Christmas Every Day

1462 The Night Attack on Mehmet the Conqueror

When your nickname is Vlad the Impaler, and you are the inspiration for the bloodsucking Count Dracula, it is hard to imagine that you have a loyal historical following. In fact, Vlad III Drakulya, Prince of Wallachia, is a hero in the Christian lands of the Balkans which, in the fifteenth century, were being overrun by the Ottoman Turks. Vlad had his little ways —  such as nailing turbans to the heads of Turkish emissaries and impaling or burning his less enthusiastic subjects — but his resistance to the Turks made him a folk hero.

In 1453, Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, which had been for centuries a barrier to the expansion of Islam into Eastern Europe, fell to the forces of Mehmet II, nicknamed the Conqueror. Mehmet then turned on the minor princes of the Balkans — Serbs, Croats, Saxons, Albanians, Wallachians, Transylvanians, etc. — and demanded that they become his vassals. Most saw no option and paid tribute to the Turks, often serving in their armies. Like so many others, Vlad did the same, for a time, but by 1461 he had ceased to acknowledge the lordship of Mehmet and turned to the Catholic Hungarians for aid. Mehmet responded by invading Wallachia with a huge army of perhaps 150,000 men.

On the night of June 16-17 Vlad launched a night attack on Mehmet’s camp, hoping to capture or kill him. Fortunately for the Turks, the Wallachians struck at the tents of the emperor’s advisers and missed their main target. Vlad withdrew and Mehmet followed him to the vicinity of the town of Târgoviște. There they discovered a mass atrocity, designed to daunt the Turks. According to a contemporary Greek historian:

The sultan’s army entered into the area of the impalements, which was seventeen stades long and seven stades wide [about an acre in size]. There were large stakes there on which, as it was said, about twenty thousand men, women, and children had been spitted, quite a sight for the Turks and the sultan himself. The sultan was seized with amazement and said that it was not possible to deprive of his country a man who had done such great deeds, who had such a diabolical understanding of how to govern his realm and its people. And he said that a man who had done such things was worth much. The rest of the Turks were dumbfounded when they saw the multitude of men on the stakes. There were infants too affixed to their mothers on the stakes, and birds had made their nests in their entrails.

The Turks abandoned that campaign but continued to rack up victories in the Balkans. The treacherous politics of the area saw Vlad arrested by his fellow Christians and then restored briefly to power. He died in 1466 fighting the Turks who sent his head to Constantinople.

“Bloomsday”

“There is a group of people who observe what they call Bloom’s day – 16 June.” So wrote Irish author James Joyce (1882-1941) in 1924. Since then, June 16th has been used by literary enthusiasts around the world to celebrate the life and works of Joyce whose novel Ulysses tells the story of one day — June 16 — in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom. (Joyce had chosen the date because it was on that day in 1904 that he had his first sexual encounter with Nora Barnacle who was to become his wife.)

Bloomsday takes many forms. In Ireland, it is often the occasion for readings, pub crawls or re-enactments of scenes in the novel. On the centenary of Joyce’s birth in 1982 a 30-hour dramatization of the book was broadcast by Irish radio. The day is also marked in Hungary because Bloom’s fictional father Vrag was a Hungarian Jew who migrated to Dublin. In the United States readings are often paired with the performance of Irish music, while in Trieste, Italy (where part of Ulysses was written) the Joyce Museum is the centre of Bloomsday events. On Bloomsday 2011, @Ulysses was the stage for an experimental day-long tweeting of the novel, 140 characters at a time.

1966 The Index of Prohibited Books is ended 

The invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century changed society in many ways. Books became far less difficult to produce, far less expensive, and contained content that appealed to a mass market, instead of the largely religious works that had had to be hand-copied. It also meant that dangerous ideas could now spread much more quickly than ever before. Consequently, every government soon developed heightened powers of censorship. England left the control of illicit printing to the Stationers’ Company while in Catholic Europe, the Church was charged with looking out for licentious or heretical literature. To assist local authorities with that task, the Council of Trent authorized the creation of a list of banned books, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

After 1571 a Vatican department called the Congregation of the Index considered works thought to imperil the souls or morals of Catholic Europe and updated it as required. Its powers technically lay only inside the territories administered by the Church but the Index was consulted by censors working for national governments. Among those authors listed in the various editions were Protestants such as John Milton, Jean Calvin, and John Locke; scientists such as René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Johannes Kepler; atheists and Deists like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and Jean-Paul Sartre; and authors such as Dante, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas.

A number of bureaucratic changes took place in the 20th century before the Index was finally abandoned as a continuing form of literary surveillance. Nonetheless, the future pope Benedict XVI reminded Catholics that “the Index retains its moral force despite its dissolution.”

