On September 14, 1741, Handel completed his Messiah. I won’t be writing about that in this installment since I already covered it on April 13 of this year, the anniversary of its first performance. But I do bring it up to suggest again that conservatives who think art is for lefties and losers have a look at Brigitte’s C2C piece… while the Messiah blasts out of their stereo.

Instead I’m going to mention that on September 14, 1812, Napoleon captured Moscow. It was quite an achievement and he must have felt pretty pleased with himself. He was on a roll; he’d won his famous victories from Austerlitz to Jena and Wagram. (OK, I didn’t know about the last one, but in 1809 he walloped the Austrian army and the Fifth Coalition disintegrated so it was pretty cool… if you’re Napoleon.)

Now European geopolitics in this period really does resemble a Monty Python sketch. It was of course Britain that had been the prime organizer of various coalitions against Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France that kept disintegrating thanks to that darn Napoleon. But Britain fought Russia from 1807 to 1812 because Tsar Alexander I declared war after the British attacked Denmark on behalf of Sweden.

Then Britain, Russia and Sweden went what the heck are we doing and signed a secret anti-Napoleon treaty in April 1812. Then France and Russia went to war over who would get to mistreat Poland.

There went Napoleon again. Raising another massive Grande Armée, some 650,000 men including 270,000 French and a lot of allies and conquered types, picking up 100,000 Poles along the way despite Napoleon’s refusal to promise them anything, and winning most of his battles while not noticing he was falling for a rope-a-dope.

After three months following Russian armies that were employing a scorched-earth-plus-Cossack-cavalry-harassment plan, the French army finally squared off against the Russians at Borodino and sort of beat them in a bloody confrontation that left at least 70,000 killed or wounded. The French got the battlefield, but the Russian army got away.

So then Napoleon marched into Moscow on the theory that now the Russians had to surrender. It wasn’t actually their capital. That was St. Petersburg at the time (see the September 5 entry). But still, you seize Moscow, they’re meant to surrender.

Instead the Russians emptied the city, released a bunch of criminals, and set it on fire. And Napoleon stood there, with winter approaching, going but but but NO FAIR. Then he turned around and left on the disastrous Grand Retreat that all but destroyed his army; only 27,000 soldiers fit for duty remained by the time he lurched back into Poland.

Being Napoleon, he raised fresh forces and tried again, finally meeting his Waterloo at, well, Waterloo in 1815. And the world was left with two notable things.

First, one of the greatest graphics of all time, Charles Joseph Minard’s highly imaginative, compact, informative and chilling depiction of the dwindling Grande Armée on its way to and from Moscow (pictured above). Second, one truly reliable geopolitical rule.

Don’t invade Russia.

It often looks inviting. But it never works. (Well, if you’re the Mongols it works for a while but even they faded out.) It’s just too big, too cold, the defenders are too determined and, as Tsar Nicholas I memorably said, “I have two generals who will not fail me: Generals January and February.”

Even a bigshot like Napoleon, who actually captured Moscow and then stood there going Ooops, I should not have done that.

There are a lot of ways to be famous. Not all are good. You can be incredibly brave, incredibly successful in a good cause, or even incredibly successful in a bad cause. We know Hitler’s name as well as Churchill’s. You can be famous like Napoleon for sheer audacity that wins many battles before ultimately you lose decisively. You can also be famous for daring to go big without anything necessary to back it up. Like, say, Mussolini. A dangerous buffoon who caused much misery and death. But totally out of his depth the whole way.

Then there’s this other category of ignominy, where you fail so badly at something lacking in cosmic importance that you achieve pie-in-the-face-style immortality.

Which brings me to the classic football game on September 12, 1885, in which Arbroath beat Bon Accord by a record 36-0.

Now it might not seem that dramatic, let alone a record. Until you realize that it happened in the Scottish Cup and that therefore by “football” I do indeed mean what we North Americans insist on calling “soccer,” logically reserving the name “football” for a game in which most players not only do not kick the ball but are not allowed to.

