On October 15^th of 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent did a Terminator at the gates of Vienna, abandoning his siege. But the Ottomans would indeed be back, in 1683.

I’m sorry if this is getting monotonous. But don’t blame me. I’m not the one who kept doing it. And the fact is they were back even before 1683, attacking in the Mediterranean and getting stopped at Lepanto as noted earlier in this series (see Oct. 7).

It doesn’t seem to me that it worked out very well. The 1529 retreat was something of a debacle, partly due to bad weather, and thus Suleiman “the Magnificent” initiated the long slow decline that would see the Ottoman Empire become “the sick man of Europe” in the 19^th century, taped together and propped up by various European powers because they were afraid of the quarrels it would precipitate among them if it fell to bits. (And with chronic trouble in the Middle East, including Russian warplanes buzzing around Western ones in Syria now, we see that they were right.)

I cannot help noting that highly esteemed rulers in the West are those who defend their people, from Winston Churchill back to Alfred the Great, and are under the law rather than above it. Perhaps Suleiman would have been more genuinely magnificent if he’d concentrated on the welfare of his own people. Instead he had two of his own sons and four of his grandsons murdered; his local title “The Lawgiver” is a bit perplexing in this context though evidently he furnished a series of laws that locked the Empire into institutional immobility during its long decline. And he kept attacking the West which, even as a pragmatic proposition, hasn’t generally worked out well for anyone who persisted in doing it.

Still, there are those for whom it seems to be an unbreakable program.

Here’s a lesson we can learn again. And again. And again. Or perhaps I should say sit through again and again while learning nothing. On October 14, 1933, Germany announced its withdrawal from the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva and the League of Nations, effective Oct. 23. The droning went on in both bodies until, of all things, Germany attacked the world. And it accomplished… nothing.

Not nothing. It convinced democratic politicians and voters that something important was being done about guns, and of course it is guns that do the killing. And so they ignored the real problem which was evil people who wanted to kill.

Disarmament is pointless with people who do not wish to attack us and worse than useless among those who do. Any questions?

Yes, sir. When will this class be held again? We’re having trouble grasping the point here somehow.

Oh don’t worry. I think they just held a recap in Teheran. And the exam may come sooner than you expect.

On October 13 of 1399 King Henry IV of England was crowned. Which might not strike you as especially important unless you are from the 14^th or 15^th century. But you are.

Henry was the first king from the House of Lancaster, all Henries, ruling successively, and coming a cropper in the Wars of the Roses partly because Henry VI was mad much of the time. So much for historical dust. Now for the good stuff.

Henry is important first because he succeeded Richard II who was deposed for claiming his word was law, that is, for trying to discard the rights of the English, most especially that they controlled their government and not the reverse. It was a rule all but the most reckless would observe; when Henry VI was in exile in France between his first and second unhappy periods of rule, his Chancellor Sir John Fortescue wrote De laudibus legum Angliae (In Praise of the Laws of England) in which he stressed that the common law bound rulers in England, a statement that would not merely have been incorrect elsewhere but incoherent as there was no common law or law of the land elsewhere).

Second, when Henry of Bolingbroke put forward his claim to the throne as Henry IV, it was to Parliament that he had to appeal for confirmation of his status. And Parliament told him that they would confirm him as king only with conditions, which shows a difference between England and places where such an act, if it happens at all, is a formality.

So do the conditions, the most important of which was that whereas in the past Parliaments had been summoned because the king needed money, had presented him with petitions or lists of grievances requesting royal redress, had given him money, and had been sent away again, from now on the king must answer their grievances before he saw a shilling of public money.

It was not the final and complete assertion of the power of the purse; there were many procedural questions to be settled concerning how parliaments would meet, the impunity of their members and so on, and some of these would require an English Civil War and an American Revolution. But others, frankly, have become unsettled again in our own day, with tame legislatures performing circus tricks at the behest of an executive swollen with pride. So let us not be smug about our superiority to those who, in 1400, told the new king that his position on the throne depended not on brute force or royal favour but on respecting the rules against taxation without representation.

Back in 1971, on Oct. 12, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Equal Rights Amendment” pertaining to “sex,” as they then called gender, by a massive 354-23 majority. It passed the Senate almost as overwhelmingly in March 1972, 84-8, And with the backing of the political establishment left, right and fringe: from Strom Thurmond and Richard Nixon to George McGovern, Jane Fonda and the AFL-CIO it was sent to the states for what was widely assumed would be easy ratification. But then a strange thing happened. The public got involved.

The ERA was simple and straightforward in wording and intention.

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

And in the wake of civil rights for blacks it seemed unstoppable.

It was quickly ratified by 28 states by mid-1973 and got its 35^th ratification in January 1977. Just 3 to go for 38, the required ¾ of the states. But that’s where things took a funny turn. A lot of regular people worried about what it might do to the family, and to laws protecting women including those restricting the military draft to men. And they mobilized and prevented it from getting the required ratification by 38 states even though it received an extension of the deadline from 1979 to 1982 of dubious legality.

