So this is the anniversary of the “Great Stand on the Ugra River”. Or at least part of it. Never heard of it? See, it’s a tributary of the Oka which in turn leads to the Volga. Oh. You meant the stand. Well, apparently it was pretty much the end of the Tatar Yoke over Russia, in 1480.

Now I’ve written elsewhere in this series about the lamentable political history of Russia including the sad way the newly independent Tsars seem to have learned all the wrong lessons from the period of Mongol dominance. And it’s all true. But it doesn’t diminish the value of this incident beginning on October 8, 1480 when the army of Akhmat, Khan of the Great Horde, tried to force the Ugra and were stopped by the forces of Grand Prince Ivan III of Muscovy including by their possession of firearms that the Horde lacked.

I said Oct. 8 was part of the stand. And it was, because the action went on for four days. Then the armies sat glaring at one another while Ivan tried successfully to reconcile with his own brothers whose troops then showed up swelling the Russian ranks and the Khan waited unsuccessfully for his ally the King of Poland whose troops then didn’t show up not swelling the Mongol ranks.

The latter withdrew and a few months later Akhmat was killed in battle with other Hordies. And the Mongols never really came back.

I wish Russian history since had turned out better, that Muscovy had somehow got back onto the open, European path Kievan Rus’ had been on until the Mongol Empire showed up with fire and sword and Möngke Khan. But sometimes sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof or in this case the heroism of the Russian soldiers and the steady hand of Ivan III.

At any rate, if you’d been there that day you’d have been cheering for them. And they did win. So that’s got to count for something.

On this date in 1879, Otto von Bismarck got too clever by half. Or maybe he had that problem all along. But on October 7 of 1879, his plan to keep Germany from being isolated by isolating France and Russia began to mature with the signing of the “Twofold Covenant” between Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Now you might think the alliance between these two central European states was natural, precisely because they were central European states, whatever else you might think of it. For instance that the Central Powers were the aggressors in World War I, or that land powers tend to lose to sea powers in big geopolitical showdowns, or that attacking the Anglosphere is a bad idea no matter how carefully you prepare, or that Austria-Hungary was a useless ally for anyone to have. (Incidentally Hitler shared this last view, calling Austria-Hungary “this mummy of a state” in Mein Kampf, and while he was indescribably evil he was regrettably prone to strategic insights including about the defects of Germany’s first attempt to conquer the world, which is why he got as far as he did and did as much harm as he did before finally being stopped. Mind you, he chose to be allied with Mussolini’s Italy so maybe he wasn’t that smart.)

In any case, there was real genius in Bismarck’s successful alliance with a nation his own Prussia had fairly recently humbled, in 1866, in one of the wars in rapid succession that created a mostly united Germany. Minus some of the German-speaking bits Hitler went about accumulating on his way to aggression, genocide and ultimate defeat. Moreover Germany's unification and neighbour-attacking was generally driven or at least justified by nationalism, which the Austro-Hungarian rulers rightly saw as a deadly threat to a state whose very name indicated the presence of several important and very self-conscious minorities and which, indeed, was the figurative trigger behind the literal trigger whose pulling killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and in turn set off the cascading series of threats among members of the rigid yet rickety European alliance system that plunged the world into World War I.

That alliance system was, in turn, Bismarck’s great achievement or at any rate his doing. True, he was gone by the time the great crisis of 1914 came, and those who controlled Germany were lesser lights than his. But his light shone in the wrong direction and put them where they found themselves tempted to strike fast and hard to solve dilemmas Bismarck’s alliance system had made worse not better.

It was Bismarck’s obsession with keeping Germany from being isolated that created a menacing sense of isolation among almost everyone else, even his supposed ally Italy and certainly France on the west side and Russia on the east side of his central European bloc. Indeed, the “Twofold Covenant” of 1879 specifically provided that Germany and Austria-Hungary would support one another if either got into a war with Russia, while they would maintain benevolent neutrality if either got into a war with somebody else or should I say quelqu’un d’autre.

Bismarck then proceeded to sign treaties with just about everybody else including Russia. But everybody thought he was up to something and that something would involve German troops crossing their border, which is why France and Russia gradually created an alliance that was formalized in 1894. And why Britain and France created one in 1904, and added Russia in 1907.

Now the wise course for Germany would have been to give up the notion of attacking everybody until it achieved “Deutschland über alles” whose original lyrics speak of Germany stretching from the Memel river (in Belarus) to the Meuse (in France) and from the Adige (Etsch) in Italy which created understandable anxiety or perhaps more exactly angst in the nations suddenly and musically informed of the need to start either German lessons or military training. Unfortunately Bismarck was clever rather than wise.