In what we call football you get as many as 6 points at once, before a guy with no mud on his uniform trots in and kicks one wimpy point before trotting out again to sit down, which makes it fairly easy to get into double digits. So I repeat, this was in soccer. The game in which top matches routinely end in shootouts because nobody can score.

To be sure, the referee did later express some doubts about the outcome. He felt that he had called offside on Arbroath too often and that the real score might well have been 43-0.

How do you do that? I don’t even know how you can score that many goals in soccer without collapsing in exhaustion. I know the players are remarkably fit but still. However my real question is how you lose by that big a score?

I’m afraid one answer is to throw a game, which happened in Madagascar in 2002 when a team utterly incensed at a referee’s call in their previous match decided to protest by kicking the ball into their own net 149 times. (Guys, I’m all for incoherent rage, but that was ridiculous.) But how else? How can you be keen enough to form a team and enter a tournament, and good enough to play a game, and then get shellacked by the equivalent of losing a “football” game by about 200-0? Which actually did happen in 1916, when Georgia Tech beat Cumberland College 222-0.

Famed sports writer Grantland Rice reported that “Cumberland's greatest individual play of the game occurred when fullback Allen circled right end for a 6-yard loss.” And Georgia Tech’s coach John Heisman, yes the guy the Heisman Trophy is named for, took pity and agreed to play 12 rather than 15 minute quarters in the 2^nd half. It didn’t help. (In 1927 a high school football game in Kansas ended 256-0. Is it worse or does it matter?)

Oh, and by the way, there was once a high school girls’ basketball game in Texas in 2009 that ended up 100 to nothing. But there’s a touching postscript. Evidently the victorious Christian school was so embarrassed at thus humiliating a tiny school for girls with learning disabilities that its administration fired their own coach and called for their victory to be forfeited for such poor sportspersonship.

Now, legend persists that the Arbroath result was due to their opponents being a cricket club invited to a soccer tournament by mistake. But evidently they weren’t. And even if they had been you’d think they’d have managed, I don’t know, a shot on goal which Bon Accord apparently did not. Or would that be weirder, like the 2003 Michigan high school basketball game that ended 115-2, the losing squad being good enough to score two points but not good enough to get two more, or even some colossal figure like six, by scoring one in three quarters of the quarters?

Still, it’s one way to become famous. At least, we know the Bon Accord goalkeeper was Andrew Lornie. Though, to steal a phrase from the classic adventure novel Captain Blood that became a classic Errol Flynn film, I describe the purpose for which he was placed there rather than the duty he fulfilled.

September 11 was a busy day in history. And as I mentioned in last year’s item for that date, many of them were things Osama bin Laden was bitter about, including the beginning of the end of the 1683 Ottoman siege of Vienna. Evidently he felt that a desperate Christian counterattack against Muslim aggression was a classic unprovoked assault. So how about the end of the siege of Malta?

Yes, also September 11. 1565 this time. And another Christian stronghold under siege by the Ottomans in the name of Allah. Malta was held by the Knights Hospitaller, the same ones who in this July 23’s feature beat the Beylik of Aydin in 1319, a distinctly temporary victory. They had also been driven from Rhodes by, who else, Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522. In 1530 they set up on Rhodes and guess who showed up saying hey, it should be ours, it could be ours, give it to us, it used to be a mosque or something, God said to attack you as He so dependably does for us.

Right. The Ottomans. Still under Suleiman, and still seeking to convert by sword rather than word or example. But this time they didn’t win. The siege lasted over 3 months, from May 18 to September 11. And it was fought by a mighty Ottoman force, tens of thousands strong, one of the largest Armadas since the end of the Roman Empire, against the usual ragtag bunch of knights errant, local militia and in this case Imperial Spanish forces, (yeah, for once I’m praising them reasonably wholeheartedly), maybe 6,000 in total, half of them locals.

