Well, that’s nice. On September 30, 1399, Henry IV was “proclaimed” King of England. So that was that.

Well, no. And thereby hangs a happy tale.

Henry became king because people were fed up with Richard II’s feckless tyranny. And it was part of the tangled run-up to the Wars of the Roses because Edward III had been so foolish as to have five sons survive into adulthood, setting the stage for many tangled claims including those of Henry IV through his father John of Gaunt, Edward’s fourth son and third to make it to the age of majority.

Now bear with me briefly. Richard II was actually Edward III’s grandson, by his eldest son Edward the Black Prince. So when he departed the scene, first deposed on September 30 1399 and then starved to death on or around February 14, 1400, next in line might have been the son of Lionel of Antwerp, John of Gaunt’s older brother and incidentally nearly seven feet tall. But he only had a daughter, and her son Roger had died leaving a boy Edmund Mortimer as the eight-year-old easily-brushed aside heir presumptive.

The full-grown Henry looked pretty plausible instead. Especially with that big scary army standing behind him that he’d raised after Richard II recklessly and inexplicably tried to disinherit him of his father’s lands. But blood isn’t everything in England, whether running through your veins or dripping from your sword.

To be King, Henry needed… popular approval. Yes, that’s right. And not from a shouting mob. It had to come from Parliament. And when he went to Parliament to say can I be king can I huh huh I mean we all hated Richard don’t worry he won’t trouble you again, they said well, we kind of think so provided, just sort of asking, you happen to be thinking what we’re thinking which is that from now on when we present a petition to the king, that might be you, asking him to fix some injustice or another and meanwhile you keep trying to get us to give you money from the ordinary people of this realm, we’ll sort out our grievances and concerns before we talk about your cash.

What Henry’s private opinion of this proposal might have been we know not. But he had no choice. To be king he had to promise a further institutional refinement of the old promise of “No taxation without representation” contained in Clause 12 of the original 1215 Magna Carta and reaffirmed under Edward I in 1297 in De Tallagio Non Concedendo, a refinement that essentially put in place the parliamentary control of “supply” that is to this day our guarantee of accountability in the executive branch.

It wasn’t the proclamation on September 30, or the coronation on October 13, that actually made him King. It was the support of the people’s representatives, on condition that he not tax them without representation.

Which is nice.

Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. As Kenny Stabler used to say, “Easy to call, hard to run.” A thought prompted by the September 29 anniversary of the excommunication of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in 1227. Well, one of four actually.

Right away you see the problem. The Pope is meant to be holy. This other guy has “holy” in his title. And here they are hurling abuse at one another over political matters.

Of course a lot of people don’t think the Catholic Church is all that holy. Indeed quite a few hate it bitterly. And no one has improved on Voltaire’s gibe that the Holy Roman Empire was in fact none of the above. But it’s noteworthy that while this particular excommunication was formally because of Frederick’s failure to take part in the Sixth Crusade it was really about political and military disagreements over European matters.

Even a Crusade is sort of a mixed bag render-unto-Caesar-wise. It’s a war which is secular but with what were meant to be holy motives. And the Biblical injunction never meant kings should not try to defend churches, monasteries and schools against rampaging invaders; Alfred the Great certainly did exactly that and rightly so. But this whole episode was shabby and not least because the Crusades were used as a pretext.

On both sides, it seems. Frederick actually had set out for the Holy Land before becoming too ill to continue, something his enemies downplayed or denied. But he only went on the crusade because he’d managed by proxy to marry Yolande of Jerusalem and promptly had his new father-in-law John of Brienne deposed as king of Jerusalem so he could bag it. Piety was not self-evidently his main motive.

As for the Pope, his motives were essentially secular. The papacy was a major political player in those days and didn’t get along with the Holy Roman Emperors. In fact Frederick’s predecessor Otto IV had been excommunicated by Gregory’s predecessor-but-one Innocent III, the same guy who backed Bad King John against Magna Carta and the Barons (which pace Dave Barry would be a good name for a rock band). Innocent had a bit of a case, in that Otto was trying to control the church in his territories and was leading an army toward Rome. But the deeper cause was quarrels over secular papal control of various Italian polities and alliances with various rulers.

The same is true of Frederick’s issues with the Pope, who actually excommunicated him again when he did go on the Sixth Crusade in 1228, on the grounds that an excommunicated guy shouldn’t do so. There were legitimate grounds for dissatisfaction with some of his actions as a Crusader. But it is telling that by 1229 Frederick and Gregory were at war over various bits of Italy and when the excommunication was lifted in 1230 it was for political rather than moral or religious reasons.

