[Feb 14] History of Magic - 5th Years

on March 30, 2016, 05:53:39 PM

Professor Butler sighed as he sipped his tea and waited for the 5th years to arrive. The circumstances for meeting a new class were about as ghastly as they could be. Nevertheless he had a job to do and he would have to do it. With the death of Professor Smythe the students had fallen behind in their lessons and he would have to press on in order to prepare them for their OWLs. He had intended to set them a test to see what they had learned so far but he had decided to set it aside given the abductions. The pupils had enough to worry them at present without adding to their woes.

He looked over the classroom. He had done very little to change it since arriving. There was a new photograph of a gathering of historians at the museum that he and Bill had attended and a variety of new books were on the already amply filled shelves. He would personalise it later if he felt like it.

"Welcome, my name is Professor Butler, the new Professor for History of Magic as you have no doubt guessed. I understand that Professor Smythe had gone over goblin rebellions with you in good detail. Since Bill's tragic death though you have had no regular teacher so we are a little behind. It is nothing that we cannot catch up on in a month or two so do not worry about preparation for your OWls. It does mean however that we must focus our attention despite how difficult that is in the current circumstances."

He sighed again,

"As hard as it is we will turn our attention now to centaurs. Centaurs as you no doubt are aware are a proud and intelligent race skilled in archery, concealment, herbology and magical healing. It is astronomy and divination however that they are most renowned for though their revelations tend to be more abstract than human seers. They tend to keep themselves to themselves and avoid contact with both muggles and wizards. Thus there is not the same history of conflicts and other interactions between wizards and centaurs as there is between wizards and goblins.

That is not to say however that there have been no such incidents. The earliest conflict between man and centaur that we know of was in ancient Greece. Muggle myth records that centaurs fought with a people in Thessaly called the Lapiths. The myth records that the war was caused by the centaurs' attempt to carry off the lady Hippodamia and the rest of the Lapith women on the day of Hippodamia's marriage to Pirithous, king of the Lapithae. This is of course ardent nonsense. In the entirety of recorded history there has never been any recorded instance of a centaur being interested in a human woman or for that matter in a human man. The only one 'romantic' occasion that I know of if you could call it that was in France in 1698 when Philippe Bernard or 'Bernard of the Burgundy' propositioned the centaur Iranse and got two hoof prints in his head for his troubles. His successful defence when tried was that he was so drunk he thought that he was asking out the witch Jeanne Martin who Iranse vaguely resembled from the waist up. This defence did not help Philippe much though as Jeanne's father Pierre had forbidden him from going out with his daughter and challenged him to a duel. Philippe turned up to the duel drunk, dropped his wand and then got transfigured into an ass by the outraged Pierre.

Anyway returning to ancient Greece, the likely real reason for the conflict between the centaurs and the Lapiths was human incursions into territory the centaurs deemed their own which has long been the main source of strife between centaur and man. There is an ancient record from the wizard Polybius from that time. The record is incomplete but it suggests that the war started after the Lapiths sought more land.

We have other early records of centaurs from ancient Greece. They were centaur herds mentioned in Magnesia and Mount Pelion in Thessaly, the Foloi oak forest in Elis, and the Malean peninsula in southern Laconia. Another tribe of centaurs was said to have lived on Cyprus and there were also the Lamian Pheres of the Lamos river.

Though there are protected reserves where centaurs live today they no longer hold any significant dominions. It is not well recorded why the centaur race declined in comparison to humanity in classical times. Their magic though significant is far more limited than the power of witches and wizards. While there are some instances of centaurs defeating muggles whenever they have faced wizards in significant numbers they have nearly always been defeated. Such instances though are uncommon and cannot have been more than rare occurrences in ancient days given the smaller magical population then. It may have been partially due to humanity's development of arms and armour which gradually overcame the centaurs' advantages in strength and mobility but this cannot have been the sole factor given the slow pace of human military development in the era. It may have been to do with centaurs' isolationist tendencies. They tended not to press attacks or conquer lands they did not already own. I suspect however that it was simply due to numbers. The centaurs were never able or willing to keep up with humanity's growing population. While one centaur could easily defeat one man, he would struggle to defeat three men and by the time he had to fight ten men the era of centaurs holding significant territories was at an end.

As the centuries progressed the centaurs retreated to the deep forests where they still reside. They passed from muggle history into legend though there are still some records if you look hard enough. For example in this country Pictish carvings depicting centaurs have been found in Scotland from the 8th and 9th centuries AD. There are certainly recorded instances in wizarding history though of conflicts between centaurs and men whenever the centaurs last redoubts were threatened by human expansion. Can you think of any?"