Simon Mattacks
speaker
2,982 appearances
18 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard yesterday
Simon Mattacks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 15 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
But on closer inspection, there's something unusual about the room.
It's flooded.
The feet of the diners are submerged beneath the water.
It's been speculated that people in Hormuz may have intentionally flooded rooms in their homes as a way to cope with the heat.
We've already seen how other Europeans, including Marco Polo and the Portuguese troops, struggled with the climate.
Francis Xavier, a Portuguese cleric known for his missionary work across Asia, also visited Hormuz.
He was disturbed not only by the heat, but by what he perceived as the immorality of the place.
A biography of Xavier includes impressions of Hormuz,
Its moral state was enormously and infamously bad.
It was the home of the foulest sensuality and of all the most corrupted forms of every religion in the East.
The Christians were as bad as the rest in the extreme license of their lives.
The author then goes on to say, the riches of the place attracted every possible luxury to enhance the general license.
Avarice was made a science.
It was studied and practiced not for gain, but for its own sake and for the pleasure of cheating.
In the eyes of some, Hormuz's prosperity was linked to its immorality.
In Europe, the very name Hormuz, or Ormus, as it was also known, became a symbol of decadence and opulence.
When the English poet John Milton wrote Paradise Lost a century later, he used Hormuz as a point of comparison.
In Milton's words, the throne of Satan far outshone the wealth of Hormuz.
Throughout the 16th century, other powers had their eye on the Strait of Hormuz.
The Ottomans attempted, unsuccessfully, to seize control from the Portuguese.
Showing 2681–2700 of 2,982 · page 135 of 150
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