Tomás de Torquemada (1420-98) was the legendarily ruthless Grand Inquisitor of Spain during a time when the persecution of Jews, Muslims, and conversos in that country accelerated.
The population of medieval Spain consisted of a majority of Catholics with significant minorities of Jews, Muslims and those who had converted to Christianity from those faiths. The latter were called “New Christians”, marranos (if Jewish), moriscos (if Muslim), or conversos. Non-Christians were subject to intermittent persecution and converts were always under suspicion for secretly clinging to their original religion. “Purity of blood” — a line of family descent free of Jewish or Muslim ancestors — was a social advantage; in medieval and early-modern Spain Christianity and racism went hand-in-hand.
Torquemada himself had Jewish blood but his influential relations in the Spanish church smoothed his career path. He rose inside the Dominican Order and eventually became confessor and advisor to Queen Isabella of Castile. When the papacy created a separate Spanish Inquisition at the request of Isabella and her husband Ferdinand of Aragon, Torquemada soon became its head and directed its efforts against those who openly professed a religion other than Christianity and those converts who were suspected of being crypto-Jews or -Muslims.
The Reconquista, the 700-year drive to expel Islamic states from the Iberian peninsula, was completed in 1492 with the surrender of the last Moorish stronghold in Granada. The surrender terms guaranteed freedom of religion for non-Christians but within months the Alhambra Decree, engineered by Torquemada, demanded the instant conversion or expulsion of all Spanish Jews under very cruel terms. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911 says that the Jewish community had offered a large sum of money to Ferdinand not to enforce the decree but “when Ferdinand was about to yield to the enticing offer, Torquemada appeared before him, bearing a crucifix aloft, and exclaiming: “Judas Iscariot sold Christ for 30 pieces of silver; Your Highness is about to sell him for 30,000 ducats. Here He is; take Him and sell Him.” Leaving the crucifix on the table he left the room. Chiefly through his instrumentality the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492.” Though Torquemada died in 1498 the Spanish Inquisition’s persecutions of Jews, Muslims and converts continued for centuries. In 2012 the Spanish government granted automatic citizenship to anyone who could prove descent from the banished Jewish population.
In the early 1960s demands for voting rights and civil rights for African Americans were met by violence, particularly in the southern states. There, support for separation of the races was a deeply entrenched social belief and the Ku Klux Klan attracted many men (and women) who would fight for segregation. Increased media attention, the popularity of leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and political considerations by the Kennedy regime in Washington turned up the pressure. Vigilante attacks on civil rights workers and those attempting to march or vote escalated to murder.
On the morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963 a bomb was placed outside Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. The church had been active in organizing protests against segregation and this made it a target in the eyes of some. At 10:22, fifteen sticks of dynamite under the porch exploded killing four children and wounding 22 others. The dead were four little girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair.
This atrocity did much to energize the civil rights movement and discredit southern segregationists but justice for the victims was not easily forthcoming. The federal government dispatched FBI agents to help in the investigation and the state of Alabama issued a paltry $5,000 reward for information. Martin Luther King condemned Governor George Wallace, a vociferous segregationist, telling him “the blood of four little children … is on your hands. Your irresponsible and misguided actions have created in Birmingham and Alabama the atmosphere that has induced continued violence and now murder.”
The FBI eventually identified 4 members of a Klan splinter group as the perpetrators — Thomas Blanton, Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry — but no federal action was taken against them while J. Edgar Hoover headed the FBI. In the 1970s a new Alabama Attorney General secured a murder conviction against Chambliss who had purchased the dynamite. In 2000 the federal government reopened the case and convicted the two surviving bombers, Cherry and Blanton, of murder, 37 years after the deed. All four of the accused maintained their innocence throughout.
Pope Adrian VI, born Adriaan Florensz in Utrecht, in the Netherlands in 1459, was the last non-Italian pope for over 450 years. He was born into a humble family but received an excellent education at a school run by the Brethren of the Common Life, who were pioneering humanist teaching for lay people. He went on to the University of Leuven on a scholarship provided by the Duchess of Burgundy. He became a teacher of theology and eventually taught that subject at the university where one of his students was Erasmus.
When the Habsburg princess Margaret of Austria became Governor of the Netherlands in 1506, she chose Adrian as an adviser. He soon became tutor to her nephew Charles, the son of Emperor Maximilian, a boy who would himself become Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. He was employed frequently by the Habsburgs, who ruled almost half of Europe, as a diplomat. He served for a time as Regent of Spain and as head of the Spanish Inquisition.
