Christmas Every Day

1473 The murder of Miguel Lucas de Iranzo

Born into a family of no particular noble distinction, Lucas de Iranzo (1453-73) rose in rank because he had been a page to prince Enrique who would become King of Castile. (Some chroniclers would suggest a homosexual relationship between the prince and Iranzo). Because of this bond he was heaped with honours: Constable, Royal Falconer, Chancellor, and member of the Council. His ascent caused jealousy among the ranks of the nobility, so for the sake of a quiet life he moved to the city of Jaén where he was governor. There he undertook civic improvements, established a mint, and strengthened fortifications — the city had only been wrested for the hands of a Muslim prince in 1446 and Andalusia was a contested frontier area. Iranzo was frequently at war with the forces of the Islamic Kingdom of Granada. As governor, Iranzo quarrelled with the local bishop, aroused the envy of local nobles, and upset the common people because of his protection of the city’s Jewish converts. 

Lucas de Iranzo was murdered on March 21, 1473 while he was praying on his knees in the main chapel of the cathedral. The act was publicly justified because of the support that the Constable had given to the Jews, and, indeed, anti-Jewish attacks soon erupted in the city. After his death, King Enrique IV arrived in Jaén incognito and went to the Council, where he inquired about certain jurors and aldermen whom he deemed to be guilty of the assassination. He ordered them to be hanged from their windows in retribution.

2000 Capture of a violent radical

Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin was born Hubert Gerold Brown but is best known as H. Rap Brown. On this date in 2002 he was apprehended by police for the murder of a Georgia police officer.

Rap Brown first came to the attention of America in the 1960s when he assumed the chairmanship of the civil rights group known as the Students’ Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). Under his leadership the group’s pronouncements were anything but nonviolent. He clashed with President Johnson in a visit to the White House, telling him “I think that the majority of Black people that voted for you wish that they had gone fishing.” He called for urban guerilla warfare in an armed uprising of blacks against the country he termed the “Fourth Reich” – “Black folks built America. If America don’t come around, we should burn it down.” He played a part in a short-lived attempt to merge SNCC with the Black Panthers, after which the group collapsed and Brown became increasingly alienated from the mainstream of the civil rights struggle.

Brown was charged with inciting a riot and a firearms offence; his trial was tumultuous, marked by bombings and Brown’s going on the run for 18 months. He was convicted in 1971 and served five years in New York’s notorious Attica prison. There he converted to Islam and took his new name.

After his release he moved to Atlanta and was active in community organizing and Islamic outreach. But the polic interest in him did not die down. In 1995 he was accused of shooting a man outside of the grocery store he ran but the charges were dropped. In 1999 he was stopped by police for driving a stolen car and impersonating a police officer; when he didn’t appear for a court date, two policemen (both black) were sent to serve a warrant on him. In the gunfire that ensued both officers were shot, one fatally. Al-Amin fled but was arrested four days later. He was convicted of murder by a majority-black jury and is serving a sentence of life without parole. Efforts continue to have him released.

1649 Abolition of the House of Lords

The long-simmering quarrel between much of England’s political class and the monarchs of the new Stuart dynasty boiled over into civil war in the 1640s. The result of this Parliament-Crown conflict was the execution of King Charles I and an attempt to institute a form of republican government. On March 19, 1649, the lower house of the bicameral Parliament, the House of Commons representing the towns and shires of the country, voted to abolish the upper chamber, the House of Lords, where the heads of the noble families and England’s bishops sat.

