On this day in history, Septimius Severus died. Och aye, ye may well say.

Or not. Perhaps you do not see why a Roman Emperor keeling over on Feb. 4 back in 211 is very interesting to anyone, let alone of particular interest to Scots of the authentic or “biscuit-tin” variety to which I occasionally belong.

Well, it’s like this. The Scots, you may recall, actually did resist the Romans, with such typically unrelenting bloody-mindedness that the great builders constructed Hadrian’s Wall in order, as George Macdonald Fraser says any Englishman can tell you in five words, “To keep the Scots out.”

Normally if you annoyed the Romans they stomped you flat. Unless you were, say, Arminius and wiped out three legions in the Teutoburger Wald. But when you were the Scots, they just sort of walled you out and mounted guard.

Apparently this rather annoyed Septimius Severus, a very militarily successful emperor after he sort of killed his way to the purple in 193 AD. He walloped Germans, Gauls, and especially the Parthians, capturing various capital cities and expanding the Empire almost to its maximum size under Trajan nearly a century earlier, before coming to Britain, strengthening Hadrian’s Wall, reoccupying the Antonine Wall further north (between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde, it was built 20 years after Hadrian’s, begun in 142 AD and finished about 12 years later, but of wood and turf not stone, and abandoned in 162 AD because fighting the Scots was a wearying business they never seemed to get tired of.

Anyway, Severus showed up in 208 with a big army, determined to put a stop to all that nonsense… and died. Not of angry armed Scotsman but of illness, at what was then Eboracum but now York. And with his death the empire fell into political turmoil as his son Caracalla had his own brother assassinated, before governing so horribly that he was assassinated six years later, probably at the instigation of his successor Macrinus who lasted a year before being deposed and killed. By that point conquering Scotland kind of got lost in the bottom of the inbox.

Suppose it hadn’t. Suppose Severus hadn’t died when he did. He was not an old man by any means when he died. He was just 66. (You may have swallowed the progressive modern tale that life expectancy was terribly low in the bad old days, also known as virtually all of human existence, but it wasn’t. Infant mortality was high, but if you made it to 20, you had a decent chance of seeing 70.) What if he’d led the legions north, or at least sent them there, with the same energy he’d exhibited in walloping all sorts of other tough adversaries?

Well, maybe he would have failed. Maybe there’d have been a Bannocoburnus battle equivalent to the Teutoburger Forest. Maybe he’d personally have been killed. Or maybe he’d have succeeded, and brought the Scots into Roman Britain for a few centuries. If so it would, I think, have changed the place dramatically and with it the course of world history in which, at least over the last 1,000 years, the UK and its English-speaking offshoots loom so large.

Remember, the Romans were in Britain for nearly 400 years. The distance between Claudius’ conquest of Britain in 43 A.D. (after Julius Caesar’s various raids a century earlier) and the final departure of the legions around 410 was as great as between today and the beheading of Charles I. And it profoundly shaped Britain, mostly for the better.

Mind you, Britain wouldn’t be Britain without its wild Scots strain. The union of the two, though in oddly bad odour today, seems to me to have brought both the English and the Scots to heights neither could have achieved alone, and the Welsh. (I grant that Catholic Ireland’s history as part of the UK, and the antecedents to its incorporation, were much less happy.) And I think it worked partly because of complimentary strengths, including what may overbroadly be called a fusion of northern energy with southern self-control. But possibly the alchemy would have worked 1500 years earlier.

I don’t really have a strong feeling either way. But it does remind us that while history really is composed of “forces” and logical causes, of lasting cultural patterns and influences that assert themselves over centuries, the actions of individuals do matter too. Even when they consist of going “I don’t feel so good” and then perishing.

On this day in history the tulip was just a nice flower. Which might not strike you as being quite on a par with “On this day in history Rome fell” or “Germany invaded the Soviet Union” or “I was born”. But considering what had gone before, February 3 of 1637 was quite a day.

Specifically what had gone before was a speculative mania in tulips in the Netherlands. Tulips were of course very pretty, with an intense colour. And thanks to what we know now was a tulip-specific species of the mosaic virus, they also had spectacular patterns.

OK, OK, nice flower. But there was more to it.

The Netherlands, due to an unusual degree of freedom, had become a great trading nation and significant power. And its newly rich merchants, despite a certain dour Protestant strain, liked to show off including by surrounding their estates with brilliant flower beds.

What then happened is that as people were prepared to pay more and more for bulbs, prices rose. And rose. And rose. And nobody noticed, or not enough people, that enthusiasm had overwhelmed judgement.

