Today we do another battle. But not just any battle, or one with a funny name. One with absolutely profound consequences for our way of life. Salamis, on September 22, 480. No Salamis, no classical Greece, one might say. And no classical Greece means no open society today.

It’s amazing how much of what we regard as the beginnings of our secular heritage, from the philosophy of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle to the drama of Sophocles and Aeschylus to the architecture of the Parthenon took place in this very brief period between, say, the overthrow of Hippias in Athens in 510 BC to the death of Alexander the Great in 323.

Now you may be objecting here that I just threw a lot of marble at you. And it’s true. But here’s the thing. It may be all Greek to us today. But it was all once a staple of education in Western society, not just in school but at home, in conversation, even in church.

Where did it all go? How did we lose interest in our heritage if not by losing interest in its results, becoming so focused on our failings that we lost sight of the fact that the great defect of the West is not living up to its ideals whereas the great defect of so many other societies is the ideals themselves.

Certainly that is true of the Persian Empire that, under the god-emperor Xerxes, sought to conquer the free city states of Greece early in the 5^th century BC and very nearly succeeded. In Persia there were no rights for the common person, nor indeed for the rich, whose property was as liable to be seized on an imperial whim or their head cut off as the humblest peasant. There was no dignity for the individual, no spirit of inquiry, no toleration of dissent, let alone admiration for it. And there were, not coincidentally, no citizen-soldiers.

In Greece there were. And it is they who rallied, after a long string of ominous defeats against a numerically far superior foe and after the annihilation of the Spartan rearguard at Thermopylae and of the main Greek armies at Artemisium and the conquest of much of Greece, they nevertheless rallied to Themistocles’ call to confront the mighty Persian fleet.

What’s more, as free people, they bickered and squabbled and argued their way, right up the battle, to a strategy that actually turned the Persians’ superior numbers against them in the narrow straits of Salamis and decisively crushed Xerxes’ navy. (For more on this, as so often, see Victor Davis Hanson’s inspiring Carnage and Culture.)

The mighty Xerxes went home, leaving his general Mardonius to crush these annoying turbulent insolent commoners. Instead the next year at Plataea his army was badly beaten, as was his fleet at Mycale. The Persians left and never again attacked the Greek mainland.

It is a date we should celebrate if we love the right to question authority. It’s not some new radical thing. It’s embedded in our heritage right at the base of those Doric columns. And paradoxically we should today question the radical skeptics who are the new voice of orthodoxy. Because the point of questioning isn’t to undermine everything. It’s to separate truth from error. And sometimes the truth is that tradition had it right.

Chant from on high: “Question authority!” Twerp in crowd: “Why?” Because the messy, rowdy, dynamic Western heritage of individualism is as much worth defending today as it was at Salamis.

Here’s another one. Nickname, I mean. On St. Matthew’s Day, 1217, which is of course September 21 of that year, Kaupo the Accursed was killed in battle in Estonia. “The Accursed”. Dang. That’s gotta sting.

It might also interfere with recruiting to your cause. You go “Hey, we’ve got a big army, a great leader, a holy cause, who’s game to join in?” Then they go “OK, who’s this great leader person you have? Eh? Did you say ‘the Accursed’? Because maybe it’s just me but when you say that it sounds like it might not go so well.”

Now to be fair to the late Kaupo the Ill-Monickered, he probably picked up the name in the enemy camp, maybe even after the fact. He was apparently a leader of some Livonian group in the early 13^th century, and is described in one chronicle as “quasi rex” which again isn’t quite the nickname you might have been fishing for. (It means “almost king” or “like a king” and isn’t nearly as cool or scary as “Tyrannosaurus rex” with no ifs, ands or quasis.)

