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LOST WORLDS 23 September, 2001:
REMARKS following the 11 September New York World Trade Centre bombing:

In the town in which Lost Worlds is produced lives an old man, Donald Beaton, who as an Australian soldier was stationed in Japan after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Hiroshima Prefecture.

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On day ten after the attack, I asked him his reaction to the situation following the New York bombings. All he would say is this: "Terrorism is a weapon for poor people."

Coming from post-atomic Japan, this remark threw many things into a perspective. Especially, that a major factor in world affairs, too-little-mentioned in the world news coverage of the 11 September bombings, and related matters, is world poverty.

However, to mention local or regional poverty, or world poverty, or, in some countries, "poverty in an Islamic world", is also to refer to a great many other matters (where Islam or its critics are influential); including attitudes to various sorts of modernity, the institutions of liberal democracies, and tolerance in religious life - matters affecting all people involved including non-Moslems.

While any sort of war ensues, including any sort of jihad, or Holy War, comment and concern about world poverty is likely to be sidelined even further as a serious issue. This will be doubly unfortunate.

It also seems safe to say, that to speak too strongly about alleviating world poverty will be counter-productive, as to speak too strongly would disturb the balance of human virtues which need to be applied to the relevant work, including suitable education.
(So there will be no strong words spoken here by this website, which is anyway mostly concerned with the human past.)

However, I have since 11 September received a great deal of email which is equivocal, uncertain, possibly misleading, about the current world situation. Also, some email which is highly sceptical or cynical about the financial machinations used, or not, by the planners of the New York attack, and the suicidal hijackers involved. None of that email makes for comfortable thoughts about anything.

Deep within all religions abide timeless ideas about how to live a well-rounded human life that leaves a respectable mark when a person dies. These ideas can relate also to some alleviation of world poverty.

World-wide, these ideas need much closer attention from the world media, from economists and financiers, from governments and from religious leaders.

For one new reason: because as so many people after the New York attack, from around the world, remarked quite accurately: the world has changed.

So is there any connection - should there be any connection? - between the current aim of the US, the rooting out of terrorism, and the rooting out of world poverty?

If any such connections exist, matters need further exploration, particularly by the wealthy of the entire world.

This website carries various information about the bloody and unfortunate Crusades which preceded the Renaissance of Western Europe. Which information it is hoped will be of interest about any current risks faced by adherents of religion today.

The world does not need any new Crusades, or conflict between Islam and adherents of any other religions. What the world needs now, more than anger with damage to wealth or pride, is less poverty.

And so, the wealthy and the poor need to sit down, and talk, and share.

In fact, as an unpleasant truth, poverty is much more easily-shared-out than wealth. This may be an essential problem the world is now asking itself to face more realistically.

If this is the case, what is now most important is to ask the right questions. The world seems to be in such a state that many of the better questions will be deflected.

One of Lost Worlds' conclusions from studying the world's first wave of Crusades is that the questions asked by those Crusades were not the best questions, nor the most realistic.

A second, Crusading visitation of non-realistic questions will be disastrous, and will not help alleviate problems in places of poverty. It will merely prolong our evident problems.

Meetings of financiers and the leaders of the world's religions - all religions - almost never happen. So they can never be reported in the world press.

In the interests of realism, we now need to ask: why is this so? Why do financiers and religious leaders have so many motives to avoid each other's company so continually?

It is about time some such meetings were scheduled, regularly, and media-reported, until some decent ideals about future human life can be spoken about seriously, and believably, in the world's media, and by ordinary people.

For if there was one word over-used in the world's media concerning the New York attack, it was the world "unbelievable". Did the over-use of that word speak for itself, or not?

Now, the challenge for the world media is to draw back enough curtains, so that the word "believable" can be used much more often, with much more confidence, by ordinary people, and especially by presently poorer people.

Otherwise, we may all oblige ourselves to continue to live with things "unbelievable". Which will remain painful.

Dan Byrnes, Editor, Lost Worlds

Essays from Lost Worlds

The Secrets of Enoch

By Dan Byrnes

SECRETS, forbidden or not, exert their fascination, but when it comes to the secrets of the Books of Enoch, confusion can easily set in, especially when Biblical genealogy is invoked.

Enoch (or one incarnation thereof) is taken to be an eldest son of Cain, son of Adam and Eve. This Enoch had a son, Irad.

Cain here is said to have built a city which he named Enoch after his son. Or (in a different incarnation, was Enoch a son of Jared, a descendant of Seth?

This Enoch walked with God and was father of Methuselah. Was this the Enoch said to be seventh in line from Adam? (There is also Enos, taken to a son of Seth, therefore a grandson of Adam. [All from Young, Analytical Concordance])

The genealogy, rather unbelievable as it is, is nevertheless one excuse in writings attributed to Enoch, for a concern with Adam and Eve, who are seen quite close-up. (We find, for example, that Adam was buried in the land of his creation, not in Eden, however, and that Noah had Adam's bones on the ark!

(A legend is that at Jared's direction, Noah had Adam's body, from a cave, in the ark and prayed daily to God in the presence of Adam's body. Later, Jared directed, Shem would lay the body of Adam in the middle of the earth, in the place where salvation shall come. Then Jared turned to his son Enoch and said to him, Enoch should abide in the cave, and minister diligently before the body of our father Adam, all your life, and feed his people in innocence and righteousness.")

Adam used to pray to God while fully immersed in a river.)