In January, 1522 he was elected pope in the midst of the burgeoning Protestant Reformation. He condemned Luther as a heretic but his own attempts at reform were viewed with suspicion and resistance from his conservative cardinals. He died in September 1523.
A celebration of that great and amiable man from Chambers’ Book of Days:
Montaigne was born in 1533, and died in 1592, his life of sixty years coinciding with one of the gloomiest eras in French history–a time of wide-spread and implacable dissensions, of civil war, massacre and murder.
The father of Montaigne was a baron of Perigord. Having found Latin a dreary and difficult study in his youth, he determined to make it an easy one for his son. He procured a tutor from Germany, ignorant of French, and gave orders that he should converse with the boy in nothing but Latin, and directed, moreover, that none of the household should address him otherwise than in that tongue. “They all became Latinised,”‘ says Montaigne; “and even the villagers in the neighbourhood learned words in that language, some of which took root in the country, and became of common use among the people.” Greek he was taught by similar artifice, feeling it a pastime rather than a task.
At the age of six, he was sent to the College of Guienne, then reputed the best in France, and, strange as it seems, his biographers relate, that at thirteen he had run through the prescribed course of studies, and completed his education. He next turned his attention to law, and at twenty-one was made conseiller, or judge, in the parliament of Bordeaux. He visited Paris, and was received at court, enjoyed the favour of Henri II, saw Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and entered fully into the delights and dissipations of gay society. At thirty-three he was married though had he been left free to his choice, he “would not have wedded with Wisdom herself had she been willing. But ’tis not much to the purpose,” he writes, “to resist custom, for the common usance of life will be so. Most of my actions are guided by example, not choice.” Of women, indeed, he seldom speaks save in terms of easy contempt, and for the hardships of married life he has frequent jeers.
In 1571, in his thirty-eighth year, the death of his father enabled Montaigne to retire from the practice of law, and to settle on the patrimonial estate. It was predicted he would soon exhaust his fortune, but, on the contrary, he proved a good economist, and turned his farms to excellent account. His good sense, his probity, and liberal soul, won for him the esteem of his province; and though the civil wars of the League converted every house into a fort, he kept his gates open, and the neighbouring gentry brought him their jewels and papers to hold in safe-keeping. He placed his library in a tower overlooking the entrance to his court-yard, and there spent his leisure in reading, meditation, and writing. On the central rafter he inscribed: I do not understand; I pause; I examine. He took to writing for want of something to do, and having nothing else to write about, he began to write about himself, jotting down what came into his head when not too lazy. He found paper a patient listener, and excused his egotism by the consideration, that if his grandchildren were of the same mind as himself, they would he glad to know what sort of man he was. “What should I give to listen to some one who could tell me the ways, the look, the bearing, the commonest words of my ancestors!” If the world should complain that he talked too much about himself, he would answer the world that it talked and thought of everything but itself.
A volume of these egotistic gossips he published at Bordeaux in 1580, and the book quickly passed into circulation. About this time he was attacked with [kidney] stone, a disease he had held in dread from childhood, and the pleasure of the remainder of his life was broken with paroxysms of severe pain. “When they suppose me to be most cast down,” he writes, “and spare me, I often try my strength, and start subjects of conversation quite foreign to my state. I can do everything by a sudden effort, but, oh! take away duration. I am tried severely, for I have suddenly passed from a very sweet and happy condition of life, to the most painful that can be imagined.”
Abhorring doctors and drugs, he sought diversion and relief in a journey through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. At Rome he was kindly received by the pope and cardinals, and invested with the freedom of the city, an honour of which he was very proud. He kept a journal of this tour, which, after lying concealed in an old chest in his chateau for nearly two hundred years, was brought to light and published in 1774; and, as may be supposed, it contains a stock of curious and original information. While he was travelling, he was elected mayor of Bordeaux, an office for which he had no inclination, but Henry III insisted that he should accept it, and at the end of two years he was re-elected for the same period.
