Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard The History Wizard

Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 10 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 9 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week we’re going to be learning about history’s favorite war criminal, Genghis Khan. The man, the myth, the incorrigible slut.
But first! It’s time for another installment of the Alchemist’s Table. Today potion is called Summer Cyclone. Take 1.5 oz of anejo tequila, 1 oz of Blue curacao, and 1 oz of coconut syrup. Shake vigorously and pour into a wine glass. Top with prosecco and enjoy.
With that out of the way it’s time for a biography! Would it shock you to hear that Genghis Khan was not his given name? The Khan of khans was born Temujin sometime between the years 1155 and 1167, there is still a lot of dispute over exactly when Temujin was born, though many traditions have him being born in the Year of the Pig, so either 1155 or 1167, although based on its fidelity to the accepted timeline of Temujin’s life, 1162 is generally considered the most accurate estimate for his birth year. Temujin’s life gets even more confusing when you learn that even his birthPLACE is up for debate. The Secret History records his birthplace as Delüün Boldog on the Onon River, but this has been placed at either Dadal in Khentii Province or in southern Agin-Buryat Okrug, Russia. The Secret History being the book The Secret History of the Mongols, which is the oldest surviving literary text we have written in a Mongolian language, though it bears noting that it was written after Temujin’s death.
Oh yeah, and we also don’t know where he’s buried. It’s generally accepted that he is buried somewhere near the Mongol sacred mountain of Burkhan Khaldun in the Khentii Mountains. But the exact site of his burial is, to this day, unknown.
So, we don’t know when he was born, we don’t know where he was born, and we don’t know where he was buried.  So what DO we know about the life and times of Temujin? Luckily, a whole fucking lot. Though, before we get into the scholarly consensus, let’s talk about some of the myths and legends surrounding his birth. Some legends say that Temujin was born clutching a blood clot in his hand, this is a somewhat common trope in various Asian folktales prophesying that Temujin would grow up to be a great warrior. It is also said that Hö'elün, Temujin’s mother and the principal wife of Yesügei, chieftain of the Borjigin tribe was impregnated by a ray of light. Oh, and apparently Temujin’s entire family line was started by a blue grey wolf and a red doe about 21 generations prior to his birth.
Yesügei,died when Temujin was 8 years old after being poisoned by a group of Tartars that he was sharing a meal with. Temujin was able to ally himself with some of his father’s former friends and allies and began to rise to some levels of prominence, but tensions with one of his friends Jamukha eventually led to the two men fighting a decisive battle, which Temujin list and afterwards was not seen in the lands of his father for about a decade.
There was, for a long while, debate and dispute over where Temujin was and what happened to him during that time, though it is now generally accepted that he crossed the border into Jin China where he lived as either a servant or slave, sources are unclear on exactly which.
Temujin’s clash with his former friend Jamukha took place in 1187 Dalan Baljut, and it would be around 1196 that Temujin returned to the steppes, now much more powerful and influential than he’d been before. In early summer 1196, he participated in a joint campaign with the Jin against the Tatars, who had begun to act contrary to Jin interests. As a reward, the Jin awarded him the honorific cha-ut kuri, the meaning of which probably approximated "commander of

Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 9 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 8 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week we’re going to be looking at infighting within Christianity. There are many differing opinions within the faith on the whos and whats and whys and hows, and very oft en they decide to kill each other over these, ultimately minor, differences. The Cathar Genocide, often known as the  Albegensian Crusade, was just such an event. It was a time when the Pope felt threatened by those who he deemed to be heretics and so decided to kill them.
But, first it’s time to craft our potions. Todays libations, gods I love that word, is called Melting Snow. Take two ounces of sake, 1 ounce of triple sec, 3-4 dashes of black lemon bitters, shake and pour into a rocks glass before gently pouring 1 tsp of grenadine syrup into it. The resulting drink should have the grenadine settle at the bottom initially making a lovely presentation. Though I’d mix it before actually imbibing.
With that out of the way let’s talk about who the Cathar were. The name Cathar comes from the Greek word katharoi, meaning “the pure ones”. Their other name, the Albegensians, comes from the fact that many adherents during the Crusade lived in or around the city of Albi. Catharism is described as a somewhat dualist, somewhat Gnostic heretical branch of Christianity. Though, it bears mentioning that both are likely exonyms and the followers of this particular faith often self identifies as Good Men, Good Women, or Good Christians.
