BY PALACE STEPS (PHOTOS INSIDE!).
How did an illiterate, raggedly dressed peasant with a well-known reputation for s.e.xual debauchery become a trusted friend to Czar Nicholas II and Czarina Alexandra of Russia? Well, it may have been Rasputin"s remarkable ability to heal their hemophiliac son, Aleksei. Or maybe, as many have thought, Alexandra was in love with him. When Czar Nicholas went to the front during World War I, Alexandra stayed behind to run the country, and the s.e.x-crazed holy man Rasputin became her most trusted adviser. Meanwhile, she probably became the most prominent of his many mistresses. Though not the best-looking fellow you"d ever meet, Rasputin did have certain, uh, a.s.setshis p.e.n.i.s was supposedly more than a foot long. It"s unlikely that Alexandra and Rasputin ever consummated their bizarre friendship, but by December 1916, the mere rumor of peasant-on-czarina loving was simply too much to bear for a group of Russian aristocrats, who finally decided to put Rasputin out of their misery. It wasn"t easy. He survived poisoning and two gunshot wounds before finally being drowned in the icy Neva River.
Touch of Evil Before Horatio Alger"s rags-to-riches stories inspired a generation of youngsters, he was quietly dismissed as minister of the First Unitarian Church in Brewster, Ma.s.sachusetts, for allegedly molesting two young boys who were members of the congregation *
_04:: James Joyce (18821941) When an admirer once asked if he could "kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses," James Joyce replied, "No. It has done a lot of other things, too." Indeed it had. Ulysses, the exemplar of 20th-century literature, was banned in much of the world for its purported obscenity. (For the greatest literary accomplishment of its time, Ulysses does feature a lot of s.m.u.t.) In America, Judge John M. Woolsey lifted the ban on Ulysses in December of 1933 (the same month Prohibition ended), and Joyce"s sprawling, brilliant tale of one day in Dublin became an instant sensation. Ulysses may not be obscene, but Joyce himself was a bit of a perv. He admitted to finding women"s unwashed underwear eroticperhaps not coincidentally, panties and petticoats pop up in Ulysses rather frequently.
_05:: Edna St. Vincent Millay (18921950) Many writers have been unfaithful to their spouses, but few can match Edna St. Vincent Millay. The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Millay was married for 26 years to Eugene Boissevain. In a reversal of traditional gender roles, Boissevain did most of the housework and Millay most of the philandering. She took many lovers, both male and female, and one biographer described her as having a "megawatt libido." True enough, but so did a lot of male poets (like Lord Byron), and they didn"t catch much flak for it. Millay was open, and funny, about her trysts. When she complained of headaches to a psychologist at a party, he wondered whether Millay might have a subconscious attraction to women. "Oh, you mean I"m a h.o.m.os.e.xual!" Millay replied. "Of course I am, and a heteros.e.xual, too. But what"s that got to do with my headache?"
_06:: F. Scott Fitzgerald (18961940) Another great modernist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, had his own quirks. Like many authors (Dostoyevsky and Thomas Hardy, among others), Fitzgerald may have had a foot fetish, at least according to biographer Jeffrey Meyers. In 1917, Fitzgerald became acquainted with the great love of his life, Zelda Sayre, outside of Montgomery, Alabama. They married in 1920, the same year his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published. Then, five years later, his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, hit the shelves. Shortly thereafter, Zelda lost her tenuous grip on sanityshe eventually landed in a sanitarium after she began practicing ballet day and night. All those hours en pointe couldn"t have been good for her feet. But Fitzgerald might not have cared: most critics think he was only kidding when he made references to a "pedentia complex," which just goes to show you, be careful what you joke about.
A Pain in the Royal Horse:
5 s.e.x Rumors About Royalty
Long before Prince Charles proved that love is blind by cheating on his beautiful wife with Camilla Parker-Bowles, bluebloods had already proudly renounced monogamy. Over the centuries, they"ve coveted their neighbors" wives countless times, sure, but what about their neighbors" livestock? It"s time to separate the perverted facts from the perverted fiction about royal s.e.x lives.