When I first read Charles (as listed below) on Enoch, several things struck me heavily. One is that the books of Enoch were proscribed by the early Christian Church, in the west, although their influence persisted in the East, presumably one reason Enoch is recognised (as having been taken bodily up into heaven, that is, "translated") in some Koranic passages (or commentary on them), where he is known as Idris.

Enoch, originally a mix of both prose and poetry (it seems), presents a wonderful conglomeration of topics, from the genealogy of Adam and Eve, to Noah and events (such as a division of earth into spheres of influences for Noah's sons, and more city-building), to reasons to be so concerned with the family history, to the idea that angels have specific, unchanging, duties, such as, creating/recreating natural phenomena such as wind, or snow; that is, angels manage the weather.

Also, because of the longevity of Adam and his progeny, we find the following:

That Adam's sin robbed the earth of its fruitfulness (or, moral misdeeds can pollute the earth). (Is this perhaps a visitation of an idea that the virtue of a ruler has a strong correlation with the fertility of the earth? A view bound up with humanity's earliest customs of human sacrifice?);

That Enoch actually visits Eden, (not Adam's birthplace, that is a land, Elda);
Eden is where Adam first learned agriculture;
that after the expulsion from Eden, an angel named Joel assisted Adam and Eve, who found it hard going, using brute animals for food, or unsuitable vegetation - presumably Adam has to practise agriculture in a much harsher environment?
That Joel here also advises Adam to name the animals, which is a strenuous revision of what is contained in Genesis, where Adam independently names the animals.

The Watchers (who are close descendants of angels, whether fallen or not is hard to say, teach eg., genetic engineering, astronomy and astrology); we also learn of the origin of music (Jubal), and metallurgy, (metal-smiths are termed Tubal-Cain);
(The Watchers taught mankind sorcery, incantations, the dividing of roots and trees (cross-breeding, genetic engineering) and generally provided the occult, or bent spirituality, taught men to make weapons, mirrors, use of paint, jewellery, dyes, "so that the world became altered". They also taught observation of the stars (astrology and astronomy, the motions of the moon), there arose impiety and fornication...)
the views on "dividing" plants or animals reads quite like an anxiety about genetic engineering, as plain as anxiety today about cloning animals, or even humans, or using genetically-engineered plants as food;

Given the apparent existence of spirits of place, or, spirits of animals (animism), a view that people are quite uncertain about where their own intellectual or spiritual boundaries are, or should be placed (a concern about identity);

a highly puritanical outlook, with great ambivalence about cities, and sophistications, versus a strong sense that spiritual purity can indeed be developed, as conveyed in a typical, biblical poetry;

A desire to know, did Angels of the Lord descend to instruct men in judgement and uprightness on earth, only to be distracted by the daughters of men? (How did we learn, how do we learn, anyway? What is the nature of intellect?)
Adam dies, and as he does, Eve is still being blamed for her sin of disobedience, (also for bringing death); she still however desired to be buried with Adam; we also learn of Adam's customs of worship;
An origin of literacy, or at least, some way of denoting astronomical events; before dying, Eve becomes a kind of mother of literacy, and she dies while on her knees, talking with the Lord;

But, confusingly, we also wonder if Enoch is a son of Jared, or is Jared a son of Enoch? Who is Jared? It seems fair to warn anybody, at this point, that confusion will result if any attempt is made to chronologise either historical events, as we know them today, or various views on the lifetimes (in years) of persons mentioned, such as Adam. All problems with dating the Antediluvian Kings remain. At one point in the Enochian legends, mention is made of a chariot, which in fact was invented rather late in the evolutionary day. (An early date for the use of chariots is about 2112BC in Sumerian cities; although evidence exists that about 5000BC, reindeer were being used in Northern Europe to pull sledges.)

So when were the Books of Enoch written? I mention evolution here, since Enoch seems to be a kind of primitive view of our evolution. Which is why it is so quaint to find that angels manage (and mismanage) the weather; and also, logically, provide one way for God to punish sinful mankind by causing a terrific flood, presumably by issuing instructions to weather-managing angels!

There is a tremendous sense of clash in Enoch's writings, between a sense of harmony with nature, and God, and the stress of managing agriculture to feed city populations, the problems of urbanization (or, civilization and its discontents). Women are to be kept down, there is ambivalence about using tactics of actually understanding the world that people live in, versus the ill effects of ignorance... ambivalence due to uncertainty about the spirituality (or not) of tactics such as the use of magic... and by now we can dispense with Adam's family history, with the problems of defining why angels can be troublesome. Who wrote Enoch, when and why?

One view, in the 1929 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, is that these books of secrets were written around 200BC-100BC; or, collected as literary fragments. Enoch allegedly wrote 366 books, which seems uncommonly like one book for each day of the solar year! So were they to be read partly as meditations on managing the natural year? A kind of family history, plus moral map and weather map? (One scholarly view is that Enoch is a kind of solar hero.)

The version (three MSS) of Enoch rediscovered in 1773 in Abyssinia by Bruce, the Ethiopic Version, evidently had not only influenced the writers of the Gospels, it had earlier influenced the development of religion around Galilee, northern Palestine. There might be three writers, probably of the Sadducean persuasion in Jewish religious life, responsible for developing this version of "Enoch", but uncertainty reigns: did they write in Hebrew or Aramaic, or both?

