The following is the revised first chapter of my book "Before First Contact"
"(T)he web of our history is woven of many separate threads, none of these is without’ influence in making the color and substance of the whole fabric." - William E. Smythe
First Thread
Two brothers, their father and a small crew were out on a wooden ship in a small sea, mending their fishing nets. If you've been out at sea during a calm day, it can be pretty quiet and peaceful, so I'm not sure why, but when a man came to the brothers and asked them to join him, they bid their father good-bye and left with the man. The brother's names were John and James, the name of the sea was Galilee and the name of the mysterious man they left with was Jesus of Nazareth.
These brothers became apostles of Jesus and witnessed miracles such as the resurrection of Jairus' daughter:
"While he yet spake, there cometh one from the ruler of the synagogue's house, saying to him, Thy daughter is dead; trouble not the Master. But when Jesus heard it, he answered him, saying, Fear not: believe only, and she shall be made whole. And when he came into the house, he suffered no man to go in, save Peter, and James, and John, and the father and the mother of the maiden. And all wept, and bewailed her: but he said, Weep not; she is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn, knowing that she was dead. And he put them all out, and took her by the hand, and called, saying, Maid, arise. And her spirit came again, and she arose straightway: and he commanded to give her meat. And her parents were astonished: but he charged them that they should tell no man what was done." - King James Bible
That was only the first "miracle" they witnessed. John, James and another apostle named Peter, were also the only ones to witness the “transfiguration” of Jesus:
“And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.” - King James Bible
At one point, a small village of Samaritans decided not to receive Jesus. Upset at the snub and apparently having fiery tempers, the brothers suggested to Jesus that he call down fire and brimstone upon the town. Jesus didn’t like that idea:
“They went, and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them. And they went to another village.” - King James Bible
After Jesus’ crucifixion, one of the brothers, James, left and found himself preaching the gospel in a place called Galicia on the Northwestern tip of the Iberian Peninsula. He decided to travel there because as best as he knew, nobody there had heard of the gospel yet. He did not get many converts while he was there, but then in January of 40 CE, it is said that while he preached, the Virgin Mary appeared to him on top of a pillar. He took it as a sign and returned to the middle east, but King Herod managed to capture him and in the year 44, killed him:
“Now about that time Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church. And he killed James the brother of John with the sword.”
His remains were returned to Galicia for burial. With the executions of both Jesus and James by Roman officials, Christianity was off to a rough and bloody start, but by February of around 280, the religion had taken over the Roman Empire, replacing Hellenism.
The Roman Empire had taken over the entire Mediterranean by 280 CE before Christianity conquered Hellenism - http://geacron.com
This is the first of many ancient threads that weave into great stories about what happens when cultures clash. Cultures take a long time to develop and it usually does in isolation, so when they meet, their differences stick out and they don't understand one another. They may not be able to communicate with each other, thus they may not be able to empathize either. Instead, they'll either dismiss, or try to change each other, leading to culture wars, and sometimes, genocide. The Jewish and Roman reaction to the rise of Jesus was to kill him and later his apostle and followers, yet in the end, one of the most lasting legacies of the Roman Empire would be the Christian faith. Once they dominated the Roman Empire, Christianity began to clash with other cultures. It's a pattern that these writings follow.
The story of James, son of Zebedee, is ground in the New Testament, and he is said to be the first martyr for Christianity. If you take the name "James" and translate it into the language at the time, Latin, you will get "Iacomus" (Pronounced EYAH kah mus). The Iberian Peninsula, where James went to preach, had another name: Hispania
There were two large cities in Hispania, Cordoba was established in 206 BCE as the Roman capital and Bracara Augusta, now in Subi lands, was established in 20 BCE. Other cities included Toledo, and Seville. Hispania was a western frontier in the enormous Roman Empire until about 395 CE, when the last emperor to rule a united Rome died and his sons split the empire in two: The Eastern half, which held Constantinople, was ruled by Arcadius, while the Western half, which held Rome and Hispania, was ruled by a ten year old named Honorius. Hispania became part of the Western Roman Empire, but Roman dominance over the region fell away. By 418, Hispania had broken up into four independent kingdoms, besides the land the Visigoths owned, another group called the Vandals ruled the southern most part of Hispania.
Meanwhile, in the east, a Gothic man named Alaric became angry when neither emperor offered him a command, so he raised his own army and became the first king of the Visigoths. They then began to invade surrounding lands. While that was going on, a threat of raids by Attila the Hun set the stage for the Bishop of Rome, named Leo I, to become the very first Pope by the order of Constantinople. By 493, the Visigoths had traveled to the Italian peninsula from the Germanic region, sacked Rome and continued west taking over a substantial portion of Hispania, leaving only one other kingdom.