To be fair, the main and best-known account of the whole business comes from journalist Charles Mackay’s 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds which is on that list of books everyone should read but no one should believe uncritically. So perhaps it wasn’t as bad as all that. But it was bad, and instructively so.

The big problem was that the value of tulips came to be determined not by what use someone could put them to, reasonable or otherwise, but by the price they thought they could sell it for. Normally the two are related, but if they somehow tear loose from one another, prices skyrocket then collapse and leave everybody going um duh are humans fools generally or was it just us?

So by all means plant tulips. Not as the main item in your retirement portfolio, but rather to warn you against get-rich-quick schemes and the herd instinct.

Also they’re nice to look at. As long as you didn’t mortgage your house to get them.

It is very striking, I find, that on this date in history, Feb. 2 of 506 A.D., the Visigoth Alaric II promulgated a Roman legal code. And I would, you may say. But bear with me while I attack Italy and perish in combat with Clovis.

No, sorry, that wasn’t me. It was Alaric II. The chronicles say little about him and what they do say pretty much fits under the heading of “stereotypes about Visigoths”. Except that generally you’d expect them to be burning Roman legal codes not writing them.

To some extent this sort of attitude stems from unfair preconceptions about the “Dark Ages”, so-called. OK, to be fair, groups like the Vandals behaved in such a way that their name lingers on like a foul stench long after they vanished. But many of these tribes were trying to become or take over the Roman Empire not smash it into marble dust. And if they didn’t always succeed, well, the Roman Empire wasn’t exactly succeeding by that point either.

For all that, it cast a remarkably long shadow. There was something about Rome that went beyond its military conquests and its most glorious emperors like Augustus or its world-class weirdos like Elagabalus. And that something was the rule of law.

I don’t just mean rule by law here. Lots of civilizations, especially complicated ones, did everything by elaborate systems of writing and bureaucratic command and control. There were a lot of things you couldn’t do any other way. But many of them were things you shouldn’t do at all, from the rigid centralization of Imperial Spain to that reductio ad absurdum of all Internet controversies, the Holocaust.

What Rome had was the rule of law, that is, a dependable, relatively stable, procedurally consistent system that aimed to protect people’s rights. Those rights were not what we might wish, and the mechanisms of government were far from ideal, both in the Republic that collapsed and in the Empire that, a long time later, also collapsed. It wasn’t until “Civis Romanus sum” met Christianity and British liberty that you really got the system we rightly cherish, whatever its alarming current discontents. But there was something about Rome that was conducive to the dignity of the individual, something that somehow did (as Chesterton argued) prepare the way for Christianity’s far more powerful emphasis on the same crucial point.

Indeed there’s a story in Acts 22 about the Apostle Paul, about to undergo some grisly torture-interrogation in Jerusalem, spoke the magic words “I am a Roman citizen” and suddenly the mechanisms of law protected him even though he was accused of being a trouble-maker which from the point of view of the authorities he certainly was.

We seem to have wandered a long way from the obscure and hapless Alaric II. But we haven’t, because the majesty of Rome as I say lay not just in its conquests, its treasures, its temples and colosseums, or its legions. It lay in the idea of somehow putting all that force and money behind fairness, of creating a civilization that did not just flourish but deserved to.

It took a pretty barbaric barbarian to gallop up to that and just start smashing it instead of falling under its influence. Even Alaric II sort of got the idea, which is why he created a legal code based on the Roman one to govern the non-Visigothic members of his kingdom in a manner that was not just effective but fair, based on some principle of justice higher than “grovel or die”. And that’s why the Dark Ages represented a struggle to keep the spirit of Rome alive not to snuff it out, a struggle that on balance succeeded.

As for Alaric II, well, he didn’t. Can’t win ‘em all.

On February 1, 1793, Revolutionary France declared war on Britain. As you’d expect. At least, as I would. And for three reasons. First, Britain and France had been enemies since there were a Britain and France. Second, Britain had long had a policy of preventing any one power from dominating Europe and becoming a threat to other places like, say, an island kingdom off the north coast of France. Third, radical regimes have a tendency toward paranoid belligerence.

In the minds of revolutionaries, it is the outside world that threatens them, and their wars are all essentially defensive. But as the Economist once noted about the Soviet Union, knotted-up defensiveness can be indistinguishable from aggression.