Kaupo or Caupo (it matters less whether you spell it with a “k” or a “c” than whether you stick “the Akkursed” after it) was the first prominent Livonian to be christened. I know, I know, tallest building in Witchita. (Cue angry letters from Livonia.) Having gone to Rome and met Pope Innocent III, the same guy who sided with King John over Magna Carta boo hiss, he went home clutching the gift of a Bible to face a rebellion which he put down, then crusaded against some pagan Estonians related to his own quasi subjects… and died.

Apparently some people regard him as a fink and a traitor, others as a visionary who helped bring his people into Christian Europe. Personally I lean the second way, given the tragedies that have befallen the Baltic States in those periods when they were separated from the West. But Wikipedia says “Latvian legends, however, are unequivocal: there he is named “’Kaupo the accursed, the scourge of the Livs,... Kaupo who has sold his soul to the foreign bishops.’”

Even Antipope would be a step up. It would also help if your nickname was “guy who won the Battle of St. Matthew’s Day” not “guy who went under in it and good riddance”.

Even better to be called “Saint”, as in “the guy St. Matthew’s Day is named for”.

Kaupo the Accursed, not so much.

On the subject of nicknames and history, can I get a quick show of hands on appropriate jobs for the “Butcher of Cesena”? No, no, not “he should sell meat in Cesena, Italy”. He wasn’t that sort of guy. He was Robert of Geneva, son of Amadeus III, Count of Geneva, and he earned the nickname for ruthlessness in authorizing a massacre of between three and eight thousand citizens of the Italian town of Cesena in 1377 during the “War of the Eight Saints”. So, who figures he should be Pope?

Well, I see some hands there at the back. And not just from die-hard anti-Catholics in our own time. In fact they belong to, oh dear, a bunch of 14^th-century French cardinals, who raised them on September 20, 1378 to make Robert of Never Mind Cesena into Pope Clement VII. Or rather Antipope Clement VII. I’m not sure whether Antipope is a better title than Butcher but I’m pretty sure you don’t want much to do with anyone who acquired both in the space of two years… or ever.

It seems the French cardinals did not like Pope Urban VI very much. I’m not sure why; after all he was forced on the papal conclave by an angry mob and wasn’t a cardinal. On the other hand he was apparently simple, frugal, arbitrary, violent and imprudent. An odd combination. And in this case batting .400 won’t do. Though the French choice wasn’t any better, and triggered the “Western Schism” in which the French crown tried to control the papacy again, having done so with a heavy hand during the “Avignon Papacy” from 1309-1377, a.k.a. the “Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy” which is another nickname you wouldn’t want especially in context of being Pope.

The ruckus over Urban v Clement quickly drew in all sorts of angry secular rulers. And it resulted in a deal, after they both died and their successors proved equally stubborn, whereby a third, compromise pope was also elected, adding to the chaos.

Finally people noticed that the whole thing was rather embarrassing and tended to discredit the faith. So a papal council got two of them to step down and excommunicated the third and elected Martin V who apparently didn’t have a nickname although maybe privately he was called “thank goodness that nonsense is over” or some such.

Obviously an event of this sort has complex roots. But it can’t help to choose a Pope nicknamed “the Butcher” of anything unless it’s “of farm animals for food” which in this case it definitely wasn’t.

BTW, if you’re thinking a war characterized by that sort of brutality would be lucky to muster eight saints among thousands of wretches, it turns out we’re not quite sure who the “Eight Saints” were but there’s no evidence that they were in any way saint-like. They seem to have been either tax collectors or a war council who had unusually good luck with nicknames, unusually good PR or possibly were the victims of pointed sarcasm.

On this date back in 1796 George Washington published his “Farewell Address”. It was not actually a speech but a written document, and addressed not to the political class narrowly conceived but to American generally; its full and somewhat characteristically florid 18th-century title was “The Address of General Washington To The People of The United States on his declining of the Presidency of the United States.”

Washington could easily have secured a third term as president; there were no term limits until the mid-20^th century. But he feared the precedent of a dominant figure assuming something resembling power for life, as well as being heartily sick of partisan abuse. So instead he stepped aside, creating a precedent nobody felt worthy to discard until Franklin Delano Roosevelt (with the plausible excuse of a looming world war, but still…).