During the middle ages, pilgrimages from Judea to Hispania, in the style of James' biblical trip, became popular and James soon became venerated as Saint James of Spain. Each saint was also given a feast date where they would be celebrated, his was July 25. The Latin language, would become the root language of Italian, Castillian (future Spanish), French, Portuguese and Romanian. English and Germanic languages would come from what the Romans called Germania; Tribal groups who managed to resist Roman rule. A variation of James' Latin name, "Iacomus" developed into "lago" (EYE AW go), and later "Yago" (YA go). "San Yago" was how one would refer to Saint James at that time.
In 535 a volcano in Indonesia named Krakatoa erupted, causing a cloud of ash to wrap around the world taking about 18 months to settle. Once the dust settled, on 542CE the black death (Bubonic plague) spread in Constantinople, killing thousands and would spread as far as Gaul. In 551, The Eastern Roman Empire decided to team up with the Lombards to take back Ravenna and Rome. The battle was a success and thus most of Italy was taken back by the Eastern Roman Empire. The next year, the Eastern Empire was also able to take the southern coast of Hispania. By 600, the Visigoths lost their capital city of Toulouse to Burgundy who pushed them completely into Hispania. The island of Britannia, like Hispania, had broken into several independent kingdoms, when Pope Gregory the Great sent Augustine I to the island to convert the people there into Christianity.
Second Thread
From its Jewish roots, Christianity grew to become larger than Jesus, or what was left of the Roman Empire; They became the dominant culture. Yet down in the Arabian Peninsula, a new culture was springing from similar roots. In 610, a man named Muhammad, living in a village called Mecca, claimed to have seen a vision of the Angel Gabriel while he was asleep. The Angel Gabriel appointed Muhammad Prophet of God (or Allah) and tasked him with spreading messages from the Angels to the public. It took him a few years to catch on, but Muhammad was able to pass along these messages and grow his followers, beginning the rise of a new culture.
Of course, when new cultures rise, they begin to clash with the dominant culture. In this case, it was the ruling classes of Mecca who felt as though their culture was threatened. They attacked Muhammad's followers in the streets and generally ostracized them from society. Many followers began to leave Mecca, but Muhammad stayed and his family was relocated to a ghetto where his wife would die in 619. After her death, Muhammad claimed to have received a new prophesy, permitting him and his followers to fight back against the people who were oppressing them. The ruling class then conspired to assassinate Muhammad, forcing him on September of 622 to sneak out of his friend’s home and flee to a city called Medina, becoming the “Ummah”.
Here in Medina, free from the dominance of the Meccan tribes, the religion of Islam would continue to grow and develop. Muhammad entered the city with so much sway, he became a de-facto ruler, so his prophesies and the way he legislated his city habitually intertwined with each other. Citywide prayers occurred five times a day, and giving to the poor became a matter of law. Initially, he established equal rights between men and women, Jews and Arabs promising to protect them, but he was hoping that the entire population of Medina would join the Ummah. He began to receive messages saying that Allah was the same god that the Jews and Christians worshiped and that they would all enter the same paradise, but this didn't convince the Jews to convert. Either frustrated, or threatened by this, Jewish tribes were driven out one by one, one tribe for not wanting to take part in raids. Finally, Muhammad gave the remaining Jews the choice to either convert to Islam or die: They chose to die. They beheaded the men, while the women and children became slaves: Another bloody example of how volatile cultures can be when they collide.
Muhammad made it a point to raid passing caravans, mostly from Mecca, to keep his people fed and supplied. In one major raid on a Meccan caravan in March of 624, Muhammad said that anybody who died in the battle would enter paradise, no questions asked. The Meccans were driven back, and Muhammad returned to Medina with a good chunk of supplies from the caravan.
Over a period, Meccan attitudes towards Muhammad and Medina softened. Faced with possible annihilation, the people of Mecca now wanted a truce. By 630, now with an army of ten thousand, Muhammad approached Mecca and took it over without any bloodshed. Muhammad now ruled over Mecca as well as Medina. He died just two years later and controversy followed over who would succeed him and become the next ruler of the Ummah. They chose Muhammad’s father-in-law from his second marriage, Abu Bakrah, however many Muslims had wanted to appoint his son-in-law, Abu Talib, instead. The future split between Shiites and Sunnis is rooted in this controversy, but at this time, even though Abu Talib disputed the appointment, he eventually threw his support behind Abu Bakrah, who became the new Caliph.
