Christmas Every Day

1509

The Battle of Diu

When the Portuguese explorers in the late 15th century rounded the Cape of Good Hope and headed up the east coast of Africa, they were on a mission that would revolutionize geopolitics in Asia for centuries. Empires would rise and fall, trade routes would be changed, the balance of wealth would shift to the Atlantic from the Mediterranean, and Christianity and Islam would clash on a new battlefront.

For centuries the Italian city states controlled international commerce between Europe and Asia, acting as a middle man between Christian nations and the Turks and Egyptians. What was termed the “spice trade” really meant the importing of a host of chemicals, preservatives, foods, timber, and cloth from Asia. Between the money their ships made from the transport of these goods and the mark-up they charged their European markets, cities like Venice and Genoa prospered.

The Atlantic-facing states — England, Spain, Portugal and France — all took to the sea at the turn of the 16th century to find a direct way to Asia. While others sailed west, the Portuguese sailed south around Africa and finally intruded into Asian waters in 1494. They found that while their trade goods were little valued by sophisticated Asians, their maritime technology was irresistible. With large sailing vessels propelled by square and lateen sails and bristling with heavy artillery, they could outfight any Arab or Indian fleet and bombard ports into submission. With easy brutality the Portuguese set about erecting a trade empire and alarming those who had held a monopoly hitherto.

In 1509 a unique alliance of Christian trading cities (Venice and Ragusa) and Islamic powers (the Mamluks of Egypt who had controlled the Red Sea, the Ottoman Turks, and various Indian states) gathered a fleet to oppose the Portuguese. Outside the port of Diu on the Arabian Sea, 18 Portuguese carracks and caravels blew 100 small allied vessels, many of them Mediterranean galleys, out of the water.

The Battle of Diu allowed the Portuguese to continue snapping up Indian ports and led to the overthrow of the Mamluks for their failure to protect the sea routes that were part of the pilgrimage to Mecca. This latter change made the Turkish Sultans the new caliphs of Sunni Islam and their Ottoman Empire the dominant Islamic power.

If you were around Westminster in London on this date in 1649 you would have noticed a rare event: a king being put on trial for treason.

Charles I, the second of the Stuart dynasty, had quarrelled with Parliament and had fallen (or jumped) into a bitter Civil War which he and his royalist cause had lost decisively. Now he was being tried for warring against his people and “all the treasons, murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs to this nation, acted and committed in the said wars.”

1916

The end of the Battle of Gallipoli

One of the most consequential battles of the 20th century took place beside the straits that lead from the Aegean Sea to the Black Sea. On April 25, 1915 Allied forces began to land on the Gallipoli peninsula as part of a plan to capture Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire and thus drive Turkey, a German ally, out of the First World War. Less than nine months later after bloody stalemate, the British, French, Australian, New Zealand troops withdrew, with a regiment of Newfoundlanders serving as the rear guard covering their retreat.

Instead of victoriously marching up the peninsula toward Constantinople, the Allies barely succeeded in penetrating the hills beyond the beaches. The Turks, under the command of German officers and a colonel by the name of Mustafa Kemal, held the heights tenaciously at great cost to both sides. With trenches mere yards apart at some points, the fighting was often vicious and personal. Casualties were high and eventually the Allies chose to withdraw and abandon the ambitious plan.

The fall-out of this defeat was enormous. Both present-day Turkey, New Zealand and Australia regard it as a foundational moment in their histories. Kemal would go on to overthrow the Ottoman Empire and become known as Atatürk, the founder of a secular, new republic. Winston Churchill, whose brainchild the invasion was, lost his job as head of the Admiralty and amphibious invasions were regarded with great trepidation until the success of the D-Day landings in 1944. Most importantly, the failure to clear a path to the Black Sea prevented the western Allies from reaching Russia with supplies. Russia’s subsequent military set-backs led directly to the overthrow of the Czar, the establishment of a nascent democracy, and the toppiling of that democracy by the Bolsheviks. The history of the 20th century would have been vastly different if the Allies ahd won at Gallipoli.

St Distaff’s Day

January 7 is so called because the Christmas season in the United Kingdom ended on Epiphany, and on the following day women returned to their distaffs or daily work. It is also called Rock Day, after the antique term for a distaff. A seventeenth-century poem by Thomas Herrick states:

St. Distaff’s Day; Or, the Morrow after Twelfth-day

Partly work and partly play
You must on St. Distaffs Day:
From the plough soon free your team;
Then cane home and fother them:
If the maids a-spinning go,
Burn the flax and fire the tow.
Bring in pails of water then,
Let the maids bewash the men.
Give St. Distaff all the right:
Then bid Christmas sport good night,
And next morrow every one
To his own vocation.

1642 Charles I invades the House of Commons

Animosity had been growing for years between a large section of the Parliamentary class and the second king of the Stuart dynasty, Charles I. Charles had attempted to rule without Parliament, introduced a number of unpopular and possibly unconstitutional taxes, and given the impression he favoured the return of Catholicism by supporting the Arminian practices of Archbishop Laud and marrying a French Catholic wife. In 1640 he abruptly cancelled the parliamentary sitting when Members demanded reform. In 1642, acting on the rumour that his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, was to be impeached, Charles brought troops into the House of Commons demanding that five of his critics be arrested.

Sitting in the chair of the Speaker of the House, Charles directed the Speaker to tell him where his opponents had gone. On his knees William Lenthall replied, “May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here.” The king left in disgust, but his actions had greatly exacerbated tensions and further cast him in the light of a tyrant. Within months the English Civil War had begun.

Words fail me.

Big Chief put his war paint on and kissed his squaw goodbye
Throw away his pipe of peace, and went to do or die
He said, “Uncle Sammy feeds me, gives me all I get
Now that Uncle Sammy needs me, Big Chief no forget”

Chorus:
Big Chief’s on his way to Berlin, just to do his share
Big Chief’s goin’ to make ’em squawk
When he hits ’em with his tomahawk
Big Chief’s goin’ to scalp the Kaiser, take away his gun
Oh! oh he have heap much fun
Goodbye Herman, no more German
Big Chief Kill-a-Hun

Pershing wants to catch the Kaiser, take him live or dead
Big chief says he’s satisfied if he can get his head
There will be no more Budweiser, in the Kaiser’s brew
All he’s goin’ to get to drink will be some Waterloo

Canadians were also willing to set the Kaiser to rights, according to his piece of sheet music.

I always thought that “Yanks” and “doughboys” were the nicknames for American soldiers in World War I. Who knew that there was a brief craze for “Sammies” as in “Uncle Sam’s boys”?

Apparently, they liked to smoke.

Two observations about this one: (1) those are awfully effeminate-looking warriors (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and (2) they were incorrectly using apostrophes to pluralize even back then.

Here an Uncle Sam in shirt-sleeves uses a left jab to give it to the Kaiser. How merry it must have been to sing this around the parlor piano.