It was a scary business and much watched; Queen Elizabeth I of England wrote at the time that “If the Turks should prevail against the Isle of Malta, it is uncertain what further peril might follow to the rest of Christendom.” But “the Turks” did not prevail.

They didn’t give up either. They kept attacking including the naval assault on the European coast of the Mediterranean that was defeated by the usual ragtag bunch at Lepanto in 1571. And of course they were moving by land toward Vienna until they were defeated by the usual ragtag bunch there in 1683.

Perhaps some would suggest that I am harping and seek to turn the conversation back to the Crusades, an unprovoked attempt to regain holy places the Muslims had, um, seized by force on the grounds that the Temple Mount used to be a mosque or something so God said to attack. But don’t you find that there are a surprising number of such incidents?

No, I’m not picking on the Spanish Empire here just because my September 10 topic is another of their failed North American settlements. Specifically the Jesuit Ajacán Mission (also spelled in various other ways heavy on “x”s like Axacam or Xacan) to bring Christianity to the aboriginals of Virginia. Which did go very badly.

What was meant to be St. Mary’s Mission was founded on September 10, 1570 on or near the Virginia Peninsula where Jamestown would be established 37 years later. Nobody is entirely sure where because, well, they were slaughtered.

The founder, Father Juan Bautista de Segura, was determined to found a mission without a military garrison, which made his superiors nervous. But they let him anyway, and he landed with another priest, six Jesuit brothers, a Spanish servant boy, and one “Don Luis de Velasco,” a local of Virginia who had been kidnapped in 1561 and apparently converted to Christianity, constructing a small hut with a room for Mass.

Very little is known about “Don Luis” including his original name. And there are people who think he was actually Opechancanough, half-brother or other close relative of Pocahontas’ father Powhatan and a vehement, violent opponent of European settlement in the area. But we do know that whoever “Don Luis” was, he soon left the Jesuit settlement to live with relatives he had apparently located.

The Jesuits were worried at having lost their guide and translator. And though they managed to cope, bartering for food, at some point around February 1571 three of the Jesuits went to the village where they thought he was staying. He had them killed, and took other warriors to the mission and killed everyone but the servant boy who they took with them, and stole their stuff.

A Spanish supply ship showed up in 1572 and was attacked by locals dressed in the captured clerical garb. The attack failed and captives told them the servant boy was still alive. They traded some of their prisoners for him and he told them about the massacre. The Spanish later sent a punitive expedition that couldn’t find “Don Luis” but did kill a few dozen people and then left.

What are we to make of this? The Jesuits may not have been very welcome. But they don’t seem to have taken the land they settled on by force, nor do they appear to have converted anyone by force. On the other hand, Don Luis could justly complain of his treatment by other Spaniards and if he warned his friends and relatives that European settlement would be bad for them he was not mistaken.

Does that justify treachery and murder? I don’t think it does, especially without first telling the Jesuits to leave or die and with the Jesuits deliberately showing up unarmed. And once again it indicates that the PC version of the collision between Europe and America is sanitized to the point of dishonesty when it comes to the locals, and particularly their chronic low-intensity warfare, which was not very lethal only because their weapons were not very effective. They didn’t just do this sort of thing to the white-skinned strangers. They did it to one another, relentlessly.

I do not know what advice you would have given the locals in Virginia in 1570 when the Jesuits arrived. But even knowing what you know now about the long-term consequences for aboriginals of European contact, would you have said slaughter them without warning?

If not, can you really excuse their doing so, especially since they did not know then what you know now?

9/9/9 wasn’t good for Rome. OK, they didn’t know it was 9. They thought it was 762 or DCCLXII or thereabouts. Actually the Roman system of dating years was so chaotic that there’s almost no telling what people might have called the year. But they knew what to call the day: the “Clades Variana” or “Varian disaster”. Because on that day the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th legions led by Publius Quintillius Varus were ambushed and destroyed in the Teutoberg forest by one “Arminius” or Hermann, a Roman-trained German. The Romans never really resumed their advance into Germany. And I’m sorry they didn’t.

