the best medical care. And massages were included in your healthcare plan. After all your manager didn’t want to see his investment die unnecessarily. So much for romance.

The typical day for a gladiator was spent like that of any other pro athlete–hours of mind numbing training. A newby began his day with a regiment of bodybuilding and weapons training. Each school hired their own weapons trainers who were expect in a particular style of combat. These teachers may have even been survivors themselves.

Armed with wooden weapons, gladiators would try to impress their trainers by hacking away at a 6 foot high wooden practice pole. This was their first lesson in how to handle a sword. For hours the trainee would attack, using military style combat tactics. Frontal assaults, side stabs, dodging imagined blows, and then leaping up to strike his enemy in the head. But any gladiator who only learned offense was a dead gladiator. Equally important was training in the fine art of defense. Keeping your shield up, jumping back, feinting, rolling, and most importantly, keeping those vital organs from becoming shish kabob.

The trainee’s number one priority was to get to the top of the pole. A gladiator who survived his first fight was known as a veterani. But to become a true hearthrob you had to keep on winning to become Primus Palus ‘top of the pole’.

Now your high school history teacher may have fed you some bullshit that every gladiatorial match ended with a dead body. But, you can excuse him for the lie, history books and movies having been feeding us that line for decades. But think about it logically. If you owned a gladiator would you really train a guy for months only to watch him buy the farm in his first 10 minutes in the ring? Hell no, that’s just bad investing.

Gladiators were the main event of a show that cost a lot of money and effort to put on. Only a complete idiot of a manager would just throw two men out into the arena at random. Sure, the crowd wanted to see blood but not an instant kill. Gladiators were paired up to be fairly equal in ability while continuing to provide maximum entertainment value.

Gladiators trained for months in a single style of combat. There were dozens of different styles. A Murmillo wore a helmet with a crest that looked a little like a fish (hence the name) and was armed with a long shield, shin guards a loincloth, and a gladius (short sword). A Murmillo was typically paired against a Thraex who, with his short curved blade, small shield, and long leg armor, was built for speed rather than brute strength. Either one of these two types of gladiator might face down a Retiarius who was different from any other style of fighter. This guy was easily recognizable because of his lack of armor. Only a loin cloth, a bronze arm plate, a net and a trident were what kept him alive in the ring. Like the fishing nets they are named after, the Retiarius had one shot with the net. If they hit their mark their opponent was done for. If they missed they had only their trident to fall back on.

The life of a gladiator was hard and brutal without much chance of bettering yourself. We know that many came into the arena as slaves or criminals, but why would anyone in their right mind willingly give up their freedom to die? The reasons are as simple back then as they are today. Desperate people take risks. Many sold themselves to a ludi in order to pay off a debt or perhaps earn enough money for his family to survive on. In Roman times, the poor (even children) sold themselves into slavery to pay their debts. The other reason is cold, hard fame. If you were any good you could look forward to a life of celebrity status. Not to mention all of the attention from the ladies.

Roman buildings are covered in graffiti with stuff like “The slasher Celadus makes all the girls sigh”. How Romantic. Speaking of the ladies. Even though it was a man’s sport, there are a few documented female gladiators who won fame for their skills in the arena. And, although it was rare, a few Roman nobles, senators’ sons and even a few emperors (Commodus and of course Nero) took up the sword. But usually, their swords were the wooden variety. These were rich boys “slumming it” after all. Few of these guys ever went on to doing the real thing. Although Commodus did try to get out into the ring, but who in their right mind would hit an emperor with real steel? Especially, the type of emperor who once had a gladiator killed because he was too popular!

Gladiators didn’t write about their own lives. At least historians haven’t found anything written by one. Much of what we know about gladiators comes from the works of historians like Seneca, who looked down on the games as barbaric. An even better source of information are the graves of gladiators. When you barely made it to 30 years old, leaving your name behind was important. Many gladiators were concerned with saving up enough cash to afford a proper burial. Historians have found several gladiator cemeteries. By examining their bones they are able to tell the way a gladiator died and at what age. This evidence shows that many gladiators survived their wounds and many lived to the ripe old age of 45.

Lexington & Concord

After the shenanigans of the Boston Tea Party, and by “shenanigans” we mean straight up corporate vandalism, the British government is on high alert. Parliament decides to take a get tough on crime approach. Like a mother with bad parenting skills, Parliament slaps down one controversial law after another in order to punish Boston and quash the rebellion. But Parliament is clearly stupid or naive– probably both.

Parliament sends in Thomas Gage as the new military governor of Massachusetts to restore law order to Boston. Like the High Sheriff in a bad western flick, Gage swaggers into town in 1774 and immediately begins laying down the law. Gage beefs up security–recalling regiments from Canada and the western provinces. Overnight the city of Boston (pop. 15,000) adds a few thousand soldiers. Boston is under military lockdown. What could go possibly wrong?