The Farewell Address is remarkable in becoming an instant and enduring classic, full of statesmanlike wisdom. He cautioned his countrymen against sectional divisions, a prescient warning (and yes, Washington was a slaveowner but unlike Jefferson and many others, he freed his slaves in his will). He warned against entangling alliances, praised free trade, urged good faith and justice to all nations and particularly highlighted the danger of having divisions on foreign policy intrude on domestic politics.

He also gave a famous warning against political parties, one that I feel was misguided. It’s not just that it proved ineffective in practice; so did his caution about sectional divisions. It’s that parties are a very effective way to filter options and present reasonably coherent choices to an electorate. They are also loud, abusive and stupid. But you can’t have everything.

He also stressed a point that was not popular with my professors and I suspect would be even less so today: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens…. And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

You said it, George. And in the elevated tone and improving effect of his Address, he showed us what true statesmanship can be and, in the process, underlined the sorry state of public affairs today in which one cannot imagine a departing politician having anything of remotely similar calibre to say or having the grace to say it the way Washington did.

By the way, Washington had actually wanted to step down after one term, and initially drafted the Farewell Address with James Madison’s help in 1792. But he was so worried about growing animosity between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, his Treasury Secretary and Secretary of State respectively, that he went for a second term to try to keep things under control. And it was a very successful term though, as these things tend to be, also one marked by greater political rancor than the first.

His departure saw an eruption of partisan bitterness, the formation of the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties, a series of foreign crises that became dangerously entwined with domestic politics, and a bitterly contested election in 1800.

One wonders what calming influence Washington might have exerted from retirement had doctors not bled him to death over a throat infection in 1799. But his Farewell Address did help keep passions within limits among men who had known and deeply respected him, perhaps more so as he took on the august status that death paradoxically confers by protecting a public figure from further polemical blunders or simply remarks resented for their entanglement with current controversies.

If it does not look that way reviewing, say, the insults exchanged in 1800, imagine how little it might have taken to turn crisis into catastrophe in those troubled years. And consider especially Alexander Hamilton’s personally painful choice in 1800.

The election was thrown into the House of Representatives because of an Electoral College tie between the Democratic-Republicans top choice, Thomas Jefferson, and his appalling running mate Aaron Burr (in those days there were not separate Presidential and Vice-Presidential votes, and while one elector was meant to vote for Jefferson but not Burr it got messed up). Hamilton vigorously urged his party to vote for his bitter personal rival Jefferson rather than the egregious Burr because he would rather have a president with wrong principles than a president with none. Without a strong sense of what George would have wanted, and the Farewell Address denunciation of how partisanship embitters men and clouds their minds ringing in his ears, might Hamilton have been content to sit back and watch his rivals tear themselves apart to his country’s loss?

If we cannot produce such a document today, we can at least still read this one.

Aaaaargh. Here they come again. It’s September 18, 1739 and the Ottoman Turks just annexed Serbia in the Treaty of Belgrade. It turns out the siege of Vienna wasn’t the end of their relentless advance.

They were able to grab Serbia, including Belgrade, because they’d just defeated a Russian-Austrian alliance in the creatively named Austro-Russian–Turkish War that started in 1735 because, guess what, the Ottoman vassals in the Crimea kept attacking Russia.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the situation was somewhat obscure. But the Russians were allied with the Cossack Hetmanate in what is now Ukraine (the Russians claim the Hetmanate actually ceded itself to Russia in 1654 but this is generally regarded as a lie). And the Crimean Tatars, who had converted to Islam in the 14^th century, were a major source of slaves for the Ottomans and conducted essentially annual slaving raids into Ukraine and Russia, seizing perhaps 3 million people over four centuries. I wonder if they’re considering reparations. Or does nobody talk about that one?

