Napoleon, Helena and the Iron Crown of Lombardy

In 1805, Napoleon was in the unusual position of being both an Emperor and a president. In late 1804, he had crowned himself Emperor of France, but he was also president of the Italian Republic. This was not the Italy we know today which wouldn’t come into being for another fifty-five years but comprised the regions of Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna in the north of modern day Italy.

Napoleon decided that if a hereditary monarchy was good enough for France then it was good enough for Italy and so, on 17 March 1805, he created the Kingdom of Italy to replace the Italian Republic. Unsurprisingly, Napoleon’s ideal candidate for king was himself. On May 26, 1805 at Milan Cathedral, he crowned himself King of Italy by placing the Iron Crown of Lombardy on his own head. In so doing, he unwittingly created a connection between the crown’s history in his own ultimate fate.

St Helena

St Helena of Constantinople (born ca 246/250 AD) was the mother of one of history’s greatest military leaders and the first Christian emperor of Rome, Constantine I. It was Constantine who elevated Christianity from a persecuted sect to the beginnings of a major religion. In 326 he sent an expedition to Palestine to find the relics of Christ. His choice of leader for the long and potentially dangerous journey was unexpected: he appointed his elderly mother, by then at least 76 years old.

The most sought after relic was the cross upon which Christ was crucified, the True Cross. After reaching Palestine, Helena began by demanding the location of the cross from a group of rabbis. Under threat of torture, they produced a man named Judas who was to lead Helena to the cross. When he failed to cooperate, she ordered him to be starved. After six days, he relented and led her to a temple dedicated to Venus. Here, twenty feet underground, three crosses were found, supposedly belonging to Jesus and the two criminals executed with him (although not named in the Canonical gospels, various names and histories have been attributed to the two men; they are often referred to as Dismas and Gesmas). A woman near death was made to touch each cross in turn and, upon touching the third, she was healed, proof enough for Helena that this was the True Cross.

St Helena finding the True Cross

Helena discovered other relics of Jesus’ crucifixion including His tunic and the nails of the crucifixion. She brought the nails back to Rome where, according to various sources, they were distributed between Constantine’s helmet, the bridle of his horse, his horse’s bit or were cast into the Adriatic to calm a storm. (The number of nails used for the crucifixion is the basis of an old theological debate. The stigmata of St Francis of Assissi were considered by the Catholic Church as proof that four nails were used. The opposing point of view, that three nails were used, is called triclavianism).

One of the nails was purportedly made into a band and incorporated into a crown which came to be known as the Iron Crown of Lombardy. Currently held in the Cathedral of Monza near Milan, it is one of the oldest crowns in Europe. It may have been used in as many as 34 coronations including those of Charlemagne (800) and Frederick Barbarossa (1155). The iron band is said to show no signs of rust and displays no magnetic attraction. (Miraculous properties were often attributed to holy relics. Some pieces of the True Cross were resistant to fire since they were, in fact, made of asbestos.)

Napoleon’s Exile

Napoleon on St Helene by Francois-Joseph Sandmann

In 1812, after twenty years of success, Napoleon’s luck finally began to turn. After withdrawing from a disastrous attempt to invade Russia, things went rapidly downhill and three years later, on 15 July 1815, less than one month after his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon surrendered and was exiled to one of the most remote pieces of land on Earth, a small volcanic island in the South Pacific Ocean called … St Helena. Helena of Constantinople never visited, the place; it was named her honour by Portugese explorers in the sixteenth century.

Despite plans to have him rescued (including one fantastic idea involving an escape to America by submarine), Napoleon died there in 1821.

David Bushnell's submarine, The Turtle, 1775.

Nicolas Sarkozy is a monarch, Prince Philip is a God

In 1278, the sovereignty of the tiny Principality of Andorra, located in the Pyrenees between Spain and France, was split between two co-princes: the Bishop of Urgell in Spain and the Count of Foix in France. The last Count of Foix was Henri de Bourbon, a descendent of King Louis IX. When, in 1589 he outlasted Henry III of France and Henry I, Duke of Guise in the War of the Three Henrys to become King Henry IV of France, the Andorran title went with him.