Governor Gage then convinces Parliament that the best way to deal with a bunch of angry colonists who feel that their rights are being threatened is to take away more of their rights. Makes perfect sense! Throughout 1774, Parliament passes the Boston Port Act which shuts down Boston’s trade with the outside world. This has the immediate effect of throwing hundreds of people out of work. Next came the Administration of Justice Act and Massachusetts Government Acts which put the kabash on democracy by crushing the colonial assembly. All colonial decisions in Massachusetts will, from now on, be made by His Majesty. So it comes as no surprise that these “Intolerable Acts” have the same effect as tossing a cat into a cage-full of dogs. Smooth move there Gage.

On February 2 1775, Parliament declares the colony of Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion. Cue the standoff music. Those colonists who are now calling themselves “Patriots” have been holding illegal meetings in direct violation of the Massachusetts Government Act. Colonial merchants defy the Boston Port Act by playing pirate and smuggling their goods into Boston Harbor. The colonists basically erected the 18th century version of a billboard that read: “Up yours King George!”.

But the biggest showdown will come to blows over the issue of gun control. Colonial towns have always been allowed to store their own weapons and gunpowder for easy access in case of an Indian attack. But, now these militias have become the new threat to British law and order. Both the Gage and the Patriots know that these gunpowder houses will be the first target when things turn ugly. Gage decides to act first and move the gunpowder where the Brits can keep a better eye on it. Gage is just doing what any commander with half a brain would do. But the colonials interpret this as the first move to disarm and force them into submission. Gage and the colonials are locked into a high stakes game of colonial chicken. Cue the sinister standoff music.

In September, 1774 Gage sent in the sheriff (backed up by a few Redcoats) to relocated the gunpowder stored at Somerville just in case any rebels decided to get ballsy. The same thing almost happened in Salem (but colonials got word and got there first). But things would turn out differently in Lexington.

Thanks to his network of spies and informers Gage was being fed steady information of Patriot activities. A British armory had been robbed, with the guns and ammunition now hidden somewhere in the Boston suburbs. Gage, puts together a secret mission to destroy the contraband, which is rumored to be hidden in the village of Concord. Oh, and while they are there arrest two colonial troublemakers: Sam Adams and John Hancock. Under the cover of darkness 700 elite British troops set out on April 18, 1775.

The Patriots have their own spies and Gage’s plan has been leaked. Around 10 p.m. two riders, Paul Revere and William Dawes, break curfew and slip past British sentries. The locals have set up a prearranged code of lanterns “one if by land, two if by sea” to communicate the movement of British troops. Gage has set up a feint, sending troops down the Charles River, but the main force is marching down the main road towards Concord. Dawes and Revere each take a different route to evade the British sentries that patrol the roads at night. But forget the nonsense about yelling the “British are Coming”. Remember, this is supposed to be a covert mission. Hence, the sneaking past the guards bit. Anyone stupid enough to go around shouting in the dark would have deserved the arrest and beating at the hands of British troops on the lookout for night riders. Seriously, Around midnight the pair roll into Lexington and sound the alarm giving Adams and Hancock to throw together a plan and then book out of town.

Dawes and Revere pick up a friend, local leader Samuel Prescott who happened to be returning from a one a.m. “visit to a lady friend”. The trio head off together in the direction of Concord but managed to get themselves stopped by a small unit of sentires. You know, the same ones that they were supposed to be avoiding. Dawes and Prescott manage to dodge arrest and leave Revere to fend for himself. Too bad for you Dawes and Prescott, for that jerk move you end up getting left out of Longfellow’s poem and history pretty much forgot about you. Revere is now being questioned by British troops. With a gun to his head (literally) Revere spun some bull story about large numbers of militia who were setting up an ambush back in Lexington. The sentries fall for the story and decide to march back to Lexington to investigate, where it turns out a militia actually has gathered and someone is ringing the town bell like a madman. The sentries decide they have bigger problems and let Revere go.

When the 700 Red coats reach Lexington the next morning they find a small group of colonial militia lined up on the town green waiting for them. Yeah, Revere lied about the numbers after all. But they weren’t here to fight but to make a silent protest.

The Americans had been told that the British were not allowed to fire unless they fired first. An anonymous British officer began ordering the militia to “lay down your arms”, classic cop move. Further up the road were the main column of 700 British regulars who charged, classic soldier move. The militia broke and ran, classic militia move. In the tension, someone fired the shot “heard ’round the world”, as the line goes. The Americans claimed it was a British officer on horseback, naturally the British pointed the finger back at the Americans.But it really doesn’t matter.

The British charged, stabbing with bayonets. The militia began firing back from behind trees and tavern windows. By the time order was restored four militiamen were dead and ten wounded.

The British continued on in their mission to Concord, but the missing ammunition was already long gone. Word spread like a pee in a community pool full of kids that the British troops had killed American militiamen. Drums and gunfire brought farmers racing to Lexington. As the British retreated back to Boston, they found themselves surrounded at every turn by angry militiamen who, fighting Indian style, fired at the British regulars from the woods and behind rocks. The British literally had to fight every inch of the way back to Boston. By the time the British reached their headquarters in Boston, 250 were dead.

The American Revolution was on. Even if nobody knew it yet.