Possibly, the writers were Chasidim, a school of thought which split into Pharisees and Sadducees in Jewish life; these were also the forerunners of the Apocalyptists! Certainly, Enoch conveys a continual anxiety about the strain of living in the material world, versus spiritually-wrought wrath bearing down on people's heads.

One of Enoch's books, on the laws of heavenly bodies, appears to have been written before the last third of the second century BC. Before about 161BC, some chapters were written about a first-world judgement, a history of the whole world till a final judgement - and a view of a Messianic Kingdom appearing after judgement, with a New Jerusalem set up by God (Himself). Some material is very contemporary, written while Judas the Maccabee was fighting his rebellion!

Some were sections written before 166BC, a "primitive" view of an eternal Messianic kingdom, but greatly influenced by the Book of Noah. Plus, the "similitudes", written about 95BC-64BC, with some influence from Noah also.

But "Enoch" becomes more elaborate, since there is a Slavonic version, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, discovered in Russia/Serbia. This gives a life of an ultra-saintly Enoch, and tells how he is taken up into heaven... which may explain how "Enoch's" view of natural phenomena were purified in the heat of righteousness - thus we end up with a close-up view of Adam's career, as well as a post-Noah, messianic vision.

One scholarly view (in Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible), is that Enoch has "little attention to chronological or logical sequence, or to consistency of thought...". This is exactly right. In fact, "Enoch" is continually, and quite poetically, torn with anxiety about thinking (analysing natural phenomena), about social management (managing life and people), about the threat of the visitation of divine wrath... and as puritan he disapproves of cities and women using cosmetics. His own family history, of course, reminds him graphically, continually, of the sufferings of Noah's family, right back to Adam and Eve... we can feel the grief as Adam dies and is buried.

"Enoch" is an apocalypticist. Some of the Books of Enoch are: Introduction, with a theme of punishment of the wicked, reward of the good.
Book 1, Angels and Universe; influenced by the Book of Noah, with a concern about intercourse with sons of Gods and daughters of men; instruction in the arts and crafts of civilization have corrupted mankind (a view making for a sure way to become ambivalent, and incidentally, an anti-city view);
Book 2, Parables or Similitudes; the Son of Man (pre-existent, splendid, non-human) will sit in a judgement seat, the good are rewarded, the wicked punished, a concern with meteorology and astronomy;
Book 3, The Heavenly Luminaries; promoting a solar, not a lunar year, or, an argument about use of which calendar; contradictorily, Enoch is seen as the inventor of writing, mathematics and astronomy; are these the "corrupting" arts of civilization?
Book 4, The Dream Vision; future history of Israel to Maccabean times;
Book 5, The Admonitions to Righteousness; a poetically-potted history of the line of Adam, and an apocalypse; and a conclusion which includes material on the birth of Noah .

The books of Enoch are really a failed, or an unsatisfying, attempt to bind everything up in a holistic vision of creation, evolution, divine punishment seen perhaps as a price for having evolved (becoming conscious, engaging in pre-planning, and producing the evils of cities), the meaning of things in the divine plan, and a final Messianic picture - and a destination - heaven, where Enoch because of his saintliness was taken bodily... his work is done and he is relieved of further responsibility.

We find also that one student of these legends, Milik, felt that the Books of Enoch collapsed two old sets of legends about fallen angels, not merely one set. Some internal confusion is a result in Enoch. One group of angels is called the Watchers, as in E. Clare Prophet's book (as given below). These help instruct humanity in "science". Enoch is usually ambivalent about examining the physical world, one reason for him to try to bind up a total explanation, in order to settle matters for himself and others. But the profound confusions, the worrying legends, about either fallen angels, associates or Lucifer, or, a role for Angels of the Lord, are almost alone, enough to tell us why the early Church Fathers, by around the Fourth Century, proscribed Enoch.

Combined with his beliefs, his ignorance, his misunderstanding, his lack of method, Enoch's anxieties can actually seem frightening. Yet in some ways, Enoch has a more rational outlook that those who believed in Enlil, Lord of the Wind, or the Greeks who (in terms of their pantheon) believed in the demi-urges of Chaos, or the Ocean. In his state of pre-scientific worry, "Enoch" might also have been ahead of his time? Still, he remains worrying, as his "writings" tend to convey an outlook - some human events are predetermined in heaven. Is this, despite Adam's sin? Or because of it?

Today, we might imagine that Enoch tried to encapsulate thousands of years of human experience into 366 leaflets of religious poetry, and leave it to his people.

What remains interesting is that many of Enoch's preoccupations were about the origins of all things, the end of all things. His explanations did not entirely suit his own day, nor the later Church fathers; they do not suit our scientized selves today. Despite Enoch's lack of consistency, many of his preoccupations were, and are, quite timeless, and many things mysterious to him are mysterious still to us.

Incidentally, in an encyclopedia, we find mention of Enosh or Enos, (man, or, mankind), son of Seth, father of Kenan.... "J records the tradition" that some form of Yahweh-worship began in Seth's time".

NB: The book known as The Slavonic Enoch was discovered in 1886, by Professor Sokolov in the archives of the Belgrade Public Library. It had survived a 6th century AD proscription.

(Finis)

Bibliography of books consulted for this article on Enoch

R. H. Charles, The Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. Oxford at the Clarendon Press. First pub., 1913 ff. Including, The Book of Jubilees.

Mercea Eliade (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Religion, 1987.

Encyclopedia Britannica, 1929. 14th edition.

Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible. Abingdon Press, 1962.