So what is dualism and what is gnosticism? Well in the case of the Cathars they were pretty much the same thing. Dualism is the moral or spiritual belief that two fundamental concepts exist, which often oppose each other. Gnosticism draws a distinction between a supreme, and hidden God above all, and a lesser deity (sometimes called the demiurge) who created the material world. Consequently, Gnostics considered material existence flawed or evil, and held the principal element of salvation to be direct knowledge of the hidden divinity, attained via mystical or esoteric insight. Many Gnostic texts deal not in concepts of sin and repentance, but with illusion and enlightenment. Gnosticism preferred people to have personal knowledge and experience with the divine, something that threatened the power of the early Church.
Cathar cosmology identified two Gods. One who created the perfect spiritual world and the other, the demiurge who created the imperfect and sinful physical world. The demiurge is often identified as Yahweh and is referred to as Rex Mundi, King of the World. All visible matter, including the human body, was created or crafted by this Rex Mundi; matter was therefore tainted with sin. Under this view, humans were actually angels seduced by Satan before a war in heaven against the army of Michael, after which they would have been forced to spend an eternity trapped in the evil God's material realm. The Cathars taught that to regain angelic status one had to renounce the material self completely. Until one was prepared to do so, they would be stuck in a cycle of reincarnation, condemned to suffer endless human lives on the corrupt Earth.
Also, while they revered Jesus Christ, they also denied that he was ever a mortal man, instead believing that both he and Mary were Angels taking the semblance of a human form in order to teach our sin tainted flesh to grow closer to the purity of divinity. Other Cathar beliefs included the pescetarian diet, their view that women were pretty purely to tempt men away from divine purity and some Cathars believed that Eve had sex with Satan and gave birth to a race of giants who were all wiped out in the Great Flood. Cathars also rejected the Catholic priesthood, labe

Content warning for discussion of genocide.
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 7 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 6 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week we;re going to be looking at one of the many genocides that have been perpetrated against indigenous Americans. This, however, will not be the genocide you’re expecting. That will be a later episode. The Genocide at Sacred Ridge took place long before the arrival of European colonizers. Unfortunately, much like history’s oldest war in Jebel Sahaba, we don’t have a historical record of the events so much as a purely archaeological one. But, we’ll get to that shortly, first…
Let’s start things right off with the second installment of the Alchemist's Table. I hope you enjoyed last week’s potion. This week we’ve got another delightful brew called A Taste of Fall. Start with 2 oz of bourbon or rye whiskey, follow up with an ounce of maple syrup (make sure you’re using actual maple syrup, not pancake syrup) then finish with 4 oz of soft Apple Cider, shake well and strain into a wineglass.
With that out of the way let’s talk about the Puebloans. Puebloans is the modern taxonomy for many indigenous peoples who lived and live in and around southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. Now when looking at old cultures without a writing system, or at least without a surviving written record peoples tend to be classified into distinct categories based on the things they left behind. The artifacts we are able to find from archeological sites, how they built their homes, and any kind of art they left behind. There are a number of beautiful petroglyphs at sites like Mesa Verde, which is now a national park.
So, who are the Puebloan people and where did they come from? Well the Jargon tells us that They are believed to have developed, at least in part, from the Oshara tradition, which developed from the Picosa culture. But to understand what that means we have to know WHAT the OSHARA tradition is and what the Picosa culture is. The simple answer is that we define these cultures by the technology they used and divide them up somewhat arbitrarily in order to have distinct THINGS to talk about. Historical and archeological classification is all made up. None of it is REAL in any objective sense. It’s just that we as humans need some way to put things into little boxes so that we can study and understand it.
Puebloan prehistory was divided up into 8 periods at an archeological conference in Pecos , New Mexico in 1927. It’s called, you might be shocked to discover, the Pecos Classification. The Pecos classification didn’t include any dates, it just split up these prehistoric civilizations based on changes in architecture, art, pottery, and cultural remains. 
So what defined the Puebloan people? Well, most notably it was the emergence of housing structures known as pueblos, the switch from woven baskets into pottery for storage, and the advent of farming. Once people began to develop these technologies and cultural markers they were considered to have transitioned from the Basketmaker III Era into the Pueblo I Era. This is also why no real dates were attached to these periods, because not all groups would enter them at the same time.
Hell, even more distinct historic eras, like the Middle Ages are arbitrary and were determined after the fact, as my old history professor Dr. Brian Regal used to say “no one just woke up on January 1st, 1500 and said “Welp, I guess the Middle Ages are done now!”
Now, Puebloan is the modern taxonomy for the people who lived and live in the Four Corners region. That being the area on a map of the modern United States where the corners of Colorado, Arizona, Utah, and

Content warning for discussion of genocide.
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 7 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 6 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. Speaking of weeks, we’ve finally hit our first week! Get it? This is episode 7, the episodes are called Days. There are 7 Days in a Week… I’m funny dammit!
