Saints’ lives don’t come much weirder than that of Christina (c.1150–1224), a Belgian woman of low birth. In her early twenties she suffered a seizure that appeared to cause her death. Lying in her coffin in church, she astonished the congregation by levitating to the ceiling, apparently repelled by the stench of sin on her friends and neighbours. She claimed that in her coma she had received a vision of the terrors of Purgatory and was then transported to the presence of God. In her words:
The angels then transported me into Heaven, even to the throne of the Divine Majesty. The Lord regarded me with a favourable eye, and I experienced an extreme joy, because I thought to obtain the grace of dwelling eternally with Him. But my Heavenly Father, seeing what passed in my heart, said to me these words: “Assuredly, my dear daughter, you will one day be with Me. Now, however, I allow you to choose, either to remain with Me henceforth from this time, or to return again to earth to accomplish a mission of charity and suffering. In order to deliver from the flames of Purgatory those souls which have inspired you with so much compassion, you shall suffer for them upon earth; you shall endure great torments, without, however, dying from their effects. And not only will you relieve the departed, but the example which you will give to the living, and your life of continual suffering, will lead sinners to be converted and to expiate their crimes. After having ended this new life, you shall return here laden with merits.”
Back on earth she lived a long life of extreme penance and self-denial, occasionally throwing herself into fires and emerging unscathed or plunging into freezing rivers for long periods. Those around her could not tell if she were mad or blessed and she was imprisoned on more than one occasion. Witnesses, and there were many of them, testified to the miracles she performed and the attention she drew to the plight of souls in Purgatory. She is the patron saint of millers, those suffering from mental illness and mental health workers.
A well-known part of recent Manitoba history is the flight (and descent) of the Gimli Glider, a tale of breath-taking incompetence, serial disasters and unearthly flying skills. The story is best told in the Wikipedia entry, which is reproduced here.
On July 22, 1983, Air Canada’s Boeing 767 (registration C-GAUN) flew from Toronto to Edmonton where it underwent routine checks. The next day, it was flown to Montreal. Following a crew change, it departed Montreal as Flight 143 for the return trip to Edmonton (with a stopover in Ottawa), with Captain Robert (Bob) Pearson, 48, and First Officer Maurice Quintal at the controls. Captain Pearson was a highly experienced pilot, having accumulated more than 15,000 flight hours. First Officer Quintal was also very experienced, having logged over 7,000 hours of total flight time.
On July 23, 1983, Flight 143 was cruising at 12,500 metres (41,000 ft) over Red Lake, Ontario. The aircraft’s cockpit warning system sounded, indicating a fuel pressure problem on the aircraft’s left side. Assuming a fuel pump had failed the pilots turned it off, since gravity should feed fuel to the aircraft’s two engines. The aircraft’s fuel gauges were inoperative because of an electronic fault indicated on the instrument panel and airplane logs.
During the flight, the management computer indicated that there was still sufficient fuel for the flight but only because the initial fuel load had been incorrectly entered; the fuel had been calculated in pounds instead of kilograms by the ground crew and the erroneous calculation had been approved by the flight crew. Effectively, this error meant that less than half the amount of intended fuel had been loaded. Because the incorrect fuel weight data had been entered into the system, it was providing incorrect readings. A few moments later, a second fuel pressure alarm sounded for the right engine, prompting the pilots to divert to Winnipeg. Within seconds, the left engine failed and they began preparing for a single-engine landing.
As they communicated their intentions to controllers in Winnipeg and tried to restart the left engine, the cockpit warning system sounded again with the “all engines out” sound, a long “bong” that no one in the cockpit could recall having heard before and was not covered in flight simulator training. Flying with all engines out was something that was never expected to occur and had therefore not been covered in training. Seconds later, with the right-side engine also stopped, the 767 lost all power, and most of the instrument panels in the cockpit went blank.
