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.
On this date in 1939 the Wepner family in New York City welcomed the arrival of a son, Charles. The lad grew up in straitened circumstances in Bayonne, New Jersey where he learned how to fight at an early age. After a spell in the Marines, Wepner became a professional boxer at a high level, earning fights with (and losing decisively to) pugilistic luminaries such as Sonny Liston, George Foreman, Mike Tyson, and Muhammed Ali. He once fought a bear, and was reputed to be the inspiration for Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, but what brings him to your attention today is his famous nickname: “The Bayonne Bleeder”.
Since the days of bareknuckle contests, boxers have had nicknames – heavyweight champ James John Corbett, for example, whose sobriquets “Gentleman Jim” and “The Dancing Master” spoke to his stylish technique. Similarly named were “Sugar” Ray Robinson and Archie Moore, “The Mongoose”.
Some monikers are bestowed because of geographical origins — John L.Sullivan, “The Boston Strong Boy” or Argentinian Luis Firpo, “The Wild Bull of the Pampas”. Jack Dempsey was “The Manassa Mauler” and Tommy Hearns of Detroit was “The Motor City Cobra”. Larry Holmes was “The Easton Assassin”. Barry McGuigan who first saw the light of day in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland was inevitably known as “The Clones Cyclone”. Who said Voltairean wit was dead?
Size can get a guy a name. Italian heavyweight Primo Carnera was called “The Ambling Alp”, “The Gentle Giant” and “The Vast Venetian”.
Some nicknames were racial, as in the case of Peter “Black Prince” Jackson or Gerry Cooney, “The Great White Hope”. Did you know that, before he was dubbed “The Brown Bomber”, Joe Lewis was saddled with hearing himself referred to as “The Dark Destroyer”, “The Sepia Socker” and “The Coffee-Colored KO King”?
Many sportswriters cannot avoid puns and so we have Michael “Second to” Nunn or Manny “Pac-Man” Pacquaio. Breidis Prescott defeated hitherto-unbeaten Amir Khan and was thereafter known as “The Khanqueror”. James Broad could not escape the tag “Broad-Axe”.
Most boxing nicknames, however, attempt to convey an aura of menace. Roberto “Hands of Stone” Duran; Jake LaMotta, “The Raging Bull”; “Smokin’ Joe” Frazier; “Bonecrusher” Smith (who actually had a university degree in business administration); and my favourite, Marco Antonio Barrera, “The Baby-Faced Assassin” whose scientific thrashing of the insufferable Prince Naseem Hamed was such a pleasure to watch in 2001.
The people of the eastern Baltic were the last Europeans to be Christianized, clinging to their polytheism despite attempts by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches to evangelize them. The orders of the Northern Crusade – the Teutonic Knights and the Livonian Order – took it upon themselves to wage war against the pagans (and occasionally their Orthodox neighbours), enforce conversion, and spread Germanic hegemony. History records many notable battles fought by these western knights, the most famous of which was the Battle on the Ice memorialized by Sergei Eisenstein in his epic 1938 film Alexander Nevsky.
(It’s a jolly little piece of Stalinist propaganda with a musical score by Prokofiev that I will deal with here in the future.)
The knights lost that fight, but on this day in 1336 they were triumphant in an attack on a pagan stronghold of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the hill fort at Pilėnai. A force of some 6,000, mostly German but also French and Austrian nobles and their detachments, approached the fort in which thousands of refugees had sought shelter. According to medieval chroniclers, the people panicked and resolved to kill themselves rather than be captured and enslaved. One elderly woman was said to have axed 100 people to death before killing herself. The commander of the defenders, Duke Margris, slew his own wife and guards before committing suicide.
The significance of the fight was its role in buttressing Lithuanian nationalism. The battle inspired epic poems, novels, operas, and historic re-enactments.
Since 1942 BBC Radio has broadcast a show entitled “Desert Island Discs”, called by some the “greatest radio programme of all time”. Each week a guest is asked to imagine that he or she is a castaway on some deserted shore who is allowed to bring along a book (not including a Bible and the works of Shakespeare), 8 recordings, and a luxury item (which cannot allow one to escape or communicate with the outside world.) Much interesting chatter ensues as the guests justify their choices.
If I were to choose a single book with which to while away the months or years on my coral atoll, I would choose Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up, first published in 1621. Among its many virtues are its length (over 1,000 pages), encyclopedic scope, and its depth of understanding of the human condition.
Burton was an Oxford academic suffering from what we would call today a clinical depression. One of the ways he dealt with his mental state, and to help others with theirs, was to examine the condition in light of medical knowledge and philosophy. The result was The Anatomy of Melancholy.
