June 20

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by gerryadmin

1909

Birth of a romantic legend

Though this daily blog charts history’s more momentous events — battles, treaties, catastrophes, and atrocities — there can still be time to celebrate one who, in the words of Dr Johnson’s praise of David Garrick, added to the “the public stock of harmless pleasure”.

Errol Flynn was born in Tasmania and educated in Australia and England. Expelled from school for having sex with the laundry lady and fired from his first job for theft, he gave early signs of a life spent in ignoring conventional morality.  By the age of 24 he had been bitten by the acting bug and started appearing on stage in Britain and in lightweight films. Though dramatic depth was never his strongpoint, his easygoing charm and swashbuckling manner soon saw him starring in roles that featured his lithe form and skill with a blade, such as Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Charge of the Light Brigade. He was equally at home twirling a six-gun in Dodge City, They Died With Their Boots On, Santa Fe Trail and Virginia City.

Flynn could not resist the bottle or women, especially young (very young) women and scandal dogged his career. He died dissolute and puffy at the age of 50 but will always be remembered for his way with romantic lines that no present-day actor could get away with. Heed the following.

From The Adventures of Don Juan

Don Juan: I have loved you since the beginning of time.

Catherine: But you only met me yesterday…

Don Juan: Why, that was when time began!

Or

Catherine: But you’ve made love to so many women.

Don Juan: Catherine, an artist may paint a thousand canvasses before achieving one work of art, would you deny a lover the same practice?

 

 

June 18

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by gerryadmin

Hroswitha of Gandersheim

One way medieval historians make themselves annoying to the general public is by contradicting popularly-held beliefs. After centuries of stating that the fall of Rome produced a Dark Age in the West, medievalists began to say there was no such thing. It’s “late antiquity”, they said, not the Dark Ages, and it wasn’t so horrible after all. The barbarians must no longer be called that; they became “migrants” or “settlers”. They didn’t invade so much as they “intermingled” and “created new societies”. Were these new societies literate? Well, no. Did they encourage long-distance trade or sophisticated mass-production as in the days of the Roman Empire? Sadly, no. Did they have the rule of law? No, savage tribal customs replaced Roman law. So, after twenty years or so of this sort of revisionism a new group of historians began pointing out that the barbarian invasions did, indeed, cause a civilizational catastrophe that took centuries to overcome. Among the things that disappeared in Western Europe was drama and it took a remarkable woman to reintroduce it.

Hroswitha of Gandersheim (c. 935-c. 1002) was a German nun during the cultural renaissance that was sponsored by the German Ottonian emperors in the tenth century. She was probably born into a noble family and certainly received a classical education that was not usually given to women of the time, even of the elite classes. Even more remarkably one of her teachers was herself a woman, the abbess Gerberga, sister of Emperor Otto I and a former Queen of France.

We have no record of anyone in Latin Europe writing a play since the days of imperial Rome but Hroswitha took it upon herself to revive the art form. Her plays deal with political problems, women’s roles, the challenge of sin and romance. She also wrote saints’ lives, poetry and works of history. Unlike many female authors, right up until the twentieth century, Hroswitha did not hide her sex, rather she sought recognition of herself as an exceptional woman, blessed by God.

June 18

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by gerryadmin

 

1815

The Battle of Waterloo

For twenty years, Napoleon Bonaparte, a minor Corsican noble who had made himself Emperor of the French, had troubled Europe with his armies and insane ambitions. Millions had died in the battles that raged from the Caribbean to the ruins of Moscow, but in 1814 Napoleon had found himself facing a great coalition that had brought him to admit defeat. Instead of taking him behind the woodshed and shooting him, thus ridding the world of such a pest, the crowned heads of Europe decided that it would not do to execute someone who had worn an emperor’s crown, an act that might give the lower orders dangerous ideas. So, a ridiculous fiction was devised, whereby Napoleon would continue his life as a ruler, but his domain would be restricted to the tiny island of Elba, off the west coast of Italy. He was given the freedom of his territory but a British squadron patrolled the island’s shores to prevent his escaping.

But escape he did. A small boat took him to France where the armies that had been sent to arrest him fell under his spell and reinstated him in imperial splendour in Paris. Poor Louis XVIII, whose Bourbon dynasty had been restored, fled quickly to England. For 100 days Napoleon ruled again and gathered a force to smash the coalition, marching north into Belgium to encounter a British army stationed there, before it could be joined by a Prussian contingent.