Too clever by half. With appalling consequences.

On this date… let me take a deep breath and really let this one go… the earliest opera we still have had its first performance. Euridice by Jacopo Peri was performed in Florence on October 6, 1600 “signifying” according to Wikipedia “the beginning of the Baroque period.”

Obviously it’s an oversimplification or at least a very bold simplification to date the start or end of an artistic period to a particular day. But Oct. 6 1600 is as good a day as any because both opera and Baroque are, how shall I put this in a suitably Philistine manner, rather over the top.

I mean in one sense opera is just theatre where they dance and sing instead of walking and talking. And why not? Dancing and singing are good… unless I’m doing them, but that’s a topic for another day. Or perhaps decade. Like the 2070s. Meanwhile can I just say that the thing about opera is that it rather is to singing as Baroque is to decoration. It’s incredibly impressive. But it’s dazzling, overdone and in the end I admire the technical accomplishment more than I enjoy the thing.

At this point you’re probably raising your hand, or baton, to suggest that I don’t seem to know much about opera. And I don’t. Once I’ve told the joke about the diva who had no sideways I’m pretty much done except I know Mozart wrote some and they were probably among the best. I’m not even all that sure whether the dancing is in operas or mostly in ballet where people make impossible feats look easy but don’t sing much though I’m pretty sure there’s dancing in at least one Mozart opera because I watched Amadeus. So there. But clearly there are different kinds of opera, some of which try not to go over the top and fail and others embrace it with gusto-o-o-ooooooo (here the wine glass shatters).

Indeed, early opera was thought too frivolous and so some very straight-laced people tried to make it long and dull. Or allow “opera buffa” for rubes who actually liked to laugh during an evening out. (Or out cold if the opera was dull enough.) Then they started castrating people which is just never a good thing. Then you got “bel canto” which means beautiful singing which makes me wonder what had gone before and why. Then they decided the songs were too intricate and showy and maybe it would be better with some actual tunes, an idea associated I gather with Verdi. Already I like him. But he still wrote operas so maybe not so much. And people followed him up with melodramatic opera which strikes me as painting the lily. (Yes, that is the real expression, from Shakespeare’s King John, not “gilding the lily” which makes no sense. I assure you.)

So on it goes. And there I sit sympathizing with Captain Haddock, in Tintin, saying whenever he hears Bianca Castafiori sing it reminds him of the hurricane that struck his ship off the Azores.

By the way, there seems to be an opinion out there that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, that in trying to revive classical art in the “Renaissance” or rebirth of not being dirty poor ignorant and superstitious during the Dark and Middle Ages (another misunderstanding, incidentally) some smart-alecky Italians thought the “chorus” sang in Greek plays and maybe everyone else did. So they revived something that never existed. The first “opera” ever, Dafne by Peri, “is unfortunately lost” according to Wikipedia. I’m not sure how unfortunate it is given that first tries are not always successful and given that Euridice isn’t generally performed today because it’s not, you know, any good. But however that may be, opera caught on and there’s nothing we can do about it now.

On October 5 of 1793 the French government “disestablished” the Catholic Church, that is, ditched Catholicism as the official national religion. Which was definitely the right idea and, as usual, was done in the wrong way.

It was the right idea because of that business about rendering unto Caesar. It’s not the business of the policeman to tell you which church to attend or to shake out the contents of your pocket into a particular collection plate whether or not you show up and pay attention or snooze through the sermon. Nobody can be saved by being forced to act as if they were virtuous even if the government knew what virtuous was which is pretty unlikely.

The French Church itself had lost sight of the question in many ways, another pernicious consequence of being linked to the state. It is one more unique achievement of the Anglosphere that you could have a church, even an established one which the Anglican Church was and rather feebly still is, that was neither a slave of the state nor constantly scheming to rule it from behind the rood screen. But in meddling constantly in matters of state the Church became horribly worldly and, unsurprisingly, blind to the gross defects of the established order that eventually erupted into the bloody French Revolution.

To condemn the Ancien Régime is not to praise the Revolutionary one, of course, any more than to denounce Tsarism is to praise Lenin and Stalin. The Revolution may have exploded with uncontrollable force because the old system crushed and smothered society for so many centuries, preventing the venting of harmful pressure in less disastrous ways. But that in no way diminishes the destructive violence of the Revolution. Including in matters of religion.