_01:: Catherine the Great (17291796) The reign of Catherine II, the German-born czarina of Russia, began when she overthrew her alcoholic, incompetent, and purportedly impotent husband, Frederick (the not so Great), in 1762. If there was one thing Catherine the Great would not stand for, it was impotence. Although grossly overweight, Catherine loved mena great many of them, in factover the course of her 34-year reign. And then, it was rumored, she died during a botched attempt to make love (if it can be called such a thing) to a horse. The rumor may have been spread by Catherine"s Polish enemies, who resented her for annexing much of Poland. (On the list of European royalty"s leisure activities, "overrunning Poland" has historically been a close second to "s.e.x.") At any rate, Catherine never had s.e.x with a horse, and one wonders why anyone felt compelled to make up such a story, since her actual death was plenty humiliating. While straining on the toilet, she had a stroke.
Touch of Evil Supposedly, a priest attending Napoleon"s autopsy ended up "saving" certain body parts, including the Bonaparte p.e.n.i.s. Later bought by a collector and displayed in a New York museum, the organ was said to resemble "a shriveled sea horse."
_02:: A Tale of Two Georges In what seems to be an outlandish coincidence, England"s king George II (16831760) also died of a stroke while on the commode. Some sources say that although he was quite happily married to his wife, Queen Caroline, George took mistresses so as to maintain his reputation. After all, a mistressless king could be seen as weak or, worse still, impotent. His son, George III, however, broke that streak of monarchial infidelity when he married the notoriously homely Princess Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1761. Seeing her for the first time on their wedding day, George is said to have winced in disgust, but the two came to love one another immensely (and frequentlythey had 15 kids), and George III was never unfaithful.
_03:: Another Royal Horse The Roman emperor Caligula (1241 CE) redefined s.e.xual debauchery during his reign. Aside from fancying himself a G.o.d and having an altogether creepy s.e.xual fascination with his sister Drusilla, Caligula supposedly engaged in many orgies (which inspired a famous adult film). Plus, he had a suspiciously intimate relationship with his favorite horse, Incitatus. Some Roman historians claimed that Caligula intended to make his horse consul, but that appears to have been kind of a Roman urban legend. Roman historians despised Caligula so intensely that it"s difficult to sort out the actual facts of his reign. And while Caligula did like his horse (he apparently built Incitatus a house), there"s no reason to believe he "liked him" liked him.
_04:: Jahangir (15691627) Though there are plenty of excellent candidates for most s.e.xually insatiable king ever, including Hal the h.o.r.n.y (the oft-married Henry VIII of England), our vote has to go to Jahangir, the fourth Mughal emperor of India. Jahangir had little to do with the day-to-day running of the empirethat work was accomplished by his favorite wife, Nur Jahan. (The Taj Mahal was built for Jahan"s niece, Mumtaz Mahal.) While Jahan became one of the most powerful women of the 17th century, Jahangir busied himself with loving. He supposedly had 300 wives (296 more than allowed by the religion, Islam, he supposedly followed), 5,000 female concubines, and 1,000 male concubines. Jahangir also kept a ma.s.sive herd of 12,000 elephants, but we won"t speculate.
_05:: And, of Course, Prince Charles! (1948) Of all the recent s.e.x rumors about the British royal family, none has been kept quite so quiet as that of Prince Charles"s supposed bis.e.xual affair. For weeks in late 2003, the British press printed banner headlines about a royal s.e.x scandal but, conscious of Britain"s strict libel laws, never came out and openly revealed the accusations. Instead, they engaged in all manner of hints and innuendo. This led to the strange phenomenon of the royal family issuing a statement denying allegations that had never publicly been made. The rumor: Prince Charles had a love affair with his adviser Michael Fawcett. Scandalous, sure, but unlikelyit seems the prince only has eyes for Camilla. After decades of courtship, they finally wed in 2005.
ENVY.