I know, I know. Imperialism has an evil name. And Roman imperialism had many critics including in Rome itself. It was a famous Roman historian, Tacitus, who commented acidly as Rome was rising to its mightiest status that “they make a desert and call it peace”. But it is precisely because of that self-critical spirit, so essential to the West and so conspicuously absent elsewhere, that to this day the world is markedly different inside and outside the Roman Empire.

I don’t mean literally within the boundaries it occupied at its height, the entire Mediterranean basin, France, part of Germany and most of the British Isles. I mean in those lands still fundamentally shaped by it, which is basically Western Europe and those places settled from Western Europe, with a big asterisk even on the bits overrun by Islam and later recovered.

In many ways German is the problematic part. Or at least was from the time “Germany” was reunified down through the mid-20^th century. But there was always an important difference between north-eastern “Prussia,” which dominated reunified Germany until the 1945 partition, and the western and southern parts that were more, well, laid back.

Don’t take my word for it. Ask Konrad Adenauer, the great West German Chancellor (in office 1949-1963) who oversaw his nation’s reintegration into the community of civilized nations. He had to travel to Berlin frequently in the 1920s because as Mayor of Cologne he was a member of the Prussian state council, the upper house of its parliament. And whenever they crossed the Elbe River he would draw the railway car curtains and mutter something like “Now we are in Asia”. And this division that so troubled him goes back to Rome, and to the Clades Variana.

According to the always colorful if not necessarily reliable Suetonius, when the Emperor Augustus heard of the disaster, he banged his head on the walls of his palace, shouting “Quintili Vare, legiones redde!” (Latin being a splendidly concise language, it translates as “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”) Varus was in no position to do so, having committed suicide at the end of the battle. But while Rome fairly quickly got more legions and even recovered the lost standards of the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th, they never again used those numbers in their order of battle. And they never resumed their advance eastward.

To be sure, the Teutobergwald is some 300 km west of the Elbe. But it sits on the Weser, well east of the Rhine. And Rome’s cultural influence generally penetrated some distance beyond its formal borders, getting weaker as you went. And because the Clades Variana, which as so often sounds even worse in German (variously the Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald, Hermannsschlacht, or Varusschlacht), stopped the Roman advance eastward permanently at the Rhine, the West did for a long time stop somewhere in central Germany.

As with the failure of Western influence to penetrate further in other directions too, and in this case with particularly ominous consequences in the 20^th century, it is much to be regretted. Quintili Vare, legions redde indeed.

September 8 is the anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine, Florida by admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. It happened in 1565, well before the first settlement that didn’t flee, die or both in what would later be British North America, namely Jamestown in 1607. And Samuel de Champlain’s founding of Quebec City in 1608. So you can see with that head start while Spain’s colonial empire proved the most… um… uh…

Stagnant. That would have to be the word. It might not have felt that way to, say, the Aztecs or Incas whom the Spanish brushed aside and plundered in roaring off to an early lead, bagging the tropical stuff, the spicy stuff and the gold and silver-filled stuff, creating permanent settlements in Central America in the 1490s and leaving everyone else playing catchup, especially the English who were busy with religious upheaval and civil war while Spain was… stagnant.

Yes, stagnant. Superficially impressive, rich and powerful, but lacking in dynamism. Everything was just too well under control. Including its highly bureaucratic empire answerable to an absolute monarch.

Just how stagnant was it, you ask? And rightly so. It was so stagnant that Florida, of which Menéndez de Avilés was also the first governor, had just 4,000 inhabitants of European descent in 1763 when the British bagged it from Spain in return for Havana, by which point the population of British North America was north of 1.5 million and growing fast.

So did the population of Florida once the British got it. With actual freedom to make a new life, people poured in. (And yes, brought slaves with them, both from the Caribbean and from South Carolina and Georgia.)