The logical and proper thing to do would have been to tell the church from now on we neither enforce your orthodoxy nor collect your tithes. It is up to you to attract the loyalty and support of the citizens. And you are free to criticize politicians of every stripe just as every other Frenchman and woman is in this land of liberty as described on paper in our noble constitution. But of course that’s not what they did.

Instead of separating Catholicism from the state they tried to separate it from the French. They set themselves the goal of eradicating belief and practice in the Church altogether. They seized its property, subordinated the clergy to the government instead of turning them into private citizens from an official point of view, setting rules for their election by parishioners and condemning them to death if they did not swear an oath to the new order, then set about destroying statues, icons, crosses, bells and all signs of Catholicism and ultimately of all Christian churches.

Very quickly, of course, they created their own religion in name as well as in fact, a ghastly farce involving the Cult and Goddess of Reason (including a formal celebration of her in Notre Dame Cathedral on Nov. 10 1793) and then later the Cult of the Supreme Being promoted by Robespierre shortly before the Revolution devoured him too, things in which virtually nobody believed and nobody worshiped. And it is typical of such an approach that behind the hollow noble words there was always a covetous determination to seize the silver and gold to finance revolutionary wars.

I do not mind that the state legalized divorce despite Catholic doctrine. There are in my view good reasons for making divorce difficult but, like taking over the birth, death and marriage registries, it seems to be a sensible part of rendering unto Caesar of the sort grudgingly and insincerely granted by Louis XVI in the November 1787 “Edict of Tolerance” that was too little and far too late. But massacring clergy, either through mob violence or a justice system that increasingly resembled mob violence (for instance mass drownings of priests), was a horrible thing to do.

By 1795 they actually permitted public worship under some conditions, like no bells, processions or those bits of wood in a sort of X. By the time Napoleon made some sort of peace in 1801 with Pope Pius VII, whose predecessor died in French captivity, thousands of clergy had been massacred and tens of thousands had fled. And in 1905 the French state went back to aggressively promoting secularism. A very odd conception indeed of freedom of conscience, and one hauntingly similar to that of the Ancien Régime except that it seeks to enforce lack of hope instead of a particular vision of hope.

In some sense it worked. Many Frenchmen and Frenchwomen were apparently only going to church because they had to, doing neither them nor the church any good. But it is unfortunate, though typical of the sort of explosion that follows long centuries of oppression, that the new regime managed to imitate many of the worst failings of its predecessor in even worse form while insisting, and for the most part believing, it was doing the opposite.

Today is… well, arguably it’s October 4th. But if you ask Pope Gregory’s opponents it’s more like September 21. Which doesn’t mean your bills aren’t due.

The reason Gregory XIII was messing with the calendar is not the alarming grandiosity of modern tyrants who rename cities, mountains and then months or days as they go progressively more insane. It’s that the old Julian calendar had the length of the day slightly off and as the centuries flicked by it got worse and worse. So Gregory brought in that business of skipping Feb. 29 in years ending 00 unless they are divisible by 400.

Don’t worry. It only means 2100 isn’t a leap year and if you’re around to care then you’re doing pretty well even if you forget. This year was; 2020 will be; 2024 will be; 2400 will be. Relax. But by 1582 the accumulated difference was putting various festivals including Easter some distance from where they belonged relative to the earth going around the sun exactly once which many people persist in believing is intimately related with the length of a year, so the Pope got some guys with sharp quills to figure out how long the year was, what to do about it and how to reset the calendar so it was right and would stay right.

Naturally there was a hoo hah. It’s a rule of public policy that no matter how sensible something is, it will bring out at least some of the outraged reactions a really stupid or nasty idea produces. It’s one reason it can be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in political debates and yes, it was happening even before the Internet worked its transformative magic on so many of us, sending us to dwell in the slime beneath crumbling bridges. But I digress.

The point is, I’ve always cherished the riots that ensued in England when, belatedly, the Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1752 by which point the gap had grown to 11 days. Supposedly people erupted that the government was shortening their life, it was a Popish plot and who knows what all. The only reason there weren’t Hitler comparisons was he didn’t exist yet and neither did the Internet.

No, wait. Another reason is the riots never happened. It turns out they were just an urban legend. Dang. But that’s what happens when you research things (including, since I’ve been dumping on the Internet, the awkward fact that I disposed of a belief I’d been savouring for four decades by Googling). Apparently it was all a misunderstanding of a painting by William Hogarth or some such.