Anyway, Russia carefully maneuvered itself into a favourable diplomatic situation including ending its war with the Persian Empire (don’t ask) and signing a treaty with them as well as backing Austria’s candidate for the throne of Poland which it would subsequently help carve up.

Unfortunately none of the belligerents were any good at war and between plagues and bad sanitation and an elevated level of military incompetence especially among the Austrians in this one, the Russians and Austrians managed to lose. (Evidently we have no idea what the Ottoman losses were as they didn’t care at all.)

Serbia, to be sure, lived in a tough neighbourhood. (See Partition of Poland and other such sad stories.) Eventually they sort of escaped the Ottoman Empire from 1788 to 1793, then got reabsorbed and then revolted and as the “Sick Man of Europe” gradually lost its grip on the Balkans they fought their way out over about 25 years punctuated by massacres and setbacks.

Still, I do have to ask, with all the whining about the Crusades and European imperialism and so forth, why there’s so little commentary on the Ottomans’ persisted incursions into Europe including to back a massive slave-trading venture.

It’s kind of important to the story.

Well, September 17 gives us an opportunity to celebrate the Edict of Poitiers. I hear surprisingly little cheering.

OK, OK. So it was this 1577 declaration by French king Henri III of toleration for Protestants. Are we happier now?

Possibly not. It came, some say, after the sixth phase of the French Wars of Religion, a brouhaha that went on for some 36 years between 1562 and 1598 and caused millions of deaths directly or through famine and disease. Others deny that these wars, or this war, can be divided neatly into stages because the violence treachery and death just kept erupting despite periodic flowery declarations of reconciliation. Certainly if you look at a timeline it’s depressing how the wars blend into one another, punctuated by this assassination and that massacre ending in the “War of the Three Henries”.

As for the Edict of Poitiers, well, it was issued by the last Valois king, fourth son and favourite of Catherine de Medici which gives you some idea what his word was worth. And in any case the Edict, which arose from the Treaty of Bergerac three days earlier between Henri and the Huguenot (French Protestant) princes so everybody hated one another anyway, only granted Protestants the right to practice their religion in the suburbs of a single town in each judicial district. Not exactly life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Still, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, right? And after the “War of the Three Henries” ended with two assassinations (the ultra-Catholic Henri de Guise and then Henri III) the last man standing, Henri of Navarre, becoming Henri IV (the first Bourbon) things apparently got better even if he did have to pretend to be Catholic to become king. It was under him that the Edict of Nantes in 1598 promised Protestants something much more like genuine tolerance and even the freedom to, say, have a job you actually wanted including in government.

Still, we’re back in anecdote territory here, because France was still an absolutist state. Henri IV eventually became a very popular monarch and was assassinated in 1610, after which you got the three eternal Louis (XIII, XIV and XV, holding the throne between them for 164 years) and, uh, revocation of the Edict of Nantes and destruction of Protestant churches, closing of their schools and intimidating quartering of unruly dragoons in the homes of Protestants unless they happened suddenly to, you know, discover the truth of Catholicism. (Louis XIV, who revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685 through the Edict of Fontainebleu, boasted that of nearly a million Huguenots, less than 2,000 remained in France a year later; some of my own ancestors were among those who fled to England where their talent and energy was actually welcome.)

We are accustomed to the story of freedom being a story. It has better and worse chapters, heroes and villains. But there’s meant to be a story arc in which in the end liberty prevails, to the point that any claim that can be advanced as furthering the cause of freedom has a strong advantage in public debate in Canada today. But again, where despotism reigns, you don’t have a story so much as a series of bleakly amusing anecdotes about the folly and viciousness of mankind.

Sadly, the Edict of Poitiers is essentially in the latter category. Hence the silence.

