On this date in 1770, August 21, James Cook formally claimed Eastern Australia for Britain. It took long enough.

Maybe not from the point of view of aboriginal activists who, as elsewhere, point with some irritation to the notion of claiming a place somebody else already calls home. But the curious thing is that if Australia was a fish, a lot of people would have thrown it back. Indeed they did, including the Dutch, who did the nautical equivalent of stumbling across it in the early 17^th century and said the Dutch equivalent of phooey. And they weren’t shy about claiming, say, Indonesia or New York both of which had some drawbacks of their own.

Likewise, the British found it in 1688 and said “No thanks” or the unprintable nautical equivalent. Then Cook showed up, during a voyage whose purpose was to let astronomers view the transit of Venus (the planet not the naked goddess on a clam shell), and praised the lush ecology of Botany Bay.

I hope he was a better navigator than he was a biologist. Or that he knew it was propaganda. Because the British did then start sending convicts to start over in what was meant to be a fertile land but was actually a scrubby heap of sand and big fierce crocodiles. (And yes, inhabited. Evidently the first words spoken by an Australian aborigine to a European, on the first British colony ships, were “Warra warra” which means go away. They didn’t, even though the words were accompanied by waving a spear. Mind you Hawaiian natives did kill Cook in 1779 though as it turns out they cooked him but did not eat him, if it’s any consolation to anyone.) Not since Erik the Red came up with the name Greenland over a mug of frozen mead has PR so exaggerated the merits of a country for farming and settlement.

It got settled anyway. And I won’t repeat here what I have said elsewhere about the tragic collision of European culture and diseases with indigenous people in various parts of the world. But I will say that in Australia as elsewhere the aborigines were not living in Eden until white serpents showed up. And I will add, with Daniel Hannan in Inventing Freedom, that the Australia that the British founded did become one of the most prosperous and freest places on earth, and a key contributor to Allied victory in two world wars, because of distinctly English habits of self-government that, following the debacle of the American Revolution, were allowed to flourish in the antipodes. And the locals would not have been better off if the Imperial Japanese had been the first to show up and stay.

After visiting in 2004, Richard John Neuhaus wrote “In Australia it is said that they will not let their geography defeat their history.” And indeed they have not done badly at all for a place that seafaring colonizing nations appeared to be competing for the better part of two centuries to stick someone else with.

On August 20 of 1308, Jacques de Molay was formally absolved of heresy by Pope Clement V. Which seems kind of nice given the tangled bad feelings between the Grand Master of the Knights Templar and the Roman Pontiff, who had dissolved his order a year earlier partly because Philip IV of France was deeply in debt to the Templars and naturally figured that if he could just, you know, grab all their cash he’d be a much richer if not necessarily a better man. Uh, except for the bit where Philip had de Molay burned for heresy anyway.

Did I mention that Philip’s nickname “the Fair” pertained to the colour of his hair not his moral conduct? (Yes, on July 31.) He was also called “the Iron king” though in this case “the red hot Iron king" might have been more appropriate. He did not have de Molay burned all at once and not instantly, to be sure. He had him tortured in 1307, along with many other Templars, as a result of which they confessed to whatever to make it stop, giving Clement the rationale to dissolve the order and Philip to dissolve their bank accounts.

After that things get a bit obscure as well as bloody. Apparently the Pope and the King agreed to split the court proceedings that resulted from De Molay recanting his forced confession. And during the subsequent investigation into the crucial question whether the Templars denied Christ and Philip could get all their money, the king had 54 of them burnt at the stake in 1310.

De Molay and a few others were kept in a mouldy jail cell, from which they were dragged on March 18, 1314 to be told that as heretics they would spend the rest of their lives in a mouldy jail cell. But to the wonderment of all, de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney, Master of Normandy for the Templars, staggered to their feet and said the only thing they were guilty of was a cowardly confession under torture to save their own hides at the expense of the Order. They said the Order was pure and holy and innocent, which led to the elaborate French legal proceeding of the king ordering them burnt immediately or rather, set on fire immediately and burnt slowly that very day.

They were, rejecting all offers of a pardon in return for retraction and managing to retain their composure within reason, thus earning themselves the status of martyrs and their charred bones were collected as relics.

Philip got the money though. And as for the Pope’s pardon, which you were wondering when I’d get to, regrettably it was discovered by an Italian paleographer named Barbara Frale in September 2001 in the Vatican Archives, at which point it was a bit late for de Molay’s secular prospects to perk up.

