Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

The Forehead Cross The forehead cross has become a relatively common modern tattoo, both in the industrialized west and among some developing countries. However, those who wear it will probably not know that the first record of this design dates back to the sixth century AD. Let us travel through time and space to the […]

Mid October 1941. A man with a mustache walks up and down besides a train, while snow falls. He is conscious, all too conscious that he is about to make a decision that will change the direction of the war, perhaps even its outcome: a true hinge moment. And the decision? Quite simply should he […]

A delicate occupied zone with an unfriendly population. Think US Marines patrolling in southern Afghanistan or Israeli troops walking through a Palestinian village. That is challenging enough. But could we make it a little more interesting for, say, an HBO series? Why not, for example, put the occupying troops under the control of a young […]

There are few things in life sweeter than self important people being made to look silly. The picture above is one of this blogger’s favourite. The subject is, of course, Benito Mussolini, in the mid, late 1930s.* A group of Fascist dignitaries are prancing up some steps at the Foro Italico: but not all is […]

Christian IV of Denmark (r. 1596-1648) was a proactive, alcoholic king and one of the strongest arguments Beach knows for a republic. He got Denmark embroiled in several useless wars but made up for this by renaming Oslo Christiania after himself. In July 1606 this troublesome and vain individual descended on Britain and he and […]

A WIBT moment from eighteenth-century France: the collision of the hoary old with the bright-eyed, metallic and ghastly new. It involves a cathedral, a hammer and the crystal fragments of a Roman perfume bottle, the Sainte Ampoule, one of the longest continuously used objects in world history. This tiny flacon had been made in the late Roman […]

The US bombing of Hiroshima went off, in operational terms, flawlessly. The bombing of Nagasaki was a different matter. For one thing, Nagasaki was not even the target: Fat Man was supposed to have been dropped on nearby Kokura but smoke from a conventional raid obscured the bombing run. Everything that could go wrong on […]

Simon Bolivar was a Venezuelan troublemaker who would lead the Spanish Americas to freedom. Ferdinand VII was the cretinous Spanish monarch who would allow this to happen. What Beach had not known until recently was that Bolivar and Ferdinand actually met as boys in 1800 in extraordinary circumstances. Bolivar (right) was seventeen; Ferdinand (left) was sixteen. […]

A WIBT moment from early nineteenth-century Portugal. Thousands of well dressed but harassed men and women are milling and pushing in Lisbon harbor before a score of great British and Portuguese ships. The tense silence is suddenly broken as a piercing scream begins from behind. The woman’s voice, from a royal carriage is continual. Maria […]

The year is 1908. You are walking through a jungle territory in southeastern Cameroon in central Africa when you hear the sickening smack of the machete on flesh. Expecting the worst you emerge, your rifle half lifted, but see only a local hunter with a kill. He has taken a chimp in a trap and […]

This is one of the great scenes from Catholic hagiography. St Thomas of Aquinas has just been kidnapped by his own family and locked up in a room with a naked woman. OK, yes, yes, we can backpedal a moment…. Thomas was born to a noble Campanian clan and as a younger son, the youngest […]

Jaén in Andalucia (Spain) is a town with its roots in Spain’s troubled late middle ages, half Arab, half Christian. Jaén also stars in a wonderful book by one of our greatest living medievalists Teofilo ‘God’ Ruiz now at UCLA. In City and Spectacle, Ruiz describes life in fifteenth-century Jaén in terms of the shows, […]

Puyu (obit 1967) has gone down in history as the last Chinese emperor, not including of course Mao and his successors, and what a life he had. Brought up in the Forbidden Palace he was perhaps the most spoilt boy in the world: having servants beaten for a whim; this perhaps made up for the […]

A WIBT (Wish I’d Been There) episode from the wars between Greece and Persia in 480/479. The Athenians, save some brave warriors who attempted to defend, futilely the Acropolis, have fled from their city. The unstoppable Persian army has fired the temples and the holy places of Athena: and the Persian fleet has moved down […]

Pheidippides enters the history book because he could run fast and far, and because in 490 BC, with angry Persian immortals just outside their walls, the Athenians decided that they needed help. They looked for assistance in the most violent of all Greek polis, the Spartans to the south. Sparta, though, stood 150 miles from Athens […]