I found it kind of interesting that the plague stirred up all kinds of rebelions and revolutions. The reading says in China it started a religious rebelion and in the world of science, people were spurned to find a cure for the plague and find the reason behind people getting the plague. Evidently, "bad air" was blamed for the spread of the disease. It has also been mentioned that people thought that the disease was spread by a bad odor. This made me wonder if we are wrong today about anything in the medical world. We probably are but I can only wonder what.
I was wondering where Majorca was beacuse I have only heard of it once or twice. I found that it is known for its beautiful beaches and is located in Spain (map). It is located in the Mediterranean on the east side of Spain. Also, why was Mali trading with Majorca?
In one of the first lines it talked about how Christians go out and call the world to repent and to make people good by convincing them to join Christianity. I think the whole concept of this is really interesting because other religions have that same goal as well. Where did all of the Armenian clay come from for treatments because I didn't think that the land could provide clay or that much clay? What happened during the anti-Jewish riots? This is all happening before the holocaust which there was hate towards the Jews previously to the holocaust, but I didn't know there were riots. I researched the riots and NYT had an archived article. The PDF talked about how harsh the riots were and a little bit of what went on. The picture on pg. 459 is also very interesting because things like that and much more were drawn during the holocaust. When talking about Mali, what does it mean that children were chained until they learned the Quran, like what does the chained part mean?
It is interesting how the Black Death changed the religous world and caused a revival in the morals of Christianity. In the reading, it also states that the Muslims were affected by this plague, and the fear of this caused Muslims to call upon magic to aid them. The muslims blamed corrupt air, and turned to superstition. If the Muslims were leaders in science and medicine at the time, then what caused them to be puzzled with this epidemic?
It is amazing how this reading seems to be so current. It helps me understand why people react the way they do when something bad happens. I have two examples. The first one happened today,while driving to school, I heard on NPR that "the earthquake in China will have social and political implications as every natural disaster creates changes in the society". While doing the reading, I found out that "in China, as we shall see, plague, combined with other natural disasters, help to stir up religious movements that over spilled into political revolution." I'm wondering, what will be the consequences after the earthquake.
The second example is that we all know that there is still antisemitism and discrimination towards minorities in many countries. In the reading it says "medieval antisemitism... was just one aspect of a wider phenomenon: society's antipathy for groups it could not assimilate..." We can't ignore the sad fact that we have a long way to go before that ends.
I was curious to learn more about the blaming of the Jews for the black plague. I found this site of link which explains more about the reasons Jews were blamed for the plague. Still today, people blame others even for natural disasters. This just shows how in a way, we are still in medieval times.
On P. 456-457, there is a lot of talk about anti-semitic acts that happened a lot during this time of the plague. It says how many accused the Jews of poisoning the wells and other water sources. I found a pretty good timeline of the anti-semitic acts that occured during this time. It mentions the expulsion from England in 1290, but also that they were expelled from France 3 times between 1300-1400. However, the Wikipedia article on Jews in France doesn't show the expulsion in 1321. Either way I wondered why there were so many expulsions of the Jews in France. On the Wikipedia article, it says that in 1306, the King was mad at them. He exiled them in what is called, "The Great Exile". Later on, the Jews returned in 1315, due to an edict issued by Louis X because of popular call for them to return. Then in 1394, Charles VI exiled them again as he felt there were too many Jews committing crimes again Christians and that crossed some agreement they had with him.
The original site I found also mentioned massacres of the Bohemian community in 1389 (around Prague). Then in 1391, there were many massacres in Spain and the Balearic Islands. Nevertheless, here is a pretty good map of Jewish migration and this is another map although it is a bit hard to decipher.
I was interested in Ibn Battuta and his travels. I found a map that shows where Ibn Battuta went. It compares his journies to those of Marco Polo, and it is interesting how they are very similar. This website has more information about his lifetime, and shows that Ibn Battuta went on more than one hajj. To connect with the black plauge, Ibn's mother was a victim of the plauge. A random fact is that his full name is 11 words long.(Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn ِAbdullah Al Lawati Al Tanji Ibn Battuta).