Though a number of aristocrats had supported Parliament during the Civil War, the House of Lords was a far less radical body than the Commons. In order to counter the conservatism of the Lords, it was suggested that the upper house be abolished but the members of it allowed to sit in a unicameral body. This was resisted out of a fear that the influence of the nobility would sway the Commons unduly. Some suggested that the Lords might serve as a kind of court or a consultative body but pressure grew to do away with the House of Lords altogether. At first, the highly-influential Oliver Cromwell was opposed, calling the idea madness at a time when unity was required but he was outvoted. Th existence of a powerful chamber of aristocrats in a country which had killed its king and done away with monarchy seemed to serve no purpose and the following bill was passed:

The Commons of England assembled in Parliament, finding by too long experience, that the House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the People of England to be continued, have thought fit to Ordain and Enact, and be it Ordained and Enacted by this present Parliament, and by the Authority of the same, That from henceforth the House of Lords in Parliament, shall be and is hereby wholly abolished and taken away; And that the Lords shall from henceforth not meet or sit in the said House called The Lords House, or in any other House or Place whatsoever, as a House of Lords; nor shall Sit, Vote, Advise, Adjudge, or Determine of any matter or thing whatsoever, as a House of Lords in Parliament: Nevertheless it is hereby Declared, That neither such Lords as have demeaned themselves with Honor, Courage and Fidelity to the Commonwealth, nor their Posterities who shall continue so, shall be excluded from the Publique Councils of the Nation, but shall be admitted thereunto, and have their Free Vote in Parliament, if they shall be thereunto elected, as other persons of Interest elected and qualified thereunto, ought to have.

It is little remembered but the republican government of the 1650s reconstituted an upper chamber in 1657. Called the “Other House”, it was meant to be an assembly of nominated life (as opposed to hereditary) peers and to serve as a check on the restive Commons. It disappeared with the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660.

1906 Birth of Henny Youngman

Henry “Henny” Youngman was born to a family of Russian Jews in England but moved to New York as a child. Working with a jazzband called the Swanee Syncopaters, he began to tell jokes between numbers and developed a reputation as a comedian. Working in radio from the late 1930s he developed a style of rapid-fire one-liners with an occasional riff on the violin he always carried as a prop. He worked in nightclubs, on television, and in the movies – in fact, anywhere people would pay him. Only his death in 1998 ended his performing career. Here are some of Youngman’s innumerable jokes, amny at the expense of his wife Sadie, to whom he was actually devoted:

My wife said to me, ‘For our anniversary I want to go somewhere I’ve never been before.’ I said, ‘Try the kitchen!’

I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her way back.

My wife will buy anything marked down. Last year she bought an escalator.

We always hold hands. If I let go, she shops.

My wife told me the car wasn’t running well. There was water in the carburetor. I asked where the car was, and she told me it was in the lake.

My wife and I went to a hotel where we got a waterbed. My wife called it the Dead Sea.

My wife is on a new diet. Coconuts and bananas. She hasn’t lost weight, but can she climb a tree.

Last night my wife said the weather outside was fit for neither man nor beast, so we both stayed home.

 I was so ugly when I was born, the doctor slapped my mother.

If you’re going to do something tonight that you’ll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.

I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.

My son complains about headaches. I tell him all the time: ‘When you get out of bed, it’s feet first!’

1831 Formation of the French Foreign Legion

The 1830 revolution that toppled the Bourbon dynasty brought with it the disbanding of the regiments of foreign troops who had served those kings. In March 1831 the new French king Louis-Philippe created a Foreign Legion from those soldiers and quickly dispatched it to aid in the conquest of Algeria. Since then the mercenaries of the Legion – whose motto is Legio Patria Nostra, the Legion is our Homeland – have fought with distinction in every French war. Their toughness is legendary and their casualties were heavy, especially in Mexican, North African, and Vietnamese conflicts.

As with every elite unit, esprit de corps is essential. This can be seen in the eccentric lyrics of their marching song, “Le Boudin”. A boudin is a sausage and refers to the rolled pack carried on the soldiers’ backs.

Chorus:

Hey, here’s blood sausage, here’s blood sausage, here’s blood sausage,/ For the Alsatians, the Swiss, and the Lorrains, /For the Belgians, there is none left,/ For the Belgians, there is none left, They are ass shooters. [des tireurs au cul]

1st verse:

We are crafty,/ We are rogues, Not ordinary guys,/ We often have our dark moods/ We are Legionnaires./ In Tonkin, the Immortal Legion/ Honoured our flag at Tuyen Quang./ Heroes of Camarón and model brothers/ Sleep in peace in your tombs.