As for the other kind, surely the case gives one pause. Obviously it is not a great bargain to spend the rest of your life in a cell at the mercy of Philip the Fair in Name Only, and besides de Molay was 71 so he might have gotten out soon anyway. But for a man to whom torture was not just a word but a hideous personal reality, in the face of which he had once renounced all he believed in, to step forward a second time and risk among other things the humiliation of once again being unable to bear the pain is a very impressive act.

Who today might do such a thing? Not, one fears, those enjoying the loudest applause and most fulsome praise particularly from themselves. I suppose there have always been more willing to act the role of Philip the Fair or support it than Jacques de Molay. But I have little confidence that all the progress we congratulate ourselves on having experienced has improved that situation.

Ugh, witch trials. Gotta hate those Middle Ages, right? Like the one of the “Samlesbury Witches” held on August 19 of 1612 in Lancashire where…

Wait a minute. 1612? That’s not the Middle Ages. They weren’t just this bad period back then somewhere when people weren’t smart and kind like us. They were a very distinct period from either the Fall of Rome if you include the Dark Ages in them, or from around the 10^th century if you don’t, down through about 1500 and then we had the “Renaissance” and the “Enlightenment” and after all that dumb superstition the lights came back on and classical knowledge and attitudes were reborn.

Remember?

Now there are a lot of things I could say about this view, like that it’s totally ridiculous. I have often cited Tony Blair’s foreign secretary Robin Cook saying that Slobodan Milosovic’s forces putting Albanians into concentration camps “belongs to the Middle Ages. It does not belong to modern Europe. We are right to fight it.” So you’re saying concentration camps were a feature of Edward I’s England not Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany. And you learned your history where exactly?

The answer appears to be Aberdeen Grammar School, Royal High School and the University of Edinburgh where, to be fair, he studied English literature. But it sounds as though it could have been Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And since for many people it was, the prevalence of this “Terrible Middle Ages” idea makes it necessary to take it a bit more seriously in order to demolish it in detail.

Like they thought the Earth was flat ha ha ha. Elizabeth May recently ridiculed our “First Past The Post” electoral system by saying it was invented when “people thought the Earth was flat”. Except they didn’t. Indeed, John Sacrobosco’s best-selling Tractatus de Sphaera (he was so dumb he wrote in Latin which we would never do) presented not merely the doctrine that the Earth was round but several simple compelling proofs. I’d like to hear a typical modern student do that. (Since you ask, three of them are that stars rise and set sooner in eastern than western places, people in the northern hemisphere can always see some stars including the Pole Star that you can’t in the southern but you can see others and the list changes gradually as you travel south or north, and that as a ship sails away from shore, people on deck lose sight of land before those at the top of the mast. Clever, huh?)

Now let’s consider witches. They burned them in the Middle Ages because they were dirty dumb and religious, right? Uh, wrong again. The first explicitly attested witch trials were in the 14^th century, but they really got going in the 16^th and went over the top in the 17^th. Remember Salem, the famous non-medieval outbreak? Even England, not as bad as France, Germany or Scotland, executed somewhere under 500 witches between the early 15^th and the mid-18^th century, versus a couple of hundred a year in Scotland in the late 16^th century and what seems to have been thousands in Germany.) And evidently the upsurge in concern about witches in 17^th-century England was partly the work of James VI/I, as if he needed more blots on his escutcheon; the first Stuart king of England was convinced Scottish witches were conspiring to harm him and in keeping with his not entirely fanciful self-conceit as an intellectual had written a book Daemonologie in 1597 justifying witch-hunting. Thanks, Jim.

Now in fairness I should note that the Samlesbury Witches were actually acquitted. (And that the infamous Spanish Inquisition took a very dim view of accusations of witchcraft.) But eleven other witches tried in the same Assizes were executed. And the last execution of a witch in England was in 1716, involving a woman and her nine-year-old daughter.

Thank goodness they didn’t live in the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church insisted that the faithful … not believe witches could fly. Unlike its Renaissance version which insisted they believe it.

So how about that Pierre Janssen? What, you haven’t heard of him? Why, Pierre Jules César Janssen is the French astronomer who discovered helium, on August 18 1868.

OK, he discovered some other stuff too. He went to Peru to find the magnetic equator, observed a transit of Venus in Algeria, and he studied telluric absorption in the solar spectrum in Italy and Switzerland, which might seem odd since presumably “solar” means it was in the sun, but the sun is a bit hot for direct observation even by an adventurous man.

