Medieval History
I started out at the University of California as an Economics major. I was taking a history course this past fall semester and I was talking with a fellow student about the courses in the department I had taken. After listing about 5, he said "Well why don't you just major in history?" After discovering that, in fact, this could be done I figured, "well, why not"
History had always been a hobby of mine since about the 7th grade. In some respects, I have a hard time explaining my interest in it other than the fact that it fascinates me. To me, History is almost like reading or learning about fiction. Something funny to say about a subject which is hardly fictional, but the reason I say that is because, I feel in the age in which we live, it can be hard at times to fathom the lives and experiences of people living almost a thousand years ago. I remember visiting the Tower of London about two years ago. To understand that this fortress was built about 934 years ago by this untangeable man named William the Conqueror is, to me incredible. History puts me into a frame of mind in which time is suspended. One can read the facts and just imagine, letting one's imagination fill in the blanks. We can only wonder how far off our minds wander from the reality. We must rely only on somewhat limited sources coming from chroniclers writing long ago by candlelight, imagining what it was like to experience things like they did. But there's something great about this fiction. Remnants, traces, inklings remain everywhere. In some places less obvious than others, but the ruins of an old church...or even a Church that still stands today. Charlemagne, for example, attending mass at his Cathedral in Aix-la-Chapelle around the year 800. Or Justinian expanding and beautifying his great Hagia Sophia Cathedral which still stands 1500 years later in a city which has changed hands and fates once and for all. Even consider Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Continued...
"The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different"
-Aldous Huxley
Istanbul...or Constantinople's Hagia Sophia. Now a museum, once a Cathedral and a Mosque.