anarchonomicon.com
10,000 word long-take I wrote on the history of female warriors, North European human Sacrifice rituals, Girardian mimetic selection, and the incompatibility of the west's current conceptions of Freedom and women's liberation.
What occured in the forests of Germany and on the Eurasian steppe for 1000s of years was one of the most extreme experiments in selective breeding and selective killing practised anywhere on earth. The Aztec and Maya were the only ones with a ritual breeding/killing program so extreme
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Great article.
I'm reading Virgil, and I'm thinking a lot about the Aenied as a primal legendary record of a kind of migratory war that was familiar in history right up to, in some ways, the Age of Discovery: the loser in a one regional war is driven out and forced to migrate to a less developed region, and because the loser is used to competing in a more developed/vicious/effective form of warfare they conquer the new region very effectively. Carlin's line about the Mongols attacking the west being like Brooks Robinson playing baseball like he came down from a higher league.
We see this throughout Roman and Classical history. The Goths, the Cimbri and Teutones, the Magyars, the Huns, these were all losers driven out of the wilderness by presumably even stronger and more ferocious rivals, who come on the scene in the civilized world and are immediately deadly. The barbarian warriors who invade civilization were sometimes Chinggis' who manage to unite the barbarians into a unified confederation, but they are more often the worst of the barbarians at barbarian warfare, driven out of their homes and forced to migrate, forced to travel south and fight.
What the Aenied reveals is that the Romans themselves perceived that they were of this same lineage! The Trojan exiles, lead by Aeneas, are the losers in the Trojan War, but noblest portion of the Trojan remnant the ones who will not submit to slavery or die in despair, they are forced into exile. They travel to Italy, a barely civilized backwater at the time, and despite arriving in exile, bedraggled and half dead from years of wandering, they run the table. Half the locals immediately rally to the obvious power and prowess of Aeneas, to the technology and wealth he shows and to the prowess in battle he is known for; or maybe the way Tlaxcala became nobles for allying with Cortes to settle scores. The rest, despite playing on their home court, against a handful of exiles who already got trashed for decades by the Greeks, get demolished. The Trojan strain becomes dominant genetically and culturally.
Speaking of Cortes, is the Age of Discovery the last and final and best of these examples? Christendom lost the long struggle with Islam, giving ground over decades and centuries in the series of wars that occupied the history of Byzantium. It was after these losses that Europe took to the western seas. Unable to defeat Islam, they turned West and Came Down From A Higher League, they conquered the weak and built empires that would develop and turn and subjugate the Islamic world.
The Age of Discovery was started by the Spanish and Portuguese who didn't lose against Islam but had actually just completed the Reconquista by destroying the Emirate of Granada
The pressures that sent trade missions West and South were the result of Christian failures to retake Eastern territories and reopen trade routes going East.
It's a more edge case analogy, but I do think it's an interesting dynamic to think about.
But literal elite overproduction in Iberia played a huge role as well. Castile, Aragon and Portugal had too many nobles and too little land to support them. Invading Morocco was their original plan, but the rulers were on the lookout for additional outlets of this pent-up power, so they would sponsor various half-crazy proposals to sail out there and find something worth invading.
Oh there are a number of factors to be considered. But there was a definite dynamic of losing control of the Mediterranean trade and seeking alternatives.
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