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Over the years the popularity of Varangian Guard in Byzantium grew so much, that these mercenaries and former pirates received a very prestigious title in the empire that can be translated from Greek as Great Companions. The Varangian guard was stationed primarily around Constantinople. Most of the guardsmen relied on their long axes as their main weapon, although they were also skilled swordsmen and archers as well. They were also famous for their penchant for drinking.

In 989 general Bardas Phocas rebelled against emperor Basil II. According to the true historic facts, Basil with his fierce Varangian guard landed at Chrysopolis to meet the  rebels face to face. Sources say, that as soon as the rebellious general saw what he would have to deal with, he turned blue in the face and died of a stroke in full view of his opponent. Seeing that Bardas was lying dead on the field, his troops turned and fled,  while being pursued by Vikings who were cheerfully hacking adversaries to pieces.

After the successful invasion of England by the Normans the guard began to see increased inclusion of Anglo-Saxons and Danes.  Thousands of them started arriving to the Byzantine empire and enrolling into service.

Overall, Varangian guard was quite a peculiar and and unusual bunch of people, whose loyalties  lay with the position of Emperor, not the man that sat on the throne. In 969 an  Emperor Nicephorus II was assassinated in his palace. A servant had managed to call for the Varangian guard while the Emperor was being attacked, but when Vikings arrived he was already dead. Without any hesitation they instantly knelt before the emperor’s murderer John Tzimisces and hailed him as Emperor.  Their logic was the following: they would defend the late emperor if he was alive, but now that he was dead there was no point avenging him. Besides, they had a new master in the house.

Varangian Guard ended its existence in 1204. It happened  during Fourth Crusade, when the army of knights attacked Constantinople. In fact, Vikings turned out to be the only part of the Byzantium army that successfully defended part of the city. Contemporary sources say that the fighting was very violent and there was hand to hand fight with axes and swords.  After the capture the Varangian Guard was disbanded.

Since the times of the Roman Empire, praetorian guard very often played an infamous role of replacing one ruler with the other. Especially, if the new guy promised to pay the praetorians more. This practice survived even after Roman Empire split in two and new Byzantine Empire was created.

In 976 Bazil II became the ruler of the empire. He had the utmost distrust for his native guardsmen, whose loyalties shifted all the time, so he was seeking the solution to protect himself and avoid fatal consequences. And he found it: he hired Vikings, mostly of Swedish origin, to become his personal bodyguards. This new force became known as the Varangian Guard. As the years went by, new recruits from Sweden, Denmark, and Norway kept a predominantly Scandinavian cast to Varangian Guard up until the late 11th century. That kind of “employment” became so popular in Scandinavia, that special medieval law was created there stating that no one could inherit the estate of a recruit who was staying in Byzantium.

Over the years, Varangian Guard proved itself to be an irreplaceable special force of Byzantine emperors. And they had one of the greatest and unique perks for their service. When the Byzantine Emperor died, the Varangians had the unique right of running to the imperial treasury and taking as much gold and as many gems as they could carry. This privilege known in Old Norse as “palace pillaging” enabled many Varangians to return home as wealthy men. And, in return, it encouraged even more Vikings to enlist in the Varangian Guard.

Everybody knows a novel by Daniel Dafoe that is known as Robinson Crusoe. This book had been all-time bestseller at the times when there was no such word as “bestseller” itself. In fact, by the end of the 19th century, no book in the history of Western literature had spawned more editions, spin-offs, and translations than Robinson Crusoe. There had been more than seven hundred such alternative versions, including children’s versions with mainly pictures and no text. Hundreds of adaptations in dozens of languages, had been published - from The Swiss Family Robinson to Luis Buñuel’s film adaptation.

But there are several historical facts unknown to general public. First of all the full title of the book was not Robinson Crusoe. When the novel was published in April 25, 1719 it had the following title: The Life and strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself.

In Hollywood movie adaptations of the novel somehow Robinson Crusoe is a cast away somewhere new African continent, this Friday is of African origin. But in the book Robinson Crusoe was most certainly based in the Caribbean. Since author mentions that the Crusoe’s island was almost in the mouth of the river Orinoco, it was probably the island of Tobago, since that island is near the mouth of the river Orinoco, and in sight of the island of Trinidad.