The leader of the British was Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, who had a splendid career fighting in India and driving the French out of Portugal and Spain. Napoleon derided him as a “sepoy general” but he had beaten every French marshal that Bonaparte had sent against him. The two sides met at Waterloo, south of Brussels, and fought a bloody battle all day. Napoleon’s artillery hammered the British across a valley and senseless cavalry charges by both sides proved that mounted units were the best-looking but stupidest troops on the field. When, in the evening, German reinforcements arrived and the massed fire of British rifles drove back uphill charges by Napoleon’s elite Imperial Guard, the battle was lost. Shouts of “La Garde recule. Sauve qui peut!” (“The Guard retreats. Save yourself if you can!”) prompted a retreat. Napoleon abdicated his throne and surrendered to the British on July 15, 1815.

June 15

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1859

The Pig War between Canada and the USA

The Oregon Treaty of 1846 had settled the boundary between British North America (later to be Canada) and the United States from the prairies to the Pacific along the 49th parallel. Things got a bit tricky however in the waters between the mainland and Vancouver Island — the Island, occupied by the British, dips below the parallel. Unfortunately, ambiguity in the language of the treaty resulted in rival claims to the San Juan Islands. An online article by Tod Matthews takes up the story:

Before the Pig War, the British were determined to resist the tide of American migration sweeping across the Rocky Mountains. They argued that the Americans were trespassing on land guaranteed to Britain by earlier treaties and explorations and through trading activities of the long-established Hudson’s Bay Company. Americans considered the British presence an affront to their “manifest destiny to overspread the continent” and rejected the idea that the land west of the Rockies should remain under foreign influence. The Oregon Treaty of 1846 gave the United States undisputed possession of the Pacific Northwest south of the 49th parallel, extending the boundary “to the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver’s Island; and thence southerly through the middle of the said channel, and of Fuca’s straits to the Pacific Ocean.” However, the treaty created additional problems because its wording left unclear who owned San Juan Island. The difficulty arose over that portion of the boundary described as the “middle of the channel” separating British-owned Vancouver Island from the mainland. Actually, there were two channels: Haro Strait (nearest Vancouver Island) and Rosario Strait (nearer the mainland). San Juan Island lay between the two. Britain insisted that the boundary ran through Rosario Strait; the Americans claimed it lay through Haro Strait. Thus, both sides considered San Juan theirs for settlement.

By 1859, there were about 25 American settlers on San Juan Island. They were settled on redemption claims which they expected the U.S. Government to recognize as valid but which the British considered illegal. Neither side recognized the authority of the other. Amazingly, this conflict occurred on an island only 20 miles long and seven miles wide, covering 55 square miles

When American settler Lyman Cutlar shot and killed the Hudson’s Bay Company’s marauding pig, the feud between nation’s came to blows. British authorities threatened to arrest him. American citizens requested military protection. Brig. Gen. William S. Harney, the commander of the Department of Oregon and anti-British to boot, responded by sending a company of the 9th U.S. Infantry under Capt. George E. Pickett to San Juan. James Douglas, governor of the Crown Colony of British Columbia, was angered at the presence of American soldiers on San Juan. He had three British warships under Capt. Geoffrey Hornby sent to dislodge Pickett but with instructions to avoid an armed clash if possible. By August 1861, five British warships mounting 167 guns and carrying 2,140 troops opposed 461 Americans, protected by an earthen redoubt and 14 cannons. When word of the crisis reached Washington, officials there were shocked that the simple action of an irate farmer had grown into an explosive international incident. San Juan Island remained under joint military occupation for the next 12 years. In 1871, when Great Britain and the United States signed the Treaty of Washington, the San Juan question was referred to Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany for settlement. On October 21, 1872, the emperor ruled in favor of the United States, establishing the boundary line through Haro Strait. Thus San Juan became an American possession and the final boundary between Canada and the United States was set. On November 25, 1872, the Royal Marines withdrew from English Camp. By July 1874 the last of the U.S. troops had left American Camp. Peace had finally come to the 49th parallel.

June 14

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Saint Joseph the Hymnographer, “the sweet-voiced nightingale of the Church”

Sicily in the 9th century was ruled by the Byzantine empire based in Constantinople and its inhabitants were largely Orthodox Christian. Arab invaders from North Africa gradually conquered the island and forced many Christians to flee. One of them was a young man who would become known to history as Joseph the Hymnographer (c. 810-881). He joined a monastery in Thessalonica where he impressed his superiors who recommended that he take a post in the capital. After some years, he attempted a trip to Rome to speak to the pope on behalf of the pro-icon party which was being persecuted by the iconoclastic rulers, but was captured by pirates and spent time as a slave on Crete. After escaping (with the help of the ghost of St Nicholas who encouraged him to sing praises to God) he returned to Constantinople where he established a monastery; he again fell foul of the government and was sent into exile on the Crimean peninsula. When he returned he rose high in the ranks of the Orthodox Church.

