Christmas Every Day

1484 Pope Innocent VIII issues the witch-hunting bull Summis desiderantes.

Though using magic in harmful ways (maleficium) was illegal in most cultures, we cannot speak of a witch craze in Europe until the late fifteenth century when Dominican Inquisitors began to persuade the Church that witchcraft was a variety of heresy and thus worthy of extirpation. Two documents were instrumental in provoking a social concern with witchery that lasted over two centuries. One was Malleus Maleficarum or The Hammer of Witches by Sprenger and Kramer, two German Dominicans; the second was the papal decree of 1484 Summis desiderantes. The latter begins:

 It has recently come to our ears, not without great pain to us, that in some parts of upper Germany, as well as in the provinces, cities, territories, regions, and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, heedless of their own salvation and forsaking the catholic faith, give themselves over to devils male and female, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurings, and by other abominable superstitions and sortileges, offences, crimes, and misdeeds, ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women, the foal of animals, the products of the earth, the grapes of vines, and the fruits of trees, as well as men and women, cattle and flocks and herds and animals of every kind, vineyards also and orchards, meadows, pastures, harvests, grains and other fruits of the earth; that they afflict and torture with dire pains and anguish, both internal and external, these men, women, cattle, flocks, herds, and animals, and hinder men from begetting and women from conceiving, and prevent all consummation of marriage; that, moreover, they deny with sacrilegious lips the faith they received in holy baptism; and that, at the instigation of the enemy of mankind, they do not fear to commit and perpetrate many other abominable offences and crimes, at the risk of their own souls, to the insult of the divine majesty and to the pernicious example and scandal of multitudes.

Over the next 200 years the Church and local authorities in some parts of Europe, especially Germany, arrested thousands of suspected witches, executing probably about 50,000 of them. This was not a “Female Holocaust” with 9,000,000 victims as some, including the National Film Board of Canada, have laughably asserted but a set of panicked reactions to an age of upheaval and violence. The Church feared heresy, secular officials feared disorder and ordinary people feared supernatural harm. Where judicial torture was legal, bizarre confessions were the result; where torture was illegal, as in England or Ireland, witchcraft confessions were few. Despite its black reputation the Spanish Inquisition was among the first to call a halt to these trials, seeing in them only deluded ravings.

November 30 is Saint Andrew’s Day. Andrew was a fisherman, the brother of Simon Peter and a follower of John the Baptist. He recognized Jesus as the Messiah and was called by the Lord to be an apostle. Andrew appears a number of times in Gospels, such as when Jesus discusses the end of the world in Mark 13 and at the Feeding of the Five Thousand in John 6.

Legend says that after the death of Jesus Andrew travelled widely, spreading the faith to Asia Minor, the Caucasus, what is now Ukraine and Russia, Byzantium and the Balkans. The churches in Constantinople and Georgia thus claim an apostolic founder. In Greece he was martyred on an X-shaped cross which became his symbol. The saltire or St Andrew’s cross is on the flag of Scotland, which claims him as a patron saint, and on the naval flag of Russia, where he is also a patron. Because Andrew was the first disciple called by Jesus, his feast day heralds the start of the Christian calendar.

November 30 is also the birthday of Winston Churchill and Mark Twain, and the anniversary of the death of Oscar Wilde.

For Winston Spencer Churchill I have nothing but praise. The greatest Briton of his era (and of all time according to a BBC poll which placed Princess Diana third, far ahead of Isaac Newton and William Shakespeare) he saved civilization at the cost of the British Empire. He assumed office as the Allied position in the west was collapsing and the French government and army were too intent on speed-reading their German phrase books to defend their country. But herein lies a salutary lesson for those who think that the events of 1940 prove that Gauls are, by nature, cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Antony Beevor’s monumental history Berlin: The Downfall, 1945 notes that in the final few days of World War II, when Hitler lay dead and the survivors of the Nazi hierarchy were scuttling like rats out of the ruins of Berlin, the last Axis defenders in the city were Frenchmen. These remnants of the SS Charlemagne Division fought on in the wreckage of the Third Reich until they were overrun by the Red Army.

Mark Twain is little appreciated outside of the United States and for good reason. Next to Walt Whitman he is the most insufferable of American writers and next to Herman Melville the most unreadable.

There was a lot that was insufferable about Oscar Wilde too. He continually betrayed a loving wife and found furtive pleasure on the bodies of under-age servant boys and rancid young aristocrats. He made almost an entire career of far-too-artfully polished apothegms (‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.’) and a smirking inversion of received truths (‘As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.’) He brought his sad end upon himself, but for the sake of his children’s stories, Oscar Wilde will be forgiven much. Requiescat in pace.

A great day for massacres

On November 29, 1729 the Natchez tribe rose up against French settlers in Louisiana. Vexed by French encroachment on their territory the Natchez attacked Fort Rosalie and settler farms, killing over 200 colonists. The French reacted vigorously and allied with Choctaw warriors, traditional enemies of the Natchez, they destroyed many villages and enslaved hundreds. By 1736 the Natchez had ceased to exist as an independent people.