Under Abu Bakrah, and a later Caliph named Umar, the Muslims subdued surrounding tribes and Islam began to spread across the Arabian Peninsula. By the second half of the century, the followers of Muhammad would grow into an empire, taking over the whole Peninsula, before heading east to Indian lands, absorbing the Persian Empire along the way and trying to take Constantinople but failing, before turning back and conquering Egypt and then the rest of north Africa. They called the Muslims of North Africa “Berbers”.
Conquering Egypt was a big deal, because the city of Alexandria contained the largest repository of information in the ancient world. By this time, the philosophy academies in Athens had long been shut down by Christian rulers, but the heavy trade routes between Athens and Alexandria ensured the survival of Plato and Aristotle's writings. While most of Christian Europe had entered the dark ages, Muslims in the middle east had acquired the wisdom of the ancients through conquest.
Among this quest for world domination between these two cultures comes suggestions that the world may be a little larger than thought. In another part of the world, a 7th century Chinese book named “The Book of Liang” told of a land to the east on the other side of the Pacific Ocean named “Fusang”, after a popular plant that was found there and used by the natives of that region. The land was described as arid, but full of native people with traditions that were nothing like the Chinese had ever witnessed, though it is doubtful that this land was in the Americas, for the text speak of a bronze age culture, while the natives of North America were closer to stone. Thousands of years later, from the other side of the ocean, near the future Colorado River in North America, there was a legend told by the natives of men in ships with golden figureheads. The men claimed they had come from the other side of the ocean.
When around 7,000 Berbers, now part of the Umayyad Caliphate, entered Hispania via the straits of Gibraltar in the year 711, the Visigoths were in the mists of a civil war. The Berbers defeated the divided Visigoths in the battle of Guadalete, giving them a foothold into the Peninsula. Over the next ten years, they would expand to take over the entire Iberian peninsula, but were defeated by the Franks in the battle of Toulouse on 721, stopping the Islamic advance from entering Europe any further. Hispania had become "Al Andalus", which meant "Land of the Vandals".
However, there was a small band of resisters to the north called the "Asturians". Over the next decades, they'll grow into their own state and eventually be called "Leon". In 756, Abd al-Rahman I defeated the existing Muslim rulers, becoming Prince of the area and turning the Islamic Emirate into the Emirate of Cordoba. Most of the Iberian Peninsula would be under independent Muslim rule for the next 700 years.
The Twist
Remember when The Jews felt threatened by Jesus, they sent the Romans to kill him, or when Muhammad forced the last remaining Jews in Medina to either convert or die? Remember what I said about patterns? With that in mind, you may be asking yourself, "how did living under Islam over hundreds of years affect the inhabitants of what was now called Al Andalus?" If you're living in the time of this author, you might be surprised, but this pattern is broken here. Perhaps by then, religious ideas had evolved and become more inclusive, or the transition from living in deserts to living on rich fertile land altered their perspectives. Perhaps it was the size, strength, and stability of the Muslim lands as a whole that gave them the confidence to accept other cultures, or maybe, with their knowledge of ancient wisdom, they took a page from Alexander the Great and allowed other cultures to thrive as long as they acknowledged their inferiority to those that ruled over them.
Though many Iberian inhabitants converted to Islam after they came and took over, there seemed to be legitimate acceptance of other cultures during this time. The Muslims that lived and ruled in Spain were called "Moors" and under them, academics thrived. Arabic was the new language of the intellectuals. The Moors were curious about the history of this lush and fertile land and of the land around it.
Now that Muslims had legitimized themselves on the world stage, it seems as though they were taking a break from conquering to grow intellectually. They set up colleges called "Madrasas" around the peninsula. They began to mass produce paper and used that paper to write books and encourage literacy. There were new inventions such as the astrolabe, which was a way to measure the inclination of stars and planets in order to tell local time, like an ancient watch; as well as a material called "endrime", which is similar to denim.
Architecture, irrigation, astronomy, history, mathematics, poetry, even something that would later split into science and philosophy were all improved as scholars translated the ancient texts recovered from Alexandria into Arabic. Cordoba grew into one of the largest cities in Europe with mosques, bell towers and about 70 libraries, peppering their skyline. Elsewhere in the peninsula, other new cities would emerge, including Madrid and Granada.