B. Lewis, V. C. Menage, CH. Pellat and J. Schacht, (Eds.), The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New edition. London, Luzac and Co., 1964++

Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Forbidden Mysteries of Enoch: The Untold Story of Men and Angels. Malibu, Calif., Summit University Press, 1977.

Robert Young, Analytical Concordance to the Holy Bible. 8th edition. London, United Society for Christian Literature, Lutterworth Press, 1879.

********FINIS************************

ESSAYS

East Timor - Some background on deep tragedy

Lately, Lost Worlds (November 1999) has been asked to contribute some remarks on the current ugly and tragic situation in East Timor, where Australian troops are now operating as "peace-enforcers", preventing massacre of people and wanton destruction of property.

East Timor, once a Portuguese colony, is now seeking independence from Indonesian domination. The current situation is a particularly badly-handled result in contexts of post-colonialism since 1945.

The background history covers a wide canvas. Some time ago, an Australian observer of maritime history remarked that Portuguese mariners had been based at East Timor for some 400 years, and taken almost no interest in exploring or meeting Australia. And in fact, any close feeling between East Timorese people and Australians has risen since World War Two, due to the help the Timorese gave Australian troops as a way of confronting Japanese aggression.

This has all prompted Lost Worlds to return to maritime history, to the story of how Portugal acquired its hegemony over East Timor, and the Spice Islands, and, the Straits of Malacca.

Also while thinking of maritime history, Lost Worlds noticed that between 980-1000AD, Vikings harrassed Portugal, at a time when Moslems were also trying to exert hegemony over the Iberian Peninsula, about a century before the First Crusade to retake Jerusalem was mounted.

Over time, pressed and stressed, the Portuguese rulers invited in the Burgundians of France to help them deal with Moslem military strength, just as the First Crusade was about to be mounted. It would hardly be surprising if the Portuguese outlook, and ways of responding, more so as Portuguese ports gave assistance to Crusaders from their north sailing to the Holy Land, had not been remembered by Moslems from Portugal, across Northern Africa (Tangier and Morocco), into the Holy Land, and further east.

The early history of Portugal is lost in post-Roman and then in Visigothic-Carolingian-Frankish heritages. We find the following...

Portugal after 1492 - when Columbus had discovered the Caribbean - by about 1510 - had developed aspirations of breaking the monopoly of Moslem traders on the spice trade to Europe. Is it probable to suggest that one of the reasons the Portuguese became interested in eastern spices is that they had noticed that their Moors had access to supplies of spices from the East? It became a Portuguese problem: how to get to the East by sea, to obtain those spices free of Moslem middlemen? (The legend exists that by 1536, Portuguese mariners had discovered Botany Bay at what is now, Sydney, Australia - see Kenneth McIntyre, The Secret Discovery of Australia, a discovery which was lost to history.)

Here, by 1505, geopolitically, an important strategic hot spot was the entrance to the Red Sea - Aden - where Moslem trading ships sailed. The entrance to the Red Sea was also important to Moslems, since Indian Moslems sailed from Western Indian ports into the Red Sea and up to ports from where they travelled to Mecca. So the entrance to the Red Sea was important to Moslems for both religious and commercial reasons.

Meanwhile, as part of the operation of the Spice Trade, Moslem mariners had sailed as far south-east as the Spice Islands, or, the Malacca Straits, from where they could also deal with mariners from China (Canton).

As part of its increasingly ambitious maritime aspirations, Portugal during the time of Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) desired to move into the Spice Islands to trade in spices almost as a matter of trade invasion. Here a little-known organisation, the Order of Christ, had a role - explained below.

What is not entirely explained by European historians on the matters of the Portuguese maritime adventure in eastern seas is the extent, strength and integrity of the existing Moslem-dominated shipping trade, circa 1500AD.

The Maldives Islands here are a world mystery, in that their people have long adhered to the Moslem faith. How people arrived on the Maldives in the first place is not well explained - Thor Hyerdahl has written a book on the subject.

Now, it would be possible using coast-hugging sailing methods, to sail from the Red Sea, around India, south around Malaysia, then amongst the Indonesian Islands, where mariners from China came. However, the fact that the Moslem faith was found on the Maldives Islands indicates that Moslem mariners were not coast-huggers, but had techniques of blue-water sailing far from land - which techniques are not yet well-explained. Which is to say that Moslem mariners had been venturing across the large Indian Ocean long before Europeans had the courage to sail across the Atlantic - to the Caribbean, or, the Americas.

(The exception to this in European maritime history is the early work before 860AD, of Irish monk-mariners going to Iceland before it was settled by Vikings from 860AD - see Njal's Saga - in legends of Vikings "discovering" parts of Canadian North America - and so on.)

By the time - 1505 - the Portuguese had developed aspirations of invading the Moslem-operated spice trade, the first mariners and traders in Europe to devise such a plan, they were daring to confront a centuries-old, very well-integrated trade. As early-mercantilists, the Portuguese were prepared to bombard ports resistant to their plans - such as Calicut.

Overall, partly due to Islamic plans for expansion, Portugal became a nation which in European terms bore a brunt in terms of conflict with Islam. Part of the Portuguese response was to mount an ambitious, long-distance, maritime attack on an old Moslem trading operation, the spice trade. Hence the Portuguese attention paid to the Indonesian "Spice Islands" from around 1505AD. A long-term outcome of that is the current tragic situation in East Timor.

