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A personal anecdote from a non-historian:

Some years back I took a holiday in Malta.

Taking the ferry to Valletta, climbing the ramp up from the dock, I was shocked to see the scale of the fortifications. I knew it was a strategically important place, but what surprised me was how obviously the entire walled peninsula of Valletta seemed to have been constructed first and foremost as a fortress. It's easy to forget the scale and scope of historical conflict and the effort that went into it, and this was a stark reminder.

The other thing that surprised me was that they had the old suits of armor of the commanders of the order, and I was surprised how big they were. I'm pretty tall (6"6) and was surprised to see the suits were close to my height. Presumably bigger than the men that wore them, but what occurred to me was "these are the guys who made it to the the top of their organization, the commanders, and they must have been very big for their time. This is probably an organization that values brute strength."

I don't know if that's a valid inference or not, but Malta definitely left the impression it was created by folk who mean business.

This linked article is really interesting context, makes me realize why Malta was built so well.




Isn't there still a correlation between status and size these days? Tall with good hair and you're already leadership material...

It's amazing how much of that story could have been written yesterday. Tunneling is still used in the middle-east as a war tactic. North Korea tunnels to South Korea. The value of engineering ;) Embargoes are essentially siege tactics.


There's even a correlation between height and intelligence (presumably due to nutrition).


> Isn't there still a correlation between status and size these days?

Yes. The wage gap between short men and huge men makes any perceived gender based wage gap between male and female look very, very puny.


Sorry for the nitpick, but:

Why do you present the height-based wage gap as a fact, while presenting the gender-based wage gap merely as "perceived"?

Is there more evidence for the former wage gap than for the latter? Or, is the one type of discrimination more acceptable than the other?


Not the original poster, but:

A number of the gender based wage gap studies that have made a splash in the press have neglected to account for multiple facets of employment and occupational risk leading to conclusions showing an outsize pay gap... They've documented inequal outcomes in the market based on equivalent experience or education across sectors without controlling for inequality of physical-demands and employment distribution... The popular press then extrapolates these findings inartfully, leading to a shared sense of gender discrimination that is not borne out by the broader market.

I know this is something of a hot button topic, so I'll be extra clear: women and men are of equal value, and deserve equal pay for equal work, naturally. But we have to own the fact that, statistically, men really should be earning more at work as long as men are doing the majority of high-risk occupations and women are taking more time off of work when having children. There are a lot of different studies, but last I dug into this when you start comparing more apples-to-apples you find that the gender gap is nowhere near the oft cited 0.75 cents on the dollar.

There is a gender pay gap, though it's quite difficult IMO to pin that gap on broad sexism given a few cultural factors. Namely men being 6 times more likely to ask for a raise at work, men being more likely to measure self-worth at work through money and not peer approval, societal pressures for men to be a 'provider', and for men to measure self-worth almost exclusively through career success.

While we're looking at why young men are more likely to find themselves doing EOD work or high-voltage wire repair than women, lets also remember that the physical difference between the sexes can, in fact, be a life or death matter in some occupations... And if we want to compare employment outcomes by years of education taken, we really need to quantify how dirty and dangerous jobs oriented towards physical labour would ideally be gender-represented in the market. Ie Sewer repair technicians and plumbers and construction skew male and high paying compared to white collar positions with the same length of training - are we really going to expect 50% female representation in those fields?

Height based studies, on the other hand, are much easier to setup controls for. Outside of the far extremes height doesn't fundamentally impact employment opportunities, and demographically are much easier in terms of experimental design. As long as those studies control for certain kinds of physical work which self-select towards large/small people we should be able to get a reasonable grasp of how the world responds to taller people. Last I checked a few inches in height meant a significant increase in yearly takehome pay, management opportunities, and attractiveness as a mate.

Bottom line: easier studies that aren't politically loaded tend to give us better data than harder studies that are rich with social and political subtext... Women should get paid as well as men, but we can't pretend that Geese and Ganders are one and the same. Deep sea welders get paid a lot of money and jobs like that will create a statistical gender pay gap as long as they are not equally distributed among the genders.


This comment, at the very least, should make think a bit more critically when reading or listening to stories about the gender pay gap. Thanks!


Crowley's Empire of the Sea (mentioned elsewhere) talks about this a lot.

We talk about the knights now as though they were some kind of priests, but in reality they were pretty much ferocious pirates with a religious sanction.


By pure happenstance, my wife and I took a tour of the Eastern Mediterranean and ended up in both Rhodes and then Malta where we learned about the Knights of St. John, the seiges by the Ottomans and the rest.

The fortress of Rhodes, now much restored by the fascist regimes of the early 20th century as a showpiece, is indomitable. The recorded histories say that Suleiman the Magnificent brought nearly a quarter million men to take the island. The defense was 700 knights, 500 archers and about 5,000 lower units.

After six months, as the story goes, the fortress was much battered, but still had not completely fallen. The Knights of St. John had lost the bulk of their men, but were still defending. Suleiman's forces on the other hand had suffered massive casualties -- depending on the source somewhere between 5,000 to several tens of thousands.

One of the local stories says that after the six months of siege, Suleiman communicated with the Knights something along the lines of "I am in awe of the defenders of this fortress. I have lost half my men, and you no doubt have lost half of yours. If you lay down your arms, you and any who wish to leave will be granted safe passage off of Rhodes."

Other histories I've looked into have different, but similar terms along those lines.

The Knights accepted and moved to Malta. The locals of Rhodes thus count the Fortress at Rhodes to have been surrendered but never to have fallen.

We toured that fortress and it's one of the most obviously formidable fortifications I've ever seen. Ever single square meter of it was designed to trap humans and place them into undefendable positions where they could be caught in an easy cross fire and slaughtered. It almost looks like something from science fiction in parts: layers of walls with straight line shots between them, approaches to gates with multiple overlapping fields of fire.

This approach in particular has really stuck with me - http://l450s.alamy.com/450s/cx91gf/knight-fortress-in-rhodes...

Nearly every hole you see there at ground level was designed for cannon with support fire from above by archers and other small arms. A person trying to breach this gate would be consumed by shots from nearly a dozen positions. The alternative approaches along the wall were all clear cut open spaces that could swallow thousands of men and set them up for easy pickings.

http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/115461818.jpg

https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/greece-rhodes-july-fortress-...

Succeed in that, and you get another layer of walls with more places to get killed. And more and more and more. If you look down this corridor, you'll see some stone spheres. Those I was told were representations, and perhaps even some original, canon balls. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Rhodes_o...

Imagine scaling the wall to the right in the picture, making it across that open shooting range, then setting up ladders or something to scale the wall on the left.


Thanks for sharing. While searching for more, I found a higher-resolution photo of your first image:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gate_d%27Amboise_01.jpg

And there are several more great photos on the rest of the Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortifications_of_Rhodes




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