1994 The murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman

Nicole, the ex-wife of football star O.J. Simpson, and friend Ron Goldman were found stabbed to death outside her condominium in Los Angeles. Suspicion fell on O.J., who had a history of domestic violence and who behaved erratically before his arrest. It was widely believed that jealousy over Nicole’s alleged affair with football player Marcus Allen led to her murder and that Goldman, who had been on an errand to return a pair of sunglasses left at his restaurant, was inadvertently caught up in the crime.

The sensational trial was televised and became the topic of rapt attention all across the continent. The defence “dream team” queried the DNA evidence and played the race card incessantly. This technique resulted in Simpson’s acquittal but a subsequent civil lawsuit found him responsible for the deaths and liable for multi-million dollar damages. In 2008 Simpson was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 33 years in jail; he was released on parole in 2017.

1184 BC The Fall of Troy

Along with the Bible, the story of the fall of Troy provides the foundation of Western literature. As described first by Homer in his epics The Iliad and The Odyssey, the ten-year siege of Troy and its destruction was the basis for countless other legends, plays, novels, poems, operas, and films.

The events beneath the walls of Troy (Christopher Marlowe’s “topless towers of Ilium”) took place because of the kidnapping of a Greek queen, Helen of Sparta, by a Trojan prince, Paris. The city-states of the Greek world banded together under the leadership of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, to recover Helen but despite the contribution of the almost-invincible warrior of Achilles, it took ten years to bring Troy down. Even after a decade of battles, it was a cunning ploy by the wiliest of the Greeks, Ulysses, that brought about the end of the Trojan monarchy — a hollow horse filled with Greek soldiers was brought into the city by unsuspecting citizens who believed their enemies had abandoned their siege. Once inside, the Greeks opened the gates and a general massacre and sack ensued.

For centuries it was believed that the Trojan war was entirely fictional but that was before the efforts of amateur archaeologist and Homer fanatic, Heinrich Schliemann (1822-90). With the money made from his career as a successful merchant, Schliemann excavated a site on the Troas peninsula which he believed fitted the description of the landscape described by Homer. He uncovered a series of cities built throughout the ages on top of each other and announced that one of these was the historic Troy. Unfortunately his crude techniques (which involved the use of dynamite) and his choice of archaeological layer have been criticized — Schliemann thought that Homer’s Troy was the city found on level II when modern researchers opt for levels VI or VIIa.

Today the existence of ancient Troy is taken as certain — its location would have allowed it to dominate the entrance to the Dardanelles and grow rich on tolls and trade — but the dating is uncertain. The genius Eratosthenes of Alexandria compiled an ancient chronology and place the destruction of Homer’s great city to 1184 BC.

1871 American attack on Korean forts

By the 1870s Western powers had ventured into Asia and forced most nations to open themselves to trade and diplomatic relations, not always with happy results. The American gunboats that forced Japan to encounter the outside world prompted civil war and a process of modernization; in China the Opium Wars produced more civil war and weakness of the Qing dynasty. One country that was determined to keep closed was Korea, the “Hermit Kingdom”, which forbade most foreign contact.

In 1866 the American merchant ship General Sherman attempted to sail deep into Korean territory, ostensibly to trade, but was attacked and the crew killed. An American expedition of their Asiatic Squadron was sent to the peninsula in 1871 to learn more of the fate of the doomed ship and to negotiate treaties with the Korean government. The reply was to refuse talks and to fire on the American fleet, whose commander demanded an apology with 10 days. When that was not forthcoming by June 10, troops were landed and several Korean forts on Gangwha Island were taken at the cost of 3 American dead and 243 Korean casualties. The enormous banner of the commanding officer was captured (see above).

Despite these losses the Korean government refused to negotiate and it was not until 1882 that Korea opened itself up to foreign diplomacy and trade. The flag (the only one of its kind surviving) was returned to Korea in 2015.

632 

The Death of Muhammed

The Islamic prophet and warlord Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim was born in Mecca about 570. Orphaned at an early age he was raised by an uncle. In his middle age he began to see visions, in which he claimed that the archangel Gabriel was speaking to him. (See the 14th-century Persian illustration above.) In 610 he began to proclaim these messages which centred around the utter oneness of God, a viewpoint which made him unpopular in Mecca which enjoyed a thriving pilgrimage trade to the shrines of various pagan deities. In 622 he and some followers fled to Medina where he struggled for political dominance and the unity of various tribes. In 630 he returned in force to capture Mecca. By the time he died in 632 he had succeeded in uniting most of the tribes of the Arabian peninsula under the banner of his new religion, Islam.

His death sparked a struggle for succession to the headship of the Islamic world. Though many opted for the title of Caliph (“successor”) to Muhammed’s cousin and son-in-law Ali, the majority were for the position to go to Abu Bakr. Ali was again denied the caliphate in 634 after the death of Abu Bakr and the reigns of Umar (d. 644) and Uthman. It was only in 656 after Uthman’s assassination that Ali was recognized but in 661 he himself was assassinated and the Muslim realm fell into the Sunni Shi’a conflict which has yet to be resolved.