On this date in 1781 the crew of the English slave ship Zong, faced with a lack of drinking water, threw 130 enslaved Africans overboard. As was customary, the lives of these slaves had been insured and the woners of the Zong made a claim for their losses. A jury found that the slavers could recive compensation for the people thay had murdered by an appeal court reversed that ruling. The incident was a great spur to the abolition movement, leading to laws prohibiting such insurance claims, mandating better treatment in shipping slaves, and finally an end to British participation in the African slave trade.

In the early years of the American Civil War, the Cheyenne tribe took advantage of Washington’s preoccupation in subduing the southern rebellion by fighting back against white settlement in the territory they claimed, carrying out a number of massacres and atrocities. On this date in 1864 a troop of volunteer cavalry under Colonel John Chivington attacked and destroyed a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people in southeastern Colorado Territory, killing and mutilating an estimated 70–500 Native Americans, about two-thirds of whom were women and children. A subsequent inquiry was scathing in its assessment:

As to Colonel Chivington, your committee can hardly find fitting terms to describe his conduct. Wearing the uniform of the United States, which should be the emblem of justice and humanity; holding the important position of commander of a military district, and therefore having the honor of the government to that extent in his keeping, he deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty. Having full knowledge of their friendly character, having himself been instrumental to some extent in placing them in their position of fancied security, he took advantage of their in-apprehension and defenceless condition to gratify the worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man.

On November 29, 1986 the Surinamese army attacked the village of Moiwana, killing at least 35 of the inhabitants, mostly women and children, and burning the house of rebel leader Ronnie Brunswijk who was leading a fight to protect the rights of the maroon (descendants of escaped African slaves) minority. The survivors fled with thousands of other inland inhabitants over the Marowijne River to neighboring French Guiana. An end to the conflict was eventually negotiated and Brunswijk is now vice-president of the country.

1628 Birth of John Bunyan

John Bunyan was born in Bunyan’s End, Bedfordshire to a family of small means. As a teenager he followed the tinker’s trade and then served in the rebel armies during the English Civil War. At the war’s end in 1649 he returned home where he underwent a religious conversion and joined a congregation of nonconformist Protestants. In 1655, though unlearned in anything except the English scriptures, he began to preach and write tracts. He had been cautioned for unlicensed preaching in 1659 but his real troubles began with the return of the English monarchy in 1660 and the reestablishment of the Anglican Church which cracked down on the radical sects and demanded that all services be conducted according to the Book of Common Prayer. Bunyan refused to abandon his calling and was arrested and imprisoned numerous times for unlicensed preaching and abstaining from attendance at a lawful church. After 1672 the government relaxed its oppression of nonconformists for a time; Bunyan was released from prison and became a popular minister, even being named chaplain to the Lord Mayor of London.

Bunyan was an indefatigable writer, producing some 6o tracts and books of a religious nature. His spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and The Life and Death of Mister Badman are still read, but most of his other works such as Seasonal Counsel or Suffering Saints in the Furnace – Advice to Persecuted Christians in Their Trials & Tribulations are not. His masterwork is Pilgrim’s Progress or to give it its full title, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come; Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream, published in 1678. It follows the journey of sin-burdened Christian from the City of Destruction past the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, the Valley of Humiliation, the Hill of Difficulty and other trials to his destination in the Celestial City. Along the way he will meet Evangelist, Mr Worldly Wiseman, Simple, Sloth, Presumption and the demonic Apollyon. Pilgrim’s Progress is the most famous allegory in the English language, a monument of religious literature which has inspired many. It has been translated into more than 200 languages and has never been out of print. Modern-language versions are now being produced for those whose taste does not run to seventeenth-century English prose.

511 Death of the first Christian king of France.

Early in the 400s the Roman empire was invaded by a host of Germanic tribes moving down out of northern and central Europe. The empire in the east with its capital at Constantinople had the money and troops to defend itself, but the western half of the empire was overrun. Rome was sacked, the last emperor was deposed by a German warlord, and what had once been a single state was now a motley collection of barbarian kingdoms established by Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Burgundians, Angles, Saxons, Vandals and Jutes. One of the most formidable of the new states was the Kingdom of the Franks which covered most of what had been Gaul and which was ruled by the ruthless Clovis who managed to claw his way to the top over the bodies of rival Frankish leaders.

Most of the original inhabitants of Clovis’s new kingdom were Catholic Christians while invaders such as the Franks were either pagan or Arian Christian. On Christmas Day in 496 Clovis agreed to a Catholic baptism in order to better secure his rule, associating himself with the religion of his people and of Rome. This baptism was miraculously marked by the arrival of a container of holy oil from heaven which was used to anoint Clovis and many subsequent kings of what became France. French monarchs could thus claim the title of “Most Christian King”.

Clovis had brutally united his kingdom and many historians consider this the foundation of the French nation and Clovis the founder of the Merovingian dynasty. However, the Franks followed the custom of partible inheritance whereby a father divided his land equally among his sons and on the death of Clovis in 511 his kingdom was partitioned among his four sons. The tawdry history of the Merovingian Franks is one long story of conquest, unification, partition, battle and reunification. Why Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code chose the thuggish family of Clovis to be the supposed bloodline of Jesus remains a mystery best left unsolved.