Christmas Every Day

If you go into the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise. So says the children’s song, “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic”. So said German chieftain Arminius to the Roman legions of General Varus in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.

Arminius, or Hermann to the folks back home, was a young chief of the Cherusci tribe who spent his youth in Rome as a hostage and later as a soldier, being granted Roman citizenship and command of military units.

In 7 AD he returned to Germania where the Romans had penetrated beyond the Rhine, occupying large tracts of territory and reducing tribes to a tributary status. Arminius began to conspire with other chieftains to form a pan-tribal alliance and drive the Germans out. In the early autumn of 9 AD he convinced Varus, the governor of Germania, that a distant Roman garrison was endangered and that he should send troops to rescue them. Varus promptly marched three legions, the Seventeenth, the Eighteenth, and the Twentieth, out of his safe fortifications into an ambush in which the Roman army was hacked to bits and massacred.

Augustus Caesar was distraught, said to cry out for months afterward, “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”He sent retaliatory raids back across the Rhine which laid waste to German villages and recovered two of the three lost legionary eagles. Roman troops happened upon the site of Arminius’ victory and according to the historian Tacitus this is what they saw:

In the center of the field were the whitening bones of men, as they had fled, or stood their ground, strewn everywhere or piled in heaps. Near lay fragments of weapons and limbs of horses, and also human heads, prominently nailed to trunks of trees. In the adjacent groves were the barbarous altars, on which they had immolated tribunes and first-rank centurions.

Some survivors of the disaster who had escaped from the battle or from captivity, described how this was the spot where the officers fell, how yonder the eagles were captured, where Varus was pierced by his first wound, where too by the stroke of his own ill-starred hand he found for himself death. They pointed out too the raised ground from which Arminius had harangued his army, the number of gibbets for the captives, the pits for the living, and how in his exultation he insulted the standards and eagles. 

This was a decisive victory for the tribes because it convinced the Romans that there was little to be gained in renewing their conquest; henceforth they built their border defences along the Rhine. 

The alliance that Arminius had put together soon collapsed and he was murdered in 21 AD by his own tribesmen who feared he was growing too powerful.

1900

Birthday of an Assassin

On February 15, 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt was giving a speech from an open car in Miami, Florida. From the back of the crowd of onlookers, a short man stood on a chair and began firing pistol shots. Before he was subdued, he had wounded five people, including Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak who later died from his injury.

The killer was brick-layer Giuseppe Zangara born on this date in 1900 in Calabria, Italy. It was assumed at first that his target had been the President, a motive that seemed to be corroborated when he stated in the police station: “I have the gun in my hand. I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists.” Despite a history of mental illness Zangara was quickly found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in the electric chair, a fate which he scorned, telling the judge: ““You give me electric chair. I no afraid of that chair! You one of capitalists. You is crook man too. Put me in electric chair. I no care!” He was executed on March 20.

Since his death suspicions have been expressed that FDR was not the intended victim and that Cermak had been the real target. This was at the time when Chicago housed gangsters such as Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik and Frank Nitti, Al Capone’s successor as head of the city’s organized crime syndicate. Cermak was rumoured to have ordered a hit on Nitti in which the mobster was shot three times, and Zangara was supposedly a hitman hired to take revenge.

September 6, 1522

The first circumnavigation of the globe completed

In August, 1519 a fleet of five ships under the command of Ferdinand Magellan set sail from the port of Seville for a voyage around the world. Of the 250 crewmen aboard those ships, only 18 survived to return home on September 6, 1522 from their journey of 14,460 Spanish leagues (60,440 km or 37,560 mi). The expedition was chartered by the King of Spain but the crew was drawn from Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Greece, England and France. Its purpose was to reach the Indies without travelling around the horn of Africa, a route controlled by the Portuguese.