Which Janssen was. He went wherever you had to in order to study solar eclipses including Siam, as it then was, and Trani, which I don’t even know where it is, and Madras State in India, now Andhra Pradesh. And maybe he enjoyed it and maybe he didn’t. But during the Indian eclipse observations he noticed that the spectral lines (indicating chemical composition) from the sun’s prominences were so bright that they could be observed under ordinary daylight conditions. Which mattered because sometimes an eclipse just didn’t work out. Janssen actually escaped besieged Paris in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war, by hot air balloon, to observe an eclipse in Algeria and then it got all cloudy.

Janssen was a clever as well as bold and resourceful chap. For instance he also realized it would be good to put observatories in high places so you’d be looking through less atmosphere, which led him to lobby for one atop Mont Blanc and once it was built, at age 69, he climbed up there to make observations, including I suggest the observation that he was one fit guy. But back to helium.

In his results from that 1868 Madras State observation, there was a particular bright yellow line that was eventually determined to indicate a hitherto undiscovered chemical element, the first to be detected off the Earth before being found here (which it was in 1885), helium being of course very light and also extremely non-reactive and thus not hanging around waiting for a scientist to trip over it.

Another scientist, the Englishman Joseph Norman Lockyer, also observed this bright yellow line in the solar chromosphere’s emission spectrum, and he and others worked out that it must be some unknown element, which they named helium for the obvious reason that never struck me until I researched this bit, namely that the Greek word for sun is helios. And without his work, and Janssen’s, no kid would have the brilliant experience of a lighter-than-air balloon on a string or the heartbreak of discovering just what lighter than air means if you let go. (At Disney World they tie weights to the string, in the familiar Mickey Mouse logo shape, which is surely brilliant too.)

So yes, Lockyer gets a lot of credit for helium too. But I still think August 18 is a good date to take a deep breath of the stuff and utter a comically squeaky and high-pitched hip hip hooray for Pierre Janssen.

August 17 is a red-letter day in the annals of dubious achievements. For it was on this date in 1498 that for the first time ever a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church resigned his office.

Now you might be thinking, with Benedict XVI in mind, that it’s not an admirable rather than dubious achievement. Someone humbled by their incapacity to perform this exalted office, laying it aside instead of clinging to the pomp and prestige. (Or you might just hate the church and wish they’d all resign, but that’s a topic for another day.)

The problem is, the person who resigned back then was Cesare Borgia. Now clearly he should never have been a cardinal due to his enthusiastic embrace of murderous wickedness, not to mention that he was the illegitimate son of the Pope who made him a cardinal, Alexander VI. (OK, he was just Roderigo Cardinal Borgia when he had Cesare, and probably he didn’t poison people, at least not much, but still.) But Cesare only resigned the post in order to further his and his father’s ambitions by becoming Duke of Valentinois.

It didn’t work. After his father died in 1503, followed after only 26 days by his sympathetic successor Pius III, he was tricked into supporting a deadly family foe Giuliano Della Rovere for the papacy, as Julius II. Four years later Borgia fell into an ambush and was mortally wounded and stripped of everything but a red fig leaf, even the leather mask he wore apparently to hide the ravages of syphilis. Again not the ideal accoutrement for a cardinal.

Cesare Borgia’s career was, apparently, a significant inspiration for Machiavelli’s The Prince. Which might make you question Machiavelli’s judgement as well as his morals except for one point about his infamous book that has been almost universally overlooked lately. The Prince is supposedly the ultimate how-to guide to amoral realism, a kind of Achieving Brutally Cynical Power for Dummies. But in the 18^th century it was generally seen, correctly in my view, as a satire, a thinly, even transparently veiled scathing denunciation of power-mad cynics.

If you really were a cynic and tutor to cruel dictators, you would not take as your role model someone whose nasty career ended with ignominious and degrading death in his early 30s. Even if he did at least vacate the cardinalship while vertical, for base motives.

If I told you that this is the anniversary of Henry VIII’s 1513 victory over the French at Guinegate, in the Battle of the Spurs, would it provoke yawns at another battle that seems deeply unmemorable? Puzzlement that Henry was fighting the French in France on behalf of the Pope in company with the Holy Roman Emperor? Or would you just wonder what battle in those days didn’t involve spurs?

Well, I can settle the last one easily. The name was a cruel jest about the speed with which the French cavalry departed the field, discarding lances, standards and even armour in their haste to escape. Ouch.