The streets of Iberia became shaded by arched columns during the day, with flame lanterns installed on them that would light up during the night. Homes became equipped with running water and thus, courtyards were soon filled with lush gardens. The echos of the greatest minds of Ancient Greece, Egypt, and the Roman Empire as a whole were like thin strands of thread that were being spun together to create a new and more robust culture. Under hundreds of years of Muslim rule, the people of Al Andalus experienced an enlightenment.
But also during this time, the holdings of Asturias in the north were growing. By the time it became Leon in 911, it had taken over about a third of the peninsula. The land of the Franks had split into two and were continuing to form their own identities, the Vikings had invaded Europe through Normandy and the vast empire the Muslims had gained split into factions.
By the year 1095, Constantinople was in threat of being taken over and they asked the Pope for help. In response, the Pope called for the first Crusade: A general call to arms for Christians to join together against the Muslim threat - funny how the pattern seems to continue anyways. For the next four years, scores of Christians from France, The Holy Roman Empire, and Naples met at Byzantium and pushed back the Sultanate of Rum. The Christians of Hispania didn't participate however, it seems like they were having problems of their own. The tiny Christian resistance at the top of the Iberian peninsula had grown so large, it now covered about half of the peninsula, taking over cities like Toledo. Toledo gave up without a fight, so the city was spared from destruction and for at least a little while, Muslims and Christians lived side by side. Finally, in 1140, a new faction broke off from Leon, the new country was Portugal.
An excerpt of the preface of Susan Wise Bauer's History of the Renaissance World tells a story of a man who visited Toledo a little after 1140:
"Not long after 1140, A.D., the Italian scholar, Gerard of Cremona traveled to the Spanish Peninsula, hoping to find a rare copy of the thousand year old Greek astronomy text known as the Almagest. His chances were better there than anywhere else in Europe. The southern half of the peninsula had been in Arab hands for centuries, and the ruling dynasties of Muslim Spain had brought with them thousands of classical texts. Translated into Arabic, but long lost to the vernacular languages of the west. The libraries of the city of Toledo, in the center of the peninsula, housed scores of these valuable volumes, and Toledo had now been recaptured by one of the Christian kingdoms of the north, meaning that western scholars could visit it in relative safety.
Gerard found more than he bargained for: Not just astronomy texts, but classical and Arabic studies of dialectic, geometry, philosophy and medicine. Unknown monographs by Euclid, Galen, Ptolemy and Aristotle, a whole treasury of knowledge. Overwhelmed, he settled into Toledo and set to work learning Arabic. 'Regretting the poverty of the Latins in these things', one of his students wrote, 'he learned the Arabic language in order to be able to translate. To the end of his life, he continued to transmit to the Latin world, as if to his own beloved heir. Whatever books he thought finest in many subjects as actively and as plainly as he could.' Renaissance had begun." - Susan Wise Bauer
The reason why I went into certain depths on this part of the story is not only to explain culture clashes between Muslims and Christians, or to highlight the early cultural influences that would go into influence the creation of future San Diego, but to point out that it is here, where the ancient wisdom that the Muslims took from Alexandria and preserved for centuries, would be "rediscovered" by Christian Europe. This treasure trove on information forms the basis of our earliest known stories, and a vast pool of scientific knowledge. It has even lead future explorers to travel the world in search of the cities where some of these events took place. The culture that would help influence the creation of future San Diego was also the culture that provided that massive service to the rest of the world and to future generations, that culture was Islam.
Many modern English words have their root in the Arabic language because of this time, from "alcohol" to "chemistry", from "assassin" to "lime". "Algebra", another subject that was translated into Latin from Arabic during this time, explained of a mathematical concept called "sifr", or empty, which was the precursor to the modern "zero". Our modern numbers also come from Arabic:
Earliest example of translated Arabic numerals from a book on architecture.
I really wish to press on about how big of a deal this was to our overall culture: Europeans returned to their countries full of ancient, translated works and started founding colleges and universities such as Oxford. These old works were carefully taught and studied at these new colleges, universities, even hospitals. The knowledge brought back from Toledo made the rest of the world self aware of its collective past, and made the western world wiser. Soon scholars in these new universities would study these documents and write about them, building upon that knowledge and from it, asking new questions. They began to produce new works and even critique the works of the ancients.
We have become the heirs of an ancient intellectual movement that began in the ancient cities of Sumer and continued throughout Egyptian, Greek, and Roman times.