The ancient notion of mind and body being governed by the “four humours” still ruled early-modern medicine. To be healthy (or in “good humour”) was to enjoy a balance of four liquids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. A predominance of blood led to a sanguine personality (active, bold); phlegm to a phlegmatic disposition (cold, dispassionate); yellow bile to being choleric (prone to anger, daring); and black bile to being melancholic – a state that included not just depression but a host of other mental challenges. By examining the condition of melancholy Burton is led to discourse on innumerable topics in medicine, science, philosophy, literature, love, geography, etc. As he says: “No Centaurs here, or Gorgons look to find,/ My subject is of man, and human kind.”
The Anatomy of Melancholy is not an easy book to read. Burton’s range of learning was vast and he was wont to cite sources unfamiliar to most scholars today. He also loved to quote in Latin, sometimes translating, sometimes not. This sentence is typical: “When I first took this task in hand, et quod ait ille, impellents genio negotium suscepi, this I aimed at; vel ut lenirem animum scribendo, to ease my mind by writing”. But after a while the eye skips over the Latin and reassembles the sentence. Here are some pertinent quotes:
Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or habit. In disposition, is that transitory melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dullness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions, [925]no man living is free, no stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, some time or other he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality.Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of an excuse; envy alone wants both. Other sins last but for awhile; the gut may be satisfied, anger remits, hatred hath an end, envy never ceaseth.
[Diseases] crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, shrivel them up like old apples, make them so many anatomies.
[The rich] are indeed rather possessed by their money than possessors.
Though they [philosophers] write contemptu gloriæ, yet as Hieron observes, they will put their names to their books.
Aristotle said melancholy men of all others are most witty.
Machiavel says virtue and riches seldom settle on one man.
Every man, as the saying is, can tame a shrew but he that hath her.
Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher’s stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases…but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, ’tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul.
England is a paradise for women and hell for horses; Italy a paradise for horses, hell for women.
What physic, what chirurgery, what wealth, favor, authority can relieve, bear out, assuage, or expel a troubled conscience? A quiet mind cureth all them, but all they cannot comfort a distressed soul: who can put to silence the voice of desperation?
Now go and brag of thy present happiness, whosoever thou art, brag of thy temperature, of thy good parts, insult, triumph, and boast; thou seest in what a brittle state thou art, how soon thou mayst be dejected, how many several ways, by bad diet, bad air, a small loss, a little sorrow or discontent, an ague, &c.; how many sudden accidents may procure thy ruin, what a small tenure of happiness thou hast in this life, how weak and silly a creature thou art.
And yet with crimes to us unknown, Our sons shall mark the coming age their own.
As Petrarch observes, we change language, habits, laws, customs, manners, but not vices, not diseases, not the symptoms of folly and madness, they are still the same.
Polycarp (69-155) was a bishop of Asia Minor who had, according to tradition, studied under St. John, the last of the original Twelve Apostles, thus an important link between primitive Christianity and the expanding Church. Called upon to apostatize and worship the imperial cult, Polycarp refused, saying: “Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King and Saviour? You threaten me with a fire that burns for a season, and after a little while is quenched; but you are ignorant of the fire of everlasting punishment that is prepared for the wicked.” He was burned at the state. He is the patron saint of those suffering from dysentery and earache.
303 The Beginning of the Great Persecution
Christianity had been intermittently subject to persecution since its inception but there were two periods of intense and focussed attempts to exterminate the new religion, one in the mid-3rd century under the emperor Decius and, the second and most murderous, under Diocletian beginning on this date in 303 when he attacked the church in the eastern capital Nicomedia. Diocletian had embarked on a successful series of reforms to rehabilitate the empire’s finances, military strength, and cohesion. Christians, by refusing to worship the emperor or any of the other Roman gods, were thus a political threat.
Image of the majestic Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey.
532 The foundation of Hagia Sophia is laid
In the two centuries following the persecutions of Diocletian, Christianity became the state religion of the Roman empire. The greatest church in Christendom (and the most imposing building on Earth for the next millennium) was the Church of Holy Wisdom, commissioned by the emperor Justinian to replace the one destroyed during the Nike Rebellion. Pictured above is how it would have looked before it was converted to a mosque in the 15th century and the addition of four minarets.
1455 The printing of the Gutenberg Bible
Though the Chinese had used block printing for centuries, Europe had lacked a way of mechanically reproducing books until Johann Gutenberg of Mainz invented a moveable-type press. The first fruit of his labours was a Vulgate Bible, a 5th-century Latin translation by St Jerome of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. This was a moment whose revolutionary impact cannot be over-estimated.
The Great White Way has seen its spectacular successes over the years. We are still humming the tunes from Broadway musicals such as Showboat, Camelot, The Music Man, Annie, and Phantom of the Opera. (On request, I believe I could produce creditable renditions of most of the songs from Finian’s Rainbow.) Comedies such as The Producers or Barefoot in the Park and dramas such as Death of a Salesman, Come From Away and Amadeus are the stuff of legends.