The Spanish got Florida back in the aftermath of the American revolution, which neither East Florida nor West Florida wanted any part of. It’s funny, in fact, that over many years of studying American history including the Revolution it never occurred to me to wonder what part if any the Floridas played. The short answer is they were too behind all the others, thanks to long Spanish control, to be self-governing societies at that point. They were just British outposts.

As for Spain, it supported the revolution. But quietly at first, given the ominous implications of colonial revolts for its shaky hold on its (mostly South and Central) American possessions. By 1779 it decided to jump in against Britain. And in the Treaty of Paris, a.k.a. the Treaties of Versailles, it got to keep West Florida which it had conquered, and also East Florida in return for the Bahamas.

It was a bum deal. For Florida itself, which stagnated. And for Spain, which lost its whole colonial empire in the 19^th century to various revolts, having long since lost its status as a great power by being stagnant. It even lost Florida to the United States, which had been nibbling steadily at it both formally and informally, with hillbillies pouring in in defiance of the authorities, until in 1821 the U.S. went whsst chomp burp.

Since then Florida has done really well despite being on the wrong side in the American Civil War, to which it contributed little and from which it suffered little direct damage.

To this day, St. Augustine celebrates its quaint Spanish heritage. While breathing, very possibly, a quiet sigh of relief that it didn’t last any longer than it did, because the only solid contribution it ever made to prosperity is as a historical tourist attraction.

September 7 1876 was a very bad day for the Jesse James gang. I’m not sure they really had many good days; that lifestyle was never as glamorous as some films and popular culture have suggested. But if they did have such days, September 7 1876 in Northfield Minnesota wasn’t one. They were caught in a shootout while robbing a bank and lost badly. To armed citizens not the cops.

It wasn’t even much of a bank, apparently. No offense to Northfield but it wasn’t a booming metropolis and the First National Bank of Northfield had a better name than it did a balance sheet. Now possibly the gang, whose origins were as Confederate guerrillas in Missouri during the Civil War, had a grievance against a major bank shareholder, former Union general Adelbert Ames. And they wrongly thought he had recently put a big pile of cash into the bank. So it was a badly planned caper. But it got worse fast.

The gang were evidently somewhat the worse for likker when they headed for the bank early in the afternoon after lunching on fried eggs and bad hooch. Once there, three went in and murdered a clerk who refused to open the safe while five stood guard including Jesse James himself. Well, maybe stood guard isn’t the right word.

They swaggered around firing guns to scare people. And it didn’t work. Instead the locals realized a robbery was going on and some of them grabbed guns including from local hardware stores, took up good positions, and opened fire on the criminals to deadly effect. Two of the gang were killed outright and all the others wounded including those inside the bank who ran out into the battle with a few bags of nickels for their wicked pains.

The surviving gang fled. But the citizens of Minnesota pursued them and caught three and killed one. Only Frank and Jesse James got away, but without their gang. And after three peaceful years in Tennessee Jesse returned to a life of crime, dragged Frank in (apparently he was happy just farming), and on April 3, 1882, got himself shot in the back of the head while unarmed and adjusting a picture by an lowlife acquaintance named Robert Ford in return for a public reward. (Ford himself was gunned down a decade later in a makeshift saloon. Unsurprisingly.)

As for Frank James, he turned himself in in 1882, tired of a life of crime and constant running from the law. He somehow got himself acquitted by two different juries over two different offences, avoided ever being tried in Northfield, and lived until 1915, partly doing odd jobs, partly on his fame or infamy including in a Wild West show, before improbably dying peacefully at age 72.

Obviously he’d have been far better off just farming, as he eventually realized. But that’s not the main point here. The main point is that this arguably most infamous of all the Wild West criminal outfits was brought down not by the law but by armed citizens. And not some particularly ornery group of black-clad gun-fighting “citizens” with ominous nicknames like “Kid Shelleen” but just a bunch of regular folks including Swedish farmers. One innocent civilian was killed in the fight, but by a member of the James gang (apparently Cole Younger) not by one of the, well, vigilante is too strong a word. They were just regular people willing and able to defend decency and order against these vicious boozy thugs.

