Today’s post about exciting doings on December 25 will concentrate on the Early Middle Ages, 500-1000
• 567 Beginning of the “Twelve Days of Christmas” as decreed by Council of Tours. The days from Christmas to Epiphany on January 6, containing commemorations of St Stephen, St John, the Holy Innocents, the Holy Family, and the Virgin Mary, are united in one festal cycle.
• 597 Augustine of Canterbury baptizes thousands of Saxons in Kent. The Italian monk Augustine was sent to England to evangelize the Anglo-Saxon pagans whose king had married a Frankish princess. She has persuaded her husband Æthelberht to allow Augustine’s mission which will prove successful in starting the conversion of the barbarians who had overrun Britain.
• 683 Emperor Gaozong of the Chinese Tang dynasty is ailing, perhaps dying of a slow poison. On his death two days later, his consort, Wu, will seize power and become the only empress regnant in Chinese history.
• 691 The controversial Church Council of Trullo has banned the giving of Christmas presents.
• 764 The weather is so cold that the Black Sea “froze over hundred miles and over thirty miles, the ice thickness was one cubit [45cm or 18 inches] and it was hard as stone. People walked on it as they were on solid earth. Snow was so abundant that it formed mountains and exceeded 20 cubits [about 9 m or 30’]”.
• 768 The Caliph of Baghdad, Al-Mansur, orders that his physician Jurjis be given three beautiful slave girls to console him for the absence of his old and frail wife. Jurjis was not pleased. “
Pupil of Satan!”, he yelled at his student, “Why did you let them into my house? Go at once and take them back to their owner.” Mounting his mule, he rode with his pupil and the slave-girls to the caliph’s palace and handed the girls over to the eunuch. When al-Mansur heard of the matter, he sent for Jurjis and asked him why he had returned the slave-girls. “Such persons cannot stay in the same house with me,” answered Jurjis, “because we Christians marry one woman only, and as long as she lives, we take no other wife.” A1-Mansür was filled with admiration, and immediately gave orders that Jurjis should be allowed admittance to the quarters of his wives and concubines and that he should serve as their physician. This incident enhanced his prestige even further in the caliph’s eyes.
• 800 Pope Leo III crowns Charlemagne emperor in Rome
Now when the king, upon the most holy day of the Lord’s birth, was rising to the mass, after praying before the confession of the blessed Peter the Apostle, Leo the pope, with the consent of all the bishops and priests, and of the senate of the Franks, and likewise of the Romans, set a golden crown upon his head, the Roman people also shouting aloud. And when the people had made an end of chanting the Lauds, he was adored by the pope after the manner of the emperors of old. For this also was done by the will of God. For while the said emperor abode at Rome, certain men were brought unto him, who said that the name of emperor had ceased among the Greeks, and that among them the empire was held by a woman called Irene, who had by guile laid hold of her son, the emperor, and put out his eyes, and taken the empire to herself, as it is written of Athalia in the Book of the Kings; which, when Leo the pope and all the assembled bishops and priests and abbots heard, and the senate of the Franks and all the elders of the Romans, they took counsel with the rest of the Christian people, that they should name Charles, King of the Franks, to be emperor, seeing that he held Rome, the mother of empire, where the Caesars and emperors were always used to sit, and that the heathen might not mock the Christians if the name of emperor should have ceased among the Christians.
• 820 Leo V the Armenian, Byzantine emperor, is murdered in Hagia Sophia church. Leo had arrested one of his generals, Michael the Amorian, and condemned him to be thrown into a furnace on Christmas Day but was convinced by his wife that such an act on such a day was wrong. At the Christmas morning service in Hagia Sophia, a group of Michael’s friends attacked the emperor.
When the Emperor realized that he was being attacked, he went into the sanctuary and seized the thurible by its chains (some say it was the divine cross) with which to ward off the blows of his attackers. But the conspirators attacked all together, not one at a time. He was able to resist for some time by parrying the sword-thrusts with the divine cross, but then he was set upon from all sides, like a wild beast. He was already beginning to flag from his wounds when, at the end, he saw a gigantic person about to deal him a blow. Then, with an oath, he invoked the grace which inhabited the temple and begged to be delivered. The noble was of the Krambonitai family; “This is not the time for swearing oaths, but for killing,” he declared – and dealt him a blow which cut off the arm at the joint, not only severing the member, but also sundering an arm of the cross. Someone also cut off his head, which was already damaged by wounds and hanging down.
The corpse of Leo will be dragged through the Hippodrome. Michael, still in chains is brought from his prison and crowned emperor. Leo’s sons are exiled, castrated, and confined to a monastery as monks. Ironically, nine years later, Theophilus, the son of the usurper, will order the death of those those who had conspired to put his father on the throne by the murder of Leo.
• 858 A meteorological phenomenon is recorded in a German chronicle: On the very night of Christmas and on the following day, there was a violent and recurring earth-tremor at Mainz, and a great pestilence followed. The sea threw up a certain tree, torn out by the roots, which had previously been unknown in the provinces of Gaul: it had no leaves, but instead of boughs it had little tiny branches like blades of grass, thick-spread in places but longer, and instead of leaves it had things shaped like triangles and in colour like human nails or like fishbones, quite tiny and attached to the very tips of the grasslike branches as if they had been stuck on from outside, just like those little things made of various kinds of metals which are fixed on to sword-belts or on to the body-armour of men or horses by way of ornament.
998 In Iceland a bloody Christmas: That winter at Yuletide had Thorolf a great drinking, and put the drink round briskly to his thralls; and when they were drunk, he egged them on to go up to Ulfar’s-fell and burn Ulfar his house, and promised to give them their freedom therefore. The thralls said they would do so much for their freedom if he would hold to his word. Then they went six of them together to Ulfar’s-fell, and took a brushwood stack, and dragged it to the homestead, and set fire therein. At that time Arnkel and his men sat drinking at Lairstead, and when they went to bed they saw fire at Ulfar’s-fell. Then they went thereto forthwith, and took the thralls, and slaked the fire, and the houses were but little burned. The next morning Arnkel let bring the thralls to Vadils-head, and there were they all hanged.