It is plainly ironic, now, that Australian troops are trying to assist in East Timor. This is because, as part of a world-wide and peaceful division of hegemony, fixed by Papal authority, arose the Treaty of Tordesillas, which gave halves of the world to Portuguese and Spanish (Catholic) rulers and traders. Lines halving/quartering the world managed to split South America into areas for exploitation by either Spanish or Portuguese, the Portuguese obtained the Spice Islands, the Spanish obtained the Philippines.

The line which gave to the Portuguese the Spice Islands is roughly coincident with the present north-south-running eastern border of Western Australia. (This matter from 1770 has something to do also with the claims of Capt. James Cook over Australia, which we will not go into now. The point is that Australia also has been affected by the world-halving Treaty of Tordesillas!.)

Here then from Lost Worlds is some background on how this strange Portuguese situation developed, from the time the Vikings were bothering Portugal in 968AD - and before that. Lost Worlds has again been consulting its genealogy data-base!

The ruling families of Europe were...

By 968 AD to 1000-1100AD, before and after William the Conquerors move into England, ruling families had already set up a remarkably "quilting" over the European countrysides. The Honhenstaufers of Germany had linked with Guelf (Welf) plus Tuscany and "Italy", also Poland. The French Capetians had intermarried with the Pamplonas of Spain, and the Normans, De Conteville, plus the House of Anjou (Angevines). Also with the notable houses of France, Flanders, Hainault, Aquitaine, Burgundy, Vermandoise, and via links with Hohenstaufers, with Kievian and Swedish rulers. (At a time when Kiev also had Viking influences.) Anna of Kiev (1036-1076) married Henry I Capet (1031-1108), King of France.

Capets also had links with Guelf and the Wessex kings of England. The name Anjou later helped provide the English Plantagenets. To the east of Germany, to the north of the Byzantines at Constantinople, were troublesome people not yet Christianized, who moved each other about, producing instability. By 1000 and later, also, Portuguese rulers were more inclined to deal with Spanish rulers, and here the name Borell, originally from France, but settling at Barcelona, to become the Counts of Barcelona, is notable. Borell intermarried with Flanders, Toulouse, Pamplona of Spain, and Leon-Castile also. Also with houses such De La Marche, Provence, Arles and Capet of France, and the Crusader family, De Hauteville, which had determined to take Southern Italy from the Arabs. In Italy, some names tended to become a mix of Borell and De Hauteville. By 1000, the Byzantines, (Comnena/Comnenus) were coping badly with Arabs and Turks.

With the Crusades, the Comnena responded by linking with Crusader families, Aquitaine, from France, the De Hautevilles, and Anjou, Courtenay, and also the rulers of Armenia. But if alliance-by intermarriage had been a Byzantine plan to regain strength, it failed - there were reasons not to trust the westerners. The Kingship of Jerusalem proved to be an empty husk; some notable Crusaders failed entirely to respect Byzantine royalty. Meanwhile, with remarkable energy and vitality, (with a Viking vitality?), the Normans ranged from Northern France, into England. Within 30 years of William conquering England, the First Crusade had been called, to halt Moslem expansion, to regain the major relics of Christianity, but to have less influence on the Byzantine world than expected. Itself expansionist, the Crusader movement did finally give European trade better access to Mediterranean trade routs. And the Templars, after all, did much to develop banking.

Moslem missionary expansionism had meant that Moslems had intervened at Jerusalem from 637AD. Moslems, partly due to their existing maritime works, were actually invited into Portugal to help with problems by 711. Later they occupied Toledo. They were on Crete by 826, taking the island from the Byzantines, another obviously maritime adventure. Moslems had intervened in Sind (India) by the early Eighth Century, but they did not dominate Northern India till the Eleventh Century. (As the Moghuls they established the Delphi Sultanate by 1206).

Moslems took Baghdad by 1055-1071. By 1091, the Crusader Roger De Hauteville (1031-1101, eighth son of a notable Crusader father, Tancred, who has no notable forebears in French history ) was trying to evict Arabs from Southern Italy, where they had been since the Ninth Century. In many ways, the Crusades were a battle for control of the Mediterranean sea and its best hinterlands, seen as broad trade routes. Perhaps here, the early observations of the Portuguese and Spanish, near the entrance to the Mediterranean, were seen as important?

In Portugal, Ramiro III Leon (ruling 968-985), King Castile, was accepted by the Barons as King in the time of the power of the Counts of Castile. About the time he succeeded to his throne, the Vikings led by Gundered in 968 appeared in Galicia. (He succeeded at age 5 after his father Sancho Abarca retained his throne with the aid of Moslems.) (Livermore, p. 37).

Sancho's wife, Ramiro's mother was Urraca, of the influential line of the Pamplonas of Spain. Urraca (Pamplona) here is a grand-daughter of Queen Toda of Navarre. Then came Alfonso V "The Noble", died 1027, who tried to expand central Portugal. Further influence of Pamplonas. Lines crossed, and Alfonso V married daughter, Sancia/Sancha, heiress of Leon, who married to Ferdinand (died 1065), Fernando I, of the Pamplona line.

On Viking strikes: Vikings had begun moving south, raiding, from C8th to C10th. They were some of the best shipbuilders and sailors in the world, their war ships had 30 oarsmen and about 90 crew, The Vikings were called Danes in England and Varangians in Russia. Two prompts for Viking expansionism to Germany, the Low Countries, France and Spain had been population growth and efforts by Harold I of Norway to subjugate the Vikings, who were raiding northern France by 843AD. They attacked Ireland from the Eighth Century till 1014.