5 People Admired for Their Jail Time 6 Sets of Mismatched Siblings 3 Famous People Who Had Famous Heroes 6 National Inferiority Complexes and the Wars They Caused 6 Well-spread Fabrications 3 Showy Leaders and the Envious Imitators They Inspired 5 Grossly Mismatched Warfare a.r.s.enals 7 Geniuses and 1 Entire Science That Never Won the Big One 3 Tiny Nations That Were Happy to Colonize Africa 6 Musicians Who Always Felt Cheated 4 Men Who Tried to Outdo Their Dads 5 Women Who Disguised Themselves as Men to Succeed 3 Early Middle East Conflicts 6 Feuds Steeped in Jealousy 5 Infamous Second-place Finishers Who Never Got the Spotlight 4 Famously Jealous Politicians Does That Come in Stripes?
5 People Admired for Their Jail Time
Before she began serving her five-month sentence for illegal insider trading in 2004, Martha Stewart came perilously close to comparing herself to a somewhat more n.o.ble former inmate. "There"s many other good people that have gone to prison. Look at Nelson Mandela." Oh, we"ll look at him, Martha. But we"re not so sure you"ll stack up. While we wouldn"t envy the following folks, they certainly earned respect by spending time in the clink.
_01:: Nelson Mandela: The Political Prisoner The son of a Tembu chief, Nelson Mandela worked as a lawyer (an honest lawyer!) until becoming a leader of the African National Congress in 1949. Today, Mandela has a reputation for nonviolence, but in reality he embraced armed struggle and sabotage after the appalling 1960 ma.s.sacre of nonviolent protesters in Sharpeville. After admitting he helped found Spear of the Nation, the ANC"s military wing, Mandela was sent to prison for life. During his 28 years in jail, the charismatic Mandela became even more popular among black South Africans, and his writings from prison, particularly I Am Prepared to Die, galvanized international opposition to apartheid. Released in 1990, Mandela made the most of his freedom. Within four years, he helped negotiate an end to apartheid, won the n.o.bel Peace Prize, and became South Africa"s first black president.
_02:: 50 Cent: The Platinum Prisoner In the hip-hop world, nothing sells like street cred. Anybody can rhyme about prison and shootings and drug dealsbut it"s the precious rapper who can claim nine bullet wounds and several incarcerations that"ll move those alb.u.ms. For better or for worse, 50 Cent"s payment of dues in jail certainly played a role in his seven-figure record contract. After all, the rap world was starving for authenticity, and 50 (aka Ben Jackson) was a true gangster in the Tupac mold. His resume includes growing up selling crack and surviving being shot nine times in 2000 (he"s also been stabbed!). Many critics, and some fellow rappers, have attributed his success more to his life"s story than his mediocre rhyming. But it"s probably not a trade worth makingmost ex-con crack dealers who get repeatedly shot and occasionally stabbed tend not to end up with platinum alb.u.ms.
_03:: Adolf Hitler: The Palace-Bound Prisoner These days, Adolf Hitler is perhaps history"s least admired individual. But during his reign as Fuhrer, Hitler"s time in prison was seen as proof he sacrificed for National Socialism and Germany. In reality, though, his hard time wasn"t particularly hard. Sentenced to five years in prison after failing spectacularly to take over the country in 1923, Hitler served only nine months. Also, he was "jailed" in a castle, and all his friends were either in jail with him or free to visit. What"s a poor inmate to do? At the castle, Hitler decided to write (or dictate, actually) Mein Kampf, his self-aggrandizing autobiography/study in irrational hatred. Hitler originally gave the book the catchy t.i.tle Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice, which n.a.z.i publishers smartly shortened to the catchier My Struggle. Soon enough, much of Germany admired Hitler"s struggleeven if he was the real lying, stupid coward.
_04:: Leonard Peltier: The Pine Ridge Prisoner While America was extricating itself from Vietnam in the early 1970s, a minor war was brewing on the home front. The American Indian Movement (AIM), advocating a return to Native traditions, was locked in a fierce battle with those Indians who supported, and were supported by, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. Some 60 Native Americans died, but the story didn"t become big news until June 26, 1975, when two FBI agents were killed during a gunfight on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. AIM activist Leonard Peltier was convicted of the murders. Although quite probably guilty, many (including Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Amnesty International) have argued that Peltier is a political prisoner. President Clinton considered pardoning him in 2000 but didn"t. Perhaps hoping to pardon himself, Peltier ran for president in 2004 as the candidate for the somewhat ironically named Peace and Freedom Party.
