A short History of Windmills

 

Nashtifan, the ancient city of windmills

No one knows who first acted on the idea of using wind to grind grain.  


We do know that there were windmills in Iran by the 7th century.  These windmills had a long, vertical drive shaft around which rotated six to twelve rectangular, reed-covered sails. This type of device is called a "panemone" windmill.

The first windmills in Northern Europe date from the 1180s and have a very different design.  They are called "post" windmills because of the large upright post on which the mill's main structure, the "buck," is balanced so that the mill can rotate to catch the wind when it comes from different directions. The mill was moved using a tailpole or tiller beam that extended from the rear of the body. The picture below, from a 14th century manuscript, shows a post windmill. The two prone figures to the right make me wonder if this illustrates Chaucer's Miller's Tale, but I might be wrong since the text is in Latin and Chaucer wrote in Middle English.

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Fourteenth century windmill image licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

This is the kind of windmill that Nathan Marsall had to wrestle into position in my middle grade medieval novel, On Fledgling Wings.

It has widely been suggested that returning Crusaders brought the idea of windmills back to Europe with them.  While the timing is right, the huge difference in design suggests that this might not be the case, and that windmills might have been designed independently in Europe and the Middle East.

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How do windmills work?  Inside the mill, a shaft attaches to the sails, and called a windshaft for obvious reasons, moves a large wheel.  This is called the brake wheel because it has a large wooden friction brake around its outer edge that could slow or stop the milling process.  The brake wheel transferres power to a smaller gear at right angles to it.  This smaller gear, called the wallower, shares a vertical shaft with a spur wheel, which drive the millstone.

By the 1300s, those who could afford it build tower mills.  This type of windmills has a rotating cap that holds just the roof, the sails, the windshaft and the brake wheel while the body of the mill remains stable.  They are built from stone or brick, and therefore can be built taller, allowing for larger sails and greater power. However, they were also expensive to produce.


 Photo by  Francis Franklin (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)],  via Wikimedia Commons

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The Dutch developed a better windmill in the middle of the sixteenth century.  Smock mills, named after the dress-like peasants' clothing they resemble, these were large enough to be powerful, yet less expensive to build. (photo by Uberprutser (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 nl (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nl/deed.en)]

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Windmills were a major source of power in Europe from the 1300s to the 1800s. They went out of favor with the development of steam power, and for two hundred years they have languished. However, the trend for organic and non-manufactured foodstuffs has shifted the economics slightly back in their favor once again.

Not a Spring Chicken

 

Last fall I visited my mother and entered the house to the luscious, comforting smell of roasting chicken.

On the three hour drive home the next day I kept thinking about that chicken and what I could do with the leftovers.  Enchiladas. Crepes.  Pot pies.  Tetrazzinis.  Soups.  My mouth watered and my mind wandered all the way home.

The next time I bought groceries I bought a chicken, but then the inevitable business of life got between it and getting it into the oven.  One night I got home too late.  Another night we ate out.  I began thinking that maybe I needed to put it in the crock pot, but my mornings proved just as harried as my evenings.  

The chicken languished in my fridge for a while.  A week?  Two?  I'm not sure. Over time, I forgot about the chicken in the bottom bin of the fridge.  What finally brought it back into my consciousness was a smell.  The smell wasn't overpowering.  It was just a teensy, tiny bit off, but it was definitely off.

Here I will admit that most of you are smarter than I am.  Most of you would have known what to do if you'd have taken one whiff of a chicken that's sat in solitary confinement for so long.  Your offending chicken would have gone directly into the trashcan.  But not mine.

Call me over optimistic.  Or cheap.  Or stupid.  Or a combination of all three, but I didn't throw away my smelly chicken.  I decided that maybe, just maybe a day in the crockpot would kill whatever was making that chicken smell bad. 

Instead, I came home that evening to a house filled with a stench that made me want to retch before I even got in the door. The crockpot had helped that smell multiply a thousand times over.  I took the crock out and dumped its contents into the garbage, opened every window in the house and turned on every fan. We ate out that night.

A chicken is just a chicken unless you're a writer or a teacher.  Then, it's liable to become a metaphor or an object lesson.  What part of your life is just a teensy, tiny bit off?  What failures are you holding onto in the hopes that someday you can make good on them?  Sometimes it's smart to recognize that a situation or relationship isn't going to get any better, and it's time to stop it before it gets any worse.

The Crusades: the Middle Ages for Middle Graders

 

 

By Anomyme (Livre d'heures, Londres, British Library)

For many middle grade readers, the Middle Ages were exciting times! Knights on horseback!  Damsels in distress!  Dragons!  (Forget the dragons.  Contrary to popular opinion, there were no more dragons in Europe during the Middle Ages than there are now.)

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Grateful Jews accept Crusader protection.

One of the most exciting of times for readers of Medieval fiction is the Crusades.  In 1095, Emperor Alexius I of Byzantium asked Pope Urban II for help in fighting the Seljuk Turks. Urban's call received a tremendous response from western Christians.  One reason so many wanted to go was the promise of an indulgence: the forgiveness of sins for any who accepted the mission.  Not only was this a free pass for anyone who wanted to act badly, but a "get out of purgatory free" card for those who wanted continued amnesty from consequences in their next life. 

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 Historians aren't completely sure what Urban asked of Europe's Christians.  Many people wrote down their remembrances of his call to arms, but not until many years later.  Perhaps he just asked for Europe's warriors to help Alexius repel the Turkish threat.  Perhaps he asked for more.  Whatever he asked for, those who went on Crusade decided that the recapture the Holy Land, especially the holy city of Jerusalem, from the Moslems was their primary focus.  The Holy Land remained the central battlegrounds of the Crusades until 1291.

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The Third Crusade (1187-1197) is the one that receives the most literary attention.  This is primarily due to the star power of Richard the Lionheart, whose tall frame and handsome face helped him become known as the noblest and most chivalric of England's kings.   

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Richard's primary opponent was Saladin, an extraordinary Moslem leader and war lord who managed to rally the disparate Arab and Middle Eastern Tribes into one united force even though he was a minority Kurd.

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Add to that the mystique of the Knights Templars.  These men were a heady combination of warrior knight and religious monk, and, because their order was both widespread and wealthy, also became the chief financiers and bankers of the Middle Ages.  The favorite figures of conspiracy theorists (think Da Vinci Code!), the Templars show up in almost every work of literature about the Crusades.  

Want to read more about the Crusades?  Check out these works of historical fiction.