If you enjoy your freedom you might want to thank Don Juan of Austria today. And some other people. Because on Oct. 7, 1571 a ragtag fleet under Don Juan’s command thumped the Ottomans in the last major battle between galleys, a less famous victory than that on land outside the gates of Vienna in 1683 but also important in finally turning back the Islamic assault on the West that had been going on since the 7^th century.

You get a lot of grief these days from Islamists and their Western fellow travelers over the Crusades, as though these had not been a frequently botched and sometimes vicious counterattack attempting to regain lands sacred to Christians that had been wrested from them by force. Like Osama bin Laden’s outrage over “Andalusia,” another instance of Christians brazenly taking back something Muslims had stolen fair and square, it’s a very peculiar view of what constitutes aggression.

Luckily the West, despite the usual chaos of open societies, fended off the challenge in one improvised effort after another. That’s why I want to remember not just the commander, but all those who fought at Lepanto because the cause mattered to them, not because like those on the other side they were the Sultan’s slaves.

Had they not done so, history might have turned out differently and worse.

Good grief. It’s been two thirds of a century since Peanuts first appeared in daily papers on Oct. 6 1950. And while a great deal has happened since to grab headlines, I suspect that once again culture has had more influence on the course of human events than politics while getting less ink.

Charles Shultz’s ironic, sometimes depressing but usually determinedly upbeat vision shaped people’s sense of the world and of themselves in ways that windy stump speeches about our values did not. We saw more of ourselves in his everyman Charlie Brown, philosopher Linus or endlessly imaginative Snoopy than we did with Joe Politician.

Curiously Shultz himself seems to have felt a lot like Charlie Brown. He suffered from depression and was apparently surprised to hear that his work was popular. Which is a bit weird when you’re syndicated in 2500 papers worldwide. And I do wish he could have given Charlie Brown a few more triumphs over the years. But Charlie Brown never does quit.

Its odd to think that Peanuts bridged the gap between strips with very long story lines like Terry and the Pirates or (no one knows why) Prince Valiant to today’s almost invariant single-day stand-alone format. And it’s also strange to dig out very early Peanuts strips and see how the characters began and fairly quickly evolved into the familiar versions that greeted us for decades. Certainly any aspiring cartoonist should study how Snoopy changed (and Pogo, Opus and others) to save themselves a lot of time and heartache in their own artistic development.

Charlie Brown didn’t even have a stripe on his shirt at the very beginning. And Peanuts did change a bit with the times. But through it all there was a comforting, if sometimes slightly gloomy, sense that decency must persevere and would somehow come out all right.

Again, such things were not often found in the headlines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B24gIWoecOo Remember those “Write on, brother” ads for the Write Bros. 19 cent ballpoint pen? Or do I date myself, especially as I go on to stammer that it was something called an “advertisement” on a thing called “television”? Anyway, a reliable, long-lasting pen for less than a fifth of a dollar is a remarkable thing, though hardly an elegant one. And it dates back to 1880, when the first ballpoint pen was patented by Alonzo T. Cross.

A lot of useful things got invented in the late 19^th century. It was that kind of time, and also one thing that got invented was the mass production of quality steel and hence of cheap quality steel. From bicycles to ballpoints to railway rails, it helps to have this super-versatile, hard metal that can be shaped very precisely and relied on to keep its shape. And the ballpoint was of course invented in the United States, long the focal point of modernity as of conservatism.

For all that, I have to say that the ballpoint pen is an inelegant tool for an inelegant age. I myself used a fountain pen from early in high school until my professional life took me on too many airplanes and I discovered the vibrations of this convenient and remarkably cheap but, again, inelegant form of travel tended to cause significant leakage. If it didn’t get ink on my shirt in flight, the next time I used it, it sure got ink all over my fingers.

This lament has nothing to do with calligraphy. My handwriting is so bad my printing is barely legible. But while I appreciate Mr. Cross putting cheap pens in the hands of students and businesspeople around the world, I do rather miss the elegance of dipping a pen then dusting the product with sand before sending it.

In contrast with email and tweets, especially given the cost of postage, it forced you to consider whether you had expressed yourself properly, including in the arcane field of actually spelling things right, and whether whatever you’d said was worth saying and whether it needed quite so many obscenities.

So yes, I have ballpoint pens on my desk. You can’t avoid them nowadays. But I never use one with pleasure, as I did with my old fountain pens, and that’s not an unqualified victory for modernity.