By the way, Northfield hosts annual “Defeat of Jesse James Days” in September. As arguably should we all.

Say, is that battered wreck the Victoria? Hip hip hooray. Where’s the boss? Oh dear. Dead on the other side of the world. So why the cheering? Because the Victoria was, on September 6 of 1522, the first ship ever to complete a trip all the way around the world.

We call it the Magellan expedition. And perhaps rightly so, even though he personally expired part-way through, like most of those who set out with him. In Magellan’s case the cause of death, on April 27, 1521, was being repeatedly hit by sharp things by Lapu-Lapu’s warriors in the Battle of Mactan in the Philippines. But the voyage was his idea after all so it makes sense to call it the Magellan expedition rather than the Elcano expedition for the last captain standing, on the deck of Victoria on September 6 1522.

The expedition, and Magellan’s fate, certainly indicate the courage it took to be part of the so-called Voyages of Discovery. This name has come in for much derision in recent years on the grounds that what Europeans discovered already had people living in it. Whaddaya mean, you “discovered” my house? I’ve been here for years. But they did discover much about how one part of the world connected to another and how to get there half-alive that was unsuspected by, say, Lapu-Lapu, who had no more idea there was a Europe than he did that anybody could possibly object to chronic low-grade warfare as a way of life. (Incidentally he’s now a national hero in the Philippines with several monuments and his image is used by the Philippine National Police and the Bureau of Fire Protection. But virtually nothing is known about his life including what his real name was or when and how he died.)

One problem with the PC fuss about “Voyages of Discovery” is that it tends to whitewash the conduct of anyone on the wrong end of them. The Noble Savage myth lives on, with suitably updated terminology. But the inhabitants of Mactan, or of North America, would cheerfully have conquered and mistreated everybody else if they’d been able to. The Europeans, in fact, had more qualms about it than most, part of the dynamism of an open society that explains why it was them “discovering” the Philippines not the other way around. But I digress.

The point is that taking part in these things took incredible bravery whatever its other qualities. If you’re wondering why the Victoria, an 85-ton “carrack,” whatever that might be, was the first ship, in the singular, to get all the way around the globe, it’s because the Concepcion, Santiago and Magellan’s flagship Trinidad were all shipwrecked or scuttled while San Antonio deserted during the horrendous trip through the “Strait of Magellan” between the South American mainland and Tierra del Fuego. I like the chutzpah of deserting with a ship instead of from one. And I do understand that discretion is sometimes the better part of valour. Though of course you could stay in Seville and die too.

Magellan started out with roughly 265 men. Victoria staggered home with just 18 of her original 42 or perhaps 43 although some of the others, from that ship and the expedition generally, deserted rather than taking the standard route of dying, from disease, wounds or by execution after a mutiny in Patagonia, including the slow capital punishment method of marooning the captain of San Antonio, an accountant by profession, who was dumped on some desolate island along with a priest and some biscuits and never heard from again. No. I would assume not.

After the Battle of Maclan in which Magellan perished, the survivors were invited to a banquet by the guy they’d been fighting for, Rajah Humabon of Cebu, who naturally had most of them poisoned or otherwise killed including both the new leaders. You’re welcome.

The pilot of Victoria somehow survived, and became its captain until he was deposed. He doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry of his own, but his name does not feature on the short list of those still alive when Victoria limped into Seville Harbour and the pages of history. From which she limped out again in 1570, vanishing with all hands somewhere in the Atlantic.

At least they built a replica in 1992 and another in 2011. Because you do have to admire the guts it took to get all the way around the world or die trying. Even if all else being equal you’d rather admire it from the dock than the deck.

So long, guys. Good luck with, you know, the typhoons, dysentery, treacherous allies, rocks, currents and stuff.

P.S. A carrack turns out to be a three- or four-masted sailing ship, a mainstay of the Voyages of Discovery. All Magellan’s ships were carracks except Santiago which was a caravel, a nimble vessel with triangular or “lateen” sails.