As the swastika was coopted by the Nazis, so the Moline Cross has been taken up and exploited in myriad contexts. The Medicci Cartel of Renaissance Florence presaged the mafioso of modern Italy. The MC exacted a heavy cost on those merchants and guilds unwilling to share their profits: the uncooperative were hung, their palms branded with a moline cross. This was a far cry from the Crusaders of the Apostolic Church Of Magna, who journeyed towards Jerusalem under the Moline cross on a mission to kill Muslems holding their holy land.
But the Moline cross extends still further back. Henrich Schliemann's excavation of the ancient city of Troy at the end of the 19th century proved true the stories of Homer's Illiad. Among the artifacts unearthed at that site was an early representation of the Moline cross, dated from the second settlement of Troy, 2500-2200 B.C., 3500 years before the Crusades. A Sumerican proverb bears a three-tined decorative mark that is not linguistic, a mark that has been interpreted as a moline cross variant and linked to agrarianism. The proverb translates as
Gudea cylinder B (ca. 2144-2124 B.C.E.) contains similiar designs which scholars have not considered part of Sumerican cuneiform. Some Sumerican scholars have argued that the symbol connects to the grain goddess Ashnan, though those claims rest on more speculation than evidence.
What must be admitted is the presence of the symbol well before the medieval millstone. That such an object should appear at in the Mediterranean in an age well before the development of the iron millstone suggests that its origins lie deeper than industrialized agriculture.