Joseph is most famous as the composer of hundreds of hymns, some of them still in use today in Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Churches. He is praised in an Orthodox hymn:

Come, let us acclaim the divinely inspired Joseph,

The twelve-stringed instrument of the Word,

The harmonious harp of grace and lute of heavenly virtues,

Who lauded and praised the assembly of the saints.

And now he is glorified with them.

June 10

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1692

The execution of an American witch

By the end of the 1600s most of Western Civilization had abandoned the hunt for witches.  Gradually across western Europe, the judicial proceedings that had resulted in the deaths of some 60,000 accused over the course of 200 years were less and less frequently put into motion. Almost a century before, the Spanish Inquisition had recognized that witchery was not an objective reality but rather the product of deluded minds. However, in Puritan New England an outburst of bizarre phenomena in a number of towns resulted in a series of hearings known as the Salem Witch Trials, trials in which hundreds were accused and twenty victims were put to death.

The disturbances began in early 1692 when two young girls began having fits and exhibiting signs of demonic possession. Soon more people were behaving strangely. The authorities reacted by arresting three women, the sort that made typical small-town scapegoats — a black slave, a beggar woman, and one who seldom attended church. As more and more people in surrounding villages claimed to be the object of spectral persecution, the arrests mounted and the accused now included prominent and godly community members.

In June seven men sitting as judges in the Court of Oyer and Terminer began to hear the cases. The first to be tried was Bridget Bishop, a thrice-married tavern owner of unsavoury reputation, who was accused of  tormenting and striking down her targets by witchcraft. Though she denied even knowing her accusers, she was convicted speedily and executed by hanging on June 10.

The trials would continue until 1693 by which time twenty had been executed, one had been pressed to death for refusing to testify, and more had died in prison. Soon the communities began having second thoughts about the trials, particularly the admission of evidence of visions. By 1695 relatives of the convicted began to appeal for reversal of the sentences and restitution, pleas which were eventually granted. Many who had taken part in the trails and who had supported the accusations repented. One minister, John Hale, said ruefully: “Such was the darkness of that day, the tortures and lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former presidents, that we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way.”

A similar, though less mortal, hysteria broke out in the 1980s when pagan feminists began to claim that over the centuries a Female Holocaust, operating as a tool of oppressive Christian patriarchy, had executed 9,000,000 women under the guise of witchcraft accusations. This fable was widely taken up by radical academics and was taught in universities. The National Film Board of Canada fell for this hoax as well, its notorious Studio D producing in 1990 The Burning Times, narrated by Starhawk, an enthusiast of the Goddess movement.

June 7

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1900

“Smash! Smash! For Jesus’ sake, smash!”: Carrie Nation attacks her first saloon

Carrie Nation (1846-1911) was an American teacher and member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union who vociferously opposed the sale of alcohol. In 1900, in her home of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, she received a message from God:

The next morning I was awakened by a voice which seemed to me speaking in my heart, these words, “GO TO KIOWA,” and my hands were lifted and thrown down and the words, “I’LL STAND BY YOU.” The words, “Go to Kiowa,” were spoken in a murmuring, musical tone, low and soft, but “I’ll stand by you,” was very clear, positive and emphatic. I was impressed with a great inspiration, the interpretation was very plain, it was this: “Take something in your hands, and throw at these places in Kiowa and smash them.”

Taking this message to heart, she went to Dobson’s Saloon in Kiowa and greeted the patrons with the words “Men, I have come to save you from a drunkard’s fate”. She then proceeded to smash the bar and its bottles of the demon rum with rocks she had picked up and a sledge hammer. Other saloons in the area received similar treatment at the hands of this fiery Amazon — she was over six feet tall and weighed 250 pounds. Her husband jocularly suggested that she use a hatchet during her next attack and this became her trademark; she called her assaults “hatchetations”. She and her followers from the WCTU or the Anti-Saloon League attacked bars across the United States, resulting in a series of arrests and fines which did not deter her. She died in 1911, a national celebrity and eight years later the United States adopted Prohibition.

June 3

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1905

Death of missionary Hudson Taylor

China in the mid-nineteenth century was in a dreadful state. The decadent Qing (or Manchu) dynasty was unable to deal with challenges posed by natural disasters and the intrusion of the outside world after years of relative isolation. The British East India Company had encouraged a massive drug problem in order to alleviate its balance of payment problems and the Chinese governments’ attempts to counter this were met by the Opium Wars. China was forced to open its doors at the point of a gun and in poured foreign merchants, ideas and missionaries. One of those missionaries gave a pamphlet entitled “Good Words to Admonish the Age” to a young Chinese man named Hong Xiuquan, a failed candidate for the civil service exams. After reading Christian tracts and undergoing visions, Hong proclaimed himself the younger brother of Jesus and began a rebellion that would lead to the death of 20,000,000 of his fellow countrymen. Into this chaos stepped Hudson Taylor (1832-1905).