During a visit to Paris, he became acquainted with Mademoiselle de Gournay, a young lady who had conceived an ardent friendship for him through reading his Essays. She visited him, accompanied by her mother, and he reciprocated her attachment by treating her as his daughter. Meanwhile, his health grew worse, and feeling his end was drawing near, and sick of the intolerance and bloodshed which devastated France, he kept at home, correcting and retouching his writings. A quinsy [throat infection] terminated his life. He gathered his friends round his bedside, and bade them farewell. A priest said mass, and at the elevation of the host he raised himself in bed, and with hands clasped in prayer, expired. Mademoiselle de Gournay and her mother crossed half France, risking the perils of the roads, that they might condole with his widow and daughter.
It is superfluous to praise Montaigne’s Essays; they have long passed the ordeal of time into assured immortality. He was one of the earliest discoverers of the power and genius of the French language, and may he said to have been the inventor of that charming form of literature—the essay. At a time when authorship was stiff, solemn, and exhaustive, confined to Latin and the learned, he broke into the vernacular, and wrote for everybody with the ease and nonchalance of conversation. The Essays furnish a rambling auto-biography of their author, and not even Rousseau turned himself inside out with more completeness. He gives, with inimitable candour, an account of his likes and dislikes, his habits, foibles, and virtues. He pretends to most of the vices; and if there be any goodness in him, he says he got it by stealth. In his opinion, there is no man who has not deserved hanging five or six times, and he claims no exception in his own behalf. “Five or six as ridiculous stories,” he says, “may he told of me as of any man living.” This very frankness has caused some to question his sincerity, but his dissection of his own inconsistent self is too consistent with flesh and blood to be anything but natural.
Bit by bit the reader of the Essays grows familiar with Montaigne; and he must have a dull imagination indeed who fails to conceive a distinct picture of the thick-set, square-built, clumsy little man, so undersized that he did not like walking, because the mud of the streets bespattered him to the middle, and the rude crowd jostled and elbowed him. He disliked Protestantism, but his mind was wholly averse to bigotry and persecution. Gibbon, indeed, reckons Montaigne and Henri IV as the only two men of liberality in the France of the sixteenth century. Nothing more distinguishes Montaigne than his deep sense of the uncertainty and provisional character of human knowledge; and Mr. Emerson has well chosen him for a type of the sceptic. Montaigne’s device—a pair of scales evenly balanced, with the motto, Quo scais je? (What do I know?)—perfectly symbolises the man.
The only book we have which we certainly know was handled by Shakespeare, is a copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. It contains the poet’s autograph, and was purchased. by the British Museum for one hundred and twenty guineas. A second copy of the same translation in the Museum has Ben Jonson’s name on the fly-leaf.
Darius, the Persian emperor, was bent on expanding his realm into the Greek world. The help given by the newly-democratized city of Athens to Greek cities in Asia Minor in their resistance to Persia persuaded Darius to invade their territory with a huge fleet and army. He landed his army at Marathon, some 25 miles from Athens, because it was an area supposedly loyal to Hippias, a former Athenian tyrant who accompanied the Persians and who hoped to be restored as a puppet ruler under Darius.
Sparta declined to send help immediately to its fellow Greeks, using the excuse of a religious festival, but the small city of Plataea sent 1,000 men to aid the Athenian force of 9,000 hoplites — heavy infantry. Under Miltiades the Athenians blocked the Persians from moving inland and forced a battle, despite being outnumbered by at least 2 to 1. The Persians seem to have been taken by surprise by a sudden Greek charge, panicked, and were slaughtered in great numbers on the beach.
The Athenian victory was important because it convinced Greece that Persia was not unbeatable and because, had they lost the battle, their experiment with democracy would have ended.
Ten years later, the son of Darius, Xerxes, returned to Greece with an even larger force and confronted the Hellenes in battles at Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea.
When we think of September 11 we are apt to most quickly remember the horrors visited on New York and the Pentagon in 2001, but there are many other noteworthy events which have taken place on that date. On this day in history William Wallace and his Scots defeated the English at Stirling Bridge, Oliver Cromwell’s troops stormed the Irish town of Drogheda and massacred the inhabitants, and the American consulate in Benghazi was overrun by Islamic militants.
Of more significance than any of those was the conclusion of the Great Siege of Malta in 1565. The Turkish emperor Suleiman the Magnificent had launched an expedition against the pesky Knights of St John at Malta who dared to contest Islamic naval supremacy in the Mediterranean. 48,000 troops were landed on Malta from 150 ships — Barbary pirates, Turkish cavalry, regular Janissaries and sundry religious fanatics and volunteer adventurers, opposing 500 Knights of St John, 2500 Italian and Spanish infantry and a few thousand Maltese volunteers. The siege lasted for four months and was waged with intense cruelty and bravery on both sides. The Knights’ town and fort were pounded into rubble but they repelled every attack. In September 1565 the Turks finally sailed away leaving behind at least 25,000 dead.
