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

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

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

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

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

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

“Anyone with only a week to live will not find it in his interest to believe that all this is just a matter of chance. Now, if we were not bound by our passions, a week and a hundred years would come to the same thing.”

Pascal Pensées

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If a man really cannot make a fool of himself, we may be quite certain that the effort is superfluous.”

G.K. Chesterton in “A Defence of Heraldry” in The Defendant

[podcast title="News and Views with Rob Snow, September 9"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2016/September/RobSnow160909.mp3[/podcast]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"His character was of an average kind, rather free from vices than distinguished by virtues."

Tacitus