I’ve got something special for you starting at the end of Week 1. It’s a new segment I’m going to call the Alchemist’s Table. Every Day I’m going to be sharing with you a cocktail recipe that I have invented. If you enjoy a nice cocktail and you aren’t driving to work feel free to make yourself one before sitting down for the rest of the episode.
For Day 7 we’re going to be enjoying the first cocktail I ever created. It’s called A Taste of Spring. It starts with 2 oz of Gin, I prefer gunpowder gin, but a London Dry will work just fine. Followed by 1 oz of elderflower liquor, 1 oz of lavender syrup, stir for about 30 seconds in ice before straining into a rocks glass over ice. And that, my friends, is a Taste of Spring. Enjoy.
Anyway, it’s time to head back to the West, and for this episode we have to travel back in time to the 5th century BCE for the Siege of Melos during the Peloponnesian War. IN a modern historical context we look at the Peloponnesian War as being between Sparta and Athens, and while this isn’t technically wrong, it’s also not as right as it could be.
The Peloponnesian War was fought between the Delian League, which was a confederacy of various Greek city-states with Atens in supreme control. The Delian League was created as a defensive alliance against the Persian Empire following the Second Persian Invasion of Greece (this is the invasion that included the famed Battle of Thermopylae). And the Peloponnesian League which was less a league and more an ancient world version of the Warsaw Pact, with Sparta (then called Lacadeamon) at the head with its various allied city states. See, around 550 BCE SParta got tired of having to conquer everyone and instead offered to NOT conquer them if they joined the League.
The Delian League got its name from the island of Delos where they would meet and where their treasury was held before being moved to Athens in 454 BCE. The Peloponnesian League got IT’S name from the peninsula at the southern tip of Greece, which is known as the Peloponnese Peninsula. The Peloponnesian League is something of a misnomer as its membership was not limited to that area of Greece.
But, I ramble, and so let us return to the Peloponnesian War. Why did Sparta and Athens, erstwhile allies against Xerxes I and the Persian Empire decide to go to war with each other?
The period between the Second Persian Invasion of Greece and the Peloponnesian War is sometimes known as the Pentecontaetia, a term which means “a period of 50 years” which refers to the 48 year period between 479 and 431 BCE. The Pentecontaetia saw the rise of Athens as one of the most prominent Greek City States, it saw the rise of Athenian democracy, and it saw the rise of tensions between Sparta and Athens. You can look at this period as somewhat similar to the rising tensions between Rome and Carthage. Sparta HAD been the most powerful Greek city-state, and now suddenly they had a rival and didn’t like that. Sparta was the Sasuke to Athens Naruto, the Vegeta to Athen’s Goku.
Following the flight of the Persian armies from Greece Athens began to rebuild the great walls around their city that had been lost to the Persian armies. Sparta, upon learning about this construction, asked them not to do that. But Athens rebuffed them, not wanting to put Athens effectively under the control of Sparta’s massive army. Another way we can view Athens and Sparta through the lens of Cartha

Content warning for discussion of genocide and mention of suicide.
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 6 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 5 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week we’re going to, finally, be stepping outside of the Western sphere of influence and migrating over towards Jin Dynasty China to learn about an event that is sometimes known as the Upheaval of the Five Barbarians. This refers to the genocide of many non-Han tribes from China that took place in the beginning of the 4th century CE.
As always, we will start with that most important of set dressings, context. The thing that, without, all of history would just be one shot DnD stories told around a table. But before even that, let’s talk about the word barbarian. Etymologically the word barbarian comes to us from the Greek word barbar, meaning a non-Greek person or someone who didn’t speak ancient Greek. Meaning that, technically, we are all barbarians. In a more modern context the word has a far more pejorative connotation. It’s used in the same contexts as words like savages or uncivilized. It becomes an inherently stigmatizing term. One designed to make the people being referred to by it inherently lesser than those using it.
The is one of our first instances of dehumanization being used in a historic genocide. The Romans didn’t see the Carthaginians as animals or subhuman, merely as a threat to the Roman way of life and to Roman hegemony over the Mediterranean. Pontus didn’t see the Romans as barbarians or savages, merely a threat to Pontus’s control over Asia Minor. But the Five Barbarian Tribes? They were inherently less. They were, to be sure, a threat to Jin dynastic control over China, but more than that, they weren’t Han Chinese, and so they were ethnically inferior.
