On this date in history, or possibly legend, October 27 312 AD, the Emperor Constantine had a vision of the Cross and the words "Εν Τούτῳ Νίκα" which, being hard to pronounce or understand, we now render as “in hoc signo vinces” which alas is also today hard to pronounce or understand. But it means “Through this sign you shall conquer” and as the Emperor did win the subsequent battle of the Milvian Bridge. And convert to Christianity along with the Empire of which he became sole ruler partly due to this battle.

Nowadays such stories are dismissed as the sort of silly superstition typical of the dumb people who populated the past. If you’re very lucky someone will try to discern a “genuine” scientific event, like a solar halo, that might have misled the Emperor into thinking he’d seen a cross, or perhaps think he’d been blessed by some solar deity and later muddled himself into believing it had been Christ. More likely they will argue that he wasn’t really a Christian because the sun god appeared on his monuments or coins.

It’s odd to think how rapidly the idea that he might have had a genuine vision has been banished. I don’t say disproved. It’s not even obvious to me how you would disprove it. Not that one should accept every claim to have seen a vision. And certainly nobody in the 4th century AD did so. Not even the deeply credulous. Definitely not the sophisticated, educated, intelligent and tough-minded sorts who fought and won battles for control of the greatest empire the world had ever known.

On the other hand, Constantine went from being not officially Christian to being officially Christian because, as far as we can tell, he himself recounted the story of the omen to Eusebius, who in his Life of Constantine says he heard it from the Emperor personally. Certainly something happened. And the odd thing about all the debunking of things that were widely believed for many centuries is that they tend to explain why history didn’t happen the way it did.

I don’t know if Constantine saw a vision or just found the story good propaganda. I don’t know whether he was long secretly a Christian due to his mother’s influence or whether he convinced her to convert. But I do know he decreed official toleration for Christians and when he knew he was dying urgently sought baptism, trying to reach the river Jordan but not making it.

So obviously he thought it was very important for some reason scholarship strives mightily to prove was not merely wrong but preposterous and probably insincere. Just as an enormous number of people from the early Apostles onward became Christians despite the manifest dangers of doing so and surface absurdity of the whole story. But apparently all of them were ignorant, deluded or weird.

Unlike we moderns, with our calm, rational, well-informed approach to everything.

“The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of custom is complete.”

John Stuart Mill On Liberty

Yes, today is still the anniversary of the Charlottetown Accord’s referendum defeat, and a jolly good reminder of why we should get to vote on fundamental changes to our Constitutional order. But since we did that last year, I want to celebrate a grim deed for which a guy actually got his comeuppance.

On Oct. 26, 1689, an Austrian General named Enea Silvio Piccolomini, leading an army counterattacking following the repulse of the Turks from the gates of Vienna, ordered the town of Skopje, the current capital of Macedonia, burned to the ground. Supposedly he did it to prevent the spread of cholera of which it was a hotbed, though there is some suspicion that it was partly retaliation for the siege of Vienna.

Either way it was an awful thing to do. One of very many that happen in history including war, to be sure. How many towns and cities have been sacked, their inhabitants massacred, ravished or both, I do not care to consider. And it’s especially bitter because the perpetrators, in a great many cases, got away with it or suffered some subsequent fate that was about equally likely to befall someone who had not taken part in such an event. Certainly the burning demolished much of Skopje and killed or drove out most of its inhabitants (the latter maybe not the best way not to spread cholera) and it never really rebounded.

In this case, not only was his army subsequently defeated. Piccolomini himself died soon afterward. Of cholera. And yes, it served him right.

“Economics is about how people make choices, the economist James Duesenberry remarked in the 1950s, and sociology is about how they don’t have any choices to make.”

The New Republic Feb. 5 1990 [I did not record the author’s name]

Yes, Oct. 25 is St. Crispin’s Day, as we all know from Shakespeare’s Henry V and that wonderful speech the playwright had the king give before a famous if pointless victory (see It Happened Today, Oct. 25, 2015). But I always wondered if the king had problems with his pronunciation.

