Skip to main content

July 11, 969 AD

We read of the ferocity of the Mongolian armies but it turns out the great wall of China was built not to keep out men. The wall was built to keep out horses. Another good defense against horseback soldiers was, a wooden wall. The story is told of Genghis Khan that, faced with a walled city prepared for a long siege, he parlayed with the inhabitants in these terms: give me 1000 cats and 10,000 swallows, and I will end the siege. He received the animals. His men tied pieces of cloth to the tails of the cats and birds, then lit the cloth on fire. The animals were freed to run home, thereby setting the wooden structures aflame.

This is described in a 17th century chronicle written by Sagang Sechen. John R. Krueger, translated Sechen's A History of the Eastern Mongols to 1662 (1964).

David Morgan's book, The Mongols, (1986), points out that "slight variants" of this story are told about other historical figures: Princess Olga of Kiev, Harald Hardrada of Norway, Guthrum the Dane, and Robert Guiscard the Norman.

Princess Olga's slight variant does not include cats. Olga's ploy, when her husband was murdered, and she was faced with solidifying control of what we now call Kievan Russia, in order that her son's inheritance would be safe, involved doves. Olga sent the flaming birds into a rebellious stronghold. She was an early convert to Christianity and the eastern orthodox church considers her a saint, her sanctity equivalent to that "of the apostles." Princess Olga of Kiev died on July 11, 969.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

May 27, 1564

  May 27, 1564 John Calvin, a Protestant theologian who argued for predestination, was fond of his wife's cat,"Henriette." His wife and his wife's cat died in the same month, and according to J. Stephen Lang, author of 1,001 Things You Always Wanted to Know about Cats, Calvin did not get another wife or another cat. John Calvin died on May 27, 1564.
Post a Comment
Read more

August 23, 1941

Onora Sylvia O'Neill (August 23, 1941) is a British thinker. She studied at Oxford and received a doctorate from Harvard. After a noted career, in 1992, she  accepted the post of  Principal of  N ewnham College, Cambridge, and since 2006 she has been Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Her 1997 paper, "Environmental Values, Anthroporphism, and Speciesism" contains a timely  argument  in which Dr. O'Neill, (she prefers that title to the "Baroness" to which her elevation to the peerage allows) points out inadequacies in the use of the term speciesism to argue against according humans more ethical rights than aspects of the non human world.  A viewpoint that puts " a person torturing a cat is on a par with a cat torturing a bird," is not one she finds supportable. The link is to a downloadable version of this paper.  We have  this picture  of Onora O'Neill, in 2002, at Newnham College: We meet in the Principal's lodge at Ne...
Post a Comment
Read more

July 8, 2006

 Raja Rao, the Indian writer credited for his authentic portrayal of Indian values in English publications died on July 8, 2006. From his obituary in The Guardian this description of two books Rao wrote. "Aiming at an ultimately positive encounter between east and west, Rao's metaphysical novel,  The Serpent and the Rope  (1960), displays an intellectuality that goes beyond the textual, through its metaphysical associations and a spiritual dimension that tells us much about the Indian and European worlds. His protagonist, Ramaswamy, entertains his friends with philosophical discussions ranging over an impressive set of themes - including Buddhism, theology, monasticism and world politics - while at the same time he charmingly invites the reader to envisage reality from his Hindu viewpoint, offering the key of distinguishing the projected reality of the serpent from the existing reality of the rope, an image derived from Shankara. ...[In a subsequent book,] Rao manages to ...
Post a Comment
Read more