This is the anniversary of the Massacre at Chios on March 31, 1822. The Turks don’t want you to know that.

The massacre happened during the Greek revolt against the decaying Ottoman Empire. Greeks from the neighbouring island of Samos had come to Chios and, with the backing of some islanders, attacked the Turks and drove them into the citadel. Then a Turkish fleet arrived, pillaged and looted the town of Chios and, on March 31, were ordered to burn it down.

Oh, well, that and kill everyone under three, all men 12 or older and all women 40 and older unless they were willing to convert to Islam. As for women under 40, well, you figure it out. Not that most of the inhabitants had done anything to aid the revolt. But what the heck.

Over the next four months, some 40,000 Turkish troops rampaged through Chios, and it is estimated that about three quarters of the 120,000 inhabitants were killed, enslaved or died of disease. About 2,000 people were left on Chios when it was over.

It didn’t even work, unless you consider killing people and enslaving them an end in itself. The massacre roused outrage throughout Europe, especially after Eugene Delacroix displayed his 1824 painting The Massacre at Chios in Paris, featuring scenes of carnage and desolation and a fetching young lady being yanked out of her clothing. And that outrage helped rally support from Russia, Britain, France and others that brought Greece independence in 1832.

All that was a long time ago now, especially as moderns reckon such things, and the Ottoman Empire has gone the way of the dodo and Assyria, its last gasp being a jihad on behalf of Germany in World War I. And yet when a copy of the painting was displayed on Chios in 2009, officials removed it as a “good faith initiative” to mollify the Turks and try to improve Greek-Turkish relations.

I’m happy to say outraged public opinion forced its reinstatement and it’s still there. But it’s revealing that the incident happened… both the hideous original and the 2009 kerfuffle.

On March 30 of 1296 Edward I, the dreaded “Longshanks,” sacked Berwick-on-Tweed and massacred many of the inhabitants. It was the sort of thing he did, and the sort of place he did it. In fact if you like chaos Berwick was probably a good place to be.

There’s another Berwick, in Scotland, that might have seen some turmoil too. But this one is special.

Indeed when I say there’s another one in Scotland you’d better fasten your seatbelt, because this Berwick was in Scotland from some time around 1000 A.D. until William I of Scotland invaded England and got whomped and Berwick was ceded to England’s Henry II. His son Richard I sold it back to Scotland to finance his wars (Richard’s claim that he would have sold London if he could have found a backer was thus not really a joke).

In 1296 England went to war with France and John Balliol, whom Edward I had chosen as king over Robert Bruce in an arbitration held in… wait for it… Berwick-on-Tweed, invaded England and got whomped. Edward didn’t just capture Berwick. After he captured and horribly executed William Wallace he displayed one of his arms there in 1305.

The Scots got a measure of revenge when Edward II gathered the army there that went on to invade Scotland and get whomped at Bannockburn on June 24 1314, a battle that ended up securing Scotland’s independence for almost three centuries and guaranteed that the eventual Act of Union in 1707 took place under more equal and far more favourable terms than might have happened in the 14^th century.

The Scots managed to besiege Berwick and capture it in 1318. But according to Wikipedia “England retook Berwick some time shortly after the Battle of Halidon Hill in 1333”. I like it when they don’t even know for sure when your town got captured this time. “Och, mon, it happens so often, why write it doon?”

Why indeed? A treaty was signed in Berwick in 1357 in which the Scots agreed to pay a big ransom to get David II back, a ransom they could not afford and, being Scots, were in no hurry to pay anyway. In 1461 they got Berwick back anyway, as a bribe from Henry VI’s wife for help in the Wars of the Roses which the Lancasters went on to lose so badly the people who beat them, the Yorks, didn’t even win either. But that’s a story for another day. Except that it was one of those Yorks, Richard III, who took Berwick back in 1482.

That was about it for Berwick bouncing back and forth like a ping-pong ball. A treaty was signed there between Charles I and the Scots after the First Bishops’ War in 1639, the “Pacification of Berwick” which didn’t pacify anything much.

The Act of Union in 1707 did establish formally that Berwick was under English law, and there it has sat ever since. But some Scots and some locals are now grumbling that it should become part of Scotland because Scotland has better social services or some such edifying reason.

Good grief. Enough already.

Well, March 29 is a big day for Canada. Or at least it should be, because it was on that date, in 1867, that Queen Victoria gave royal assent to the British North America Act under whose terms the Dominion of Canada came into existence on July 1 of that year. Many people are not happy with it.