To this day, the French head of state also acts as the prince of Andorra. The current rulers are Archbishop Joan Enric Vives i Sicilia and Prince Nicholas Sarkozy.

To the Yaohnanen tribe on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and self-confessed cantankerous old sod, is a God. The origins of the Prince Philip movement are unclear but it gained momentum after his visit to Vanuatu in 1974. Over the years, the prince and the Yaohnanen have exchanged gifts. In 2007, a British reality TV show organised for some of the islanders to travel to Britain to visit Prince Philip.

The Prince Philip movement is an example of a cargo cult, a religious movement that emerges in a tribal society after contact with members of a more affluent, technologically advanced society. Tanna island appears to be fertile ground for cargo cults; many emerged after US troops were stationed on the island during the second world war. The John Frum cult and the Tom Navy cult persist today.

Like the Prince Philip movement, the Rastafari movement regards a world leader as its deity. Born Lij Tafari Makonnen, later Ras Tafari Makonnen (Ras meaning Duke), Haile Selassie ruled as emperor of Ethiopia for nearly forty-four years. News of his coronation in 1930 ignited the Rastafari movement in Jamaica. When Selassie visited Jamaica in 1966, 100,000 Rastafari were at the airport to greet him. The date, April 21, is celebrated as Grounation Day, the second holiest day in the Rastafarian calendar.

The Tarahumara and the Marathon Monks

The Tarahumara, an indigenous Mexican people, are renowned for their running feats. They run for fun, transportation and ceremonial purposes from childhood into their sixties. Distances of more than a hundred miles in a single session are not uncommon, typically run barefoot or in sandals made from tyres.

Various explanations for their abilities have been put forward, from genetics to their toe-strike running style to the huge quantities of corn beer they consume the night before a long run. The likelihood is that all of these, combined with a culture that revolves around running from an early age, produce these incredible feats of endurance.

However, the Tarahumara have rivals for the title of world’s greatest endurance athletes from a very different group of people whose abilities are not so easily explained.

For a thousand years, the Tendai Buddhist monks of Mount Hiei near Kyoto, Japan have practiced a form of training called Kaihōgyō. The Kaihōgyō lasts seven years beginning with running 40 km per day for one hundred consecutive days for each of the first three years. That’s a little short of marathon distance. They wear bamboo sandals, stick to a diet of a rice ball and a bowl of noodles a day, and are given no reprieve from their other duties at the monastery, meaning that they may have time for only a few hours sleep a night. In years four and five, the monks run 40 km a day for two hundred days, then in year six, 60 km a day for one hundred days. In the last year, they must run 84 km, two marathons back-to-back, every day for one hundred days, followed immediately by 40 km a day for another hundred days. In all, they cover over 46,000 km, more than the circumference of the planet.

During the fifth year, the monks undergo the Doiri, or entering the temple. They meditate for nine days straight with no food, water or sleep. Theoretically, both the lack of sleep and dehydration should be fatal and yet many survive.

So how are they able to perform these feats? Unlike the Tarahumara, they have no close common genetic heritage, no running culture instilled from childhood and they survive on a Spartan diet that doesn’t include copious quantities of corn beer. Could the answer lie in the doctrines of Tendai Buddhism?

Maybe, but there are two caveats to consider.

First of all, completion of the Kaihōgyō is a rare event – only forty-six people in the last four hundred years have managed it.

Second, the monks are highly motivated. They carry a knife and a rope during their runs. If they find themselves unable to continue for any reason, they must commit suicide by hanging or disembowelment. The graves of those who didn’t make it line the course that the monks run.

So, aspiring endurance runners have two options: drink lots of beer and run for pleasure, or motivate yourself with the threat of  disembowelment. Personally, it seems like a waste not to utilise my beer-drinking experience, so I figure I’ll stick with the Tarahumara approach.