The fleet crossed the Atlantic without incident but when resupplying in what is now Argentina, a mutiny broke out, forcing Magellan to execute the captains of two of his ships and a number of rebellious crewmen; other mutineers he marooned. After a winter spent on shore, Magellan laboriously navigated through the narrow channels at the tip of South America to reach the Pacific. In doing so, one ship was wrecked and another abandoned the voyage to return to Spain. The three remaining vessels headed northwest and in March 1521 they became the first Europeans to reach the Philippine archipelago. Magellan involved himself in local politics as well as trading with the natives; he converted some regional nobles to Christianity but others he chose to war with. On April 27, Magellan and dozens of his men were killed in battle, leaving the fleet seriously undermanned. The crew consolidated on to two ships and continued their journey through the Spice Islands but when Trinidad, the larger vessel, showed signs of damage the expedition split up. The smaller Victoria would continue west toward Africa while the crew of Trinidad would repair their ship and return via the route by which they had come. Trinidad was captured by the Portuguese and lost but Victoria would eventually limp home under his captain Juan Sebastián Elcano with a starving, skeleton crew and a hold full of spices. The three years of adventure had cost the lives of 232 sailors but laid the foundation of Spain’s empire in the East.

476

The Fall of the Roman Empire in the West

Though Rome was sacked in 410 by a Visigothic horde and again in 451 by a Vandal fleet, the empire in the West itself continued to exist, though in a much weakened condition. An emperor ruled, at least on paper, from Ravenna on the northeast Italian coast. Real power was in the hands of the generals, many of them of Germanic descent, in charge of the few Roman armies left in the field and of the barbarian chieftains whose tribes had overrun most of the West. Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Picts, Scots, Alemanni, Burgundians, etc., had all carved off pieces of the empire.

In 475 a teenager by the name of Romulus Augustulus had been set up as Western Emperor by one of his generals but he exercised no real power. The next year an army of Ostrogoths led by Odoacer finished its conquest of the Italian peninsula by taking Ravenna. Romulus was forced to hand over the imperial regalia — crown, orb and scepter — to his barbarian conqueror but his life was spared. The position of emperor had fallen so low that the incumbent was not even worth killing; the boy was simply sent on his way with a pension to console him. Odoacer never bothered to claim the throne either, pretending to rule Italy on behalf of Zeno, the emperor in Constantinople to whom he sent the regalia. Zeno then declared the division of the empire at an end; henceforth until 1453 the Roman Empire was ruled from Constantinople.

Italians could not have been too unhappy or dismayed by those events. Peace was restored and taxes continued to be collected. One vexatious point was that the Ostrogoths were Arian (non-trinitarian Christians) with their own hierarchy of bishops ruling over a largely Trinitarian (Catholic, Chalcedonian, Nicene; take your pick) population. Toleration was usually the order of the day — for the Gothic rulers Arianism was a tribal badge — but Catholic bishops often had to struggle to keep their church buildings. The Ostrogoths built a number of beautiful churches in Ravenna, especially the Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo, with its gorgeous mosaics. (Arians in North Africa were much less accommodating and genuine persecution took place there.)

1260

Mongols smacked down

One of the most consequential battles in world history that most people are unaware of took place on this day in present-day Israel, north of Jerusalem at a place known as Ain Jalut or Goliath’s Spring.  It was there that an army of the all-conquering Mongols was met by a force of Mamelukes from Egypt.

For three generations vast Mongol armies had erupted on to the civilized world, smashing those who resisted them, and setting up an empire that stretched from Poland to the South China Sea. In the late 1250s it was the turn of the Muslim kingdoms of the Middle East. In 1258 the Mongols sacked Baghdad so brutally that its loss is still blamed for the centuries-long decline of the Islamic world. It was then the turn of the Mamelukes of Egypt. To their ruler Qutuz, the Mongol Khan Hulagu sent the following chilling message:

From the King of Kings of the East and West, the Great Khan. To Qutuz the Mamluk, who fled to escape our swords. You should think of what happened to other countries and submit to us. You have heard how we have conquered a vast empire and have purified the earth of the disorders that tainted it. We have conquered vast areas, massacring all the people. You cannot escape from the terror of our armies. Where can you flee? What road will you use to escape us? Our horses are swift, our arrows sharp, our swords like thunderbolts, our hearts as hard as the mountains, our soldiers as numerous as the sand. Fortresses will not detain us, nor armies stop us. Your prayers to God will not avail against us. We are not moved by tears nor touched by lamentations. Only those who beg our protection will be safe. Hasten your reply before the fire of war is kindled. Resist and you will suffer the most terrible catastrophes. We will shatter your mosques and reveal the weakness of your God and then will kill your children and your old men together. 

Qutuz replied by killing the Mongol emissaries and displaying their heads on the walls of Cairo; he then led his army into Palestine. There his numerically-superior forces met a Mongol division strengthened by the knights of local Christian territories who had been intimidated into aiding the invaders. Using the old fake-retreat-hidden-ambush trick the Mamelukes pounced on the too-confident Mongols and killed all those who did not retreat. This battle marked the end of this wave of Muslim expansion westward, leading many historians to wonder what would have happened if the outcome had been reversed. One of these has speculated thus:

Had the Mongols succeeded in conquering Egypt, they might have been able to carry on across North Africa to the Straits of Gibraltar. Europe would have been surrounded from Poland to Spain. Under such circumstances, would the European Renaissance have occurred? Its foundations would certainly have been far weaker. The world today might have been a considerably different place. As it was, the Mamluks not only stopped the Mongols’ westward advance, but—just as important— they also smashed the myth of Mongol invincibility. The Mongols’ belief in themselves was never quite the same, and ‘Ain Jalut marked the end of any concerted campaign by the Mongols in the Levant. In saving Cairo from the fate of Baghdad, the battle of ‘Ain Jalut also sealed the doom of the relatively weaker remaining Crusader states. Mamluk Egypt rose to the pinnacle of Islamic political, military and cultural power, a position it maintained until the rise of the Ottomans some 200 years later.

Things did not go well after the battle for either of the two leaders. Qutuz was assassinated on his way home by one of his generals and Hulagu faced rebellions from other Mongol princes.

1966

Death of the Jihadi Intellectual

Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) was an Egyptian-born author and Islamic theorist, enormously influential in establishing the intellectual foundations of Muslim notions of the modern state and justification for violence.

Quite was born to prosperous parents in an Egypt that was theoretically a kingdom but was, in fact, a British protectorate. He received a good Western-designed education, became a teacher, and then a civil servant, with a growing reputation as a poet and literary critic. Though a devout Muslim, he came to despise the backward imams of Egypt; and despite the fact he had studied in the United States, he developed an intense hatred of the West — it was soul-less, sexually-obsessed, secular, and mechanistic.

After his return from his studies in the USA, Qutb became involved with the Islamic Brotherhood, a powerful Muslim organization that sought increased influence for their brand of religion in all aspects of Egyptian life. The Brotherhood and Qutb opposed the corrupt Egyptian monarchy and dabbled with a group of army officers who were plotting to overthrow the government. When the colonels of the Free Officers Movement, who would come to be dominated by Gamel Abdel Nasser, had driven out King Farouk they revealed themselves to be Arab nationalists and secularists, rather than the Islamic liberators that the Brotherhood had hoped for.  There was a falling out and the Brotherhood tried to assassinate Nasser, which lead to a crackdown on Islamists and Qtub being jailed.

In prison Qutb wrote his two masterpieces, a 30-volume In the Shade of the Qu’ran and Milestones, a work of political theory. Qutb wanted all human life subject to the Koran and sharia law but also respected the contributions of modern science; in order to achieve this end, offensive jihad was obligatory on all Muslims. Though Qutb ws executed in 1966 for another anti-Nasser plot, his works lives on, directly inspiring Al-Qaeda and ISIS.