The long Anglo-French hostility was not, at the outset, entirely the fault of the French. They despised and looked down on the English; in the 12^th century that great patron of Gothic architecture Abbé Suger had sneered ‘The English are bound by natural and moral law to be subject to the French and not contrariwise.” But the English kings had long asserted claims to the French throne that were only very tenuously connected to the French descent of the Angevins and through them the Lancasters and that had no genuine basis in reality. They caused much war, bloodshed and suffering before petering out.

Continuous French attempts to strengthen their position in Europe by weakening everyone else’s or swallowing them outright gradually transferred the burden of guilt onto French shoulders. There was policy and prudence in French policy, but also vainglory and intolerance of “disorder” defined as everything not dictated from Paris.

Finally, therefore, we come to the most problematic aspect of the whole problem: The relationship of domestic to foreign policy. Many theories have been advanced over the years about that relationship. Some say dictators are better at foreign policy because they have more freedom of action in the short run and a greater ability to mobilize and direct the resources of a society over time. Others say dictators are better because democracies are worse, being fickle, inattentive and susceptible to illusions. Still others say democracies are better, morally at least, because they are constrained by public opinion from being overly aggressive or obnoxious. And yet another “realist” point of view holds that, unless leaders are fools, there is little difference because both pursue the same type of national interests using similar tools.

My own view is twofold. First, I think tyrannies are more inherently aggressive. The same spirit of intolerance toward domestic diversity disagreement causes them to react with irritation then aggression to foreigners just because their freedom from compulsion by the regime feels like an affront. Second, I think that tyrannies have a short-run advantage because of their greater freedom of action and ability to mobilize resources. But over time they are weaker because free societies, once they do recognize a threat, both generate and mobilize greater resources more effectively, while the very lack of internal restraints on dictatorships prevents them from getting frank, useful feedback on their actual current situation and the possible drawbacks of future initiatives. Thus they exhibit a curious mix of recklessness and inertia.

I would argue that the wars that erupted after the French Revolution tend to confirm this analysis. The French mobilized, attacked, and won the first two rounds (1792-97, initially just against other European powers and then including Britain, and then 1798-1802). But they couldn’t stop, or sustain the pace, and eventually came a cropper at Waterloo after which France was never again a first-rank power, though it took over a century for this truth to sink in either inside France or outside.

Of course, it was also a case of having one more go at the English, which had specific ethnic and historical overtones. But to go one layer deeper, that long rivalry was between a self-governing society where individuals had rights and an absolute monarchy where they did not.

The result was what you’d expect. As were the wars themselves.

On this day in history, the Kaiser’s soldiers made the first significant effort to use poison gas for military purposes at the battle of Bolimow, on Jan. 31 1915. It didn’t work and they won anyway. Indeed, poison gas turned out to be a pretty disappointing weapon all round. But it would be them.

Canadians in particular are familiar with poison gas from 2^nd Ypres, where the chlorine provide highly effective and nearly routed the Allies on a key sector of the Western Front. But like all new technology it takes a while to sort things out, and thus the Germans made this first serious attempt, using tear gas shells, against the Russians on the Eastern Front, in Poland.

It failed in two key ways. First, though they fired 18,000 shells which seems like a lot, the xylyl bromide tear gas blew back at their own lines. Second, it didn’t do much harm even to them because it froze. Did I mention it was winter on the Eastern front?

For their second go, at Second Ypres, the Germans chose warmer weather, paid attention to the wind, and released the gas from cylinders. And here they were victims of their own initial success, which despite the courage of many French soldiers opened a far bigger hole in the Allied lines, some 4 miles wide, than the Germans were ready for or had sufficient reserves to exploit.

By the time they did push through they were met and stopped by Canadians. In doing so our troops not only figured out the pee-in-your-sock improvised gas mask trick (hey, when it’s all you’ve got, go for it) but inflicted the first ever defeat of a major European power by a colonial force on European soil. Still, both sides kept working on poison gas and nobody really got anywhere. It remained in use for the rest of the Great War, by both sides, and both sides had some ready in World War II but did not use it.

Humane feelings can hardly be the explanation, especially concerning the Nazis and Bolsheviks. Deterrence certainly played a role; as the Duke of Wellington evidently said on the subject over a century earlier, about much more primitive technology, “Two can play at that game.” But the big problem was that nobody ever found a way to make it work; it was unreliable in harming the enemy, and all too likely to harm your own troops. Indeed, as at Second Ypres, a major problem with the stuff is that as your troops enter the enemy positions cleared by the gas, they run into the gas. There were better ways to win a battle and, indeed, at Bolimow after the gas failed the Russians counterattacked and the Germans slaughtered them with conventional artillery fire.