Now if you’re wondering why the British took so long to do something so obvious, it’s something to do with people’s uneasy feeling that it was a Popish plot. Of what sort I don’t know; see “hoo hah” above. But eventually they did it and so did most other people, generally sooner in Catholic than Protestant countries though even there the government had to act with its usual intelligent dispatch, though some churches held out on the grounds that no sane person would let the Pope tell them how long the year was or when the spring solstice was even if he was, you know, totally right.

So anyway, that’s why 2000 was a leap year but 1900 wasn’t. And why those riots that didn’t happen were totally silly. And yes, you still have to pay your bills. Indeed in Britain tax day is April 6 because it used to be “Lady Day,” March 25, a.k.a. the Feast of the Annunciation which also used to be the start of the new year (how convenient would that be, that it wasn’t even the first of a month?). And just because the government finally rearranged the calendar for everybody else, not only moving to the Gregorian system but also making Jan. 1 the first day of the year as of the start of 1752, it didn’t mean the tax people were about to adjust, let alone somehow get by with just 282 days of taxes in a year, 1751, that was… 282 days long, or 355 days of taxes in a year, 1752, that was… well, you get the idea. But that’s bureaucracy for you.

If you’re into violent and gross, then October 3 should hold a special appeal for you because it on that date, in 1283, the first certified hanging, drawing and quartering of a nobleman took place. If you’re not, you don’t want to know. It’s really gross.

What you don’t want to know is not that Dafydd ap Gruffydd is the first nobleman to have it done to him. Nor is it that, as the profusion of “d”s and the double “ff” will have suggested, he was a Welsh rebel against English rule. It’s what exactly goes into being hanged, drawn and quartered.

Now medieval law was harsh for a reason. The administrative resources of the state were limited and chaos, political and general, was a frighteningly clear and present danger, so you needed convincing deterrents. (I would add that in those days there was rather less sympathy for the criminal vis-à-vis the law-abiding person also.) Thus in 1238 a man who tried to assassinate King Henry III was, according to Matthew Paris, “dragged asunder” before being beheaded and having portions of his body dragged through a major city. Other such spectacles involved “disemboweling,” a rather clinically euphemistic term suggesting the withdrawal of the previously conferred embowelment rather than being gutted like a fish… or worse.

Which brings me to 1283 and the drawing. It was not, I assure you, the creating of your portrait to remember you after the other stuff although there is at least one singularly gruesome extant drawing of the procedure. It was the drawing out of your entrails. And before you laugh it off, to some extent anyway, on the grounds that after they hang you it’s all just desecration, when you were hanged before being drawn and quartered they didn’t drop you hard through a trapdoor with the rope behind your ear, cleanly breaking your neck as in the more merciful later version of death by hanging.

Oh no. Not at all. Instead they just dangled and strangled you for a while, before a jeering crowd that had followed you as you were pulled through the streets tied to some wood first, very possibly naked. You, not the crowd, I mean. And it’s important to the story because as HDQ matured as a punishment, after the warmup strangling they cut off your personal bits and burned them before your bulging eyes to emphasize that you were unworthy to have progeny. Then they “drew out” your embowelment and added it to the blaze, before cutting you into four pieces and displaying them to underline that crime does not pay.

It was first performed, along more or less these lines, to Dafydd ap Gruffydd because his rebellion against English authority and proclamation of himself as Prince of Wales and Lord of Snowdon so enraged Edward I that he demanded his courtiers think up some dramatic new form of punishment. Which they did, including putting his head on top of the Tower of London while his arms and legs went on a grand tour. (William Wallace apparently got off lightly, being beheaded before the really messy stuff got going.) Who says there was no progress in the Middle Ages?

I jest, in part. There was plenty of less bloody progress, from universities to Parliament. But there was also creativity in criminal justice for people who knew the stakes were high when they challenged the king’s authority. You have to admit this new punishment was memorable, and would make you think three times minimum about raising the standard of revolt. And I should also note that HDQ is eerily like a slow, gruesome form of execution John Smith describes being used by the aboriginal inhabitants of Virginia, and by racially motivated lynchings in the American South into the 20th century, which brings into question its originality and shows how similar people are in all times and places in a distinctly unflattering way.

I do not approve of hanging, drawing and quartering even for those clearly guilty of terrible crimes. I cannot. Not even for treason, genocide or for rape causing injury or death for which I would impose the death penalty.