_05:: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Pacifist Prisoner The most prominent theologian in Hitler"s Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer openly and courageously opposed n.a.z.ism and condemned the church for "staying silent when it should have cried out." Although a pacifist, Bonhoeffer partic.i.p.ated in a lengthy struggle to overthrow the n.a.z.is that culminated in a failed a.s.sa.s.sination attempt on Hitler. Already imprisoned for helping Jews escape to Switzerland, Bonhoeffer"s connection to the group resulted in his execution on April 9, 1945. His brilliant Letters and Papers from Prison remains in circulation, however, and is required reading for contemporary theologians. Among the first thinkers to consider the role of Christianity in an increasingly secular world, the suffering Bonhoeffer lived his theology. "G.o.d is weak and powerless in the world," he wrote, "and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which He is with us to help us."
Mom Always Liked You Best:
6 Sets of Mismatched Siblings
Brothers wrestle; sisters scream. Siblings always compare themselveshow much they"re loved, how much they inherit, how they lookand feelings always get hurt.
_01:: Jesus and Who?
The New Testament mentions brothers (adelphoi in Greek) of Jesus and even names them. Yet, many Christians teach that Jesus was an only child and that the adelphoi James, Simon, Judas (different from apostles James, Simon, and Judas), and Joseph were Jesus" cousins. In fact, according to Catholic theology, Jesus" mother, Mary, never had s.e.xual intercourse and never bore a child other than the Messiah, so the adelphoi couldn"t have been his brothers. Other lines of thought tell it a little differently, claiming that the Gospel writers used adelphoi literally and that Mary was a virgin only until after the birth of Jesus. We don"t want to take sides, but if these four guys really were Jesus" brothers, they got the seriously short end of the sibling stick. Imaginenot only is your brother G.o.d Almighty, he"s also the most famous man in history. Meanwhile, scholars are sitting around arguing about whether you ever even existed.
_02:: Charlotte Bronte and Her Five Siblings Maria and Elizabeth Bronte couldn"t help being eclipsed by younger sister Charlotte; after all, they died in girlhood in the 1820s. Sister Emily, second youngest, was the family"s only poetic genius and wrote Wuthering Heights (1847). Seen in retrospect as one of the finest novels in English, it was panned in its own time and she produced no more. Youngest sister Anne"s novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and especially The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), were popular, if literarily undistinguished. Branwell, the one brother, drank too much, smoked too much opium, and died a failure in 1848. Emily and Anne died the next year. All of which leaves Charlotte the only Bronte to achieve popular, critical, and lasting success with her novels, especially Jane Eyre (1847). In the end, she was the longest-lived of the TB-plagued Bronte siblings, surviving until age 39. She was also the only one to marry (the show-off).
_03:: John and Tom Fogarty: Bad Blood Rising In 1959, Tom Fogarty, two school chums, and Tom"s little brother, John, formed a band. Playing in the Fogarty garage in El Cerrito, California, they called themselves Tommy Fogarty & the Blue Velvets. Then, in 1964, they landed a recording contract with Fantasy Records in nearby Berkeley. Renamed the Golli-wogs, the band floundered until John suddenly emerged as both a towering talent and a control freak. As lead singer, lead guitarist, lead composer, lead lyricist, lead arranger, and lead (if not sole) band manager, he could do everything but spell. John turned the group, now called Creedence Clearwater Revival, into an "overnight" sensation, cranking out top-10 singles ("Proud Mary," "Bad Moon Rising," "Down on the Corner") and No. 1 alb.u.ms. Brother Tom? In 1971 he quit in disgust. Worse yet, he couldn"t catch a break. He pa.s.sed away in 1990 as a result of AIDS, a condition contracted from a blood transfusion.
