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Mythology of Crusaders (need ur feedback!)

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With tech. system like it is, there could be an event like this:

Peasants talk of dragons

A: Send kinghts out( +2 Stab., popularity with the knights and peasants.

B: Go with Scientist( -1 stab, tech level increase, lose pop. with commons + peasants.

C. Do A plus condemn scientist( +1 stab, lose pop with scientist/tech decrease, Church, Nobles and commons support.
 
come on ppl, is Dragons all you can remember? :) :) :)

The Witcher (Polish) is a good source of descriptions of different monsters. and we have the Russian tales of huge intelligent bears in Sib., and some stories of dogheaded men in Africa.

any other things that could have been the subject of belief at that time??
 
Originally posted by sergei
come on ppl, is Dragons all you can remember? :) :) :)

The Witcher (Polish) is a good source of descriptions of different monsters. and we have the Russian tales of huge intelligent bears in Sib., and some stories of dogheaded men in Africa.

any other things that could have been the subject of belief at that time??
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If you have all of that information then why do you need us??:D

A popular belief amont the English (even to this day:D ) is that the Wesh had tails.:)
 
There were loads of mythical creatures - dogheaded men, men with no head but with their faces on their chests - these were called Blemmyae, men with only one huge leg, unicorns, basilisks, cockatrices, cyclopses, amazons etc., etc.

Check out this link for some examples of Medieveal maps (which often sported such mythical creatures) . For mythical creatures in general try the many Medieval Bestiaries that have been preserved

It´s hard to answer your question Sergei when you don´+t want to reveal what you want to do with the answer:p

Cheers,
Vandelay
 
OK more strange creatures:p

The Liber Cronicarum is also interesting as being published in 1493. (snip)

On the left hand side, and printed from a separate block, are pictures of outlandish creatures, culled from classical and early mediaeval travellers' accounts. Rodney Shirley described the figures thus:

"Among the scenes are a six-armed man, possibly based on a file of Hindu dancers so aligned that the front figure appears to have multiple arms; a six-fingered man, a centaur, a four-eyed man from a coastal tribe in Ethiopia; a dog-headed man from the Simien Mountains, a cyclops, one of those men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders, one of the crook-legged men who live in the desert and slide along instead of walking; a strange hermaphrodite, a man with one giant foot only (stated by Solinus to be used a parasol but more likely an unfortunate sufferer from elephantisis), a man with a huge underlip (doubtless seen in Africa), a man with waist-length hanging ears, and other frightening and fanciful creatures of a world beyond" (2)
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1

marco polo writes:
Now let me tell you of a race of men well worth describing in this book. You may take it for a fact that all the men of this island have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes like dogs; for I assure you that the whole aspect of their faces is that of big mastiffs. They are a very cruel race: whenever they can get hold of a man who is not one of their kind, they devour him
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2

an english 'travelbook' with monsters by Mandeville
As for travel stories, English printers focused on publishing books devoted to describing pilgrimage routes. One of these, Sir John Mandeville's Travels, is one of the earliest existing English travel texts we have. In it, Mandeville describes, in great detail, the routes pilgrims could take from England to Jerusalem and the lands to which they could then travel from Jerusalem. Mandeville also describes the monsters that a traveller would encounter in these distant lands. Mandeville's text was extremely popular, with at least thirty editions printed in Continental Europe before 1500. Although Mandeville's text was generally taken to be true, it is likely that Mandeville did not travel far beyond the library.
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3, 4
 
The links much appreciated, Sires.

I can't reveal the purpose until late August though :cool: (ECTS for Paradox, GameCon for us) but the primary reasoning stays the same: we have our ideas, obviously pretty much shaped by Russian (sometimes Polish) reference sources... and to be true to the spirit of EU, we must look further :).
 
Seli already mentioned it in an earlier post, Umberto Eco has described some of the mythical figures in his book Baudolino. Not only a good book, but to my surprise also a very funny book.
The figures he describes, living somewhere at the edge of the world are:
sciapods:
sciapod.gif


blemye:
blemye.gif


panotti:
panotti.gif


cyclops:
cyclops.jpg


satyr:
satyr.jpg


centaur:
Centaur.gif
 
Originally posted by Sonny
Speaking of dragons - how about the tales of St. George and the Dragon?

Arthurian legends were popular but I don't know how much they were believed. During the time of one of the Henrys (I or II) Arthurs grave was discovered. This was a sham to convince the Welsh that their hero was actually dead and would not return to lead them against the English - or so the story goes.:)
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St. George and the Dragon is actually of older vintage, dating back to the Arian controversy, if I remember correctly. What is interesting is how it got more and more elaborate as the story went west, much as how the St. Christopher of western Europe bears no resemblence AT ALL to the oldest stories of his life found to the east.

Regarding the Arthurian material, by the 12th-13th centuries, I doubt that much stock was put in the details of the stories as factual, especially since we had fellows like Christian of Troyes who explicitly wrote fictional accounts with the Arthurian characters ("Lancelot the Knight of the Cart" and "Yvain the Knight of the Lion" come to mind here.)
 