In the reading,Ibn Battuta is mention. I remember studying him in the 7th grade, but I didn't quite remember everything about him. I found that he was born in Tangier, Morocco and was famed for his 30 year travels all around Africa and Parts of Europe and the Middle East. He traveled to all the lands of the Muslim rulers of his time, as well as China and Sri Lanka. He is thought to have traveled roughly 75,000 miles by foot around the world, a record not surpassed until the steam engines. He made many observations of the places he visited looking at the landscape and cultures of the lands he visited.
I found the term came across the term antisemitism and thought about it for a bit. I knew it meant the discrimination of Jews, but I wondered why and how it came to be.
On Wikipedia, I found out that a lot of the source of antisemitism is the death of Jesus. I also found this site that says that in the bible "there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek" (Romans 10:12).
With more on the origin of Jewish people and the plague, this site says that some Jewish people confessed to poisoning people. They were under torture and probably only said it to stop from being tortured.
I wanted to learn more about all the "cures" for the Black Plague. I know flagellation is whipping oneself to purge oneself of the sins that caused the disease, but the reading mentioned a lot of other "cures". This site has a good overview of some of the cures. "Cures" ranged from the scientific, such as dieting or lancing the buboes, to the spiritual and extremely bizarre. The two cures tht I found most interesting were putting a live hen next to an afflicted person, which was thought to draw the pestilence from the human to the hen and having the afflicted people drink a glass of their own urine two times a day to aid recovery. I thought that this showed how desperate people were to get rid of the disease that they would go as low as drinking their own pee.
I looked up Sundiata and found the legend of Sundiata. It tells about when he becomes Mansa and about the battle between Sundiata and Sumanguru. I tried to look up things about Bure, the city that probably held the west African gold mines, but I couldn't find anything. This video shows the way gold is collected in Mali today and has a description of about how much a person could find in one day (about 2 American dollars a day).
I looked into the word "Ibn". We have seen this as the first part of many names, and I was wondering if it had any particular meaning. The Wikipedia says that it means "son of". It can also be put into one person's name multiple times, as far back as records allow. For instance, accord to the Wikipedia on Ibn Khatib, his full name is "Muhammad ibn Abd Allah ibn Said ibn Ali ibn Ahmad al-Salmani".
In the reading, one thing that caught my eye was the mention of the leader of the rebellion in China, who "claimed to be the prophesied hero". Because the reading mentioned that this leader founded the Ming Dynasty, I first went to find out more about the history of the Ming Dynasty. On Wikipedia, I found an article talking about the History of the Ming Dynasty. This article includes a great deal of information on the rebellion that formed the new Dynasty. Next, I wanted to find out more specifically about the man mentioned in the text. Zhu Yuanzhang was the only survivor among his family of a flooding of the Yellow River. He traveled and begged, and eventually settled with Buddhist Monks for a few years, where he learned to read and write. The Mongol army eventually burned down the Monastery, and this led Yuanzhang to join the rebellion, where he rose quickly among the ranks with his leadership skills. By the age of 27, he was in command of an army.
I was curious to find out more about the Catalan Atlas that was mentioned in the reading. The book says that it was made by Cresques Abraham on the island of Majorca in the 1370s or 1380s and was adorned with many precious metals and jewels. Both Wikipedia and an article I found says that it was made in 1375, for that is the date on it. "The first two leaves [of the atlas] contain a compilation of cosmographical, astronomical, and astrological texts translated into Catalan," and the rest of it is the map. I thought it was interesting that the map was meant to be read with the north at the bottom, and it had a wild rose (compass rose), one of the first on a map like that. Here is a good picture of part of the map, and the second website listed above (World Mysteries) has some really good pictures too.