The Jin Dynasty emerged from the chaos and turmoil of the Three Kingdoms Period. Following the end of the Han Dynasty the Three Kingdoms of Cao Wei, Shu Han, and Eastern Wu dominated China from 220 to 280 CE. The Sima clan from the Cao Wei kingdom rose to prominence in 249 CE after staging a coup against the Cao clan. By 263 Sima Yi had conquered both the kingdom of Cao Wei and the Kingdom of Shu Han. Sima Yi would die in 265 CE, but his son Sima Yan would go on to conquer the kingdom of Eastern Wu in 280 CE, uniting China once again and declaring himself the first emperor of the Jin Dynasty. Sima Yan would die 10 years later, in 290 CE and would be called Emperor Wu, the Martial Emperor of Jin, posthumously.
The death of Emperor Wu would spark a succession war that would come to be known as the War of the Eight Princes, and it would be within the context of this war that the Upheaval of the Five Barbarians would occur. See, after Emperor Wu died he was succeeded by his son, Sima Zhong, also known as Emperor Hui. Hui was developmentally disabled. We don’t know the exact nature of his disability, but records show that, while he could read and write just fine, he was unable to make traditionally logical decisions on his own. So, despite ruling as emperor for 17 years, Emperor Hui never exercised any real authority on his own, instead coming under the control of 9 different regents over the course of his reign.
It was because of Emperor Hui’s disabilities and the relative ease with which he could be controlled by a regent that the War of the Eight Princes began in earnest. The War of the Eight Princes, which lasted from 290 until 306 CE is somewhat akin to the Hundred YEars War in that it was not an extended period of continuous fighting. It was stretches of relative peace, interspersed with massive amounts of lethal violence that saw shifts in power each time.
First, after Emperor Wu died he named his father in law Yang Jun, and the Prince of Ru

Content warning for discussion of genocide and child death
Episode music can be found here: https://uppbeat.io/track/paulo-kalazzi/heros-time
Day 5 will take a look into the historic event known as the Asiatic Vespers, one of the only genocide committed against Rome instead of by it.
Episode Notes Below:
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 3 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 2 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. For this week’s episode we’re going to be talking about a genocide committed AGAINST the Romans. This is particularly unusual because usually the Romans are the ones committing genocides and war crimes. Historically speaking the event is called the Asiatic Vespers, which should explain the pun in the episode title. And if it doesn’t, I’m not going to be explaining it. Google is free.
Our timeline places us in the Roman Republic. The Punic Wars are over, Carthago cecidit and Rome had steadily been expanding its borders in all directions. By the time the Punic Wars were over Rome held all of Italy, most of Iberia, most of Greece, parts of northern Africa, including Carthage, and were on the cusp of moving into the Anatolia (what is today part of the nation of Turkey). You might think that Rome would be tired of wars after their decades of fighting against the Carthiginians, but their victories only made them hungry for more.
During the final decade of the 2nd century BCE the Romans were engaged in 2 distinct wars. One in northwest Africa (the area that is today Algeria) against King Jurgatha of Numidia called the Jugurthine War and one fought around western Europe against various Celtic and Germanic tribes who had invaded from the Jutland Peninsula (modern day Denmark and parts of Northern Germany) called the Cimbrian Wars.
Both wars would end in Roman victories, and we will discuss them very briefly now as they are relevant to our later discussion, but not the main focus of this episode. The Jugurthan War took place two generations after the fall of Carthage. King Massinisa, an ally of Rome against Carthage died in 149. He was succeeded by his son Micipsa, who was succeeded by two sons and an illegitimate nephew. Adherbal (son), Hiempsal I (son), and Jugurtha (the nephew). Micipsa, fearing conflict amongst his three heirs bid them split the kingdom up into three parts. One to be ruled over by each of them. 
The Roman Senate has been given the authority, by Micsipa, to make sure his will was carried out, but being the corrupt piece of shit it was, the Senate allowed itself to be bribed by Jugurtha to overlook his crimes after he assassinated Hiempsal and forced Adherbal to flee to Rome for safety. Peace WAS declared, albeit briefly, between the two men, although in 113 BCE Jugurtha, once again, declared war on Adherbal.
Rome, fearing instability in the region, acquiesced to Adherbal’s request for aid and sent troops to the fight and ambassadors to Jugurtha to demand peace negotiations. Jugurtha was clever though, and knew how much the Romans loved to talk. So he kept them doing just that until Cirta, Adherbal’s capital ran out of food and had to surrender. Jugurtha immediately had Adherbal executed as well as all Romans who had aided him in the defense of Cirta.
Now, the Pax Romana didn’t exist just yet, but Rome still took a hard line against anyone who dared to harm her citizens. So in 112 BCE the Jugurthine War was declared. We’re not going to go into any great detail of the Jugurthine War, suffice it to say that Rome won, it lasted until 105 BCE, and that some historians see this war as the true beginning of the fall of the Roman Republic. Gaius Marius was the victorious general and consul of the Jugurthine War (and also the Cimbrian War we’re going to talk about next) and he would