(Chorus)

2nd verse:

Our ancestors knew how to die/ For the glory of the Legion./ We will all know how to perish/ Following tradition./ During our far-off campaigns,/ Facing fever and fire,/ Let us forget, along with our sorrows,/ Death, which forgets us so seldom./ We the Legion.

The slandering of the Belgians refers to the incident in 1870 when the King of Belgium requested that his subjects in the Legion not take part in the Franco-Prussian War. These troops were left at their home base much to the disgust of their comrades sent to the fighting.

1862 Battle of Hampton Roads

One of the North’s most effective tactics in the battle against the Confederacy was a naval blockade of southern ports. This hampered the import of arms and vital supplies and cut off the export of cotton to Europe, a major source of income. In order to thwart this embargo, the Confederate navy took the hull and engines of a captured US frigate USS Merrimack, armour plated it and mounted 14 guns and a ram, turning it into the ironclad CSS Virginia.

On March 8, 1862 the Virginia fought a successful engagement against the Union navy, sinking wooden vessels, USS Congress and USS Cumberland, and forcing a third, USS Minnesota to run aground. Virginia was mauled during the fray but returned the following day to complete her mission. In this she found herself confronted by a rival ironclad, USS Monitor, a vessel quite unlike the Virginia in build and armament which had hurried south from Brooklyn to confront its rival.

Monitor was lower and nimbler, though outgunned. She pounded Virginia with her two smoothbore guns in a revolving turret and Virginia thundered back but no significant damage was done to either vessel in this, the first battle between ironclads. Both ships retired from the action and never fought each other again. Virginia would be scuttled a few months later and Monitor would sink in a storm by the end of 1862.

1868 Sakai Massacre

Japan, which had kept itself in isolation for over two centuries, punishing foreigners who landed or were shipwrecked there, and executing Japanese who returned from abroad, had its doors blown open in the 1850s by American and European navies. This enforced exposure to the outside world was welcomed by some but also inflamed anti-foreigner sentiment that often broke out in violence. The illustration below is an expression of the “expel the barbarians” movement.

OnMarch 5, 1868 a party of 11 French sailors in Sakai harbour was set upon by local samurai and massacred. To pacify the French, the government ordered that those responsible be ordered to commit seppuku, suicide by disembowelment. After 11 had done so, the French captain whose crewmen had been butchered said that sufficient penalty had been paid and asked that the remaining 9 be spared.

1940

Stalin orders the Katyn Massacre

World War II began in Europe with the German invasion of Poland. This unprovoked attack was made possible by a secret pact between the Nazis and the USSR, an agreement which allowed the Soviets to annex the eastern part of Poland. This partition brought tens of thousands of Polish prisoners under the rule of Joseph Stalin who, at the urging of his secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, determined to use the opportunity to exterminate Poland’s leadership class. On this date in 1940, six members of the Politburo (Stalin, Kaganovich, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan and Kalinin) signed an order condemning imprisoned “nationalists and counterrevolutionaries” — the captive officers and intelligentsia — to death.

In April, 1940, 22,000 Poles were taken from their prison camps and dispatched to killing zones where they were shot and secretly buried. About half of the Polish officer class were killed — an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 85 privates, 3,420 non-coms, 7 chaplains (including the Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army), and 200 pilots, but also government officials, landowners, university professors, physicians, lawyers, engineers, teachers, writers and journalists. The purpose was to eliminate anyone who might be a leader in a future Poland.