TOM WOLFE"S HORRIBLE-TERRIBLE, NO-GOOD, VERY BAD DAY The 1998 publication of Tom Wolfe"s novel A Man in Full brought healthy sales but brutal reviews from literary heavy hitters including novelists John Irving, John Updike, and Norman Mailer. Mailer, a longtime Wolfe nemesis, was particularly d.a.m.ning, comparing reading the book to having s.e.x with a 300-pound woman. "Once she gets on top it"s all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated," Mailer wrote in The New York Review of Books. A decade earlier, the pugnacious Mailer had angered the Virginia-born Wolfe by making fun of his sartorial trademark, a natty white suit. At the time, Wolfe replied that "the lead dog is the one they always try to bite in the a.s.s." After the attacks on A Man in Full, Wolfe dismissed critics Mailer and Updike as "old bags of bones" and said that all three of his novelist-rivals (whom he often refers to as "My Three Stooges") were panicked by his neorealist fiction. Either that, or his fancy-pants style.
_04:: Jimmy and Billy Carter: Not Like Two Peanuts in a Sh.e.l.l Twelve years younger than brother Jimmy, Billy Carter found himself cast in the role of clown prince in the late 1970s. A beer-for-breakfast kind of guy who proudly wore a "Redneck Power" T-shirt, Billy sometimes embraced the role of buffoon and sometimes tried to shake the stigma. His bid to become mayor of Plains, Georgia, close on the heels of his brother"s 1976 presidential victory, failed. He also failed as manager of the family peanut warehouse. His PR makeover wasn"t helped by the fact that he regularly greeted reporters while perched on a stack of beer cases in his service station. It also wasn"t helped by his business initiatives: Billy once tried to cash in on celebrity, promoting a brand of beer named for him. His biggest misadventure, however, came when he accepted money from the Libyan government in return for his supposed influence with his brother. Dubbed "Billygate," the episode prompted a congressional investigation and embarra.s.sed Jimmy as his 1980 bid for reelection approached. Billy Carter died at age 51 in 1988.
_05:: Rajiv and Sanjay Gandhi: Who Gets Mom"s Job?
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had two sons: Rajiv and Sanjay. The elder, Rajiv, didn"t want to follow in the political footsteps of his family (including grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru, founding prime minister of independent India). So, he became an airline pilot. Sanjay, on the other hand, was groomed by Mom to succeed her as leader of the Indian National Congress Party. Willful and aggressive, Sanjay pushed for his mother"s 1975 declaration of a state of emergencyan unconst.i.tutional abuse of power. After Sanjay"s death in a 1980 plane crash, though, Rajiv agreed, reluctantly, to run for the Lok Sabha (lower house of the Indian parliament). After his mother"s a.s.sa.s.sination in 1984, though, he was cast full force into the political sphere and elected prime minister. Unlike Sanjay, Rajiv was a reasonable leader, open to compromise. Yet financial scandals plagued his government and in 1989 he resigned as prime minister. He was seeking reelection to the Lok Sabha when a suicide bomberlinked to Tamil separatists in southern Indiakilled him. Today, his wife, Sonia, is active in Congress Party politics and continues the political legacy.
_06:: Bill and Roger Clinton: Little Rock Like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton brought his own sibling of ill repute to the national spotlight. When Bill Clinton was Arkansas governor, Roger Clinton pleaded guilty to distributing cocaine and served 15 months in prison. When Bill was U.S. president, his half brother, 10 years younger, was supposedly a rock singer. After Bill left the White House, a congressional investigation in 2001 showed that much of Roger"s considerable income during his brother"s two terms had come from mysterious sources. His "musical gigs" overseas brought him big money from foreign governments, payments that suggest he was playing something other than rock and roll. (Clinton bashers say it was influence.) He also accepted money from organized crime figure Rosario Gambino, apparently in exchange for seeking leniency from a parole board. Hey, take "the work" when you can get it. Since Bill"s White House departure, rockin" Roger"s music career has fizzled.
If I Weren"t Alexander (I"d Be Diogenes):
3 Famous People Who Had Famous Heroes
Alexander the Great wanted to be Diogenes, Salvador Dali wanted to be Napoleon, and J. Edgar Hoover wanted to be a lady. Hey, inspiration comes from strange places, so it"s no wonder that even heroes have heroes. The following are three important figures and their unlikely influences.