There are things you can’t punish properly and you just send the person to a much higher court as quickly as the wheels of true justice can turn. And I find all mutilations of corpses, and of living people, an affront to the image of God in which I believe we are made, even in the heat of the moment in battle, let alone with calm deliberation. But I do sympathize with the desire for effective deterrence in criminal justice of a sort we don’t seem to achieve these days. And I suspect medieval people would be profoundly shocked at our endless and unaffordable legal proceedings, ruinous even for the innocent, and the light sentences we hand out to people we know have done terrible things. And rightly so.

We have moved too far from justice that was swift and severe. But hanging, drawing and quartering is still way too gross.

October 2 is the anniversary of the start of the Parsley Massacre in 1937. Which despite the name is not remotely comic. It was a five-day massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. And I for one knew nothing about it.

Not much is known. Estimates even of casualties vary enormously, from fewer than 600 to around 20,000. It’s not even known whether butchers working for Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo really did force potential victims to say the word “perejil,” Spanish for parsley, to see particularly from how they pronounced the “r” and the “j” whether they spoke with a French or Haitian Creole language or a Dominican Spanish one.

We do know that it was carried out on Trujillo’s orders. And he was a nasty dictator who dominated the Dominican Republic for decades whether officially holding office or not. He’s a bit unusual among nasty dictators in that he had the habit of renaming cities and mountains for himself one associates with ideologically grandiose tyrants without having had much in the way of systematic ideas. He mixed in a few laudable policies like opening doors to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s despite a general brutal denial of rights to anyone and manipulation of popular fear of disorder generally and crime by ethnic Haitians in particular. But really all that’s beside the point here.

What matters is to give at least passing remembrance to a group of poor, desperate people massacred in a dark corner of history and the globe, largely unnoticed at the time and forgotten since. The fact that we aren’t even sure to an order of magnitude how many perished under horrible conditions even by the standards of Dominica underlines just how little value anyone seems to have attached to them at the time or later.

The massacre had no geopolitical consequences. It didn’t even awaken the conscience of the world, or part of it, as the Holocaust and Holodomor did. True, Trujillo himself was eventually assassinated, in 1961, but more as part of failed sordid political maneuvering than in retaliation for all the murders he ordered and organized. And really it is hard to devise an appropriate punishment for having as many as 50,000 people killed over three decades, although I certainly favour executing such people.

What we can do is remember. Especially those wiped out so thoroughly, and with so little notice or protest, that they lack even a number let alone names.

Meanwhile back in France, October 1 is the anniversary of the first meeting of the Legislative Assembly in 1791, the body that gave us the terms “left” and “right” in politics. But mostly left.

Try to follow a quick dismal backstory here. In 1789 the hapless Louis XVI summoned the French parody equivalent of a Parliament, the Estates-General, for the first time since 1614. It promptly deadlocked, and then the “Third Estate,” the commoners, decided their chamber was the whole legislature and turned itself into the National Assembly. Then it became the National Constituent Assembly on the theory that the sovereign authority of the French people was in its hands.

It then proceeded to be in practice the entire government, a system known as “convention government,” where instead of checking the executive the legislature takes on that role as well and who’s going to stop us? Then it dissolved following elections to the Legislative Assembly, which despite the pale twitching figure of the king still wandering the stage was another example of convention government, with one unhelpful twist.

The rules for the 1791 election included that nobody who had sat in the National Assembly could be elected to the Legislative Assembly. Which given the foul odor in which the monarchy rightly found itself meant supreme power was almost entirely in the hands of people with no experience in national affairs. Instead they were buffeted by events and manipulated by power brokers operating outside the formal system including one Maximilien Robespierre, who had been in the National Assembly and in fact had put forward the motion that none of its members would be eligible for the Legislative Assembly.

As events spun out of control in 1792 and the king was arrested, the Legislative Assembly decided to dissolve itself less than a year after first meeting, and summon a new National Convention. And to that body Robespierre returned to direct the increasingly ghastly Reign of Terror including as a member of the Orwellian Committee of Public Safety that was effectively the executive branch in France during the worst excesses of the Revolution. (It is because it happened under the National Convention that we call this highly unsatisfactory arrangement “convention government.)

Would all this have happened with more experienced members in the Legislative Assembly? Very possibly. The pressures that exploded in France between 1789 and 1794 had been building for a very long time, from long before the last futile pre-revolutionary summoning of the Estates-General. But with all due respect to the undesirable qualities of career politicians, there is something to be said for experience and a steady hand in turbulent waters. And it sure didn’t help that France lacked those from 1791-92.

It’s not the only reason left devoured right more or less literally in this period. But it did help set the stage for it.