This victory and a naval battle at Lepanto in 1571 kept Italy safe from a Turkish invasion that would have spread Islam deeper into Europe.
I am going to do a series on the Ten Greatest Canadians of the Twentieth Century, in no particular order. I may cheat a bit, as you will see. Since today is the birthday of one of those worthies, let us begin with him.
For many excellent reasons, Canada does not have a President. Our head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, and in her absence, a Governor-General who opens Parliament, hands out awards, and carries on all the ceremonial duties, while mere Prime Ministers and politicians do the grubby business of actually running the country. By universal accord, the greatest of our Governors-General was Georges Vanier, a splendid figure of a man with a heroic mustache, a chest full of medals, and a long record of service to his nation as a soldier and a diplomat. His wife Pauline was beautiful, pious and serene; together they helped refugees and founded the Vanier Institute of the Family. But perhaps their greatest gift to the world was the birth of their son Jean.
Jean Vanier served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and was a career officer in peace time with the Royal Canadian Navy. He resigned his commission to become a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, publishing works on Aristotle. When he was 36 years old, a friend showed him the horrible living conditions endured by people with mental disabilities. The result of this visit was a life-long dedication to serving the helpless and oppressed. He began a small community of the disabled and their helpers called L’Arche or The Ark, in a village in France, which blossomed into a world-wide movement with 147 homes in 35 countries. Vanier died recently at age 90, still a resident of his ‘’Arche community in Picardy.
It is a safe bet that before too long Vanier will be canonized as a saint of the Catholic Church, a fate that probably awaits his parents as well.
Well, all the above was written in 2019. Since then Vanier has been credibly accused of a tawdry sort of sexual misconduct. Under the guise of spiritual direction, Vanier seems to have manipulated a number of women, including nuns, into a sexual relationship. He was posthumously stripped of honours and schools once named after him were renamed. It is a safe bet his canonization will not take place any time soon.
“The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.” Future generations will have to weigh Vanier’s undoubted contributions against the harm he did to those 6 women.
It was the ill-fortune of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the fifth century to be governed by a pair of useless twits, the sons of the capable Theodosius I, Honorius in the West and Arcadius in the East.
Honorius succeed to the imperial throne at the age of ten. As long as he was under the tutelage of Stilicho, the half-Vandal general who had married into the royal family, things went fairly smoothly: revolts were put down and barbarian invasions were thwarted. In 408, however, Honorius had Stilicho and his family murdered. This not only deprived him of an able general but prompted barbarian troops in the service of Rome to defect to the Visigoths, who in 410 sacked Rome while Honorius hid out in Ravenna.
Thomas Hodgkin, the 19th-century historian and author of the massive Italy and her Invaders sums up the life of this hapless emperor:
Let us now turn from poetry to fact, and see what mark the real Honorius made upon the men and things that surrounded him. None. It is impossible to imagine a character more utterly destitute of moral colour, of self-determining energy, than that of the younger son of Theodosius. In Arcadius we do at length discover traces of uxoriousness, a blemish in some rulers, but which becomes almost a merit in him when contrasted with the absolute vacancy, the inability to love, to hate, to think, to execute, almost to be, which marks the impersonal personality of Honorius. After earnestly scrutinising his life to discover some traces of human emotion under the stolid mask of his countenance, we may perhaps pronounce with some confidence on the three following points.
1. He perceived, through life, the extreme importance of keeping the sacred person of the Emperor of the West out of the reach of danger.