I don’t refer here to various widespread forms of dissatisfaction with Canada generally, or even the splendid and euphonious title “Dominion of Canada”, quietly abolished in 1982 by the boringly named “Canada Act” and by a tiny group of MPs who renamed Dominion Day Canada on July 9 1982 despite not even having a quorum. But I digress.

A lot of people feel that having nationhood conferred by a solemn and formal act of the British Parliament is undignified and that we were not “all grown up” as a nation because we were granted liberties already more than 600 years old by a Parliament also more than 600 years old. We would only achieve “maturity” when we chucked all that rubbish and started winging it with things nobody had tried that we hadn’t thought through.

To be sure, looking back, the latter conduct sounds surprisingly like the typical behavior of teenagers rather than adults. And it worked out about as well. Including the fundamental mechanism by which the 1982 Constitution Act became law.

The BNA Act was actually an inspired piece of work in two related ways. First, it was the first ever Parliamentary federation in the world, reflecting a genuinely statesmanlike insight that you could protect the rights of a regional minority, specifically Quebecers, in a parliamentary as well as a congressional system. Second, because it was an act of the British rather than the Canadian legislature, it preserved the essential legal sovereignty of Parliament as it existed in Britain without enabling the Canadian federal Parliament to override those guarantees even with a popular mandate.

Without that twofold inspiration, Quebec would never have joined Confederation and there would have been no Dominion of Canada. And it worked in a key informal way, in that the British Parliament would in fact never refuse to amend the BNA Act provided the request came from duly elected Canadian authorities and did not violate the founding federal compact. All of which is good.

The mechanism used in 1982 is different, far more peculiar, and far harder to justify. Indeed, it is so far from enjoying popular legitimacy based on fundamental clarity and grounding in popular consent that not one Canadian in a thousand even knows how it was done.

The Constitution Act 1982 was recommended to the British Parliament by an Act of the Canadian Parliament, of course. But it is not an Act of the Canadian Parliament. If it were, the Canadian Parliament could amend it.

A version of it was also passed by the British Parliament. But it is not an Act of the British Parliament. If it were, the British Parliament could amend it, at least in principle. So what then is it?

We know perfectly well what the British North America Act was, and why over centuries the system evolved whereby bills adopted by both Houses became law on receiving royal assent. It meant legislators created bills, but through an elaborate formal procedure that prevented slippery and ambitious politicians from pulling a fast one.

If we look hard enough at it, we also realize what the Constitution Act 1982 was, and why the elite cobbled it together behind closed doors through a process that has kept those doors closed to the people ever since. But such a realization does not make us prefer the latter method. (For our documentary exploring these themes and more in detail, and to help us out, please visit www.fixtheconstitution.ca.)

March 29, 1867 was a good day for Canada. And it looks better and better as we contemplate the alternative and live with its consequences.

On this date in the Dark Ages, specifically March 28 of 845 AD, the Vikings attacked Paris. And you wouldn’t have wanted to be there because it worked.

Some 5,000 very scary and pungent men in 120 ships under the command of Ragnar, very possibly Ragnar Lodbrok or “Hairy Breeches,” infuriated at Charles the Bald not wanting them to sack the abbey of St. Denis, beat his men, hanged a bunch of them and went after Paris.

They took it, sacked it, and only left after Charles paid them a big ransom. Which is about what you’d expect for those days, the Dark Ages and the scarcely less dismal Middle Ages.

If so, you’d be mistaken. Paris was attacked by the Vikings again in 885-86, or by Norsemen or if you prefer the Normans, because these were the ancestors of William the Conqueror celebrated in Asterix et Les Normands which I might add is a sidesplittingly funny classic. But that siege failed. And nobody attacked Paris again until the mid-14^th century when in the course of a regrettably failed revolt by the Estates General under Etienne Martel against unchecked royal power, the King of Navarre briefly invested Paris.

As Regine Pernoud put it in her eye-opening book Those Terrible Middle Ages (originally Pour en finir avec le moyen age) “if we compare that with what has happened in Paris from 1789 to our own day, it is unnecessary to dwell on the total number of successive revolutions, attacks, foreign occupations…”

Exactly. The Viking attack in 845 was pretty bad and the one in 885-86 was no party either. Mind you Viking camps could get pretty rowdy but, again, you wouldn’t want to be there. But this habitual denigration of the period in Western history where the university, hospital and Parliament arose, in favour of modernity with its concentration camps, rap music and processed cheese, can obscure the fact that in a great many ways life was better then including, surprisingly, often being more peaceful.

People sometimes lose their self-control in wars. There cannot be an army of any size, or a war of any size, in which someone somewhere did not kill a prisoner. And the laws of war permit the killing of combatants seeking to surrender if the opposing forces believe they cannot safely take them into custody. But significant massacres of men who have surrendered and who can be held securely tell you something about the combatants who perpetrated it.