The larger problem here is that politics is such an ugly business, so often dominated by counsels of necessity in dubious circumstances, that to start excommunicating people over policy rather than because they, say, murdered an archbishop weakens the moral authority of the act of excommunication. In 1239 Gregory excommunicated Frederick again, for invading Lombardy, which may have been both nasty and unwise but is hardly among the 7 Deadly Sins. (At one point Frederick also persuaded Gregory to excommunicate Frederick’s own son Henry on political grounds, following which he outmaneuvered Henry politically and threw him into a dungeon which seems more suitable to the situation.)

Interestingly enough Frederick does appear to have held views far outside the Catholic mainstream. Very possibly he wasn’t a Christian at all. Which I can see excommunicating him for if you are Pope. But when you only erupt into theological thunder when the guy is giving you political fits you wind up being just one more politician.

In any case Frederick went on to demand the Church give up its wealth, fail to organize a European league against politically ambitious clerics, wage more wars, get excommunicated again in 1245 and die unexpectedly in 1250. His dynasty perished soon thereafter in conflict with a papacy whose political ambitions were dragging it down into the spiral of cynical worldly maneuvering that would see Borgia and Medici Popes and the Reformation.

It would have been far better to leave politics to Caesar, surely, on practical and certainly on moral grounds.

What a bastard! No, no. I mean it. On this date back in 1066, September 28, William “the Bastard” landed at Pevensey, near Hastings, and shortly became William the Conqueror, founder of the “modern” British monarchy. Should we care?

No, no, I don’t mean is all this old stuff boring and Britain irrelevant. You already know I don’t think so and if you’re reading these items neither do you. I mean how much does it really matter that William won at Hastings?

On the surface it seems enormously important. It brought not just a new king but a new ruling class, and the feudal system. Why else would we regard the real British monarchy as dating from 1066, to the point that William’s great-great-great-great-grandson Edward I as though even Edward the Confessor had never reigned, let alone Edward the Elder?

OK, I’m getting a bit pedantic. But you get my drift. 1066 is a major turning point. Or is it?

Sixteen years ago I thought it was, calling the Conqueror the most important person of the millennium on the grounds that if Harold the Great Chump had won at Hastings England might have been part of a Nordic rather than European civilization. But the more I’ve considered it the clearer it seems to me that, on the other hand, England tamed the Normans not the reverse, always remaining very much apart including, during its long history as a Catholic nation, maintaining a far healthier separation between church and state than, say, France or Spain ever did and having a “Protestant” break with Rome that for all its unattractive qualities was quite unlike Calvin’s or Luther’s. And of course Saxon common law beat back Norman statute law, at Runnymede and elsewhere.

On the third hand (someone get me an octopus, quick) it may have been precisely the powerful tension between the Norman and Saxon conceptions of government that forced the development of elaborate governmental institutions that restrained instead of empowering the state. The Normans were, after all, outstanding administrators in ways that were often highly desirable provided the underlying mechanisms of popular control could keep pace in their elaboration and formal procedures.

I do believe that in a parallel universe where that arrow missed Harold Godwinson at Hastings and the shield wall did not crack, we would remember him as Harold the Great. But I also think things turned out surprisingly well, albeit with considerable difficulty, the way things did turn out.

For all that, I do not like William the Conqueror, an angry man seething with ambition who was not, I think, entitled to claim the throne. And even after all these years, I do care about that too.

Can I just kick this one off with a bird’s head or some odd circles and waves? Or perhaps a more comprehensible drawing of a thumbs-up, directed at good old Jean-François Champollion. You respond with an ornate question mark? Well, he’s the guy who on September 27 of 1822 published a decipherment of the Rosetta Stone. And the sphinx never looked back.

The Rosetta Stone is, fairly famously, the great key to reading ancient Egyptian inscriptions because some clever chap way back when had written the same thing three times in three different languages: Ancient Greek, Demotic (the Egyptian not the Greek kind) and Ancient Egyptian. I say fairly famously because it is the most visited object in the British Museum which is not exactly short of other interesting exhibits. And of course Egypt wants it back so they can treat it with the same care they have given to various other antiquities.

The actual text is kind of odd, basically declaring King Ptolemy V divine which he wasn’t.

Interestingly, even ancient Greek was a challenge in those days. Not the truly classic Aristotelian stuff which scholars could read, but the Hellenistic bureaucratic jargon of the Rosetta Stone and similar such bumf. As for Demotic, nobody knew what it was including even whether it was alphabetic, until people who weren’t Champollion got hold of prints of the Rosetta Stone and discovered that it basically was.

Then Champollion really cracked the hieroglyphic stuff. He may not have been “good old” after all; he was apparently an annoying character who didn’t give others due credit, which not only made his life difficult but led to a lot of hair-splitting, or glyph-splitting, or stone-splitting, about the accuracy of his translation. But recently he’s been given full credit as an annoying genius.