Taylor was the son of an English Methodist lay preacher who desired that his son become a missionary to Asia. To prepare himself for this task Taylor studied medicine and Mandarin. In 1853 he set sail for Shanghai under the auspices of the China Evangelization Society but he soon abandoned that unreliable organization and conducted himself according to his own principles. Unlike other western missionaries Taylor dressed in the Chinese style, shaved his forehead and wore his hair in a pig tail. He shunned the company of Europeans and headed inland distributing tracts and Bibles. He was often robbed and caught up in riots; mission stations were overrun by combatants; his supplies were destroyed in a fire; and he encountered the vicissitudes of a land undergoing civil war. His wife and 4 young children died in China. During the Boxer Rebellion many of his colleagues and their families were murdered in the anti-foreigner uprising. Despite these challenges Taylor continued his work and built the China Inland Mission into the country’s biggest evangelistic endeavour. He died in 1905 and was buried in China. Today there are tens of millions of Chinese Christians and Taylor’s work continues to be carried on by the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (International).

June 1

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1453

Better a turban than a tiara

Gennadius II becomes the first ecumenical patriarch of the Orthodox Church to serve under a Muslim ruler when Mohammed II invests him with staff and mantle.

As the Byzantine empire shrank under the attacks of various Turkish tribes, it consistently called to western European Christians for aid. Time and again, the Orthodox Byzantines were told that the price of military help was conversion to Catholic theology and submission to the pope. A number of emperors decided to pay that price and converted, at least in name, but they could never convince their population that they should abandon Orthodoxy. The people always replied that they would prefer rule by Muslims who would allow them to keep their traditional religion than to take western aid and abandon their faith. “Better a turban than a tiara” was the cry in the streets.

In the 1450s as the situation in Constantinople grew increasingly dire, the emperor Michael XI Paleologus decided that he had no choice but to give in to the pope’s demands. In return for some western troops Michael announced that he had converted to Catholicism. His chief opponent in this was the monk and scholar Georgios Kourtesios Scholarios (1400-73), known as Gennadius. Gennadius had earlier in his career been a supporter of the ecclesiastical union of Eastern and Western Christianity but in 1453 told those who came to him for counsel: ”O unhappy Romans [the name always used by Byzantines to refer to themselves], why have you forsaken the truth? Why do you not trust in God, instead of in the Italians? In losing your faith you will lose your city. Have mercy on me, O Lord! I protest in thy presence that I am innocent of the crime.”

When the city fell on May 29, Gennadius was taken prisoner by the Turks but he was set free by the new conqueror Mehmet II. It was Mehmet’s plan that Constantinople be resettled and rebuilt with Orthodox Christian help. To that end he granted them limited religious self-government under their Patriarch. Mehmet named Gennadius to this post, knowing him to be one who would not be seeking assistance from the West. Though he was uneasy as Patriarch, Gennadius initiated the subservience of his office to the Turkish state, a condition which exists to this day. In 1953 the Turkish republic issued a stamp celebrating the 500th anniversary of Mehmet investing the Patriarch with his staff of office.

May 29

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1453

The Fall of Constantinople

On May 29, 1453, the troops of the Turkish Sultan Mehmet II broke through the defences of Constantinople and completed the conquest of the city. Michael Paleologus, the last ruler of the Roman Empire died fighting before the city was comprehensively sacked and its inhabitants sold into slavery. The great Church of Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, was immediately turned into a mosque. The most sacred relic of eastern Christians, the Hodegetria, a portrait of Mary and the baby Jesus supposedly painted by Luke the Evangelist, was chopped into bits for the gold in its frame.

By that time, Constantinople, once the grandest city on the planet, was only a hollow shell of its former self and the Roman Empire, of which it had been its capital, was reduced to a few scattered holdings. But the capture of the city had enormous political and symbolic importance. Both the Turks and the Russians claimed to be the heirs of Byzantium. Mehmet styled himself the Kayser-i-Rum, “Roman Emperor” and decreed that his next conquest would be Rome itself. The ruler of Muscovy, Ivan III, married a Byzantine princess and declared that he was the successor of Orthodox supremacy, appropriating the title of Czar, or “Caesar”. The flood of exiles from the city who found refuge in Italy brought with them manuscripts and a knowledge of Greek that helped fuel a second stage in the Renaissance. Turkish expansion brought with it a strangling of the trade between Asia and Europe, encouraging Europeans to embark on direct voyages to the East rather than relying on Islamic middle men; the expeditions of Columbus and Vasco da Gama are results of the fall of Constantinople.

Today, visitors to Constantinople, called “Istanbul” by the Turks, can visit a tiny enclave in the Fener district by the Golden Horn and see the compound of the Patriarch of Constantinople, the last remaining official of the Roman Empire.