For instance the Goliad Massacre of over 400 Texas POWs on March 27 of 1836 by the Mexican Army against Republic of Texas POWs on the express orders of the President of Mexico, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.

There is much to say about the Texas war of independence, and the subsequent Mexican-American War that ended with American annexation not just of Texas but of vast territories held by Mexico. Including various reasons why the Mexicans might feel aggrieved by some of what happened and resent the presence of foreigners in the desperate struggle then going on. But it is not possible, in justice, to uphold moral equivalency between the combatants or, worse, to say the Texans were in the wrong.

They believed in self-government and liberty, albeit within too narrow a circle that excluded blacks. Slavery existed in Texas. What’s more, although slavery existed in Mexico both before and after the Spanish conquest, it had been abolished in the 1820s. Indeed, abolition was a major reason the Texans sought independence. And that’s bad. Without altering the fundamental balance.

The problem with Texas was that its liberty wasn’t extended to everyone. The trouble with Mexico is that its liberty was fake. In a very real sense no one in Mexico was free, in 1836 or 1936 or indeed until very recently. Indeed, its war of independence resulted in the installation of a general as emperor, never a good sign or a good start.

In Mexico when it was independent, as when it was a colony, the rich and well-connected lorded it over everyone. But even they enjoyed absolutely no security if they fell from favour. And the regime still struggles mightily to extend the most elementary protections of property and security of the person to many of its inhabitants.

That Santa Anna de Lopez, 11-time president of Mexico and one of far too many strongmen to dominate its politics over many decades of stagnation, failure and repression, would expressly order the slaughter of innocents, and that its army would carry them out, under officers reluctant to carry them out but unwilling or unable to disobey, shows exactly why the Texans were right to revolt.

No president of the United States ever ordered a massacre of prisoners of war. And if he had, the citizen army would have refused to obey. And that difference in political culture matters enormously, including to the fundamental legitimacy of systems of government.

March 26 is not a happy day for the Ottawa Senators. Mind you, they don’t have a lot of those. And at least on this date in 1915 they lost in the Stanley Cup finals instead of expiring dismally in a lunge for the last wild-card playoff spot.

Yes, I’m talking about the hockey team not the legislators. Who don’t seem to have a lot of good days nowadays either, to be sure. And I’m talking about their suffering a three-game sweep in the Stanley Cup finals by the Vancouver Millionaires in the first championship series between the Pacific Coast Hockey Association and the National Hockey Association. Those were the days.

There are a few things I really like about this story. First, the name Vancouver Millionaires. Nobody would call a hockey team that today, although it would actually be accurate now which it certainly wasn’t then. And second, I like the fact that in those days hockey was truly played by inspired amateurs.

I realize nostalgia ain’t what it used to be and if you put, say, the fabled Ottawa Silver Seven on the ice against a mediocre modern team, for instance the Ottawa Senators, or even a really terminally bad one like the Toronto Maple Leafs, the modern players would sweep them from the ice even if outnumbered.

The size, strength, and systematic nurturing of the abilities of modern players has produced profoundly superior athletes. But as is surprisingly common, this application of scientific technique has improved something bit by bit relentlessly until it is all but ruined. Even the enormously superior protective equipment encourages a style of play that guarantees injury. Progress is full of such paradoxes.

The game is too loud, too lavish, too expensive, too egotistical, and prone to bouts of suffocating defence that bore fans to the brink of tears. And while there are fixes, like bigger rinks to open up the game, there are always “fixes” that will put it back in jeopardy. The spirit of the game just isn’t what it was when teams of misfits with day jobs traveled for days by train to play in unheated open rinks for the joy of winning rather than the lavish paydays associated with ten straight years missing the playoffs.

Remember Frank McGee? Blind in one eye, he led the Silver Seven to three Stanley cups playing “centre” and “rover”, and once scoring 14 goals in one… no, not season, one single Stanley Cup game; he scored five or more goals in a Stanley Cup game eight times. At age 33 he was killed fighting in France, at Courcelette, during the Battle of the Somme.

As recently as the 1944-45 season, Rocket Richard scored a record eight points in a game after moving furniture all day, something no modern player would do. And of course if I were the coach I would absolutely forbid their doing it. But still, the athletes were much more regular guys back then and I miss that.

Also back then Ottawa teams used to win, which was kind of nice. And a hockey dynasty was rising in Toronto. Which tells you how different things once were.

On March 25, 1807, King George III gave royal assent to the Slave Trade Act which abolished the slave trade throughout the British Empire. It could be portrayed as half a loaf, or a quarter. But at least it was bread.