And this is what modern public most definitely don’t know. Daniel Defoe wrote a sequel to the first book which had another long title: THE FARTHER ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE; Being the Second and Last Part OF HIS LIFE, And of the Strange Surprizing Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe. Written by Himself.

But wait! Here is more… There is even the third book written by Daniel Defoe with the title Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe. That book had really nothing with the adventures of Robinson as the first two books. It represents a series of moral essays. What has that got to do with Robinson, you may ask? Well Daniel Defoe just attached the name Crusoe to increase sales of this book and to attract the attention of the readers. .

People usually say, that there is no such thing as luck. And even if there is luck, it is always greatly aided and abetted by the application of intelligence and the acquisition of reliable information. Yet, the story that I am going to tell you shows that throughout history there were some people who were haunted by luck, even if they may not really deserve it.

But here comes Timothy Dexter, an American businessmen, who nicknamed himself as “Lord”. He was born in the middle of eighteen century in Massachusetts, never went to school and through his whole life never learned to spell. There was nothing distinguished about him. Since his childhood he was a farm laborer and at sixteen he became an apprentice for a leather dresser. He did not have a penny to his name until he was twenty one. And things started magically to change for Timothy.

He managed to charm and marry a very rich widow and subsequently buy a big house. Somehow everybody disliked him. He did not get respect from others who considered him an ignoramus and wished him bad luck. But he did not care and made the next move. At the end of the War of Independence European currency was worth nothing. The only buyer of it was Dexter who stored bags of useless then paper. But when the bad times were over and trade with Europe resumed, it turned out that this was not a stupid move at all. Timothy became a nouveau-riche.

He decided that he was a genius in business and bought two ships. His first big business action was to buy warming pans and send them to West India. His captains sold them all and made and made big profit. It turned out that locals needed ladles for their booming molasses industry. Timothy was so excited that his next business move was much weirder. He sent woolen mittens to the tropical places in the Caribbean. All the cargo was sold out almost instantly by Asian merchants who bought them for export to Siberia.

It seemed that Dexter always lucked out. Any other businessmen would end with financial disaster in the ventures similar to his. It all was just pure luck. Judge for yourself. Some people gave Timothy a bad advice trying to ruin him completely. They advised him to send his ships to sell coal in English city of Newcastle, that had rich coal mines of its own! And he did accordingly and amassed a fortune after his cargo arrived during a miners’ strike which had crippled local production. Thus, a popular English idiom “Selling coal to Newcastle” was born.

Any venture that Timothy undertook would bring him unimaginable profits. He would come out with huge money each time when, for example he sold bibles to India or stray cats to Caribbean islands. Once by mistake he stored a lot of whalebone and still got huge profits by selling it as the support material for female corsets.

At the age of 50 he decided to retire from business. As an aftermath, he wrote a book about himself. In this book he complained about his wife, politicians, clergy, and the like.
He called his work A Pickle for the Knowing Ones or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress, and it contained almost 9 thousand words and 34 thousands letters. But there was not a single punctuation mark in the whole book! So what do you think happened?

You are right, his book became a bestseller of those times. Following the success of his book, the second edition was immediately published, where Dexter added only one additional page of punctuation marks. His advice to readers was to use these punctuation marks at any place of the book, as they please. Overall, there were eight editions of his book published one after another.

If you like books and movies about pirates and their adventures you probably heard the name Tortuga many times. In the last movie trilogy Pirates of the Caribbean island of Tortuga was showed to us as a haven for pirates. In famous writer Sabatini’s  book series about Captain Blood and the movies based on it, Tortuga is also mentioned as the main base of pirates operations. So what exactly is Tortuga? What is its history and where this island is located?

Nowadays it is a quiet island that belongs to Haiti. A little bit over 20 thousand people live on its small territory which is about 180 square kilometers. It is very mountainous and full of rocks. Yet, it is hugely dense of lofty trees that grow upon the hardest of those rocks. Basically, in translation into English it means a Turtle Island. And it has a very wild history, as it was a major center of Caribbean piracy in the seventeenth century.

