The Salt of the Earth - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 65

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The Salt of the Earth
Before oil, there was salt. It bankrolled empires, determined the fate
of kings—and kept people alive through the winter. Join the throngs
of tourists and go to Wieliczka in southern Poland, for instance
(Fig. 6). You descend along rough-hewn wooden ladders into an
underground domain where kilometres of tunnels have been dug
through salt-bearing strata. There are crumpled layers of white salt,
grey salt, brown salt, and red salt. There are salt crystals and salt sta-
lactites, and shrines and chapels too—carved out of the salt by human
hands, with salt altars and salt saints and salt Madonnas.
For over half a millennium, money from the salt mines funded
military campaigns of what was then the largest nation in Europe. It
built cathedrals, and kept poets from starving. It changed the land-
scape for the winning of the salt, clearing the region of forests to
burn the fires that evaporated the brines. It sparked in human hearts
the familiar combination of great generosity and single-minded
rapacity—greed for the white gold broke empires as well as making
them. In 1666 the ambitious nobleman Jerzy Lubomirski fought the
king for the rights to the salt and won. The loss of power from the
centre is seen as a decisive turning point in the decline of a nation. In
successive wars, the divided country shrank back. By 1795, Poland had
disappeared from the map of Europe, swallowed by its neighbours.