The Vikings especially attacked England 835-865. Between 968AD-1000AD, Vikings in Spain and Portugal found the Moors fierce enemies, as the Moors used "Greek fire" (naptha) against them, via catapults from small ships. Half-naked Viking oarsmen had little means of fending off Greek fire, and went home beaten.

By the time the North Men - the forebears of William the Conqueror - had settled in Northern France, Vikings were more inclined to settle for conquest, and via conquest, than to content themselves with mere raiding.
Vikings had been active about 684 in Scotland, becoming the Earls - Jarls of Orkney and later dealing with the Canmore/Stuarts, by 1152; and dealing with some of the early Earls Caithness.

Portugal, maybe unique in Western European history to date, had become meat in a sandwich between both Moslem incursion from the south and Viking raids from the north - one reason perhaps that Portugal, after the obvious success of the Norman in France and England, and the failures of repeated Crusades against the Moslems, had decided to undertake maritime adventures as a way out - and a way out motivated less by so-called religious impulses than an ordinary-but-creative urge to trade?

To provide more background... By the Eighth Century AD, which ruling families had been "genealogically active" in making rulership more "sophisticated" in Europe? The increasing influence of powerful Vikings had been preceded by the influence of:
The Carolingians, to the south of Viking influence, and in Burgundy, France; by the names Brabant, Welf/Guelf (the predecessors of the Hanoverian Guelfs of England), Merovingians, Charlemagne, the Kings of Wessex in England (see Alfred the Great died 899). And in France, by the Capetians, and the Counts of Flanders, such as Baldwin, Count VIII of Flanders. Here we already see many old ruling families at work.

The Capetians included Hugh/Hugues, Count Paris, whose family intermarried with the Hohenstaufers, of Germany/Bavaria (see Luidolf died 866AD Duke Savoy). And Gisela Hohenstaufer married Stephen I of Hungary, King Hungary, Saint Stephen (969-1038); Gisela, daughter of Duke of Bavaria, Henry the Wrangler (died 995).

After the departure of Fernando I (died 1065), Alfonso VI (died 1109) married to Constance Capet, daughter of Robert Duke of Burgundy, and nearby in time was William Capet, his children notable as Crusaders, Count Burgundy, who married Adelaide de Conteville, sister of William the Conqueror.

The Crusades...
As well, a First Crusader Raymond Capet (died c. 1097) came into Portugal and became Lord Galicia. He was son of William Capet, Lord Burgundy, husband of Adelaide De Conteville. This Raymond married Urraca (from the Pamplona line), who later married Alfonso The Battler (died 1134), who was also of the Pamplona line. The son of this Raymond and Urraca was the famous Alfonso VII of Portugal (1105-1157), Alfonso Henriques, who had three wives: Berengaria/Berenguela Borell of Barcelona, daughter of a Count of Barcelona; Matilda of Savoy; and Ryska of Poland, daughter of Vladislav II of Poland and Agnes Hohenstaufer.
(The ruling families of Europe as they faced their so-called Moslem threat were so to speak, multi-cultural as far as the Christian world of their day went?)
Behind Matilda of Flanders, died 1083, on her mother's side, was "the blood" of both Charlemagne and Alfred the Great. The name Flanders meant Capet, Capet/Hohenstaufer, Thorfinn and De Conteville, and some Anjou. Some Capet blood stirred in Portugal by 1112.

This William Capet as above, Count Burgundy, had many sons involved in the Crusades, including Guy, Pope Calixtus II, who proclaimed the Crusade of 1122AD!!

On the Order of Christ in Portugal.
An early master of the Order of Christ was Henry the Navigator (died 1460). Later, the heir of the King of Portugal, John II Capet, The Perfect (died 1495) was his wife's brother, also his cousin, Manuel Duke Beja, who was Master of the Order of Christ at the time. The (otherwise unexplained ) revenues of the Order of Christ at this time funded the Portuguese explorations of Africa. The Portuguese from 1505 via the Order of Christ explored the western coasts of Africa. At the same time, Almeida went to Cochin to invade Moslem trading areas, after earlier Portuguese voyages to the east of 1500.

The Portuguese ruler who decided to occupy Brazil was John III (1502-1557)CAPET, King of Portugal, (son of Emanuel Capet who married Isabella Capet (wife1) and Catherine/Catalina Habsburg. By the Treaty of Tordesillas and the later Treaty of Saragossa (1529), which gave Portugal control of the Malaccas. Portugal paid Spain's Charles V 350,000 cruzados for the cancellation of Spanish claims.
Note: Portugal was ruled from Spain after the death of Henry Capet (1512-1578), ex-Cardinal and King, the end of his line.

In geopolitics, the secret to the failure of the Portuguese maritime adventure is that they did not find a strategic place to fully command. True, the Portuguese discoveries, such as the voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, in "opening up" India (Goa), in finding the Straits of Magellan, were pioneering, and useful. True, the Malaccas (The Spice Islands) was strategically useful, but the straits were used already by Moslem mariners and the Chinese. Later the Straits of Malacca were used by every European mariner.

There developed intense rivalry for maritime supremacy between Portugal and Spain. The referee for two Catholic powers was the Vatican, so in a Bull issued in 1493, the Pope confirmed the existing rights of Portugal and established those of Spain by running an imaginary line from north to south, one hundred leagues west of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. East of this line was for Portugal, west for the Spanish. (The Christian-Eurocentric arrogance of the manoeuvre is absolutely breathtaking!)