For all that, there is a lingering feeling that there is something dirty about gas even by the standards of war. The idea in war is to win not to play fair; as a U.S. Marine Corps spokesman recently observed about new technology on the battlefield (specifically those disturbing headless robots), “The Marine Corps isn’t looking for a fair fight.” And despite much revisionism from the 1920s on, Wilhelmine Germany was not just one more European power on a par with Britain and France as arrogant white person colonial empires.

Germany was a lot more aggressive and a lot less democratic. And many might argue that the two were not unconnected. It really did start the war, it really did attack its neighbours, and it really did resort to questionable weapons and tactics including U-boats with something looking like belligerent pride and twisted, unconvincing self-righteousness. It was also a nation with a highly advanced scientific tradition but, as its far more hideous use of poison gas during the next World War would prove, somewhat less restraint than other advanced nations in the uses to which it put its engineering skills.

Of course if chemical warfare had turned out to work the Allies would have used it vigorously, as for instance the Americans certainly used submarines against Japan in World War II. But I find it hard to imagine them, or the British, or Canadians starting it, due to the scruples of policy-makers and of citizens.

Indeed, if I have the story right, Wellington himself was offered a primitive form of poison gas to employ on the French and declined. The Kaiser’s Germany actively sought it out, and when it failed, refined it and tried again.

It didn’t really work anyway. But they would.

That was some piece of extreme weather we had on January 30 in ’07. I refer of course to 1607, when some 200 square miles of farmland in Britain and, particularly, South Wales was swept away, killing thousands of people. I know, I know. We’re meant to believe climate was stable and weather predictable and mild until the mid-20^th century when those darn greenhouse gases got loose and shattered nature, leaving its broken bits flying around to lethal effect. We’re meant to ignore the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and anything we know about glaciers retreating and advancing before carbon dioxide was invented. But things just keep popping up.

This particular disaster, which may have resulted from a tsunami, affected people as far as 14 miles inland. Its impact in terms of lives lost and property destroyed was much smaller than it would be today because far fewer people lived near the sea or, indeed, inland, and their stuff was worth less. But the statistical claim that extreme weather does “more damage” today is very weak, partly on those grounds and also partly because records were far less extensive. We have no idea at all what might have happened in, say, pre-Roman Britain because we know almost nothing about it.

I was just reading how 2015 was the hottest year ever. It “shattered” previous records according to the Washington Post. And the New York Times blared that “Scientists reported Wednesday that 2015 was the hottest year in recorded history by far, breaking a record set only the year before — a burst of heat that has continued into the new year and is roiling weather patterns all over the world.” It did note that “Scientists started predicting a global temperature record months ago, in part because an El Niño weather pattern, one of the largest in a century, is releasing an immense amount of heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere” but insisted that most of it is “caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.”

Right. Roiling weather patterns all over the world in ways we’ve never seen before because… we weren’t looking. Indeed, this nonsense about hottest year in recorded history verges on deliberate dishonestly, since they know perfectly well that when it comes to climate “recorded history” goes back only into the depths of the Little Ice Age that succeeded the Medieval Warm Period and was not caused by man. Of course if it was unnaturally cold four hundred years ago it is likely to be getting warmer now. But that’s no ground for saying we caused it.

As for unusual weather patterns, tell that to the people who lived through the collapse of Viking settlements in Iceland as the Medieval Warm Period ended. Or saw the North African “breadbasket” of the Roman Empire turn inexorably to desert over centuries. Or lived through the “year without summer” in 1816. Or woke up under water on January 30, 1607.

On this day in history, Kublai Khan invaded Vietnam. It seems an odd thing for him to have done.

If you’ve heard of Kublai Khan, and aren’t keenly interested in Mongol history, military history or both you probably know him primarily through Coleridge’s poem I think of as “Xanadu” though it’s actually called “Kublai Khan”, famously written under the influence of opium, interrupted and never satisfactorily finished (at least in his view; it extends for 54 lines of the 200 or 300 he evidently dreamed but seems to me to end rather decisively).

Its dreamy tone doesn’t seem compatible with military adventures that cross China to bother its neighbours. But we are talking the Mongols here, one of those odd groups or individuals who, like Napoleon or Alexander, seem very good at conquering things without any huge idea as to why. And at that point Kublai’s brother Möngke (yes, it looks like it would be pronounced “monkey” but I don’t think it would have been wise to allude to that unimportant fact in his presence) was busy conquering south China and ordered Kublai to conquer some of west China as a warmup. Having done so, Kublai figured what the heck and kept going for a bit, though he got pushed back and then distracted by succeeding Möngke in 1260 and having to fight another brother for the throne.