As for its consequences, they did include the ill-advised Scottish invasion of England on behalf of their “Auld alliance” French buddies that ended disastrously at Flodden Field. But we all know that the tale of “Henry VIII and his buddy the Pope” story didn’t turn out well in the end. And in fact this “War of the League of Cambrai” also ended badly, with a fairly decisive French victory in 1516, some 17 years before Henry chucked his first wife and the Roman Catholic church while, with absolutely characteristic chutzpah, keeping the title “Defender of the Faith” given him by Pope Leo X in 1521.

Why then am I droning on about it?

Well, for one thing, it’s an opportunity to heap more opprobrium on Henry VIII, who richly deserved it, for his vainglorious strategic overreach. But also to note how longstanding was the English concern not to face a united Europe. There were significant debates about whether to pursue the “blue water” policy generally favoured by the Tories, using the navy to contain whatever continental menace might arise, or the Whig strategy of timely interventions in European squabbles to keep said menace small.

On the whole this strategy worked, to the consternation particularly of the French who aspired for many centuries to be that menace, only to end up the butt of cruel English taunts. There is even a rumour that the peculiar British most rude hand gesture dates all the way back to archers at Agincourt, who were threatened with having their index and middle fingers cut off if captured; regrettably it appears to have no historical foundation. But the English did fight with remarkable skill, backed by remarkable statesmanship over the years, a tribute to the resilient dynamism of free societies.

Henry VIII was still an untrustworthy maniac, though.

On August 15 of 927 the Saracens sacked Taranto. Again. It’s a real nasty habit.

The first time they showed up, in 840, they turned it into a slave depot as well as a base for raiding, destroying and enslaving. After it was recaptured in 880, the Saracens came back in 882 and grabbed it again. Finally chased off, they returned in 927 and destroyed it, enslaving all the survivors. It was rebuilt. So they attacked it again in 977.

Taranto is in Italy. What were the Saracens even doing there, and so soon after Mohammed? Same thing they were doing in Tours in 732, I guess.

There’s this whiny Islamist narrative about how theirs is a religion of peace but the “Crusaders” keep attacking them so they have to kill them wherever they live in self-defence. And I do not deny that Christians have perpetrated many atrocities over the centuries. Indeed, when two Byzantine generals retook Taranto in 880 they um enslaved the original inhabitants. But these attacks on Taranto, as with the conquest of Spain and the attack on France, and indeed the violent seizure of Jerusalem and other Christian and Jewish holy places, happened centuries before the First Crusade which was, after all, a counterattack by any rational measure.

As indeed, by any rational measure, vicious unprovoked attacks from the Islamic world on the Christian one are far more common than the reverse. Even when European powers colonized the Middle East in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, they neither enslaved the inhabitants nor sought to forcibly convert them. And it is Christians who are under siege in the Muslim world today, not Muslims in the (post-)Christian West.

So why is there no demand for a historical apology for the incessant aggression and massive enslavement by Muslim rulers and armies virtually from the moment the Koran appeared, no offer of or request for reparations, no discussion of this astonishing record of belligerence?

It does appear to be something of a habit, after all. And not an attractive one.

Time for another battle. They’re appealing first because for the most part they happen on an obvious discrete date as opposed to cultural changes that kind of get smeared across the calendar in lumpy streaks. And second, they do have dramatic consequences especially if you lose.

For instance the Battle of Otranto on … oh, wait. It went on for days. From July 28 through August 11 of 1480 in fact. And then on August 14 the victorious Ottomans beheaded some 800 Christians for refusing to convert to Islam.

It’s an interesting method of proselytizing. We came hundreds of miles, invaded your country, sacked your city so our God must be the real deal because otherwise this bit of sharp metal will go through your neck. Not quite the Sermon on the Mount, mind you. But pointed. Especially as the Ottomans had taken Constantinople just 27 years earlier and apparently had their eye on Rome next. It probably used to be a mosque like, you know, the Temple of Solomon, Hagia Sophia and so on.

Obviously the Ottomans are not the first nor the last to kill prisoners. Christians have done it too. And doubtless they have sometimes ungently suggested that adopting the faith of the guy with the sword you don’t have any more might incline him to mercy. But the fact that by the time Otranto was recaptured in May 1481 some 12,000 of its inhabitants had reportedly been killed and another 5,000 enslaved helps explain the animosity directed at Ottoman attempts to drag Europeans to an appreciation of their religion by killing them en masse otherwise.

The 800 victims of the initial effort at religious persuasion were subsequently declared martyrs and are still celebrated in Italy, by the way. And Islamic militants are still beheading people for not converting.