I was interested in the treatment of diseases during the Middle Ages. In the same book Horrible Histories - The Measly Middle Ages by Terry Deary, it has some information... "Of course the Black Death was not the only illness doctors had to deal with in the Middle Ages. Since ancient times doctors believed that one of the best ways to get rid of sickness was to let the bad blood out of your body. People of the Middle Ages would down to the local barber shop and have a vein opened. (If you wanted to save time you could have your hair cut while you waited!) How could you spot the local barber shop? There was usually a bowl of fresh blood in the window! (In London this was considered bleeding bad taste and banned in 1307. All blood had to be thrown straight into the Thames.) Apart from bleeding there were other 'interesting cures in the Middle Ages. Ringworm - wash the hair in a boy's pee Gout - apply a plaster of goats droppings mixed with rosemary herb and honey Plague - eat powdered emeralds Skin disease - cover sore spot with skin of a wolf Loss of memory - eat ginger Sleeplessness (insomnia) - eat treacle (which was believed to cure loss of speech, spotty skin, and snake bites as well) Bruises - a plaster of bacon fat and flour Fainting - breathe in the smoke of burnt feathers Blocked up nose - stuff mustard and onion mixture up the nose Bleeding inside the body - wear a dried toad in a bag round the neck" They also believed that to keep yourself from getting a hangover you should make sure not to wear a hat. A hat holds in the harmful fumes and gives you a headache. The Arabs at the time were far more advanced in medicine than the European doctors. "Their cures showed more understanding of disease and their treatments were more gentle - and usually more successful. They could scarcely believe the way doctors behaved in Europe. Usama ibn Muniqidh told the story of an Arab doctor. He was treating a knight who had an abscess on his leg; he put a dressing on it. For a woman with lung disease he prescribed the right sort of fresh food. Along came a European doctor. 'You have no idea how to cure these people,' he said. First he took an axe and cut the knight's leg off. The knight died. Then he cut a hold in the woman's skull, removed her brain and rubbed it with salt. The woman died. 'I hope you have learned something about medicine today,' the European doctor said. 'I certainly have,' the Arab doctor replied."
when doing the first reading i became interested in the treatment/prevention for the plague that people came up with. in cairo, people would rub clay on the bodies infected with the plague. in spain barley water and syrup were recommended treatments. from this website i found many remedies used during medieval times.
in the second reading, i became interested in the "mansas". "mansas" were the kings on the mali empire. from wikipedia i learned that there were 21 known "mansas" and maybe 3 or 4 left to be revealed. also from that wikipedia article i learned that the names of kings would have "mansa" in their ruling name. suggesting they were the king of all kings. families were also cata gorized in "mansas". (ex. Laye mansas and Gao mansas)
I was interested in the medieval jews because i have never heard of them. What i found out was that they lived anywhere from Spain to the Sahara or Baghdad to Britain. They were mostly ruled by either Muslims or Christians.
If you go to this link it will tell you the overview and information on the Medieval Jews and it will give you a great understanding of them.
Sorry it's late, just got home from lacrosse game.
The first thing I looked into, was a word that was new to me. That word was antisemitism. After a trip to an online dictionary I found that the word meant, discrimination against or prejudice or hostility toward Jews.
The next thing I looked at was the effects of the black plague. I found some good information from this website which gave the effects as well as other good information.
In the reading it talks about the Physiological effects of people when dealing with the Plague. It talks about how "it 'spread fear and misery'". I was wondering, because the renaissance were after/near the "end" of the black plague, did any of that misery affect any of the art in the renaissance time (or is that just a silly question?)
Why is it that Jew "were among the Losers"? From the context of the paragraph, I cannot tell if it is because they were said to have "caused the Plague", by a few people, or were they hit exceptionally hard? I would guess that it is the former, but where would they ideas come from/come about.
And was does it mean that they Jews were "an often commercial people"?
Did it shift the Balance? The reading talks about Balance when it comes to female property ownership. The book says that "more widows burying more husbands could shift the balance", and I was wondering if that was a question that doesn’t have an answer yet, or whether there is no evidence, or something.
I first wanted to find more about the leader Sundiata. One interesting fact that I found out about him was that another name for him was Sogolon Djata. Also, his great grandnephew was mansa musa. His first name means hunchback or ugly women after his mother (i dont know if this is significant on whether or not his mother actually was this or not) and his surname meant lion.
Also, like a few of my other classmates now that I read some of the other posts, I did not know what antisemitism meant so I looked it up. It is a prejudice or hostility against the jews.