In the end the Mongols attacked twice more, in 1285 and 1287, and though they never conquered Vietnam the locals ultimately decided it would keep things fairly quiet if they sort of accepted the supremacy of what had by then become the Yuan Dynasty established by Kublai Khan who was still emperor at the time (he died in 1294).

I find the whole thing interesting because as a grateful citizen of Canada and a man of the West I generally think of the Mongols primarily in terms of the ominous threat they posed to Europe and the catastrophic effect they had on Russia including imposing a concept of government sharply at odds with the notion that citizens had rights of any sort. I knew they conquered China and then were in a very real sense conquered by it, finding the lifestyle and culture of the subjected people irresistible. It’s odd to think that to the Vietnamese, it was one more of those “We were just minding our own business and suddenly these maniacs came over the horizon at us” stories that compose too much of human history.

Anyway, Kublai Khan inspired a pretty good if in my reading very unsettling poem. But he also inspired a bunch of invasions that were just vainglorious. I’m sorry he attacked Vietnam and glad he lost.

On this day in history, Jan. 28, 1547, Edward VI became king of England. And died.

Not right away, to be sure. He lingered for six years before perishing. Henry VIII’s only son, or at least only legitimate one, even by the lax standards by which he legitimized and delegitimized his daughters. All those wives and just for this.

Tradition holds that Edward VI was a sickly lad whose early death was not unexpected. This view has been challenged, suggesting he was generally quite vigorous until contracting some sort of terminal illness in very early 1553 that killed him on July 6 of that year aged just 15.

As a result, he had very little impact on history, at least by his own hand. He never governed in his own right. But his death precipitated the ascension first of the hapless pawn Lady Jane Grey (at nine days, her reign-like object was so short she is omitted from many lists of English monarchs) and then Henry VIII’s fiercely Catholic daughter Mary, also known as “Bloody Mary” and not for her taste in beverages, followed by the austere, beloved Elizabeth. None of which would have happened if Ed hadn’t croaked, don’t you see.

As for what would have happened, well, as Aslan says, no one is ever told that. But historians have to try to guess, because if we cannot say what would have happened if it means we have no grasp of causation at all. To say something happened because of some other thing is to assert implicitly that if that other thing had not occurred neither would the first. So let’s parse Edward VI briefly.

The obvious issue is religion. Henry VIII, after all, broke with the Catholic Church after being named “Defender of the Faith” by the Pope. But Henry just wanted to wed and bed Anne Boleyn, and grab scads of church property for his cronies while he was at it. He actually had very little disagreement with church doctrine. (Which surely makes his actions worse not better.)

His son was evidently cut from rather different if smaller cloth. Edward was very staunchly Protestant; by age 11 he had written a treatise on the Pope as Antichrist. Had he lived to maturity, he might have proved a Protestant mirror image of “Bloody Mary” whose vigorous, sometimes violent efforts to restore Roman Catholicism in England, including marrying Philip II of Spain, earned her that epithet from her victorious Protestant foes.

Instead his half-sister Elizabeth succeeded Mary when she died of what seems to have been a fairly severe flu on top of what may have been uterine cancer. And Elizabeth, a wise ruler who was moderate as a matter of policy if not necessarily of temperament, imposed a moderate Protestant settlement that rather sharply limited the rights of Catholics without persecuting them to the point of provoking civil war. Partly as a result, for better or worse, Protestantism became a core element of Anglosphere self-understanding second only to liberty, in ways that lingered until quite recently.

Not always good ways, to be sure. Even on political grounds, Protestant-Catholic divisions in the UK, in the US and in Canada have been harmful if not generally disastrous. But if Edward had lived, and really tried to persecute the English who, until Henry’s sudden lust-, greed- and politics-driven religious revolution had all been Catholic and had not known it was even controversial, the result might have been to provoke a backlash, the installation of a Catholic monarch and reconciliation with Rome.

The odd thing is that English Catholicism had always been different, like everything in England. The pope’s periodic efforts to exert political control in England had been met with derision and defiance, to the point that a very specific writ with severe consequences, Praemunire was created expressly for use against those who argued that the Pope had authority over the king and Parliament. So perhaps Edward’s death didn’t matter very much.

Or perhaps it did, because if he had lived, and not been a maniac, the Bloody Mary episode wouldn’t have happened. But then, neither would Elizabeth’s long and glorious reign.

One hates to consign a man to the rubbish heap of history casually. But Edward VI probably did little harm and little good by slipping quietly away in 1553. He was just a quiet interlude between exciting events.