So what? Who cares about a bunch of squiggles?

We do. That’s what really stands out to me about the whole venture. It might be that the ancient Egyptians had something really important to tell us about life, the universe and everything. Though if so, I still don’t know what it was and maybe won’t until the sphinx finally opens up. But we just wanted to know, to understand, to connect with them even if it was purely one-way, because they too were humans, groping through the fog, and they mattered even if their religion was an unholy mess.

There’s a huge contrast between the West, with its obsession with historical memory, even of non-Western peoples, and the habit in much of the world of ignoring or erasing it because it had not achieved the degree of perfection of those doing the destroying. An attitude which helps explain why that degree was and is so low, from Nazis to ISIL.

In some sense people were determined to decipher hieroglyphic in the Hillary-Everest spirit. Just because it is there, we’re going to figure out what it says. But even more it’s because people were there and we just had to say hello, we’re here too, how was it on the banks of the Nile back then? And by golly we managed to read the squiggles and get some idea.

P.S. What’s with the pyramids? You can level with us, so to speak. How did you do it? And why?

One thing I really hate is when someone blows up the Parthenon. Which they did on September 26, 1687.

Now you might point the finger-bone of blame at the Venetians, whose artillery touched it off. But they in turn might note that marble doesn’t habitually explode unless some tasteless vandal is, say, storing gunpowder there. Which the Ottomans were.

Yes, it’s our old friends the Turks. Having captured Athens in 1458 they promptly… what did they do? Right. They turned it into a mosque. Thanks for respecting the religious impulses of others even if you consider them mistaken.

Then came the disaster of 1687, during the “Great Turkish War” from 1683-1699, the same one in which the Ottomans attacked Vienna for the last time, or so we hope. The Venetians were trying to recapture Athens, of all outrageous infidel provocations. And so the Turks fortified the Acropolis and filled it with gunpowder even though they’d already blown up the Propylaea or “entrance” to the Athenian Acropolis in 1656.

As Oscar Wilde noted in a different context, one might be regarded as a misfortune. Two looks like carelessness. And indeed it speaks of carelessness, if not contempt, toward the achievements of other cultures and civilizations, the same inability to appreciate the beauty and nobility of human striving toward the divine even if misguided that led the Taliban to destroy ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan or the deliberate destruction of shrines in Iraq by ISIL and in Mali by various Islamist rebels.

Beautiful as the Parthenon’s remains are today, we have sketches from the mid-17^th century that show how much more had survived intact for over 1500 years until this catastrophe. And while one might also blame the Venetians for targeting the Parthenon, which the Ottomans may have thought they wouldn’t given its historic value and beauty, the decision to use it as a military asset is surely the main cause of the disaster.

OK, so the Turks had an issue with defending Athens and it might have seemed a good place to store munitions. But it wasn’t given what happened. And anyway, sometimes there are things more important than keeping your illegitimate conquests. Or not, depending who you are.

Lord Elgin takes a lot of heat for having collected a lot of what was left of the Parthenon and took it to the British Museum with the disputed permission of the Sultan. But at least he wanted to preserve and display it.

It sure beats blowing it up, through malice, carelessness or a combination of the two.

The newspaper business is a precarious one. No, no, I’m not going to whine about how we were on easy street with ad revenue until some fool invented the Internet. I’m talking about the sad, inspiring tale of “Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick” which appeared in Boston on September 25, 1690 and… promptly disappeared.

It has the distinction of being the first newspaper published in the Americas. There had been single-sheet “broadsides”. But now you got one of those multipage things you can’t cope with on a bus and I can only imagine what it was like in a carriage or wagon. (BTW I am old enough to remember the first appearance of the Toronto Sun, following the demise of the old Telegram, with ads in the subway saying “You don’t have to be Houdini to read the sun” and showing someone not looking at all like Houdini failing to escape a broadsheet. But I digress.)

I love the name. Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. With lots of “ks” despite the drudgery of typesetting in those pre-digital days. Never mind “National Post” or “Globe” or “Star”. Let’s go long. Especially with the brilliant acronym POBFAD. I also love the fact that it promised to appear monthly “or, if any Glut of Occurrences happen, oftener.”

That’s quite an “if” to contemplate in the modern world with its obsession with novelty and an ever-faster pace of change. It’s also disquieting, especially for someone with claims to be a journalist, to reflect on what we would do if there was only enough news to publish once a month except in the unusual event of a “glut of occurrences”. Or to wonder whether we manage to create the impression of such a glut every day by failing to distinguishing the truly important from the trivial and faddish on the theory that there has to be news, an endless stream of it, or we couldn’t print it.