2. He was, at any rate in youth, a sportsman.
3. In his later years he showed considerable interest in the rearing of poultry.
The arrest and murder of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, is one of the most tragical episodes of English history. However guilty he might be, the proceedings against him were executed with such treachery and cruelty, as to render them revolting to humanity. He was the seventh and youngest son of Edward III, and consequently the uncle of Richard II. Being himself a resolute and warlike man, he was dissatisfied with what he considered the unprincipled and pusillanimous conduct of his nephew, and, either from a spirit of patriotism or ambition, or, more probably, a combination of both, he promoted two or three measures against the king, more by mere words than by acts. On confessing this to the king, and expressing his sorrow for it, he was promised forgiveness, and restored to the royal favour. Trusting to this reconciliation, he was residing peaceably in his castle at Pleshy, near London, where be received a visit from the king, not only without suspicion, but with the fullest confidence of his friendly intentions. The incident is thus touchingly related by Froissart, a contemporary chronicler:
The king went after dinner, with part of his retinue, to Fleshy, about five o’clock. The Duke of Gloucester had already supped; for he was very sober, and sat but a short time at table, either at dinner or supper. He came to meet the king, and honoured him as we ought to honour our lord, so did the duchess and her children, who were there. The king entered the hall, and thence into the chamber. A table was spread for the king, and he supped a little. He said to the duke: “Fair uncle! have your horses saddled: but not all; only five or six; you must accompany me to London; we shall find there my uncles Lancaster and York, and I mean to be governed by your advice on a request they intend making to me. Bid your maitre-d’hotel follow you with your people to London.”
The duke, who thought no ill from it, assented to it pleasantly enough. As soon as the king had supped, and all were ready, the king took leave of the duchess and her children, and mounted his horse. So did the duke, who left Fleshy with only three esquires and four varlets. They avoided the high-road to London, but rode with speed, conversing on various topics, till they came to Stratford. The king then pushed on before him, and the earl marshal came suddenly behind him, with a great body of horsemen, and springing on the duke, said: “I arrest you in the king’s name!” The duke, astonished, saw that he was betrayed, and cried with a loud voice after the king. I do not know if the king heard him or not, but he did not return, but rode away.’
The duke was then hurried off to Calais, where he was placed in the hands of some of the king’s minions, under the Duke of Norfolk. Two of these ruffians, Serle, a valet of the king’s, and Franceys, a valet of the Duke of Albemarle, then told the Duke of Gloucester, that ‘it was the king’s will that he should die. He answered, that if it was his will, it must be so. They asked him to have a chaplain, he agreed, and confessed. They then made him lie down on a bed; the two valets threw a feather-bed upon him; three other persons held down the sides of it, while Serle and Franceys pressed on the mouth of the duke till he expired, three others of the assistants all the while on their knees weeping and praying for his soul, and Halle keeping guard at the door. When he was dead, the Duke of Norfolk came to them, and saw the dead body.
The body of the Duke of Gloucester was conveyed with great pomp to England, and first buried in the abbey of Pleshy, his own foundation, in a tomb which he himself had provided for the purpose. Subsequently, his remains were removed to Westminster, and deposited in the king’s chapel, under a marble slab inlaid with brass. Immediately after his murder, his widow, who was the daughter of Humphry de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, became a nun in the abbey of Barking; at her death she was buried beside her husband in Westminster Abbey.
The USA in the 19th century was fertile ground for the propagation of startling new religions: the Shakers, the Seventh-Day Adventists, Millerites, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Scientists. None aroused as much opposition or violence as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the “Mormons”. Founded by Joseph Smith in New York in the 1830, the sect was regarded with great suspicion for its new revelations, causing the church to gradually move west to find safe ground. In 1844 the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, and his brother were murdered by a mob and tensions increased to the point that its adherents abandoned their work in Missouri and Illinois and determined to establish a new Zion on the Utah plains. Led by Brigham Young, the church establish a colony and several cities around the Great Salt Lake. Young’s theocracy and scandalous rumours caused the American government to send the army against the Mormons in 1857.
It was at this moment when a wagon party of west-bound emigrants from Arkansas, known as the Baker-Fancher Train, entered Mormon territory. There they found the inhabitants hostile and stirred up by preachers spreading ideas of resistance to American forces and violence against outsiders. Talk of the End Times and God’s final acts of vengeance were in the air. Unable to buy the supplies they needed in Salt Lake City, the wagon party headed south. When they were camped at Mountain Meadows they were attacked by local Mormons disguised as Paiutes and some local tribesmen. After a siege of seven days, the settlers were promised safe conduct if they would surrender their animals and supplies to the natives but when they came out from behind their fort of wagons they were set upon and massacred. Every adult and child above the age of seven were killed, 120 in all, and seventeen infants were taken and given to Mormon families. The bodies were left unburied and the settlers’ property was divided among the Paiutes and Mormons.
The arrival of the American army prompted an investigation of the murders which was hindered by the Mormons. It has never been established whether Brigham Young had given the order for the killings but he did nothing to punish the perpetrators. Only one man was ever brought to justice twenty years later. The site of the massacre is now a National Historic Landmark.