Spain was dissatisfied as there had been no mention of India, and a second Bull later in 1493 took this complaint into account, and in theory allowed for any of Columbus' ambitions concerning Spanish influence in India. This adjustment in turn annoyed Portugal, and so by the Treaty of Tordesillas, on 7 June, 1494, further adjustment was made, and the line of demarcation was fixed at 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands.
(Brazil then became Portuguese). (We here deliberately ignore English maritime history, which cared little for Papal announcements.)

So in 1493 a Papal Bull had divided the world into two, the west for Spain, the East for Portugal. As those two nations continued exploration, their areas overlapped. (Under the Tordesillas Capitulacion of 1494, the Moluccas (Spice Islands) were said to have been in Portuguese limits, and Spain abandoned its claim. (Magellan failed to clear this matter up.)

Vasco da Gama (1460-1524) became the first European to voyage by the Cape of Good Hope and to journey by sea to India. His voyage 1497-1499, at the order of Manuel I, followed up an earlier voyage sailed by Bartholomew Diaz in 1488. Gama went up the east coast of Africa to Malindi, and across India Ocean to Calicut. (It is judged "possibly the most significant event for Portuguese history".) Gama later drafted instructions for Cabral's voyage to India 1500-1502.

In 1502 Gama went again to India with 20 ships, when he also tried to gain the submission of some African chiefs - by harsh methods. In 1524 he went back to India as a Viceroy but soon died. All this vindicated the discovery voyages of Bartholomew Diaz from 1487, suggesting that a large ocean lay east beyond the Cape of Good Hope.

At that time, ideas existed that a Great Southland existed south of Asia, called Jav La Grande. It did exist. It is now called Australia, but it was missed by the Hispanics, "discovered" by the English in 1770.

In 1511, Albuquerque captured Malacca "in the Malayan peninsula", on a point of trade in gold. Sumatra produced gold, gold coin was minted at Aden using Ethiopian gold, and at Hormuz, gold coin was left for Mecca in exchange for spices in India. Silver was also at the Straits of Hormuz (Moslem maritime territory). The Portuguese potentially had a world market in precious metal at their fingertips?
(See Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money, 1450-1920. London. Verso. 1991.p. 94, p. 99.)

There had been Diogo Lopes de Sequeira's voyage to "Malacca" in 1509. The capture of Malacca in 1511 by Alonso de Albuquerque and Antonio de Abreu, who voyaged to the Spice Islands in 1512. In 1511, Albuquerque captured "Malacca", and Portugal wanted to be rid of need to trade with the Chinese middlemen and to go straight to the Moluccas. A prime Portuguese motive was to cut out the middleman, possibly something they had learned about eastern trading matters from the Moors in their own country?

Magellan's ships for Spain crossed the Pacific, to the Spice Islands in 1521. Portuguese mariners - Alburquerque - were ordered to intercept him. The return of Sebastian del Cano's ship Victoria with spices spurred the Spanish to more efforts. A second expedition under Garcia de Loaysa and del Cano left Spain in 1525 to follow Magellan's track to the Moluccas. Both commanders died, and only one ship reached Moluccas in "a pitiable state".

In October 1527 Cortes despatched three ships under his kinsman Alvaro de Saavedra across the Pacific from New Spain in America, to reexamine on Magellan's expedition and to establish a Spanish Claim to the Spice Islands.

Two vessels were lost here, but Saavedra went to the Philippines, then to the Moluccas, where the Spaniards were at war with the Portuguese.

The Portuguese made belated efforts which might have given them New Guinea, but they did not enjoy that outcome. The Moluccas were disputed as they lay on the boundary of the papal division of land and water between Spain and Portugal. In 1529, Charles V of Spain in deference to the Portuguese pawned his claim to the Moluccas but not to the Philippines. That "pawning" cost Portugal dearly: 350,000 ducats.

In 1512, Abreu and Serrao reached the Moluccas; the Portuguese king had ordered the finding of the Papal line of demarcation to the eastward of Goa. An historian or two have noted that Abreu deserves to be known as the discoverer of the Pacific, as it was not until 1513 that the Spaniard Balboa look from his peak on Darien on the Pacific, and saw highly desirable possibilities.

Abreu died on the way home, but on that voyage also was "ace cartographer" Francisco Rodrigues, who made the first useful map of the Indonesian archipelago. Legends of gold told on that voyage, or about it, helped create fantasies of a southern Isle of Gold. So later the Portuguese wanted to go south (Diogo Pacheco's effort). News of this tale via Magellan seeped to Spain, so prompting the later Spanish efforts of Mendana and Quiros in exploring the Pacific - in vain and again missing out on finding Australia.

An historian has it that Portugal had an idea to settle Timor. And that the Portuguese had the habit of carrying convicts on their ships, and of leaving them behind in places to shift for themselves. A view has arisen that with the voyage of Abreu, only 80 returned, so from the beginning, one version of the South land was "contaminated" by association with facts of European crime.

A first mention of Timor is dated 6 January, 1514; ships had just gone to Java and Timor, and the Portuguese had already brought syphilis into a new area.