Tortuga is one of the first islands that Columbus discovered during his very first voyage into the New World. The island got its name in 1493 from Columbus’ sailors because its shape reminded them of a turtle. Spanish colony was set up there and thrived for over a hundred years until it became a part of a dispute between France, England and Spain. Tortuga was changing hands for a while until the island was divided between French and English settlers in 1630. It still did not prevent Spaniards to reconquer the island a couple of times during 17th century, but there were pushed out by settlers in 1638.

This is exactly the time when English, French and Dutch pirates moved in to this island. The situation soon spiraled out of control. One can only imagine what was going there. A decade later a French governor of Tortuga made the situation even worse when he brought on the island almost two thousand prostitutes hoping to bring some harmony there. Boy, he was wrong!

Naturally, our famous pirates were not unemployed, there was a constant demand from France and England for able and ruthless sailors that could be used as a striking force. Infamous great pirate Henry Morgan was on the rise when he started recruiting his sailors from Tortuga for his great and cruel expeditions against Spanish colonies. France was also trying to bribe the pirates, so it could create a stronghold in the Caribbean.

The fun for the pirates ended with the Treaty of Ratisbon in 1684 signed by major European powers. The piracy in the Caribbean grew to such extent that part of this treaty is dedicated to the united decision to put an end to piracy in and around Tortuga. And several years earlier English parliament forbade pirates to sail under foreign flags. The punishment for disobedience was death in the gallows.

Most of the pirates, especially those who had families did not want to end their life dancing on the rope, so they had to join English fleet and hunt their own pirate buddies who were still sailing under the flag of a Jolly Roger. That was the end of the free pirate life on the Turtle Island.

We all know about the deeds of Alexander the Great, one of the greatest heroes of antiquity. We know the details of his death too. But what happened after?

There were various stories circulating in ancient Greece at the time. According to one, Alexander’s body was placed in pure gold sarcophagus. This sarcophagus was in turn placed in a gold casket and covered with a purple robe. The second story tells us that the coffin with Alexander’s body was placed together with his armor in a gold carriage with a vaulted roof.

But there is more. Another legend tells us that there was an attempt to preserve Alexander’s body. A clay vessel with is body was filled up with honey. Evidently, each of former Greek generals wanted to get it. Ptolemy outsmarted them all and stole Alexander’s corpse and brought it to his capital Alexandria. He put it on a display, for everyone to see. One of the latest rulers of Egypt Ptolemy IX desperately needed money. For him Alexander’s tomb was all you can eat treasure. Without thinking twice, he melted the gold sarcophagus of Alexander and made a lot gold coins.

Trying to cover his tracks, Ptolemy IX put Alexander’s body in a glass sarcophagus instead. It did not work, though. Citizens of Alexandria were furious and could not forget Ptolemy’s unforgivable deed. They started riots. In the end, greedy Ptolemy IX was killed, which served him right.

But, wait, there is even more. It seems that Alexander’s body was kept on display till late antiquity. There was one nasty looter related to this story. It was no one else but Roman emperor Caligula who robbed Alexander’s tomb, stole his armored breastplate and wore it in Rome. Well, as we know, Caligula also ended badly.

It was around two hundred of our era when finally emperor Septimius Severus closed Alexander’s tomb to the public. His son, emperor Caracalla was a big fan of Alexander the Great and often visited his tomb during his rule. After that, history loses track of Alexander’s tomb. The details are pretty vague and unverified.

When I was going through the archives of my local web analytics company, I found another interesting case, when major government in Europe was cheated and lost its national treasure to Bolsheviks. The first case is related to the Civil war in Spain in the thirties of the twentieth century. It is called infamously Moscow gold case.

Short lived Spanish Republic desperately needed arms and military equipment but other European countries did not want to get involved in the civil war and did not sell anything to the Spaniards. The only country that ignored this embargo was the Soviet Union. That is why in 1937 the Spanish republic sent most of the gold reserves from its national Treasure to Russians. One must say, that at the time Spain was on the fourth place in the world for its stored gold. And the USSR got most of it, which amounted at the time to five hundred million dollars.