19 comments:
I found it kind of interesting that the plague stirred up all kinds of rebelions and revolutions. The reading says in China it started a religious rebelion and in the world of science, people were spurned to find a cure for the plague and find the reason behind people getting the plague. Evidently, "bad air" was blamed for the spread of the disease. It has also been mentioned that people thought that the disease was spread by a bad odor. This made me wonder if we are wrong today about anything in the medical world. We probably are but I can only wonder what.
I was wondering where Majorca was beacuse I have only heard of it once or twice. I found that it is known for its beautiful beaches and is located in Spain (map). It is located in the Mediterranean on the east side of Spain. Also, why was Mali trading with Majorca?
In one of the first lines it talked about how Christians go out and call the world to repent and to make people good by convincing them to join Christianity. I think the whole concept of this is really interesting because other religions have that same goal as well. Where did all of the Armenian clay come from for treatments because I didn't think that the land could provide clay or that much clay? What happened during the anti-Jewish riots? This is all happening before the holocaust which there was hate towards the Jews previously to the holocaust, but I didn't know there were riots. I researched the riots and NYT had an archived article. The PDF talked about how harsh the riots were and a little bit of what went on. The picture on pg. 459 is also very interesting because things like that and much more were drawn during the holocaust. When talking about Mali, what does it mean that children were chained until they learned the Quran, like what does the chained part mean?
It is interesting how the Black Death changed the religous world and caused a revival in the morals of Christianity. In the reading, it also states that the Muslims were affected by this plague, and the fear of this caused Muslims to call upon magic to aid them. The muslims blamed corrupt air, and turned to superstition. If the Muslims were leaders in science and medicine at the time, then what caused them to be puzzled with this epidemic?
It is amazing how this reading seems to be so current. It helps me understand why people react the way they do when something bad happens. I have two examples. The first one happened today,while driving to school, I heard on NPR that "the earthquake in China will have social and political implications as every natural disaster creates changes in the society". While doing the reading, I found out that "in China, as we shall see, plague, combined with other natural disasters, help to stir up religious movements that over spilled into political revolution." I'm wondering, what will be the consequences after the earthquake.
The second example is that we all know that there is still antisemitism and discrimination towards minorities in many countries. In the reading it says "medieval antisemitism... was just one aspect of a wider phenomenon: society's antipathy for groups it could not assimilate..." We can't ignore the sad fact that we have a long way to go before that ends.
I was curious to learn more about the blaming of the Jews for the black plague. I found this site of link which explains more about the reasons Jews were blamed for the plague. Still today, people blame others even for natural disasters. This just shows how in a way, we are still in medieval times.
On P. 456-457, there is a lot of talk about anti-semitic acts that happened a lot during this time of the plague. It says how many accused the Jews of poisoning the wells and other water sources. I found a pretty good timeline of the anti-semitic acts that occured during this time. It mentions the expulsion from England in 1290, but also that they were expelled from France 3 times between 1300-1400. However, the Wikipedia article on Jews in France doesn't show the expulsion in 1321. Either way I wondered why there were so many expulsions of the Jews in France. On the Wikipedia article, it says that in 1306, the King was mad at them. He exiled them in what is called, "The Great Exile". Later on, the Jews returned in 1315, due to an edict issued by Louis X because of popular call for them to return. Then in 1394, Charles VI exiled them again as he felt there were too many Jews committing crimes again Christians and that crossed some agreement they had with him.
The original site I found also mentioned massacres of the Bohemian community in 1389 (around Prague). Then in 1391, there were many massacres in Spain and the Balearic Islands. Nevertheless, here is a pretty good map of Jewish migration and this is another map although it is a bit hard to decipher.
I was interested in Ibn Battuta and his travels. I found a map that shows where Ibn Battuta went. It compares his journies to those of Marco Polo, and it is interesting how they are very similar. This website has more information about his lifetime, and shows that Ibn Battuta went on more than one hajj. To connect with the black plauge, Ibn's mother was a victim of the plauge. A random fact is that his full name is 11 words long.(Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn ِAbdullah Al Lawati Al Tanji Ibn Battuta).