A second Crusade was launched in 1146 and lasted until 1149, with the warring Iberians once again staying out. In 1158, a new faction broke away from Leon, named "Castile". A third Crusade took place from 1189 to 1192, and a fourth from 1202 to 1204. The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa occurred in 1212, giving Castile a portion of Muslim land. Between the fourth and fifth Crusades, the Kingdom of Castile continued to grew, and by 1231, devoured Leon, becoming a powerful kingdom. There was another battle in 1236 which took Cordoba for Castile, another one in 1245 that took Jaen and another one in 1248 that took Seville until all that was left was the city of Granada - The Moors had become the minority.
A second Crusade was launched in 1146 and lasted until 1149, with the warring Iberians once again staying out. In 1158, a new faction broke away from Leon, named "Castile". A third Crusade took place from 1189 to 1192, and a fourth from 1202 to 1204. The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa occurred in 1212, giving Castile a portion of Muslim land. Between the fourth and fifth Crusades, the Kingdom of Castile continued to grew, and by 1231, devoured Leon, becoming a powerful kingdom. There was another battle in 1236 which took Cordoba for Castile, another one in 1245 that took Jaen and another one in 1248 that took Seville until all that was left was the city of Granada - The Moors had become the minority.
A second Crusade was launched in 1146 and lasted until 1149, with the warring Iberians once again staying out. In 1158, a new faction broke away from Leon, named "Castile". A third Crusade took place from 1189 to 1192, and a fourth from 1202 to 1204. The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa occurred in 1212, giving Castile a portion of Muslim land. Between the fourth and fifth Crusades, the Kingdom of Castile continued to grew, and by 1231, devoured Leon, becoming a powerful kingdom. There was another battle in 1236 which took Cordoba for Castile, another one in 1245 that took Jaen and another one in 1248 that took Seville until all that was left was the city of Granada - The Moors had become the minority.
Third Thread
Though the seeds of our future city were planted back in biblical times, it isn't until around 1400 when we first begin to see the seed sprout. By then, kingdoms in Romania were resisting Ottoman invasions, and all of Europe had an estimated population of about 52 million people. In Seville, a city said to be founded in ancient times by Hercules after sailing through the Strait of Gibraltar, there lie a small village named San Nicolás del Puerto. Within that village was a pious couple who had just added to the population by giving birth to a healthy baby boy. By then, the name "San Yago" had morphed into "Santiago", the boy's parents decided to use a shorter, more masculine version of it: "Diego". This is the man that our future city will be named after - though nobody knows that yet.
There really isn’t much known about Diego, and he wasn’t a large figure in life. Diego was a rather quiet boy who ended up embracing the hermit life and finding religion in his adulthood. He soon became a lay brother at the Order of Friars Minor. On 1445, he was sent to the Canary Islands, a group of islands just west of the African coast which had just been rediscovered, to help convert the natives in the area to Christianity. Diego later returned to Castille on 1450 to share in Pope Nicholas V's Jubilee Year celebrations and attended the canonization of Bernardine of Siena. Diego then spent about three months at the Basilica of Santa Maria, caring for the sick, where it is told that many miraculous cures took place and were recorded. He spent the remainder of his life in solitude at the Friary of Santa Maria de Jesus in Alcala. An abscess took Diego's life on November 12, 1463. However, the smell that emitted from his infection and from his corpse was of a pleasant fragrance and he didn’t begin to rot or undergo rigor-mortis for days afterwards, according to accounts.
This wouldn’t be the last time Diego's remains made headlines. Shortly after his death, while on a hunting trip... anywhere between 1463 and 1474 I guess, King Henry IV of Castile had fallen off of his horse and hurt his arm. The pain was so intense, that he didn't know what to do and nobody knew how to treat his pain, so apparently in his agony, and remembering the stories of miraculous cures, he decided to head to Alcala and pray to Diego. They even removed Diego’s remains from the casket so that the King could kiss his body and place his skeletal remains of a hand on his injured arm. It apparently worked, according to the King. Henry's pain went away and Diego was placed back into rest. A chapel was later built in 1485 and 1514 in his hometown. His remains are kept at a Cathedral in Alcala de Hernares in Madrid, and it is put on display every year during the time of his feast: November 13th.
Within thirty years of Diego's death, the world would be rocked to its foundations with a discovery on the other side of the Ocean Sea that would start a new thread - the first truly global event in Human History that will generate a whole new fabric. The next few threads in the fabric that is future San Diego, will be manufactured in the next few chapters: Starting with the geological history of the future metropolis and transitioning to the time of Native occupation. Once we're all caught up, we will continue into the modern era.
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