You could call it half a loaf because it only abolished the slave trade, not slavery, within the empire. Many supporters thought it would stifle slavery itself without further action, but this hope was frustrated and slavery itself had to be abolished separately in 1833. And you could call it half a loaf because slavery would never have had to be abolished if it hadn’t existed in the Empire, which it did.

Even worse, it had been revived there, as in other European empires, in the course of the 15^th century, after essentially dying out there by the early Middle Ages, and in the new and pernicious form of racial slavery unknown in the ancient world. In England itself slavery was utterly vanished as a practice and an institution, to the point that in 1772 the Court of King’s Bench, the top criminal court, ruled in Somerset v Stewart that a slave purchased in Boston and brought to England was necessarily free. And yet somehow the English brought it into existence in their colonies and practised it as though nothing were abnormal about doing so even in a nation devoted to liberty in fact as well as rhetorically.

Now to the bread. It took the English far longer than it should have; slavery is an abomination that should have been abolished the day after it reappeared. But they did abolish it, in commerce and then entirely, before the Americans and long before most people. The Royal Navy, in fact, then set about stamping it out on the oceans regardless of the laws of those whose human cargoes they seized and freed. And by their example, backed where needed by their cannons, they induced many others to end it.

The Americans, in turn, did so, fighting an incredibly bloody and destructive civil war essentially over the liberty of the most despised section of their population. Of course in the South they poured out blood and treasure for the opposite cause, which haunted the region for a century afterward. But in the end the commitment to liberty in America proved indivisible.

Elsewhere, in the West at any rate, slavery was eventually eradicated and then, slowly and painfully, bigotry was tackled in law and in society. And before you judge your own civilization too harshly, it is important to reflect that the situation is far worse elsewhere. In some parts of the world slavery is still practiced on a selective basis; in many others all citizens are essentially the property of the state, which disposes of them as it will without regard for their wishes.

So yes, slavery is a great evil. Its persistence through history and its resurgence in the Renaissance are an indictment of humanity. But they are not an indictment of liberalism, capitalism, Christianity or the West, which did more, sooner, to confront and eradicate this blight than virtually anyone else.

Incidentally the slave in Somerset had escaped, was recaptured, and was being held on a ship for transport to and resale in Jamaica when his English godparents from his baptism in England applied for a writ of habeas corpus, which was granted and led to James Somerset’s freedom. It was a long overdue vindication of liberty under law. But it was a vindication of it nonetheless.

If you use British and English interchangeably you will get angry letters from Scots, Welsh, Irish and who knows what other Celtic or other groups. Also historians, if you’re not wary of March 24, 1707.

On that date, exactly 104 years after James VI of Scotland became James I of England in the frustrated hope of becoming King of Great Britain, his vision became reality. To singularly little enthusiasm, it seems, on either side of the border.

The Scots felt betrayed by legislators “bought and sold for English Gold, Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation” as Robert Burns later put it. And indeed there was bribery of Scots parliamentarians on such a wide scale that some payments went to people who weren’t even in the Aulde Parliament (which was, itself, an utterly feeble check on the power of the Scottish monarchy, to the point that James was unaccountably baffled to find the English kingdom he’d been scheming to acquire all his life wasn’t an absolute monarchy). The English, by contrast, feared a swarm of Scots on the make invading London, disloyal savages swarming over the border, and financial obligations without compensating gain.

The actual result was spectacularly different. Scots did come to England, and its colonies, in huge numbers and made good, for themselves and their new nation. For instance there are, I have seen it estimated, some 15 million people named some variant of McDonald around the world even though there are just 5 million people in Scotland so something went right. I do not see how they or the English could be bitter.

Scotland itself went from being a byword for backward barbarism, its highlanders charging barefoot at Culloden Moor to no avail backing a pretender of no value, to the home of the Scottish Enlightenment and a major source of the Industrial Revolution. That Adam Smith and James Watt were both working at the University of Glasgow is surely a sign not just that Scotland did wonders for Great Britain, but that the reverse is also true.

As for Britain’s position in the 19^th century, it surely vindicates, even surpasses, the dreams of the most ardent supporters of Union, while in the 20^th it stood almost alone against tyranny in two world wars long enough for its American offshoot to come to its senses and rally to the cause.

How it can be, just over three centuries later, that the Scots are either surly about or resigned to membership in one of the world’s great nations, and the English figure if the Scots want to shove off they won’t be missed? It’s one thing to have friendly ethnic rivalries expressed in unfriendly terms at soccer matches. But it’s quite another not to see that Britain is very much more than the sum of its parts.