_01:: Fathers of Their Countries Growing up in China"s Hunan province, young Mao Zedong loved to read. In fact, he liked it so much that his father, who wanted the boy to be a farmer, grew impatient. There was a less dreamy side behind the bookish Zedong, however. His heroes were military leaders, especially those who opposed established order. Though Mao concentrated on Chinese generals and great battles in Asia, he was also fascinated by ideas and stories from the Western world, including, believe it or not, the life of George Washington. In 1911, just before he turned 18, Mao joined a revolutionary army fighting Manchu authority in his province. And although he had yet to embrace the Marxist philosophy that would shape his life and China"s history, the young man"s stint as a soldier helped him begin to understand that he, like his hero, Washington, could use military force toward political ends.
_02:: A Mother of Innovation Frank Zappa"s early fansmost of them 13-year-old boys mesmerized by the vulgar weirdness of Freak Out!, his 1966 debut alb.u.munderstood little about the artist. After all, Zappa came across like a zany cultural gadfly and wild-haired rock guitar heronot the serious musician that he turned out to be. But an early clue to what was really going on lay in Zappa"s frequent references to French-born composer Edgard (originally Edgar) Varese. And while Zappa freaks didn"t know that Varese, a pioneer of electronic music, celebrated asymmetrical rhythms and dissonance, or that he died at age 81 in 1965, they did know that Zappa dug him, so he became cool by a.s.sociation. Over the course of Zappa"s 30-year career, thoughmuch of it as an ambitious, iconoclastic, and outright weird proponent of musical (and political) experimentationhis debt to Varese became ever more apparent.
_03:: What"d I Say?
Born in 1944 in Sheffield, England, Joe c.o.c.ker went to work at age 16 installing gas pipes, but he was obsessed with rock and roll. And despite his appreciation for the vocal stylings of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, young Joe fell in love with one voice that would shape his career as a music star of the 1970s and "80sRay Charles. c.o.c.ker said he got "hung up" on Charles, and French fans later referred to the gravel-voiced rocker as Le Pet.i.t Ray Charles. Although the blind genius"s influence can be heard in many corners of popular music, he had a particularly profound effect on boys growing up in the British Isles in the 1950s and "60s. You can note Charles"s phrasing and intensity reflected in such c.o.c.ker hits as "A Little Help from My Friends" and "The Letter," but also in the vocal styles of Welsh pop star Tom Jones, Irish soul man Van Morrison, and English superstar Elton John, among others.
Lies Your Mother Told You MACBETH WAS A GOOD-FOR-NOTHIN" SOCIAL CLIMBER Forget everything Shakespeare told you about Macbeth. The real Macbeth was a political genius who united the disparate Scottish lords and set Scotland on the path to nationhood. He was also beloved by the common people for his charity and piety and the fact that, unlike his predecessors, he preferred to rule in peace rather than involve them in disastrous wars abroad. In 1054, Malcolm, son of Duncan I (a hated egotist whom Macbeth had defeated fair and square in battle, not murdered in his sleep as Shakespeare would have it), invaded Scotland with an army of Anglo-Saxon mercenaries looking for land and power. Macbeth fought a three-year war against the invaders but was ultimately killed. As for Malcolm (III), he became one of Scotland"s worst kings, and that"s saying a lot; he fought numerous wars against England, losing every time, taxed the commoners to ruin, and put hated Sa.s.senachs (Englishmen) in positions of power. Overall, one of the worst trades in the history of the British Isles.
May I Have a Cup of Culture?
6 National Inferiority Complexes
and the Wars They Caused
If you think Polish jokes are bad, you should hear what they were saying about these other unsophisticated underdogsthat is, right up until they got bitten.
_01:: Macedonia v. Greece In the fourth century BCE, the rest of Greece disdained the redneck Macedonians, and strangely enough, the Macedonians seemed to agree! Philip II, the king of Macedonia, and his son Alexander both learned the more sophisticated Ionian Greek dialect and aspired to educate themselves in the Greek style. In fact, Philip went so far as to hire the Greek philosopher Aristotle to tutor his young son (nothing"s too great for my little Alexander!). The pair also wanted to reshape Macedonian culture and society along "sophisticated" Greek lines. Of course, the most logical way of making Macedonia more like Greece was to make Greece part of Macedonia, and so over the course of their reigns both Philip and Alexander brought the entire Greek peninsula under their control.
