Tea at Trianon: The Island of Gla

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, March 2, 2021

The Island of Gla

From Ancient History:

Such would have been the climate during the Late Bronze Age. At that time the lake's shores were dotted with Mycenaean settlements, notably Orchomenos, a wealthy palace site in the north-west. There was also a string of Mycenaean forts in the north-east corner, centred on the citadel of Gla some six miles distant. This network of related sites suggests that Bronze Age Boeotia, as elsewhere in the Mycenaean world, supported a complex socio-economic structure under palace administration. Indeed much of mainland Greece was probably divided between several such powerful city-states – Mycenae and Tiryns in the Argolid, for example, and Pylos in Messenia – although the actual relationship between them is still hotly disputed, as is the mechanism by which power was transferred. Insofar as it can be trusted, Greek legend states that the Boeotian cities of Orchomenos and Thebes were enemies, and the forts around Gla were clearly built to protect the area from a neighbour or more distant invader.

Given Boeotia's tough local environment though and its concomitant limitation on resources, continued growth of a city-state could only have been sustained by increasingly specialised agricultural production. With this in mind, archaeologists have connected the Mycenaean draining of Lake Copais for high-yield agricultural purposes with the contemporary construction of the fortified citadel of Gla. (Read more.)