Continuing yesterday’s depressing theme, we commemorate today the Grito de Dolores or Cry of Dolores uttered on September 16, 1810. If you are wondering who hurt Dolores so badly, rest assured it wasn’t that. It actually came from a priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and means the “Cry of Pains” and it triggered the Mexican revolt against Spanish rule.

He uttered memorable words. Pity we don’t know what they are. Various versions exist and they conflict, but clearly he spoke of patriotism, rights, religion and freedom. And the crowd rallied and took up arms and got… well… uh… more speeches about freedom.

They also got eleven years of commotion and war followed by independence in 1821. And I suppose they got patriotism; Mexico still celebrates it. But they didn’t get rights. Mexico was a seedy dictatorship until… well… uh… They are trying these days. But the truth is that the rule of law has never flourished there and still doesn’t.

As for religion, they got a variant of it for a while. The “Autumn of the Patriarch” style of government that prevailed until 1910 was heavy on religion as a slogan and was allied to the church, though its actual conduct was not what Jesus recommended in virtually any way. Then they had another revolution and an incredibly bloody civil war that went on for about a decade and killed perhaps 10% of the populace, following which the church was severely repressed including banning wearing clerical garb in public.

Then there’s freedom. Easy to call, hard to run, as the late great Oakland Raiders quarterback Kenny “Snake” Stabler used to say in the huddle. Without a strong tradition of liberty in one’s political culture, without a habit of self-government in the personal sense, political freedom rapidly deteriorates into licence and anarchy followed by a strong man restoring order and relegating rights and liberties to speeches.

The result is lots of cries of pain, fairly monotonous ones in fact, and a sad parade of hopes that are betrayed or simply crumble.

Somehow people manage to keep the patriotism. But it does them little good in isolation. It can even do harm by making them proud of endless disasters.

So September 15 is the anniversary of the “Constitutionalist revolution” in Portugal in 1820. I was trying to make sense of the story but in the end it simply confirmed the aphorism of Sébastian-Roch Nicolas Chamfort that “Only the history of free peoples merits our attention; that of men under despotisms is simply a collection of anecdotes.” And I suppose he would know, being secretary to Louis XVI’s sister and the Jacobin club.

See, Portugal was invaded during the Napoleonic Wars and moved its capital to Rio de Janeiro as well as becoming a British protectorate. And the British seem to have tried to instil liberal ideas while King John VI was far away. As for the king, he apparently hadn’t been much interested in public affairs as opposed to, say, hunting, until his brother died of smallpox and he became heir apparent in 1788 then regent in 1799 when his mother went mad. But he did like running things totally himself.

He came back to Portugal and sort of put up with the liberal constitution imposed by the army on an illiterate peasantry who had no idea what was even going on and nobles and clergy who knew but hated it. So in 1823 a counterrevolution imposed absolutism, which the king put up with, suspending the liberal 1822 constitution and instead promising “personal security, property and jobs”. Oh. That again.

It wasn’t good enough for the hardliners including his own wife, Carlota Joaquina de Borbón, a very nasty piece of work by all accounts who loved the absolutism of her native Spain and despised everything about her husband including his manners. She conspired with their son Michael to force the king off the throne, which failed, conspired again and got exiled, and then in 1826 John died, possibly of arsenic poisoning.

Well, I could go on and on. In fact it may feel that I already did. But the point is there’s really no story here, just anecdotes about the dismal result of political maneuvering in a nation without a tradition of liberty even when some of that maneuvering aims to create such a tradition. After a civil war lasting from 1828 to 1834 Portugal got a constitutional monarchy of sorts, but it presided over instability and coups until the early 20^th century when they got a republic and more instability and civil war then dictatorship.

Only in the 1970s did Portugal somehow cast off this dismal succession of anecdotes and via a military coup get something resembling democracy though with 25 governments between 1974 and 2014 and enormous economic problems there’s still far too much anecdote here about human frailty and far too little story of the sort one genuinely does find in the Anglosphere.

So if you have it, cherish it. And if you don’t, do all you can to get it against long odds.