As you doubtless recall, Henry initially says “This day is call’d the feast of Crispian” but later speaks of “Crispin’s day” then stammers “Crispin Crispian” before winding up magnificently with “Saint Crispin’s day”. But it turns out there were two of him. Not in the usual a bit confused folklore sense. They were twins. Or at least brothers.

Born to a noble Roman family, they fled to Soissons and preached by day while cobbling by night, which is why they are the patron saints of cobblers, curriers, tanners and leather workers. (Curriers, in case you're curious, took the tanned hide and further treated it to be strong, supple and waterproof before handing it to the guys with scissors, needles, hammers etc.) They so annoyed the local governor by being so pious, upstanding and do-goody that he had millstones tied round their necks and thrown in a river and, after that failed to do them in, the Emperor had them beheaded. Which I guess constitutes failing upward.

Unless they were born in Canterbury and fled to Faversham after their father was beheaded, where they took up cobbling and in some unspecified way later died. At any event they wound up with a plaque there and a pub in nearby Strood.

They were booted out of the universal liturgical calendar following Vatican II, still tied together. But at least they still apparently existed unlike Saint Valentine who might be another guy with the same name.

Anyway, nobody can boot them out of Shakespeare. And now I know why Henry says it two different ways.

I also like the very British name Strood, for what that’s worth.

“The reigning error of his life, was that he mistook the love for the practice of virtue, and was indeed not so much a good man, as the friend of goodness.”

Samuel Johnson in his Life of Richard Savage

In my latest National Post column I praise the Hill 70 Project and monument because if we forget the past, we lose the present as well.

According to Wikipedia, on October 24, 1260, “Chartres Cathedral is dedicated in the presence of King Louis IX of France; the cathedral is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.” Perhaps they felt that this was a fitting elevation of the Cathedral to truly grand status. It does not feel that way to me.

The cathedral is a magnificent achievement of Gothic architecture, that stunning and enduring tribute to the vision of the Middle Ages. Nothing, it seems to me, has quite the magnificence of a medieval castle or cathedral. History is still regarded in some circles as a largely unbroken tale of progress, or perhaps a tale of progress with a long dismal medieval dip. But I can think of nothing in all of architecture to rival these sorts of buildings, and in my view most of the stuff that even comes close is older, like the Temple of Hatshepsut.

Chartres is remarkable for a number of reasons including the speed with which it was built, dramatically renovating an older building on a site on which five cathedrals have stood. Hence it does not have the sometimes excessive rambling of buildings put together over centuries with several compelling but not entirely compatible visions directing different parts of the work. It was done when Gothic was at its height and in full possession of its powers and its confidence. And it has survived largely intact.

True, one spire was smitten by lightning in 1506 and rebuilt in the “flamboyant” style that is, as you may guess, rather flamboyant. And it was almost sacked by a mob during the French Revolution before the Revolutionary Committee decided in Taliban-like fashion to blow it up, only to be deterred by a local architect saying the explosion would choke the streets with rubble for years. Then the radicals melted the roof for bullets before arguing that a building without a roof was an expensive hassle to maintain.

The stained glass was wisely removed before World War II and an American Army officer, Col. Welborn Barton Griffith, Jr. saved it from bombing during that conflict by personally scouting to make sure the Germans weren’t using it as an observation post. (He was killed the next day; perhaps God was so impressed He wanted to tell him to his face immediately.)

In 2009 the French Ministry of Culture decided on a major renovation including painting it on the theory that it would look like new. Others have condemned this notion in part because Gothic architecture ages well which you can’t say of the most of the disposable junk we build.

Which brings me to the UNESCO designation. The Cathedral was built as an expression of Roman Catholic religious faith and the civilization to which it had given rise. Something specific, proud and dynamic. The UNESCO designation, by a branch of the worthless-when-not-actively-harmful UN, is bland and anodyne, a grudging admission that it’s a nice relic of something people once thought, to be admired in a bland and ecumenical spirit that has no idea what true and false even are.

I know they meant it as a compliment. But it slides off a building this old, to which modernity has done so much in a militant or self-satisfied spirit that was not an improvement.