In the reading,Ibn Battuta is mention. I remember studying him in the 7th grade, but I didn't quite remember everything about him. I found that he was born in Tangier, Morocco and was famed for his 30 year travels all around Africa and Parts of Europe and the Middle East. He traveled to all the lands of the Muslim rulers of his time, as well as China and Sri Lanka. He is thought to have traveled roughly 75,000 miles by foot around the world, a record not surpassed until the steam engines. He made many observations of the places he visited looking at the landscape and cultures of the lands he visited.
I found the term came across the term antisemitism and thought about it for a bit. I knew it meant the discrimination of Jews, but I wondered why and how it came to be.
On Wikipedia, I found out that a lot of the source of antisemitism is the death of Jesus. I also found this site that says that in the bible "there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek" (Romans 10:12).
With more on the origin of Jewish people and the plague, this site says that some Jewish people confessed to poisoning people. They were under torture and probably only said it to stop from being tortured.
I wanted to learn more about all the "cures" for the Black Plague. I know flagellation is whipping oneself to purge oneself of the sins that caused the disease, but the reading mentioned a lot of other "cures". This site has a good overview of some of the cures. "Cures" ranged from the scientific, such as dieting or lancing the buboes, to the spiritual and extremely bizarre. The two cures tht I found most interesting were putting a live hen next to an afflicted person, which was thought to draw the pestilence from the human to the hen and having the afflicted people drink a glass of their own urine two times a day to aid recovery. I thought that this showed how desperate people were to get rid of the disease that they would go as low as drinking their own pee.
I looked up Sundiata and found the legend of Sundiata. It tells about when he becomes Mansa and about the battle between Sundiata and Sumanguru.
I tried to look up things about Bure, the city that probably held the west African gold mines, but I couldn't find anything. This video shows the way gold is collected in Mali today and has a description of about how much a person could find in one day (about 2 American dollars a day).
I looked into the word "Ibn". We have seen this as the first part of many names, and I was wondering if it had any particular meaning. The Wikipedia says that it means "son of". It can also be put into one person's name multiple times, as far back as records allow. For instance, accord to the Wikipedia on Ibn Khatib, his full name is "Muhammad ibn Abd Allah ibn Said ibn Ali ibn Ahmad al-Salmani".
In the reading, one thing that caught my eye was the mention of the leader of the rebellion in China, who "claimed to be the prophesied hero".
Because the reading mentioned that this leader founded the Ming Dynasty, I first went to find out more about the history of the Ming Dynasty. On Wikipedia, I found an article talking about the History of the Ming Dynasty. This article includes a great deal of information on the rebellion that formed the new Dynasty.
Next, I wanted to find out more specifically about the man mentioned in the text. Zhu Yuanzhang was the only survivor among his family of a flooding of the Yellow River. He traveled and begged, and eventually settled with Buddhist Monks for a few years, where he learned to read and write. The Mongol army eventually burned down the Monastery, and this led Yuanzhang to join the rebellion, where he rose quickly among the ranks with his leadership skills. By the age of 27, he was in command of an army.
I was curious to find out more about the Catalan Atlas that was mentioned in the reading. The book says that it was made by Cresques Abraham on the island of Majorca in the 1370s or 1380s and was adorned with many precious metals and jewels. Both Wikipedia and an article I found says that it was made in 1375, for that is the date on it. "The first two leaves [of the atlas] contain a compilation of cosmographical, astronomical, and astrological texts translated into Catalan," and the rest of it is the map. I thought it was interesting that the map was meant to be read with the north at the bottom, and it had a wild rose (compass rose), one of the first on a map like that. Here is a good picture of part of the map, and the second website listed above (World Mysteries) has some really good pictures too.
I was interested in the treatment of diseases during the Middle Ages. In the same book Horrible Histories - The Measly Middle Ages by Terry Deary, it has some information...
"Of course the Black Death was not the only illness doctors had to deal with in the Middle Ages. Since ancient times doctors believed that one of the best ways to get rid of sickness was to let the bad blood out of your body. People of the Middle Ages would down to the local barber shop and have a vein opened. (If you wanted to save time you could have your hair cut while you waited!) How could you spot the local barber shop? There was usually a bowl of fresh blood in the window! (In London this was considered bleeding bad taste and banned in 1307. All blood had to be thrown straight into the Thames.) Apart from bleeding there were other 'interesting cures in the Middle Ages.