When Franco and his supporters learned about it, they heavily protested this transaction, stating that this gold belongs to the people and not to the Spanish government. But the transaction turned sour for the republicans because Soviets sold them all kind of military junk stored since World War I. Besides, prices were extremely inflated for each rifle and each bullet. This outdated equipment, part of which was malfunctioning right from the start, turned out to be one of the huge factors that impacted the defeat of the Spanish Republic.

When World War I started Romania was on the side of the Entente Powers. Its military campaign was against Germany was not successful and soon German troops moved into Romania and even occupied its capital Bucharest. Romain administration had no other choice but to send its national Treasure abroad. It was hard to choose which Ally country would safe keep the Treasure until bad times are over. There were plans to send it to England or the United States but Germans troops controlled Central Europe and there was a big chance that they would intercept the Treasure. Sweden or Denmark were another choice but there was a problem to transport all values there safely because German submarines were all over the North Sea.

In this hard situation the decision had been made to send Romanian national Treasure to tsarist Russia. According to mutual agreement Russia would safe keep Treasure until the end of the war. Under heavy guard almost hundred tonnes of gold bars and coins with the total cost of 1.25 billion dollars was sent to Moscow and safely got there. Soon situation at the front became even worse for Romania, so its administration send additional valuable transport to Russia. It included priceless items, like jewels of Romanian royalty, jewels of ancient rulers, jewels dated to the time of Roman empire and antique jewels of the pre Roman era. But this was not all. Russia also received for safekeeping archives of the Romanian Academy, priceless religious artifacts and manuscripts and even multiple deposits that citizens kept at the Romanian banks. There is no estimate for this second transport, but, most definitely, even if we try to do this, it will probably will be several times more than the first transport.

Well, it is highly likely that you already know what happened next, when Bolsheviks overthrow the old authorities in Russia. They refused to abide and respect an treaty signed by tsar and previous government. Basically, they got it all and multiple attempts of Romanian government to recover the Treasure were unsuccessful. The most important part of two transports was never returned. Only in 1935 Romanians received back bits and pieces of the archives and in 1956 small part of the paintings and ancient objects. That was all.

Up until now Romanians still can’t return their Treasure. They tried repeatedly to get it back after the fall of the Soviet Union but to no avail. All negotiations failed. Russian side sank down demands each time, refusing to discuss them further.

Pirate treasure was always the dream of many adventurous souls. All this talk about generous bounty left to us by these scary and generous pirates always excited minds and hearts. People were searching was buried pirate treasures since the end of eighteen century. Since then they believed that pirates often buried their stolen bounty in remote places. Why would they do that ask? The general belief was that pirates had intentions to return for their stuff later and dig it out with the help of sometimes heavily encrypted treasure maps.

If we search for the truth, all the stories about buried pirate treasure are based on one legend - hidden treasure of William Kidd, known in the pirate world as Captain Kidd. He was an English privateer who went astray. He did not want to die on the gallows for all his sins, so as the story goes, he hid some of his wealth on Long Island before sailing to New York. That hidden stuff was his bargaining chip in negotiations with authorities. But this did not work, they hanged Billy the Kid by the neck for piracy.

Captain Kidd did bury a small cache of treasure on Gardiner’s Island in the future state of New York. However, it was removed by authorities and sent to England to be used as evidence against him. This simple legend inspired several great writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving and Robert Louis Stevenson to create books of fiction. The most famous work, of course, is known all over the world as Treasure Island.

As time went by the legend did not vanish, but rather expanded. Several other places all over the world were named as possible locations of Captain Kidd’s buried treasure. For example, a new version sprang about Kidd attacking one of the Japanese islands of the Tokara archipelago. It is the most southern island named Takarajima. The legend says that all the pirates demanded food from the inhabitants. Their offer was refused, so a crew of pirates landed and killed all the inhabitants. On that very island Kidd has hidden his treasure in one of the caves. And he never came back due to his death on the gallows in England.