Tour History – Hannibal and the bloodiest battle ever in history …Cannae. A slightly horrific way to start the New Year… A day when 70,000 men were killed….this figure stands as the most men killed in a single day’s battle, the equivalent of the nuclear bomb’s death toll at Hiroshima and this was all hand to hand combat.
Tour History – Hannibal and his Elephants…over the Alps…. Hannibal is best known for crossing Europe’s biggest mountain chain, the Alps, into Italy with about fifty thousand men and forty elephants.
When you think of the Crusades you most often think of fanatical Catholic knights charging off to kill non-believers. However, the truth is, they sometimes didn’t go far to begin their killing! Carcassonne was the target of an internal Crusade in the early 13th century to eliminate Catharism, an offshoot of the Catholic religion. Catharism, as they go, had some positive outlooks and was fairly harmless – woman were seen as equals, they believed in reincarnation and somewhat surprisingly they were pescatarian or vegetarians!
Another call out to Hannibal Riders past and future! This time Stage 16 of the TDF rides out of Carcassonne just like early on our Hannibal’s trail.
We’ve had a lot of dealing with Graeme Fife the cycling journalist. It transpires that he was a Classics professor before focussing on cycling. He sent us the following regarding Col Agnel that is pictured – The Agnel pass has seen a lot of action, one way and another, details listed on a large rock stele up the valley.