Legendary too are the great flops – shows that were badly-cast, ill-conceived, overly-ambitious, or just too expensive to stage. Rockabye Hamlet, for example; a 1976 attempt to put the Prince of Denmark to music with lines such as this piece of advice from Polonius to Laertes: “Good son, you return to France/Keep your divinity inside your pants.” It lasted 7 performances, which is two more than Carrie: the Musical managed to stage in 1988. Apparently there was less of an audience for pig’s blood showers than the producers anticipated.
Fancy a dramatic investigation of the Shroud of Turin? Into the Light was turned off after six performances in 1986. The Broadway version of the Odyssey, entitled (wait for it) Home Sweet Homer, starring Yul Brynner closed after a single show – the producers had wanted to avoid putting it on altogether but Brynner’s contract stipulated that at least one performance was required. Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark might have continued had not the production cost $75 million before opening and requiring $1,000,000 a week to keep the lights on.
But when Broadway mavens gather around the campfire and tell chilling stories about truly desperately bad shows, talk always turns to The Moose Murders, a “mystery farce” which opened (and closed) on this day in 1983. Trapped by a storm in a wilderness lodge, the characters play a murder mystery game. Killings, flaccid slapstick, failed gags, incest, and a kick in the groin to a man in a moose costume made for a deathly silence from the audience and a closing after the first night. Movie and radio legend Eve Arden was to star but withdrew when it became obvious she could no longer memorize lines. (She did send a gracious note to the cast.)
Critics were not kind. It has been called “the golden standard of awfulness against which all theatre is judged.” The New York Times writer Frank Rich said it was “the worst play I’ve ever seen on a Broadway stage”. In fact, in a magazine’s list of Great Disasters of the Twentieth Century the play ranked Number Five (just behind New Coke). The play’s author Arthur Bicknell did manage to make a bit of money from it by penning Moose Murdered, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Broadway Bomb.
More precarity of life. Remember in reading this passage from Graham Robb’s masterful The Discovery of France that there are people alive today who knew people who were alive when these events occurred.
The tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. Mountain regions closed down in the late autumn. Entire Pyrenean villages of wood, like Barèges on the western side of the Col du Tourmalet, were abandoned to the snow and reclaimed from the avalanches in late spring. Other populations in the Alps and the Pyrenees simply entombed themselves until March or April, with a hay-loft above, a stable to one side and the mountain slope behind. According to a geographer writing in 1909, “the inhabitants re-emerge in spring, dishevelled and anemic”. But hibernation was not peculiar to high altitudes. More temperate regions, too, retreated into a fortress of sleep. Idleness and torpor cast an eerie pall over the well-cultivated parts of the Berry, where seasonal variations are slight and the temperature rarely falls below freezing. George Sand’s normally phlegmatic husband felt “something like fear” when he saw tidy land that seemed to be farmed by ghosts. The fields of Flanders were deserted for much of the year. An official report on the Nièvre In 1844 described the strange mutation of the Burgundian day-labourer once the harvest was In and the vine stocks had been burned:
After making the necessary repairs to their tools, these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.
Human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies. In Normandy, according to the diary of Jules Renard, “the peasant at home moves little more than the sloth” (1889); “in winter, they pass their lives asleep, corked up like snails” (1908). People trudged and dawdled, even in summer. They ate more slowly than modern people. Life expectancy at birth now seems depressingly low: in 1865, it was a few months over forty years in only twenty départments; in Paris and Finistère, it was under thirty; the national average was thirtyseven years two months. Life expectancy at five was fifty-one. Despite this, complaints about the brevity of life are far less common than complaints about its inordinate length. Slowness was not an attempt to savour the moment. A ploughman who took hours to reach a field beyond the town was not necessarily admiring the effect of morning mist on the furrows and the steaming cattle against the rising sun, he was trying to make a small amount of strength last for the working day, like a cartload of manure spread over a large field.
A similar practice seems to have existed in late czarist Russia, according to an article in the British Medical Journal:
A practice closely akin to hibernation is said to be general among Russian peasants in the Pskov Government, where food is scanty to a degree almost equivalent to chronic famine. Not having provisions enough to carry them through the whole year, they adopt the economical expedient of spending one half of it in sleep. This custom has existed among them from time immemorial. At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread, of which an amount sufficient to last six months has providently been baked in the previous autumn. When the bread has been washed down with a draught of water, everyone goes to sleep again. The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself, goes out to see if the grass is growing, and by-and-by sets to work at summer tasks. The country remains comparatively lively till the following winter, when again all signs of life disappear and all is silent, except we presume for the snores of the sleepers. This winter sleep is called lotska.