_02:: Rome v. Greece Greek culture still carried its cachet a few hundred years later, when the rising power of Rome began to threaten the Macedonian kingdom from the west. The Romans venerated Greek culture even more than the Macedonians had, with educated upper-cla.s.s Romans aspiring to read, write, and speak Greek as proof of good breeding. The Greek influence is even more evident, when you notice that Rome"s public monuments are total imitations of Greek architecture. It"s no wonder then that when Rome was expanding abroad, the Greeks, still resenting their Macedonian rulers, welcomed Roman intervention. At least they did at first. The Greeks figured that the Romans, respectful and a.s.siduous students of their culture, would be honored to liberate Greece and set the Greeks free. Rather than letting the people go, however, the Romans simply took over the administration from Macedonia and incorporated Greece into their empire, marking the end of Greek independence for almost two millennia.
_03:: Arabs v. Persia When the first Muslim Arabs came out of the Arabian Peninsula to conquer much of the known world in the seventh century CE, they were fairly simple bedouins with an oral tradition and little in the way of art or literature. Luckily, one of the first powers they encountered on leaving the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian kingdom of the Sa.s.sanids, possessed the oldest and most refined culture in the Middle East. Hungry for Persia"s wealth, great cities, material comforts, and beautiful art, the Arabs gobbled up the land beginning in 635. Within 20 years, these bedouin go-getters had incorporated the entire kingdom, including Afghanistan, and since they"d immediately adopted Persian art and literature as the gold standard of education and good breeding, its reach soon extended all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the borders of India.
Touch of Evil After General Leopoldo Galtieri seized control of Argentina in 1981, he ill-advisedly took the nearby Falkland Islands by forcea foolish move. Britain"s Margaret Thatcher wasted no time regaining the land, and the general was quickly disposed of in a follow-up coup.
_04:: Mongols v. China In the 13th century CE, the Mongol tribes of Central Asia had no written language, no cities, no knowledge of agriculture, and no real notion of the geography of the globe outside their own small corner of it. China of the Sung dynasty, by contrast, was the oldest continuously ruled empire in the world, with a highly refined culture and a complicated, evolved social structure that was the product of thousands of years of development. After all, Chinese agriculture produced enormous amounts of foodprinc.i.p.ally ricesupporting an extremely wealthy aristocracy and a Sung emperor who lived in opulent luxury. But all the money and refinement in the world couldn"t protect the Sung dynasty from the maelstrom the Mongols unleashed on them. As masters of archery and cavalry combat, the Mongols, led by Genghis Khan, swarmed over China in 1211 CE, killing millions of Chinese and establishing their b.l.o.o.d.y rule for decades to come.
_05:: England v. France In the 15th century, France was the uncontested center of western European civilization. Paris had been the clearinghouse of medieval scholarship with its famous university at the Sorbonne, and France boasted the most productive agriculture; the largest population; the most creative painters, architects, and artists; and the most developed code of chivalry. As for England? During this time the nation was simply a small, poor, damp little backwater ruled by a French royal family descended from William the Conqueror. And believe it or not, the English aristocracy and royal family were all but Frenchthey spoke French, drank French wine, ate French food, wore French clothes, read and talked about books by French scholars, and visited France frequently. So when a dispute over the succession to the French monarchy gave King Henry V an opening to conquer France, he naturally went for itand won! Henry was crowned king of France shortly before his death in 1422.
_06:: j.a.pan v. China The Mongols weren"t the only people attracted to China"s refined, developed culture. In fact, the nation"s sophisticated ways were alluring enough to draw the attention of another warlike neighbor, j.a.pan, several times throughout history. And the effects are evident. The Chinese written language was adopted in its entirety by j.a.pan; Buddhism, which dominated j.a.pan for a long period, was a Chinese import, with j.a.panese Buddhist monks going to study in China; the j.a.panese borrowed Chinese architectural styles and governmental structures; and literate, well-educated j.a.panese studied Chinese literature. But as recently as the 1930s, even after j.a.pan had modernized its economy and built a highly efficient armed forces, this j.a.panese obsession with China manifested itself in the desire to conquer and control the country. Sadly, the brutal attack resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese in the Second World War.
It"s a Slanderful World: