In a sign of a more cosmopolitan era, on February 22 Charles VIII "the Affable" of France marched into Naples to claim its throne. It didn’t work, as the grand schemes of Kings of France often did not. But it’s interesting to reflect on a period in which neither the French nor the Italians would regard it as in principle offensive to have a French king on an Italian throne, whatever they thought of the actual claimant.

In fairness, Charles did rather better in boldly marrying Anne of Brittany in 1491. It was bold because technically she had already married Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, by proxy and possibly not properly. By bagging Brittany instead of the Hapsburgs getting it he did help France avoid Hapsburg encirclement and emerge as a great power. The same is not true of his Italian venture.

Having somehow inherited a legally, morally and practically dubious claim to the throne of Naples, reinforced by a somewhat cynical Pope Innocent VIII, he made various deals with other important monarchs and then conquered Italy without much apparent difficulty in late 1494 and early 1495, to the joy of Savonarola but the concern of many other players including a new Pope, Alexander VI. His enemies created the League of Venice against him and he was more or less driven out of Italy in 1495, a great deal poorer but apparently no wiser. And wars would continue over Italy for 50 years, convulsing Western European geopolitics to no good purpose at much cost especially to Italians.

As for Charles, who if he was affable was so largely on the surface, he banged his head on a doorframe in 1498 and fell down dead. (OK, he fell into a coma and died nine hours later but as banging your head on a door and perishing at age 27 goes it was pretty quick.) He left France, his dynasty and Italy in a right mess. So on the whole not a good king.

Still, I do find it odd that we pride ourselves on our cosmopolitan, tolerant and multicultural attitudes. Yet we retain a kind of Wilsonian fascination with ethnic states to the point that it seems strange, even perverse, to have a French King seeking the throne of Naples, an Austrian Hapsburg seeking to rule Brittany and so on.

There were good reasons why they should not have done so, primarily that this particular French King should also not have ruled France, nor the profligate Habsburg Maximilian I of Austria, who stuck the Holy Roman Empire with a debt it took a century to pay off. But ethnicity seems to me to have nothing to do with it.

What could be more quintessentially Scottish than the Shetland and Orkney Islands? Bleak, remote, picturesque, the ideal location for a hardy folk and their hardy ponies. By reputation the Scots won’t go rock climbing unless they have "full conditions" namely rain and wind that deter even other people crazy enough to rock climb. Och aye mon.

It is therefore a bit surprising to learn that both these island chains, which to my shame I hadn’t realized were northeast of John o’ Groats in the ancestral county of Caithness to which I have not been, itself allegedly more than a little remote, belonged to Norway until the 15^th century.

Of course a lot of things "belonged" to Norway in the sense of having been seized by ferocious Vikings over the previous millennium or so. (And parenthetically I often wonder how those who feel that within North America we should do a kind of ethnic reset of landholdings to 1500 think we should undo the impact of those raids, invasions and random chaos.) But these two island chains, it turns out, wound up in Scottish hands via a pawn shop.

Perhaps you don’t fancy your chances of wandering into such an establishment with "Mainland" and its cousins (yes, "Mainland" is the largest of the Shetlands) under your coat and hoping the man at the desk will advance some money without a lot of questions about provenance. But it actually is what happened on February 20 of 1469 when Christian I of Norway put them up as security because he was having trouble scraping together a dowry for his daughter Margaret to marry James III of Scotland in what I suppose was regarded on both sides as a shrewd dynastic move.

It wasn’t. James III’s grandiose European schemes were of no benefit to Norway or his own people who he didn’t bother trying to govern well. And like so many of the Stuarts’ cunning plans James III’s ended badly, with his death in battle against rebellious nobles in 1488. (His son James IV was killed in the disastrous defeat by the English at Flodden. His son James V died shortly after the disastrous defeat by the English at Solway Moss. But I digress.)

The point is that Christian I pawned the islands and never redeemed them, Norway apparently becoming less interested in these picturesque rocks after unifying with Denmark which was bigger, warmer and less inaccessible. In 1472 they were officially annexed to the Scottish crown.

So what could be more quintessentially Scottish than the Shetland and Orkney Islands? I’ll tell you. Getting them in a pawn shop for a bargain price.

Sometimes things are just too easy to ridicule. Like Poland's "Wedding to the Sea" on February 10, 1920. It was so popular there that they had another one in 1945 under the Communists. In fact quite a few. But we should not let Communism, or cynicism, spoil things for us. And in fact the 1920 ceremony, though absurd, is also touching.

The reason it happened, or at least the occasion, was that following World War I Poland had regained access to the Baltic Sea, lost more than a century earlier in 1793 when its neighbours had partitioned it again but not for the last time. Including in the 20^th century when Hitler and Stalin did it in 1939. Poland is in a bad neighbourhood and quite frankly has deserved better of history than it has usually received.

It was partly dismembered in 1772 by Prussia and Russia. They did it again in 1793 at which point Poland lost access to the sea, and then in 1795 they and Austria did it and Poland lost access to Poland, vanishing from the map.

It was briefly sort of resurrected by Napoleon, as the Duchy of Warsaw, after which Russia created a Kingdom of Poland from which it later removed another chunk including Warsaw itself which you’d think was sort of clearly Polish. And after crushing a Polish uprising in 1831 the Russians decided to teach their ungrateful slaves a lesson and recrushed them. Ditto after the 1863 uprising when they tried to replace Polish with Russian.

Things were better in the Austrian bit. But not, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, the Prussian one. Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that after Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary all managed to lose World War I, Poland reappeared thanks to the Treaty of Versailles. Russia attacked again, of all things. But lost.

Back to our wedding.

In October 1919 General Jozef Haller was given the task of peacefully reoccuping formerly German formerly Polish Pomerelia, which has Gdansk in it. As the Germans mostly yielded it peacefully, with a bit of sabotage, the 16th Infantry Division under Haller reached the Baltic Sea. And at Puck, which has nothing to do with hockey or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Haller conjured up a rather touching if theatrical ceremony with a sermon, raising of the Polish Navy flag to a 21 gun salute, and after local fishermen cut a hole in the ice Haller threw in a platinum ring and said "In the name of the Holy Republic of Poland, I, General Jozef Haller, am taking control of this ancient Slavic Baltic Sea shore".

A commemorative post was erected and, predictably, destroyed by the Nazis 19 years later. But a replica now stands in the Port of Puck next to Haller’s bust.

Obviously the great pride and relief Poles took in getting their nation back was short-lived as they got brutally rumbled by their neighbours again and then subjected to hideous Nazi and Stalinist tyranny. And it took some gall for the Stalinists to pose as liberators in 1945 right down to permitting new versions of the ceremony. But there are still reenactments to this day.

OK, so it’s not exactly canonical. But despite the superficial absurdity, when I think of all that Poland has endured, I find it endearing, even moving.

Happy anniversary.

My latest for The Rebel:

February 9 is a nice anniversary for people who like nuclear missiles. Because on this date in 1959 the first ever ICBM became operational, the R-7 Semyorka, at Plesetsk. Yes, you are correct. It was a Soviet weapon. Indeed the reason people panicked over Sputnik, itself a harmless little beeping satellite, wasn’t just that the dang Russkis seemed to be getting ahead in the knowledge economy of the 20^th century so American students would have to hit the math books harder or be outproduced and left in the dust. (Yes, that chestnut is getting a little stale; can you go into a frenzy over "STEM" in schools?) It was that precisely the same technology that could put a satellite into orbit could also take a nuclear warhead up there and then release it onto an inexorable unpowered downward "ballistic" course toward, um, your house.

Now it is true that once both superpowers developed reasonably reliable launch-on-warning rockets it created a balance of terror that kept the peace. Absent nuclear weapons I think it is inconceivable that there would not have been a third conventional war in Europe by the 1980s. And there was a certain wilful embrace of neurosis by intellectuals in the 1950s with the imminence of nuclear annihilation as a bit of an excuse. But that’s about all I have to say of an encouraging nature here.

The R-7 is a classic Soviet story in many ways including that its name was always classified so it was code-named SS-6 Sapwood by NATO. (The Soviets always refused to give the names they used for their missiles during strategic arms talks, manifesting a fetish for counterproductive and offensive secrecy that made their general mantra of "trust us" through clenched teeth exceptionally ludicrous.) Apparently they called it by its GRAU index moniker "8K71" when in a formal mood whereas "Semyorka" means "the seven" so R7 Semyorka is a bit of redundant unnecessary repetition of the same thing again. (If you’re wondering, GRAU is the Russian acronym for the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate of the Ministry of Defence, for Glavnoye raketno-artilleriyskoye upravleniye.)

The "Semyorka" was a bit of a beast, weighing 280 metric tons, 112 feet long and burning kerosene plus liquid oxygen. It took 20 hours to prepare for launch, its massive launch system could not be hidden from US spy planes, and it could not stay on alert for more than a day. And it wasn’t very accurate or reliable. In fact it was never deployed operationally although it did get Sputnik up there and led to a family of rockets that got the Soviets into space although never to the moon and in fact failed more often than they succeeded for years.

It didn’t help that the R7s were in Plesetsk, which even Russians might consider to be in the middle of nowhere and with inclement weather unfriendly to construction and machinery. (It’s about 500 miles northeast of Moscow.) But basically the Semyorka was hugely inexpensive, worked really badly and scared other people into making better weapons of their own and regarding the Soviet government as hostile and mindlessly belligerent.

So not a nice anniversary for the rest of us.

In my latest National Post column I argue that if Donald Trump's "America First" slogan worries us, and it should, now is a great time to lead by example.

On this date in history, Feb. 1 Taiwan was conquered by China. Which is worth noting because the current regime in Beijing dreams of a replay.

It’s also therefore worth noting that it happened as recently, historically speaking, as 1662. And that it required a nine-month siege and was followed by a far from smooth process of filling the island with mainlanders and driving the original inhabitants into the hills or assimilating them.

Some Chinese might nevertheless take pride in the successful 1662 invasion since it took Taiwan back from the Dutch East India Company which could hardly claim to be indigenous and which was unpopular in part at least for suppressing local traditions like head-hunting. But it does not establish as an incontrovertible tenet of international law or morality that China and Taiwan must always be one country.

Now it is also true that since the Chinese conquest, the island was essentially taken over by mainlanders, the aboriginals now being about 2% of the population. But the key point is that the claim that Taiwan has always been part of China is untrue.

It was not part of China before 1662, nor after 1895 when Japan took it. Which I’m not excusing, especially given the aggressive intolerance of Imperial Japan. But I am pointing out that only for 333 years from the 17^th to the 19th centuries, and a further four between the defeat of Japan in the Second World War and the ousting of the Chinese Nationalists from the mainland in 1949, was Taiwan part of China.

If you take the semi-Wilsonian view that nations must be ethnically pure to avoid war, and that all members of a given ethnicity ought to be members of a single nation, then it makes sense that Taiwan and China should be reunited. Ideally, I would say, under the democratic free enterprise government of the former rather than the Communist tyrants in Beijing. And they might legitimately be unified it if is the will of the inhabitants of both established in successful referendums. But otherwise the desire of one big country to swallow another smaller one is aggression even if the people of the bigger country are generally for it. And if you do not subscribe to the ethnic purity theory of nationhood, there is no real logic to the argument that Taiwan and China must be one country so it’s OK to do it by force.

That Communists falsify history to justify military adventurism does not qualify as such logic should go without saying. These days apparently it has to be said anyway.

While I’m on the subject of St. Leninsburg it is fitting to note that today marks the end of the brutal 872-day Nazi siege of what was then Leningrad between 8 September 1941 and January 27, 1944. Whatever one thinks of the regime and the name, it was an astonishing demonstration of tenacity under circumstances that literally defy belief.

It cost an estimated 580,000 German and three and a half million Soviet military casualties and a million civilians, over 600,000 during the siege and an astounding 400,000 in the evacuation (which gives you some idea of the efficiency and compassion of Bolshevism). The inhabitants were menaced, obviously, not only with death by bombardment or bombing but also and primarily by starvation.

Among the siege tales of horror were several thousand arrests for cannibalism, mostly of those already dead of natural causes although more than 10% involved deliberate killing of humans for food, and literally thousands of cases of murdering people for their ration cards. Not that there was much to be had even with a card; during the siege people ate their pets, often touchingly trading with a neighbour so as not to eat their own. There are even statues to two hero cats from the siege, Elisey and Vasilisa, though they turn out to be celebrated not for being food but for what they ate, being part of a shipment of cats delivered from Yaroslavl to help deal with the overwhelming plague of rats in the shattered city.

There are two stories I find uplifting about the resilience of the human spirit under such ghastly conditions. One is that the authorities had created an air raid system involving a metronome broadcast over the radio that speeded up if German bombers were approaching. After air raids became less frequent the radio station often broadcast music instead. But during breaks in the music the metronome resumed to assure listeners the city’s resistance had not collapsed, and apparently hungry, cold, lonely, frightened people would huddle by the radio and draw strength from the steady unquenchable tick tock tick tock. And the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad includes an underground museum whose only sounds are emergency broadcasts and the ticking of a metronome. (Horribly, an earlier Leningrad Defence Museum and many of its exhibits were destroyed in a fit of Stalin’s jealousy that saw the heroic siege declared a myth and many who had led the defence of the city purged by kangaroo courts and sent to Siberia or shot.)

The other is a soldier’s story. Kenneth Adelman, a top U.S. arms control negotiator under Ronald Reagan, tells of meeting Soviet Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev at the 1987 Reykjavik summit and learning that as a young man Akhromeyev had been tasked with defending a road outside Leningrad during the siege and that for 18 months including harsh Russian winters he never set foot inside a building. "'Never?' I asked. 'No. We were told to stay there. We stayed there.'" (Akhromeyev also told Adelman that only two of 32 boys in his high school class survived the war and that indeed eight of 10 males born in the Soviet Union in 1923, as he was, died during the conflict.)

Such heroism deserved a better cause than Stalinism, even in opposition to Naziism. But it is heroism all the same. And while I wish it had never been necessary, I do recognize and am inspired by their capacity to persevere through conditions unbelievable even to hear about, let alone endure.