Timor (Dili) was "founded" probably in 1516, and some early Portuguese settler names were da Costa and Hornay. It remained a Portuguese colony until 1976, and so had escaped the massive de-colonialisation seen in most of the rest of South-East Asia. So for some 460-250 years, people on Timor had largely - and continually - ignored nearby Australia - only 285 miles away. Spain as a colonial power, meanwhile, was far better off in and near the Pacific Ocean with the Philippines.

By a combination of bad luck and failure of analysis, however, Portugal failed to find a second place of strategic value in geopolitics. Spain found that place, more or less; the Darien area, site of the present Panama Canal, a quicker route to the Pacific from the Iberian Peninsula than Portugal had found. (The Scottish and the English were also to recognise the Darien area as of prime strategic value - the English as they pursued their usual anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic vendetta, the Scots to their eternal cost with the ill-dated Darien Company adventures of the 1690s )

Finally, Spain from Mexico could send an annual treasure ship to the Philippines, guaranteeing trading value (as an extension of credit) from a close proximity to China and to other European traders in the area coveting trade with Canton. Far more useful than a colony such a Timor, with denser trading connections possible.

Long later, Timor, unlike Brazil, a rich Portuguese possession also dependent on the slavery of Negroes, was not a wealthy colony. It became like Ceylon, Goa, Macau and in Malaya, a centre for commerce and Christian evangelisation. Portuguese colonists more than those from any other European power were prepared to interbreed with local peoples - thus they left their legacies.

Long later, after continued Portuguese neglect of anything called Australia, or Australian, it so happened that in 1941-1942, the Japanese thought Timor interesting, occupying it in February 1942, whereupon Australian and Dutch troops occupied Portuguese Timor. The rest is recent history - and some dispute over Australian foreign policy.
(Livermore, p. 299, pp. 336-337)

Truly poor brothers in the history of South East Asia, and in the history of post-World War Two decolonisation in the region, the people of East Timor have had to stare into the remorseless face of Indonesian (post-colonial) carelessness, largely alone.

Given the earlier violent history of the Crusades, the regressiveness of the entire present situation is truly appalling! From life and history, who learns what - and how quickly?

To be continued...

References - Timor essay

On Genealogy: Cockayne, The Complete Peerage (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales) in various volumes as appropriate.

Also helpful are genealogical websites by David L. Beckwith:
http://www.smokykin.com/ged/f001/

On Crusaders, Check Website: http://www.thehistorynet.com/Military/History/articles/1998/06982_side.htm

T. N. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986.

Roger Collins, Early Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity, 400-1000. New Studies in Medieval History. Second edition. New York, St Martin's Press, 1995., table.

Peter W. Edbury, The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191-1374. Sydney, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469-1716. London, Penguin, 1972 edition.

Theodore Evergates, Louis VII and the Counts of Champagne, pp. 109-118 in Michael Gervers, The Second Crusade and the Cistercians. New York, St Martin's Press, 1992.

Laurence Gardner, The Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed. Shaftesbury, Dorset, Element, 1996 or Brisbane, Jacaranda Wiley, 1996.

Stephen Howarth, The Knights Templar. London, Collins, 1982. With citations from Jonathan Riley-Smith, Family Traditions and Participation in the Second Crusade, pp. 101-108.

T. E. B. Howarth, Citizen-King, The Life of Louis-Philippe, King of the French. London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961.

Robert Hughes, Barcelona. London, Harvill, 1992.

Gabriel Jackson, The Making of Medieval Spain. London, Thames and Hudson, 1972. (Genealogical table.)

Holger Kersten and Elmar R. Gruber, The Jesus Conspiracy: The Turin Shroud and The Truth about The Resurrection. Brisbane, Queensland, Element, 1992.

Jack Lindsay, The Normans and Their World. London, Hart-Davies and MacGibbon, 1974.

H. V. Livermore, A New History of Portugal. Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Kenneth Gordon McIntyre, The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese Ventures 250 Years Before Captain Cook. London, Pan, 1982.

Charles Mills, The History of the Crusades for the Recovery and Possession of the Holy Land. Two Vols. London, Longman, 1821.

W. M. Ormonde, The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society, 1327-1377. London, Yale University Press. 1990.

Petit-Dutaillis, The Feudal Monarchy in France and England, from the Tenth to the Thirteenth Century. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949.

Alan Ryder, Alfonso The Magnanimous, King of Aragon, Naples and Sicily, 1336-1458. Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1990.

Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades: (Three volumes.) Vol. 3: The Kingdom of Acre and Later Crusades. Cambridge at the University Press, 1955.

Steven Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century. Cambridge at the University Press, 1958. (For genealogical tables especially)

Andrew Sinclair, The Sword and the Grail. London, Arrow, 1994.

George Slocombe, William the Conqueror. London, Hutchinson, 1959.

On maritime history below

Australian Encyclopedia. In 10 Vols. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1958. Grolier Society of Australia, 1962. Various entries

J. J. A. Campos, History of the Portuguese in Bengal. London/Calcutta, Butterworth and Co., 1919.

John Dunmore, French Explorers in the Pacific. Two Vols. London, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1965-1969.

Kenneth Gordon McIntyre, The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese Ventures 250 Years before Capt. Cook. Revised. Sydney, Pan, 1977.

W. P. Morrell, Britain in the Pacific Islands. London, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1960.

Oskar H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake. Vol. 1 of The Pacific Since Magellan. Canberra, Australian National University Press. 1979-1988. [Vol. 2, Monopolists and Freebooters; Vol. 3, Paradise Found and Lost]

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