After June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and the USSR began to think of creating an anti-German army out of its remaining Polish prisoners, questions began to be asked about the fate of the missing officers. The Soviets were able to dodge awkward questions until early 1943 when the occupying German army was alerted to mass graves containing the corpses of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. Sensing a propaganda coup, the Nazis brought in a team of neutral experts to examine the bodies and determine the date of their execution. Despite their findings that the men had been killed at a time when the Soviets were in control of the area, the USSR continued to blame the Germans.  Shamefully, it was in the interests of Allied cooperation with the Soviets to agree to go along with the lie during the war. 

When I was a grad student in London in the 1970s, I went on a march to the Soviet Embassy, which had objected to a Katyn memorial being erected with the date 1940 inscribed on it. Communists were still insisting that the Germans had carried out the massacre in 1941 during their occupation of  the western USSR. Only after the fall of the Soviet Union did Russia acknowledge that the atrocity had been carried out by the Soviet secret police.

An excellent fictional account of the 1943 discovery is Philip Kerr’s A Man Without Breath.

1924 Abolition of the Caliphate

“Caliph” means “successor”, successor to the Arab prophet Muhammed and, thus, the supreme voice of Sunni Islam. Throughout history a number of dynasties have claimed the caliphate and from the early 1500s, the Ottoman emperors in Constantinople were considered to be the rightful holders of the title. In 1914 as World War I began, Mehmed V in his role as Caliph allied his realm with Germany and Austria and declared a jihad against the British and French. The result was a disaster; the Ottomans lost their holdings in the Middle East and North Africa and the empire was reduced to an Anatolian rump. Worse was to come. A movement led by Kemal Pasha (later known as Ataturk) deposed the Ottomans – Mehmed VI was the last on the throne – and proclaimed a secular republic in 1922. The title of caliph, now severed from the imperial post, fell to a cousin of Mehmed, Abdulmejid.

For a time, Kemal tolerated the existence of a Caliph at least as a figurehead. When Abdulmejid requested increased state funding for his office, Kemal snapped, “Your office, the Khalifate, is no more than an historic relic. It has no justification for existence. It is a piece of impertinence that you should dare write to any of my secretaries!” When Indian supporters of the Khilafat Movement, a pan-Islamic group, tried to agitate inside Turkey, Kemal decided to abolish the caliphate altogether on this date in 1924. Abdulmejid was sent into exile and he spent his last days painting (he was a very accomplished artist). He died in Paris in 1944 as the city was being liberated from German occupation and was buried in Medina.

Since then the dream of a restored caliphate has been kept alive. The leader of ISIS , Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, proclaimed himself Caliph in 2013 but his reign was cut short by his suicide under attack by US special forces in 2019. His successor Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurash died under similar circumstances in 2022. At this moment there is no indication that the title has been passed on.

Have you got a favourite Byzantine emperor? I know some folks favour Basil II “the Bulgar-Slayer” for his famous victory at Kleidion, while others are partial to Nikephoras II Phokas, “White Death of the Saracens”, for his successes on the eastern border against Islamic encroachment. And who can forget Justinian II with his solid-gold nose prosthesis and stirring comeback against mutilation and exile? Romantics, of course, swoon over Constantine XI and his last stand against the Turks in 1453.

My choice, however, would be Theodosius II (401-450). Not only did his reign see the construction of the mighty Theodosian Walls which kept invaders at bay for over a thousand years, the rehabilitation of the reputation of John Chrysostom, and a new codification of Roman law, but it also saw the establishment of the world’s first university.

The University of Constantinople (or Pandidakterion) was founded on this date in 425. The school boasted 31 chairs, split between Greek and Latin instruction. Subjects taught included rhetoric, law, philosophy, medicine, music arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. The institution was meant to train the empire’s administrators and elite. It should be noted that women were admitted, at least to the medical school.

Apparently Theodosius founded the University at the urging of his wife Eudocia who was a big fan of education. Alas, the marriage between emperor and empress foundered on his suspicions of her adultery in the Case of the Really Big Apple. The pair parted in 443 and she spent the rest of her life in Jerusalem hanging around with Monophysites and doing good works.