In the case of POBFAD, it turns out there was a glut of occurrences directly related to its publication. It was a one-event glut. But one is enough if it’s the colonial government striking you down five days later as presumptuous, offensive and inaccurate and insisting that anyone wishing to “Set forth any thing in Print” get a state licence.

In fact Americans went right on publishing things the authorities considered scurrilous, not always without cause, especially from the time of the early 18^th-century Great Awakening. And these newspapers played an important role in the development of a colonial identity leading up to the Revolution at which point the authorities certainly had a “glut of occurrences” on their hands.

Looking back, I’d rather be killed by the Internet than the Massachusetts government. At least that way you can still blog. I think POBFAD would be a good name for a blog, come to think of it. Even if the Internet sometimes seems to represent the ultimate glut of non-occurrences.

Here’s something that went nowhere. On September 24, 1852, Henri Giffard became the first man to… No, you have no idea. Neither did I. And yet I once again have to tip my hat to pioneers of a technology that won’t die but never really lived. Because he was the first man to drive a blimp using a steam engine.

I suppose I should say a “dirigible” since he was French. And what he did was pretty cool. It was the first passenger dirigible. Others had planned steam engines in Zeppelin/blimp/dirigibles, including Australian Dr. William Bland, who exhibited a model and designs at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London of one he thought could go 50 miles per hour in theory. But Giffard’s went in fact, with a mighty 3 horsepower engine and a steering apparatus that actually worked.

Which is cool. But what I really like, in the spirit of all those early airplanes flapping mightily then crashing onto their hapless pilot in ungainly fragments, is the idea of getting into a bag of hydrogen with a 19th-century coal-fired steam engine. I mean, what could go wrong? (I should mention that when I first took my wife to my parents’ cottage, which did not have electricity, she expressed concern about the safety of the propane lights, stove and yes fridge. I replied in the true 19th-century pioneer spirit that all I was doing was putting an open flame to explosive compressed gas and could see no reason for unease. In fact the fridge did later explode but luckily we weren’t there and it was over half a century old so I suppose it had a good excuse.)

Not much did go wrong. In 1852, I mean. Especially considering what might have. Giffard, who had the good sense to point the exhaust pipe down rather than up toward all that flammable hydrogen, drove his dirigible 27 km from Paris to Trappes (I told you it went nowhere) and could not get back because of high winds that overpowered his mighty engine. But he did turn back and forth and in a circle, proving a powered airship was, indeed, dirigible.

Enthusiasts are still waiting for blimps to be the transportation of the future. And the recent headline “World’s biggest aircraft ‘the Flying Bum’ crashes on test flight” tells you they may have a long wait ahead of them. But I’m still impressed by anyone who’d get into a steam-powered dirigible, crank it up and say “Let’s hit the sky” or however you say it in French. And then not hit it in an uncontrolled fashion, as the first man to fly from Paris to Trappes thanks to the explosion of his fuel and levitation sources simultaneously of the sort that, I gather, claimed that old fridge one otherwise peaceful afternoon.

It’s easy to poke fun at Harvard. When I was at UT Austin we used to call it “the UT of the North”. Not, you understand, from any sense of insecurity. But however that may be, I want to tip my mortarboard today to its first graduating class… on September 23, 1642. That was fast.

Well, in some ways not. Harvard was actually founded in 1636 so the six-year BA is evidently not entirely a 20^th-century slacker invention. But what was fast, bold and inspiring was that the first major wave of settlers only arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, Puritans fleeing Charles I’s dissolution of Parliament and effort to impose Laud’s Liturgy on the church.

Six years later they started a university that not only still stands, it towers. Everybody has heard of Haaaavaaaad and not just in the United States.

Now I said it was bold. And I mean partly because when the “Great and General Court,” the precursor to the Massachusetts legislature, voted the thing into existence in 1636 it didn’t have any students. Or professors. Or buildings. Though in 1638 it did acquire the first known printing press in North America. But it was bold in a much deeper and arguably equally reckless sense.

The Great and General Court had no formal authority to establish a university. In Britain you needed permission from on high. But the settlers figured that as Englishmen they were free and would do as they liked.

I have a lot of problems with Puritans including their feeling that freedom to do as you liked included freedom of communities to meddle in the affairs of individuals. (The “visible saints” of early New England are still highly visible in the mavens of PC today.) But I do like their devotion to individual initiative and the right of citizens to manage their own affairs.

I even like their devotion to education. Even if I still laugh at the joke about the Texas freshman at Harvard going up to a senior reading Nietzche under a tree and saying “’Scuze me, where’s the library at?” only to be favoured with a withering glare and a haughty, “My dear fellow, this is Haaavaaad, and at Haaavaaad we do not end sentences with prepositions.”

“Oh. Thanks. Where’s the library at, you jerk?”