On this day in history, Napoleon struck again for the first time. In 1795, he helped rout a Royalist mob in the streets of Paris with his infamous “whiff of grapeshot,” catapulting him to command of the French armies in Italy and ultimately to imperial power. And for what?

I get that Napoleon didn’t like disorder and was contemptuously impatient with nonsense. And he was also without question a great military strategist and tactician. He rose rapidly from obscurity to supreme power within France and made a valiant effort to conquer Europe, Britain and much of the New World. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those darn Anglo-Saxons.

Along the way, Bonaparte confirmed the maxim “Don’t attack the Anglosphere.” And helped to exhaust France, which should have been content with excellence and not been obsessed with greatness and glory. But to me he’s like Julius Caesar, a man of many admirable qualities, a giant among dwarves in many respects, but one whose whole career seems to have no point and ends in unlamented disaster.

What exactly did Napoleon want to do with all that power? He doesn’t seem to have had much of a social agenda and what he had seems incoherent and pointless. Obviously he enjoyed planning and winning battles. But as an end in itself a military career is gory and vainglorious.

Conrad Black recently argued that if Napoleon had conquered Europe the 20^th century would have gone much better than it did. I doubt it, not least because with men like Napoleon, Caesar or Alexander the “Great” the appetite grows with the eating. And I think it grows partly because the conquests have no purpose beyond personal aggrandizement and further conquest.

I suspect the mob Napoleon dispersed needed dispersing. But after that, well, frankly, so did he as far as I can tell.

On this day in history, a government debauched its money. Which doesn’t narrow the field much, now does it? You can’t guess which government but you can guess that on plenty of other days one or another did so. Sometimes on consecutive days.

In this case it was the Continental Congress and the year was 1776. And actually what the Congress did was to borrow money to try to undebauch the currency. But borrowing to back unsound money only works if it’s a short-term desperate measure, buying time to do something about the monetary policy that’s causing the problem, namely printing more money than you have in real assets, essentially taxing without consent.

The way it works is that when a government increases the money supply faster than the economy grows, it has a larger share of the total amount of money than it did. It therefore gets to buy a larger share of the total economy than it did. But since the economy didn’t get larger, each dollar is worth less and everyone who didn’t get to print their own now has less real wealth.

There’s not much they can do about it because all dollars, francs or whatever it may be taste like chicken. Eventually people start refusing to accept the money, at least at face value, and if things get bad enough they won’t take it at all and insist on barter, gold or foreign money. But they have to refuse everyone’s debased money, not just the government’s, because there’s no way to tell them apart. And everyone refuses theirs.

Now the Continental Congress had a legitimate problem. It had to win a war without the ability to collect taxes, lacking both the legal authority and the administrative capacity given the war it was busy not winning for most of the next four years. But appeals to patriotism and pleas of necessity only take you so far.

Ultimately the Revolution succeeded and the new national government eventually made some effort to clean up the mess. But the simple fact is that you can print money far faster than you can borrow it and, indeed, if you didn’t have to print it you probably wouldn’t have to borrow it. And while the United States became a great nation, the expression “not worth a Continental” underlined for years the fact that it did so in part on a tried and false monetary expedient of substituting paper for real wealth to grab resources in a crisis.

Oh stop it. Just stop it. That’s my reaction to the news that in 1492… King Henry VII of England invaded France. What for?

It’s certainly not high on the list of great things English kings did. I don’t even remember any memorable defeats, let alone victories. And certainly the English didn’t end up conquering France, though they continued to claim they had until 1801 when there wasn’t a French throne to claim any more (the Jacobites didn’t even give it up then.)

Now Henry didn’t invent invading France, even by English monarchs. Ever since Edward III conjured up a tenuous claim to the French throne in 1340, when the direct Capetian line fizzled out, there had been more or less continuous assertions, and sporadic efforts at enforcement, of those claims including in the Hundred Years’ War. Much blood and treasure was expended, and much suffering caused in France, for something that wasn’t likely to work and wasn’t really a good idea anyway.

I’m glad these claims did not work out, because there were no functioning parliamentary institutions in France. And especially in the early days, when the English monarchs and nobility were strongly connected to their Norman French roots, it was at least potentially dangerous to English liberty for their rulers to aspire to such dominion.