Proteus, Chimera and the Elephant Man

In 1862, Mary Jane Merrick was at a fair when she was knocked over by an elephant. Some months later, she gave birth to an apparently healthy boy named Joseph. However, within a few years, Joseph had developed thick skin lesions on his face. As he grew, the lesions worsened and spread and skeletal abnormalities began to manifest, particularly affecting his skull. By his teens, his appearance was so disturbing that he was having trouble finding work.

After his mother’s death, Joseph was mistreated by his father and step-mother. He left home and lived in poverty until, in desperation, he approached a showman to offer himself as an exhibit. Given the epithet The Elephant Man, he became a popular attraction. He later resided at the London Hospital where he became well-known among London’s upper class.

The weight of Merrick’s head meant that he was unable to lie down without risking a broken neck. He would sleep in a sitting position. On April 11, 1890, at the age of twenty-seven, he was found lying on his bed, dead of a dislocated neck. His doctor and friend, Frederick Treeves, believed that he attempted to sleep lying down out of a need to normalise his behaviour.

Until his death, Joseph Merrick held the belief that his mother’s elephant accident elephant was the cause of his condition. Most likely, it was a case of Proteus syndrome, a rare genetic disorder named after the shape-shifting Greek god of the sea. A 2011 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine resolves the question of the gene involved.

Biopsies were taken from affected and unaffected tissues from twenty-nine Proteus syndrome patients. Sequencing of exomes (DNA that codes for a protein product, constituting about 1% of the human genome) showed that, in affected tissues, a gene called AKT1 was mutated. AKT1 is involved in the growth and death of cells. The mutation was uncommon in unaffected tissue.

The study demonstrated that Proteus syndrome is a mosaic disorder, one caused by a mutation that occurs during prenatal development. The mutation is then propagated only through cells that are descended from the original mutated cell, resulting in incomplete distribution of the abnormality throughout the body. Germline mutations of AKT1 cause embryonic death.

Similar to mosaicism, chimerism occurs when two separately fertilised ova fuse into a single zygote.; essentially, two (non-identical) twins fuse into a single individual in utero. The result is a person carrying the genomes of two people in different parts of their bodies. Usually, the condition has little or no consequence. However, with the advent of genetic testing, chimerism may cause complications. This was most dramatically demonstrated by the ordeal suffered by Lydia Fairchild.

While pregnant, Lydia and her recently estranged husband submitted to genetic testing as part of Lydia’s application for child support. Her husband was found to be the father but Lydia’s DNA did not match. She was accused of fraud and her children were taken into care.

At the time, Lydia was pregnant with her third child. At the birth, a court-appointed witness was present to take samples from both the baby and Lydia. The tests on these returned the same result – the child the witness had seen Lydia give birth to was genetically not her child.

Testing of a cervical smear finally clarified the situation – Lydia was a chimera.

Bellerophon fights the Chimera by Bernard Picart

Alexia sine agraphia

In his excellent book, ‘The Mind’s Eye,’ Oliver Sacks discusses the strange case of one of his patients, Canadian author Howard Engel, who woke one morning to find the front page of his newspaper printed in an unidentifiable, ‘Oriental’ script. At first thinking he was the victim of a practical joke, he was dismayed to find the entire newspaper in the same state as well as all other written material he looked at.

Howard was admitted to hospital and was found to be suffering from stroke-induced alexia sine agraphia, also called pure agraphia, a neurological condition affecting part of the brain involved in reading. Thankfully for his profession, Howard could still write but could no longer read his own writing, making editing of his work a problem.

The VWFA is in the temporal lobe (image by Scott Camazine).

Pure alexia is caused by damage to a small region in the left hemisphere of the brain called the visual word form area (VWFA). It can lead to some bizarre outcomes. Some sufferers lose the ability to read one script but retain the ability to read a second (this is more frequent in Japan where two different scripts, Kanji and Katanka, are in common use). Other sufferers are able to sort words they cannot consciously read into basic categories, such as living and non-living. This implicit, sub-conscious understanding of word meaning may indicate that other regions of the brain (possibly the VWFA-equivalent region in the right hemisphere) perform some reading function.