Ringworm - wash the hair in a boy's pee
Gout - apply a plaster of goats droppings mixed with rosemary herb and honey
Plague - eat powdered emeralds
Skin disease - cover sore spot with skin of a wolf
Loss of memory - eat ginger
Sleeplessness (insomnia) - eat treacle (which was believed to cure loss of speech, spotty skin, and snake bites as well)
Bruises - a plaster of bacon fat and flour
Fainting - breathe in the smoke of burnt feathers
Blocked up nose - stuff mustard and onion mixture up the nose
Bleeding inside the body - wear a dried toad in a bag round the neck"
They also believed that to keep yourself from getting a hangover you should make sure not to wear a hat. A hat holds in the harmful fumes and gives you a headache.
The Arabs at the time were far more advanced in medicine than the European doctors. "Their cures showed more understanding of disease and their treatments were more gentle - and usually more successful. They could scarcely believe the way doctors behaved in Europe. Usama ibn Muniqidh told the story of an Arab doctor. He was treating a knight who had an abscess on his leg; he put a dressing on it. For a woman with lung disease he prescribed the right sort of fresh food. Along came a European doctor. 'You have no idea how to cure these people,' he said. First he took an axe and cut the knight's leg off. The knight died. Then he cut a hold in the woman's skull, removed her brain and rubbed it with salt. The woman died. 'I hope you have learned something about medicine today,' the European doctor said. 'I certainly have,' the Arab doctor replied."
sorry this is late.
when doing the first reading i became interested in the treatment/prevention for the plague that people came up with. in cairo, people would rub clay on the bodies infected with the plague. in spain barley water and syrup were recommended treatments. from this website i found many remedies used during medieval times.
in the second reading, i became interested in the "mansas". "mansas" were the kings on the mali empire. from wikipedia i learned that there were 21 known "mansas" and maybe 3 or 4 left to be revealed. also from that wikipedia article i learned that the names of kings would have "mansa" in their ruling name. suggesting they were the king of all kings. families were also cata gorized in "mansas". (ex. Laye mansas and Gao mansas)
sorry its late.
I was interested in the medieval jews because i have never heard of them. What i found out was that they lived anywhere from Spain to the Sahara or Baghdad to Britain. They were mostly ruled by either Muslims or Christians.
If you go to this link
it will tell you the overview and information on the Medieval Jews and it will give you a great understanding of them.
Sorry it's late, just got home from lacrosse game.
The first thing I looked into, was a word that was new to me. That word was antisemitism. After a trip to an online dictionary I found that the word meant, discrimination against or prejudice or hostility toward Jews.
The next thing I looked at was the effects of the black plague. I found some good information from this website which gave the effects as well as other good information.
Sorry its late, just got home from swimming
In the reading it talks about the Physiological effects of people when dealing with the Plague. It talks about how "it 'spread fear and misery'". I was wondering, because the renaissance were after/near the "end" of the black plague, did any of that misery affect any of the art in the renaissance time (or is that just a silly question?)
Why is it that Jew "were among the Losers"? From the context of the paragraph, I cannot tell if it is because they were said to have "caused the Plague", by a few people, or were they hit exceptionally hard? I would guess that it is the former, but where would they ideas come from/come about.
And was does it mean that they Jews were "an often commercial people"?
Did it shift the Balance? The reading talks about Balance when it comes to female property ownership. The book says that "more widows burying more husbands could shift the balance", and I was wondering if that was a question that doesn’t have an answer yet, or whether there is no evidence, or something.
Here is my post...
I first wanted to find more about the leader Sundiata. One interesting fact that I found out about him was that another name for him was Sogolon Djata. Also, his great grandnephew was mansa musa. His first name means hunchback or ugly women after his mother (i dont know if this is significant on whether or not his mother actually was this or not) and his surname meant lion.
Also, like a few of my other classmates now that I read some of the other posts, I did not know what antisemitism meant so I looked it up. It is a prejudice or hostility against the jews.
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