Originally posted by historycaesar
With tech. system like it is, there could be an event like this:

Peasants talk of dragons

A: Send kinghts out( +2 Stab., popularity with the knights and peasants.

B: Go with Scientist( -1 stab, tech level increase, lose pop. with commons + peasants.

C. Do A plus condemn scientist( +1 stab, lose pop with scientist/tech decrease, Church, Nobles and commons support.
Click to expand...

What scientists? There aren't any around at the time. "Science" as we understand the term, was invented in the 17th century. We must never forget that even Sir Isaac Newton was an alchemist, and by all accounts took the mystical principles of alchemy very seriously.
 
Originally posted by sergei
come on ppl, is Dragons all you can remember? :) :) :)

The Witcher (Polish) is a good source of descriptions of different monsters. and we have the Russian tales of huge intelligent bears in Sib., and some stories of dogheaded men in Africa.

any other things that could have been the subject of belief at that time??
Click to expand...

St. Christopher is said to have been "from the land of the Cynacephali" (dog-heads). This led to him being depicted as having the head of a dog in much later Eastern iconography (http://www.ucc.ie/milmart/chrsorig.html).

The saints described at http://www.ucc.ie/milmart/ would have been likely to have been popular among the crusaders.
 
Sergei:
here is the letter from Prester John
http://www.graveworm.com/occult/texts/pjohn.html

e.g.
Our land is the home of elephants, dromedaries, camels, crocodiles, meta-collinarum, cametennus, tensevetes, wild asses, white and red lions, white bears, white merules, crickets, griffins, tigers, lamias, hyenas, wild horses, wild oxen, and wild men -- men with horns, one-eyed men, men with eyes before and behind, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, pygmies, forty-ell high giants, cyclopses, and similar women. It is the home, too, of the phoenix and of nearly all living animals.

We have some people subject to us who feed on the flesh of men and of prematurely born animals, and who never fear death. When any of these people die, their friends and relations eat him ravenously, for they regard it as a main duty to munch human flesh. Their names are Gog, Magog, Anie, Agit, Azenach, Fommeperi, Befari, Conei-Samante, Agrimandri, Vintefolei, Casbei, and Alanei. Theses and similar nations were shut in behind lofty mountains by Alexander the Great, towards the north. We lead them at our pleasure against our foes, and neither man nor beast is left undevoured, if our Majesty gives the requisite permission. And when all our foes are eaten, then we return with our hosts home again.
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I have better translations in book form
 
Hmmm...Interested about crusader related legends,are you
Sergei?I suspect a legend mod for CK,coming!Cool:)
Anyway,i think you should also affiliate yourself with greek folklore about the "Franks"(that's how we called all crusaders).We really considered them to be sort of cannibals:D
The crusaders also had some peculiar ideas about the greeks.Particularly about their schizmatic religious practices.Simony was supposedly a widespread practice both by the greeks and the arabs(no discrimination made by the crusaders).
 
Oh and a nice (true) story about the mental state and beliefs of (part of) the crusaders;):

The Miracle of the Lance

A Provençal peasant, Peter Bartholomew, claimed that Christ and St Andrew had come to him in a vision and told him that the Lance that had pierced the side of Christ was buried beneath the high altar of the Church of St Peter. Peter was allowed to supervise the digging, and duly found the Lance. Many of the army leaders thought him a fraud, but the rank and file believed that a miracle had occurred. The army leaders took advantage of this to launch a last-ditched attempt to break the siege.

Kerbogha allowed the crusaders to leave the city and form up outside. The morale of his disparate troops was as low as the crusaders' morale was high, and they swiftly broke under the desperate attack. The crusaders triumphed.
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link
 
Originally posted by Angelos
Anyway,i think you should also affiliate yourself with greek folklore about the "Franks"(that's how we called all crusaders).We really considered them to be sort of cannibals]
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Catalans in particular, I seem to recall. ;-)
 
Actually bgibbard,you are wrong:)
We had much interaction with western crusaders ever since the first crusade(in the 1090s).It was since then that we called all western europeans Franks.Catalans only came in Greece in the 4th crusade,and stayed in Athens for some years.We called them Franks as well of course and considered them equally "demonical with the rest of the crusaders turned occupators.We made no such distinctions:)
 
If you need more 'weird' mytholicol creatures then the adventures of the sinbad the sailor fromm 1001 nights could perhaps be a source of inspiration, he meet soome strange creatures on his voyages...
 
Well, there are old, and then i mean oooooold myths about India being a very strange place, for example they believed that there was people in the jungles that had one giant foot to shield themselves from the sun and that there was giant ants that dug for gold. Also they believed that the indian ocean was spinning around like a whirl. But this was like during the days of Alexander the Great, but who knows...some might have still lived on :)
 
Originally posted by Angelos
Anyway,i think you should also affiliate yourself with greek folklore about the "Franks"(that's how we called all crusaders).We really considered them to be sort of cannibals
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I prefer a transliteration instead of a translation of the term:

The Crusaders were the "Ferengi".
 
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