Lars just wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition. Find out how a soap dish changed history!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203917304574412984059644024.html
Wall Street Journal Editorial
This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
With regard to the famous siege and sack of Amorium in AD 838, firstly the siege did not by all accounts last for 55 days as this book claims, and secondly after the city was stormed if all the population then fled into the church for safety, then the building must have very large indeed or the population terribly small. These are details that the author should have gotten right.
From the Director of the Amorium Excavations Project.
Thanks for the comment. As you know both Byzantine and Arab sources left written comments on this event- neither of which necessarily accurately portray what actually happened. Byzantine accounts of course want to magnify the atrocity and thus add details like the entire population perishing in the city\\\’s church (roughly half the population seems to have survived and the city obviously survived and even eventually flourished. It was more likely the leading citizens who gathered in the cathedral). They also tried to convey a religious moral of remaining faithful- thus the story of bodies floating like corks. I based my retelling on these Byzantine sources (Georgios Monachos)- a stylized version meant to convey what was by all accounts a horrific fate.