The 767 was one of the first airliners to include an electronic flight instrumentation system, which operated on the electricity generated by the aircraft’s jet engines. With both engines stopped, the system went dead, leaving only a few basic battery-powered emergency flight instruments. While these provided sufficient information with which to land the aircraft, a vertical speed indicator – that would indicate the rate at which the aircraft was descending and therefore how long it could glide unpowered – was not among them.
On airliners the size of the 767, the engines also supply power for the hydraulic systems without which the aircraft cannot be controlled. Such aircraft are therefore required to accommodate this kind of power failure. With the 767, this is usually achieved through the automated deployment of a hydraulic pump (and on some airplanes a generator) driven by a small turbine, which is driven by a propeller that rotates because of the forward motion of the aircraft in the manner of a windmill. As the Gimli pilots were to experience on their landing approach, a decrease in this forward speed means a decrease in the power available to control the aircraft.
In line with their planned diversion to Winnipeg, the pilots were already descending through 35,000 feet (11,000 m) when the second engine shut down. They immediately searched their emergency checklist for the section on flying the aircraft with both engines out, only to find that no such section existed. Captain Pearson was an experienced glider pilot, so he was familiar with flying techniques almost never used in commercial flight. To have the maximum range and therefore the largest choice of possible landing sites, he needed to fly the 767 at the optimal glide speed. Making his best guess as to this speed for the 767, he flew the aircraft at 220 knots (410 km/h; 250 mph). First Officer Maurice Quintal began to calculate whether they could reach Winnipeg. He used the altitude from one of the mechanical backup instruments, while the distance travelled was supplied by the air traffic controllers in Winnipeg, measuring the distance the aircraft’s echo moved on their radar screens. In 10 nautical miles (19 km; 12 mi) the aircraft lost 5,000 feet (1,500 m), giving a glide ratio of approximately 12:1.
At this point, Quintal proposed landing at the former RCAF Station Gimli, a closed air force base where he had once served as a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot. Unbeknownst to Quintal or to the air traffic controller, a part of the facility had been converted to a race track complex, now known as Gimli Motorsports Park. It included a road race course, a go-kart track, and a dragstrip. A Canadian Automobile Sport Clubs-sanctioned sports car race hosted by the Winnipeg Sports Car Club was underway the Saturday of the incident and the area around the decommissioned runway was full of cars and campers. Part of the decommissioned runway was being used to stage the race.
Without power, the pilots used a gravity drop, which causes gravity to lower the landing gear and lock it into place. The main gear locked into position, but the nose wheel did not; this later turned out to be advantageous. As the aircraft slowed on approach to landing, the ram air turbine generated less power, rendering the aircraft increasingly difficult to control.
As the runway drew near, it became apparent that the aircraft was coming in too high and fast, raising the danger of running off the runway before it could be stopped. The lack of hydraulic pressure prevented flap/slat extension that would have, under normal landing conditions, reduced the stall speed of the aircraft and increased the lift coefficient of the wings to allow the aircraft to be slowed for a safe landing. The pilots briefly considered a 360-degree turn to reduce speed and altitude, but decided that they did not have enough altitude for the manoeuvre. Pearson decided to execute a forward slip to increase drag and lose altitude. This manoeuvre is commonly used with gliders and light aircraft to descend more quickly without increasing forward speed.
Complicating matters was the fact that with all of its engines out, the plane made virtually no noise during its approach. People on the ground thus had no warning of the impromptu landing and little time to flee. As the gliding plane closed in on the runway, the pilots noticed that there were two boys riding bicycles within 1,000 feet (300 m) of the projected point of impact. Captain Pearson would later remark that the boys were so close that he could see the looks of sheer terror on their faces as they realized that a commercial airliner was bearing down on them.
Two factors helped avert a potential disaster: the failure of the front landing gear to lock into position during the gravity drop, and the presence of a guardrail that had been installed along the centre of the decommissioned runway to facilitate its use as a racetrack. As soon as the wheels touched down on the runway, Pearson braked hard, blowing out two of the aircraft’s tires. The unlocked nose wheel collapsed and was forced back into its well, causing the aircraft’s nose to slam into, bounce off, and then scrape along the ground. This additional friction helped to slow the airplane and kept it from careening into the crowds surrounding the runway. After the aircraft had touched down, the nose began to scrape along the guardrail in the centre of the tarmac; Pearson applied extra right brake, which caused the main landing gear to straddle the guardrail creating additional drag that further reduced the speed. Air Canada Flight 143 came to a final stop on the ground 17 minutes after running out of fuel.
There were no serious injuries among the 61 passengers or the people on the ground. A minor fire in the nose area was extinguished by racers and course workers armed with fire extinguishers. Because the aircraft’s nose had collapsed onto the ground, its tail was elevated and there were some minor injuries when passengers exited the aircraft via the rear slides, which were not long enough to sufficiently accommodate the increased height.
In 1920 the British government undertook the rule of some parts of the former Turkish Empire. In the form of a mandate from the League of Nations, Britain occupied Palestine and Transjordan with their mixture of Arabs and Jews, Christians and Muslims. It was an unhappy regime with all sides calling for the withdrawal of the foreigners and independence for the various religious groups; Jews fought Arabs, Arabs fought Jews, and both sides took shots at the British.
After the end of World War II, Arabs and Jews continued their attacks on each other and on the British occupying force, who had no intention of staying but who had to maintain order until an international settlement was agreed upon to divide the land between Jews and Palestinians. An obvious target was the King David Hotel, headquarters of the Secretariat of the Government of Palestine and of the British Armed Forces in the region. A hard-line group of Jewish terrorists, the Irgun, received permission from the umbrella group guiding the Zionist military movement to attack the hotel and planned to plant hundreds of pounds of explosives in milk cans in the basement. This they did at noon on July 22; phone calls warning of the bombs may — or may not — have been made, but no evacuation had taken place before the devices exploded, bringing down a wing of the hotel.
The explosions killed 91 people, a mixture of British officials and clerks, Jews (including some supporters of Irgun), foreign visitors and Arabs. An outraged Britain clamped down on Jewish life in Jerusalem, achieving Irgun’s aim of causing further discontent with the Mandate occupation. To this day, the Israeli government treats the bombers as heroes.
Butler’s Lives of the Saints gives us a vivid account of this martyr:
The Emperor Maximian, reeking with the blood of the Thebæan legion and many other martyrs, arrived at Marseilles, where the Church then flourished. The tyrant breathed here nothing but slaughter and fury, and his coming filled the Christians with fear and alarm. In this general consternation, Victor, a Christian officer in the troops, went about in the night-time from house to house, visiting the faithful and inspiring them with contempt of a temporal death and the love of eternal life. He was surprised in this, and brought before the prefects Asterius and Eutychius, who exhorted him not to lose the fruit of all his services and the favor of his prince for the worship of a dead man, as they called Jesus Christ. He answered that he renounced those recompenses if he could not enjoy them without being unfaithful to Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, Who vouchsafed to become man for our salvation, but Who raised Himself from the dead, and reigns with the Father, being God equally with Him. The whole court heard him with shouts of rage. Victor was bound hand and foot and dragged through the streets of the city, exposed to the blows and insults of the populace. He was brought back bruised and bloody to the tribunal of the prefects, who, thinking his resolution must have been weakened by his sufferings, pressed him again to adore their gods. But the martyr, filled with the Holy Ghost, expressed his respect for the emperor and his contempt for their gods. He was then hoisted on the rack and tortured a long time, until, the tormentors being at last weary, the prefect ordered him to be taken down and thrown into a dark dungeon. At midnight, God visited him by His angels; the prison was filled with a light brighter than that of the sun, and the martyr sung with the angels the praises of God. Three soldiers who guarded the prison, seeing this light, cast themselves at the martyr’s feet, asked his pardon, and desired Baptism. Victor instructed them as well as time would permit, sent for priests the same night, and, going with them to the seaside, had them baptized, and returned with them again to his prison. The next morning Maximian was informed of the conversion of the guards, and in a transport of rage sent officers to bring them all four before him. The three soldiers persevered in the confession of Jesus Christ, and by the emperor’s orders were forthwith beheaded. Victor, after having been exposed to the insults of the whole city and beaten with clubs and scourged with leather thongs, was carried back to prison, where he continued three days, recommending to God his martyrdom with many tears. After that term the emperor called him again before his tribunal, and commanded the martyr to offer incense to a statue of Jupiter. Victor went up to the profane altar, and by a kick of his foot threw it down. The emperor ordered the foot to be forthwith chopped off, which the Saint suffered with great joy, offering to God these first-fruits of his body. A few moments after, the emperor condemned him to be put under the grindstone of a hand-mill and crushed to death. The executioners turned the wheel, and when part of his body was bruised and crushed the mill broke down. The Saint still breathed a little, but his head was immediately ordered to be cut off. His and the other three bodies were thrown into the sea, but, being cast ashore, were buried by the Christians in a grotto hewn out of a rock.
St Victor is patron of Tallinn, Estonia, where a medieval brotherhood sponsored art works in local churches which celebrated his deeds.
In 1402 the Turkish sultan Bayezid I, nicknamed “the Lightning”, could consider himself quite the success. He had seized the throne immediately after the death of his father at the Battle of Kosovo which broke the power of Serbia and had secured his claim by murdering his baby brother — setting the fratricidal example that Turkish leaders would follow for centuries. In 1396 he had smashed a great western crusade at the Battle of Nicopolis and erected the monumental Ulu Cami mosque in celebration. He had crushed other Turkish emirs and forced them to submit to his overlordship — but now he faced a new challenge out of Central Asia: the all-conquering Mongol armies of Timur the Lame (known in the West as Tamerlane).
Bayezid had been laying siege to Constantinople, the capital of the shrinking Christian Byzantine empire, but he abandoned that project and headed into the Anatolian heartland with a tired and thirsty army. Instead of allowing the enemy to exhaust himself chasing Turkish forces in the mountains, Bayezid insisted on an attack against a larger army possessing war elephants and mounted archers. The Turks were smashed and Bayezid was carted away by Timur in a cage. He never regained his freedom. (The 19th-century painting above shows Timur examining his captive.)
When Timur, having shattered the work of four Ottoman generations, turned back eastward, the Ottoman lands fell into a fierce internecine struggle among four brothers who contended with each other to secure possession of their European provinces, which had been little affected by the Mongol invasion, and to reunite the Ottoman dominions. In these wholly unexpected circumstances the Byzantines found themselves the favoured allies first of one Turkish contender, then of another. The blockade of Constantinople was lifted. Thessalonica – with Mount Athos and other places – was restored to Byzantine rule, and the payment of tribute to the sultan was annulled. It was the last breathing spell for the Christian empire, occasioned by a battle between two Muslim warlords.
As Muslim conquest of the southern shore of the Mediterranean proceeded, taking first Egypt, then Carthage, then Caesarea, it was inevitable that it would reach across the Straits to Spain. In 711, Arab and Berber forces from what is now Morocco, crossed the channel to the Visigothic kingdom, at the invitation of one of the factions in a civil war, and went on to subdue almost all of the Iberian peninsula.
The Visigoths were a Germanic tribe that had invaded Hispania in the 5th century, driving out other earlier northen intruders such as the Vandals (who left behind the name Andalusia — land of the Vandals) and the Suevi. They were Arian Christians when they first arrived but as they gradually became more civilized they adopted the Catholic religion of their subjects. Despite their faith, they remained a quarrelsome and murderous bunch, so fond of killing their own kings, that the Romans laughingly called assassination the morbus Gothicus, the Gothic Disease. It was one of their frequent tussles for the throne that the Muslim army was able to take advantage of.
The leader of the Arab-Berber army was Tariq ibn Ziyad (after whom Gibraltar – Jib-al-Tariq – is named). He probably did not suspect that his expedition would be so successful but it appears that the victory on this day at the Battle of Guadalete killed the Visigothic king Roderic and much of his warrior class, leaving a political vacuum which the Muslims exploited over the next couple of years. By 713-14 they had reached the Pyrenees, leaving only the northwest corner of Spain in the hands of Christians. The Moorish occupation of the peninsula would be ended only in 1492 with the fall of Granada to Ferdinand and Isabella.
In the long and squalid annals of the Kennedy family, few incidents are more shameful than the behaviour of Senator Ted Kennedy in the Chappaquiddick incident.
Edward Moore Kennedy was the last remaining son of the famous clan. Though young and already tarnished by scandal (expelled from Harvard for cheating) he had been elected to the Senate for Massachusetts in 1962 and was the white hope of left-wing Democrats who expected he would use the memory of his assassinated brothers to ascend to the White House. That plan was dealt a fatal blow in the aftermath of a July 1969 party, held to celebrate the “Boiler Room Girls”, a group of six young women who had worked on Robert Kennedy’s campaign the previous year. All the women were single and in their twenties; all the men attending were married.
At about 11:15 p.m., Kennedy and one of the women, Mary Jo Kopechne, left the party and drove off in Kennedy’s Oldsmobile. Over an hour later the car, with two people in it, was spotted by a policeman parked on a rural road; when the man approached the car, it departed in a cloud of dust. Shortly thereafter, the car drove off a bridge into the water where it overturned and sank, ending up on its roof. Kennedy was able to escape and walked to the party where he alerted friends to the accident and the fact that Ms Kopechne was still under water. With two companions Kennedy returned to the car where they tried in vain to rescue the trapped woman. Though his friends insisted that he report the incident, Kennedy, instead, dove into the water to swim across the channel and go back to his hotel. There he complained about other noisy guests and went to sleep. In the morning the submerged car was noticed by fishermen and reported to the police; Kennedy and his friends had still not made any contact with the authorities until he heard on the radio that a body had been found in his car. He then attended the police station and dictated a short statement (at variance with the facts).
Despite the fact that the police diver who recovered the body said that Ms Kopechne had survived some hours in the car until the trapped air ran out and that she could have been rescued if Kennedy had called for help, the affair was soon dispensed with. No autopsy was held; Kennedy was convicted only of leaving the scene of a crash. His driver’s license was temporarily suspended. The incident, however, showed Kennedy in the worst possible light and the stink of it prevented Kennedy from daring to run for the presidency until an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination in 1980. Even then he was dogged by the memory of Chappaquiddick when his opponent Jimmy Carter injected it into the campaign. The good people of Massachusetts, however, kept returning Teddy to the Senate, until his death in 2009.
A revolution in February 1917 overthrew the house of Romanov and ended the tsarist autocracy in Russia. Tsar Nicholas II was a decent man but a stubborn and incompetent ruler; he and his German-born wife had grown increasingly unpopular and their deposition at the hands of democratic revolutionaries was well-received in the country. The provisional government imprisoned the royal couple, their chronically-ill son, and four daughters in relative comfort in the Urals, with the hope of sending them into exile. However, the Bolshevik coup dropped the family into the hands of people with little thought of mercy. For Lenin’s Communists, Nicholas was a class enemy whose presence abroad would only encourage opposition to world revolution.
On the night of July 16-17, the royal family, a doctor, and three servants were led to a basement and a death sentence was pronounced against them. Seven executioners then shot, bludgeoned, and bayoneted the victims and disposed of their mutilated bodies in crude fashion. A press release by the local soviet read:
In view of the enemy’s proximity to Yekaterinburg and the exposure by the Cheka [Bolshevik secret police] of a serious White Guard plot with the goal of abducting the former Tsar and his family… In light of the approach of counterrevolutionary bands toward the Red capital of the Urals and the possibility of the crowned executioner escaping trial by the people (a plot among the White Guards to try to abduct him and his family was exposed and the compromising documents will be published), the Presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet, fulfilling the will of the Revolution, resolved to shoot the former Tsar, Nikolai Romanov, who is guilty of countless, bloody, violent acts against the Russian people.
In 1979, the bodies of Nicholas, Alexandra, their servants and four children were discovered but it was not until 2007 that the bodies of Alexei and Maria were identified. The royal family is now entombed together in Peter and Paul Cathedral, St Petersburg.
Many of the execution squad met their own grisly ends, either killed by angry peasants or shot by their own party in purges of the Stalin era. A cathedral has been erected over the site of the murders.
The Eastern and Western branches of Christianity had been growing farther apart over the centuries. Though they were in theory one Church, a number of factors had resulted in the development of separate worldviews and liturgical practices. The Eastern church thought and wrote in Greek, a language of which the Latin-speaking churchmen of the West were largely ignorant. The West demanded a celibate clergy; the East allowed priests (but not monks) to marry. The two churches quarrelled about the proper system for dating Easter and whether leavened or unleavened bread was to be used in communion. For Westerners the Bishop of Rome was the undisputed head; Easterners, under the thumb of the emperor in Constantinople, tended to regard the pope’s supremacy as only one of respect. Rome looked to the semi-barbarian kingdoms such as those of the Franks or the Germans for political muscle; Constantinople looked to convert the Slavs and orient them to Constantinople. Even theologically there were quarrels, especially over whether the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and Son (as in the Western creed) or only the Father (as in the East).
Matters came to a head in 1054. In the previous year Byzantine churches in southern Italy were harassed by papal authorities and Michael Keroularios, Patriarch of Constantinople, had closed Western churches in the capital. Anti-Western riots broke out in Constantinople before two legates arrived from Rome carrying a document signed by Pope Leo IX seeking military aid from the emperor and his help in curbing Keroularios who had termed Western clergy as “dogs, bad workmen, schismatics, hypocrites and liars.” Though they received a friendly reception from emperor, relations with the Patriarch grew heated. On July 16, the Roman emissaries laid a bull of excommunication against the Patriarch and his supporters on the altar of Hagia Sophia, and four days later Keroularios excommunicated the Roman legates. At the time, this was seen as being of little importance. The pope had died in April, rendering the commission of the delegates invalid; the Patriarch’s excommunication only extended to the Roman diplomats personally. But as time went on the split, later called the Great Schism, only widened and mistrust grew. In 1204 the sack of Constantinople by Catholic crusaders left a scar on the body of Christendom that has still not healed, though attempts have been made by Pope John Paul II, Francis I, and the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Moscow to heal the split.
In the early summer of 1381 the English peasantry, oppressed by the latests in a series of increased poll taxes, rose in rebellion. The most serious of these risings was that of the men of Kent. Led by Wat Tyler, the peasant army grew to number in the thousands, able to take several towns, including Canterbury, burning tax records and opening the jails. Among the prisoners freed was John Ball (c. 1338-81) a “hedge-priest”, or excommunicated cleric, who may well have been of a Lollard church.
Ball accompanied the rebels in their assault on London and in their attempt to force a meeting with the young king Richard II. When the peasant army was camped on Blackheath outside London he spoke to them of revolution in terms they could understand. “When Adam dalf, and Eve span” he asked [When Adam was digging and Eve was at her spinning], “who was thanne a gentilman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and that servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord”. Ball ended by recommending “uprooting the tares that are accustomed to destroy the grain; first killing the great lords of the realm, then slaying the lawyers, justices and jurors, and finally rooting out everyone whom they knew to be harmful to the community in future.”
Though Wat Tyler was murdered, the king promised to honour the promise he made to end serfdom, and the peasants dispersed. When London was free of the threat, Richard II ordered a mass round-up and execution; Ball was arrested in Coventry, and condemned to death by being hanged, drawn and quartered in the presence of the king. His head was exhibited on London Bridge as a warning to would-be rebels.