All that was a long time ago as we now measure such things, of course. And so it’s curious, times having continued to change in sexually radical directions, with women in combat now uncontroversial and the courts in full swing, so to speak, that it has not been reintroduced in Congress as an apparent slam-dunk.

Perhaps the fear is that doing so would invite regular people back into policy debates on gender. And that would never do. Remember what happened last time.

Exactly 100 years ago Edith Cavell, an English nurse in Belgium, was executed by the Germans for helping Allied prisoners escape.

Now I have this much sympathy with the Germans. They were in a war and trying to hold POWs in an occupied country and couldn’t just ignore people helping them get away. But then again, what business did they have occupying Belgium, and making a war they had largely provoked against France and, because it honoured a treaty with its ally Belgium, Britain as well (and Russia too, whose collapse into Bolshevism under the strain of war was a global catastrophe)?

Moreover, even when the Germans had little choice but to adopt harsh measures given the corner they’d backed themselves into, they often gave a disquieting impression of being proud of their toughness rather than sorry it had come to this. Including the execution of Cavell and the more general widespread mistreatment of Belgian civilians.

Over the years an impression has grown up of the First World War as an exercise in morally equivalent brutal stupidity on all sides. But that’s not how it seemed at the time including an international outcry against Cavell’s execution that the Germans seemed to take perverse pride in defying.

As I argue in my documentary The Great War Remembered, it was a necessary and morally justified struggle against an enemy that, while certainly not Hitler, was ruthless, aggressive and a menace to liberty.

And while I’m on the subject, today, Oct. 10, is the anniversary of Charles Martel stopping the Muslim invasion of Europe at Tours in 732. Would it be impolite to ask what they were doing there in the first place?

Before I continue, you might pull out an atlas… just kidding. I mean you might do an online search and note how close Tours is to Paris and London and how far from the Arabian peninsula where Islam had arisen barely a century earlier. So what great offense had the Franks and that crowd committed to justify this whirlwind assault?

Yeah. I don’t know either. Unless failure to adopt Islam the moment you’re told about it constitutes aggression.

Anyway, Martel did win, and the Muslims were pushed out of France and, within seven centuries or so, Spain as well, and halted at the gates of Vienna in the 16th and again in the 17th centuries. For which a surprising number of Muslims have never forgiven us. I’m still not quite sure what they think we did wrong, though.

On October 9 1779 textile workers in Manchester, England rioted against cotton-spinning machinery and, allegedly inspired by one Ned Ludd, forever gave the name of Luddites to people who found exactly the wrong answer to a real problem.

Prosperity is not in itself a problem. The new machines disrupted employment for a few people and made cheap quality cloth available to most of the human race for the first time. And human ingenuity is not a problem either. Nobody likes a smart-aleck except maybe the smart-aleck, but creativity in the face of difficulties is a joy as well as a useful thing.

What’s more you cannot suppress it. If you don’t give creativity natural outlets it will bulge out in undesirable ways. But mechanising work and life did carry a real cost and the Luddites, by trying to stop it altogether, violating peace, property rights and decency and doing it basically to protect their own narrow self-interest simply discredited the idea that we needed to think carefully about where we were going and how.

The machines have made us wealthy. We are well fed, warm, amused and otherwise coddled by stuff. But we are also overweight, anxious, disconnected from nature, the original stuff and our own, and too busy taking selfies to read a good book that might help us sort out our lives.

Smashing a loom won’t help now and didn’t help then. But the fact that the Luddites had the wrong answer to the wrong problem doesn’t mean there wasn’t a real problem or that we don’t need a good answer.

On October 8 of 1897 a journalist named Charles Henry Dow, who founded the Wall Street Journal, started tracking the price of stocks and bonds. I wish he hadn’t. It’s good that he founded the WSJ, a consistent voice for sanity in a world short of same. But stock and bond indexes, and obsessive media reporting of what they’ve done, are nonsense.

Worse, they are characteristic nonsense for an age obsessed with mathematics. We are convinced that if we know what this or that index has done recently some formula or algorithm will tell us what it’s going to do next, what the economy will do next or something. Business news keeps telling us an index is up three points or down 14 or back up or flat or whatever.

All we ever really know is that a given trend will continue until it stops unless it intensifies or reverses. But it’s not harmless because what William Barrett called the illusion of technique creates the illusion of knowledge and we waste time pursuing it that we could have used to seek real knowledge or even wisdom, and we end up thinking we know things we don’t and acting unwisely in consequence.

I know, I know. It was the spirit of the age and if Dow hadn’t done it someone else almost certainly would have. But that’s no excuse for misconduct in our lives nor in his.

So I still say it’s a pity it happened.