Precarity encore. In every village, town, and city, men and women – uncounted millions of them – woke up not knowing how they would survive the day. Their places in the economy were extremely tenuous, depending on their ingenuity and pluck, the charity of the Church or their neighbours, the weather, the time of year, and the mood of the authorities.
Some were day labourers with a little skill they would try to find employment for: carpenters; painters; rat catchers with trained ferrets and mole catchers; “cinderellas”, who collected and sold ashes used for laundering clothes; men called tétaïres, who performed the function of a breast-pump by sucking mothers’ breasts to start the flow of milk; folk who bred maggots for anglers by collecting dead cats and dogs in the attic; women who worked as human alarm clocks; ‘guardian angels’ who were paid by restaurants to guide their drunken clients home; cat exterminators who sell the pelts as sable and the flesh as rabbit meat; renters of leeches for those who cannot afford to buy them. There were the “mud-larks” of London who braved the stinking muck of the tidal Thames for discarded wood, metal, rope and coal from passing ships. There were “pure-finders” who gathered dog faeces to sell to tanners.
Then there were beggars. Beggar women sold their silence to respectable people by making lewd and compromising remarks about them in the street. They borrowed children who were diseased or deformed. They manufactured realistic sores from egg yolk and dried blood, working the yolk into a scratch to produce the full crusty effect. A judge at Rennes in 1787 reported “a bogus old man” with a fake hump and a club foot, another man who succeeded in blacking out one eye to give a terrible, dramatic impression of blindness, and yet another who could mimic all the symptoms of epilepsy. “Abraham men” pretended to be mentally ill and allowed out of the asylum to beg for their keep. “Idle beggar” was a contradiction in terms.
Prostitution, full- or part-time, was the resort of poor women and girls. Employment in brothels depended on government atitudes. The British outlawed bordellos, though it was estimated that 1 house in every 60 in London served that function and that the capital was home to 80,000 prostitutes. The Contagious Disease Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869, were passed to slow the spread of venereal disease especially by contact between prostitutes and members of the military in garrison and port towns. Women suspected of plying that trade could be detained in “lock hositals” to determine their contagion. Some English regiments reported that half their men had had to be treated for sexually transmitted disease. The French and other European countries sought to contain the public health dangers of the trade by licensing brothels and subjecting their workers to regular medical examinations.
Back to precarity. In 17th-century London it was the responsibility of each parish to keep records of births and deaths. The birth part was easy as each child was required to be presented for baptism and its name entered. Here is how the procedure for establishing cause of death worked:
When anyone dies, then either by tolling, or by ringing of a Bell, or by bespeaking of a Grave of the Sexton, the same is known to the Searchers, corresponding with the said Sexton. The Searchers hereupon…examine by what Disease, or Casualty the corps died. Hereupon they make their Report to the Parish-Clerk, and he, every Tuesday night, carries in an Accompt of all the Burials, and Christnings, hapning that Week, to the Clerk of the Hall. On Wednesday the general Accompt is made up, and Printed, and on Thursdays published and dispersed.
Here is a sample for the years 1605-06. Note that deaths outnumbered births and that deaths caused by the plague were enormous and recorded separately.
John Graunt, a well-off London haberdasher collected such data for a period of two decades and in 1662 published the world’s first attempt at a demographic survey, Natural and Political Observations, Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made Upon the Bills of Mortality, 1662, by John Graunt, a London haberdasher. Graunt made it his concern to examine two decades worth of parish records and “bills of mortality”. Graunt was skeptical of the Searchers’ accuracy in many cases and used statistical inference to calculate life expectancy and more reliable assessments of the causes of death.
In the 21st century we still die from apoplexy (stroke) and strangury (urinary tract disease) but few of us perish from being “cut of the stone” (operation for removal of gallstones or kidney stones) or leprosy. Note the dreadfully high death rate of “overlaid and starved” — children being smothered while sleeping in bed with adults or dying from lack of nutrition. Graunt blamed this on “the carelessness, ignorance, and infirmity of the Milch-women” (wet-nurses).
Three years after Graunt’s first edition, in 1665, the year of the Great Plague, London bills of mortality showed 97,306 burials, of which 68,598 were deaths from plague.
This engagement, fought during the Second Anglo-Boer War, was the first time that men in Canadian uniform, fighting in a Canadian unit, made war overseas. Troops from The Royal Canadian Regiment of Infantry under William Otter (who had taken part in putting down the Northwest Rebellion in western Canada in 1885) helped pin down some 4,000 Boers. Advancing by night towards the enemy lines, quietly digging trenches on high ground 65 yards from the Boer lines, they forced the enemy kommando to surrender.
It was the first significant British victory of the war, despite the blundering of British officers such as General Kitchener who insisted on frontal attacks on entrenched Boer positions — always a recipe for disaster. Hundreds of men on both sides, including 31 Canadians, died at Paardeberg.