Although damage to the left hemisphere has been associated with pure alexia since the 1890s, the precise location of the VWFA was not identified until 2000. The concept of a distinct brain region responsible for reading has been a source of dispute for some time. Writing has existed for a few thousand years and widespread literacy for a hundred years or less, far too brief, dispersed and complex a task for evolution to have created a dedicated brain region. Alfred Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolution, was troubled by this apparent paradox and believed it was evidence of God.

The Great Wall of China Fallacy

Image by Samuel Li

Imagine you are a tourist admiring the Great Wall as it snakes over mountains and valleys when the loud man next to you tries to strike up a conversation.

“Isn’t it amazing how the landscape has formed over millions of years to exactly match the contours of the Wall,” he says. “It’s clear evidence of existence of God.” The man is obviously insane so you nod politely and move quickly away while he fiddles with his camera.

Similarly with the VWFA, the assumption that the structure of the human brain has evolved to accommodate reading is flawed. It is writing systems that have been adapted over thousands of years to make best use of the brain. Despite independent origins, all of the world’s major writing systems share common characteristics such as clearly defined lines and junctions that assist with reading. These characteristics exploit the abilities of the VWFA which may have originally evolved for face and object recognition.

Some writing systems are exceptions. Braille, designed to be read by touch, is an obvious example. One of the great mysteries of the Inca is how such a vast and complex civilization was able to function without a writing system. However, there is growing evidence that quipu, colourful knotted strings originally thought to contain numerical information, were actually a three-dimensional writing system unlike any other ever devised.

Carrots, Bananas and Breadfruit

In the 1930s, Britain feared that Germany was nearing completion of a death ray, an electromagnetic weapon that could kill at long-range. In attempting to create their own death ray, British scientists instead developed a technology that came to be known as radio detection and ranging, or radar. After the outbreak of World War II, radar became a valuable tool in detecting approaching German aircraft. Although many of the advances in radar technology originated in Germany, the Nazis didn’t perceive its potential and consequently, its uptake by the military was slow.

In order to deflect growing Luftwaffe suspicions that a new technology was responsible for the success of British pilots during the Battle of Britain, a misinformation campaign was created. The British public were told that the RAF’s best night fighter pilots had developed superior night vision through years spent on a diet laden with carrots.The idea that carrots improved vision already existed in Germany and apparently they fell for it, at least for a while. In the meantime, an entire generation of British children were fed large servings of carrots along with the dogma that they were good for their eyes.

It was one of the most successful and enduring wartime propaganda campaigns but with the unintended consequence that the myth would continue unabated for more than seventy years.

(The above is an excerpt from a speech given to my three-year old daughter when I found the carrot myth presented as fact in a book she was reading. She no longer eats carrots.)

The Banana Revolution

That's not a banana: the November 1989 cover of Titanic magazine.

When East Germans flooded across the border into West Germany after the fall of the Inner German Border in November 1989, many were after one thing: bananas. Being virtually unobtainable in the East, people queued at fruit stalls and supermarkets to buy bunches of them. The enormous changes being embraced by East Germans as the Soviet bloc crumbled came to be known as the Banana Revolution.

 Breadfruit and Mutiny

Anyone familiar with the Mutiny on the Bounty will know that Captain Bligh’s near demise was due in large part to breadfruit. Native to New Guinea, the breadfruit tree is one of world’s most productive food plants. After the success of crops such as the potato, tomato, tobacco and cocoa, breadfruit was going to be the New World’s next superfood. Seen as a potentially cheap source of food for slaves, President of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks offered a reward to the first person able to retrieve specimens and deliver them to the West Indies. In 1789, Bligh had collected over 1,000 plants from Tahiti and was on his way to the West Indies when the Fletcher Christian-led mutiny ended the endeavour.

Bligh survived the 6,700 km journey in an open boat to safety and returned to complete his mission in 1791. Despite his heroic efforts, breadfruit never succeeded as a source of food for slaves, many of whom were reluctant to eat it.

Transplanting of the Breadfruit Trees from Otaheite, Thomas Gosse, 1796