Indeed, at one time Henry VII got fed up with such parliamentary limits on his power that he said he would never call another parliament and instead rule “in the French fashion”. But he never dared try it, and a good thing too.

For what it’s worth, I think England was realm enough for any monarch. And while it may seem absurd for me to stand athwart the 15^th century shouting “Stop,” fortunately I’m not the only one. Those same parliamentary institutions limited Henry’s ability to waste money pursuing such ambitions.

To defend legitimate English interests was one thing, and Parliament would fund it, though often grudgingly, through the years. But absurd and costly foreign ventures, like other vainglorious, expensive and oppressive autocratic undertakings, were not possible to sustain in England.

The king could start them. But someone would stand up and shout “Stop it” and he would have to. Then and now, because that’s the system we inherited centuries later and must preserve in our own time.

Doubtless it puts me in an even smaller minority than usual. But I miss Edgar the Peaceful.

In case you weren’t at the last fan club meeting, perhaps because it dissolved in the early 11^th century, I should specify that Edgar, who became king of all England on October 1 of 959 A.D., was the son of Edmund the Deed Doer, nephew of Athelstan the Magnificent and great-grandson of Alfred the Great.

These titles may seem like so much hooey given that he was a Saxon king who reigned in the “Dark Ages”. But in fact this was a golden age of peace and prosperity.

Not, perhaps, prosperity in our “new iPhone every two years or bust” sense of the term. But it was an era when England was relatively free of foreign marauders, crops grew in abundance in a pleasant climate, order was maintained, law was generally fair, and government respected its citizens.

Indeed, Edgar himself took part in a highly symbolic ceremony, being rowed on the Thames by eight kings in 973 to symbolize the internal harmony that made prosperity possible and that depended upon good government. Or six. Or maybe they just acknowledged his overlordship. It is true that no one tweeted the event so the details are a bit obscure.

It is also true that all was not peace and plenty in his day either, of course. Edgar himself came to the throne after Edmund was killed personally arresting a thief or, possibly, was assassinated. Mind you Edmund’s brother Eadred then reigned well and nobly despite a crippling digestive ailment before passing the throne to Edgar’s undistinguished brother Eadwig, who wasn’t much use.

Worse, Edgar’s son Edward “the Martyr” was murdered in a plot to put Aethelred the Unready on the throne, under whose miserable tyrannical and incompetent rule the Danish invasions resumed. But Edgar did preside over a peaceful kingdom, whatever his personal temperament, and Athelstan’s reign was magnificent.

All happiness is not found in the present, which has seen its share of horrors. And the lives of those who went before us were not necessarily mean or miserable just because they didn’t have computer chips or our advanced social views.

Under Edgar the peaceful, things really were as good in England as life gets for humans. And I for one wish I had been there to raise a cup of mead as those kings rowed him past.

This may not be the ideal day for a cheery cry of “Tennis, anyone?” Not because of the weather, which is making up for a late spring with a delightful autumn. Rather, it’s because September 30 marks the first mention of tennis in North America, in 1659… when Peter Stuyvesant, last Director-General of “New Netherland” before the British took it and made it New York, banned tennis during religious services.

I don’t think he meant you couldn’t haul out a ball and start whacking it around the pews while the preacher droned on. He meant you couldn’t have a tennis game outside when you should be in church being bored to tears by some dreary Calvinist sermon.

Actually I should be fair to the Dutch. New Netherland had an established church, and not exactly a jolly one. As a historian I try very hard to meet past ages half-way, to find some sympathetic point of contact with their ideas and customs. But I fail badly when it comes to people who are filled with religious fervor based on predestination. It just makes no sense.

That said, let me give full credit to New Netherland for proclaiming religious freedom and meaning it, funding a Calvinist church but granting refuge to persecuted Jews and Quakers, among others.

Still, Stuyvesant’s irritated proclamation reminds us of two key points. First, frivolous abandonment of often stuffy churches is not a modern phenomenon. The 17^th century is not generally regarded as one of religious apathy yet Stuyvesant had to compete with the racket of racquets cries of whatever “40 Love” is in Dutch floating in through the windows.

Second, bold rejection of religious orthodoxy in thought and deed isn’t new either. It may be good and it may be not. But we should not congratulate ourselves on having forgotten there ever was a Sabbath because we’re modern and modern is good. They were doing it in New Netherland long before graphite and synthetic rubber gave rise to 250 km/h serves.