The idea for our latest project, our True, Strong and Free documentary on how to fix the Constitution, originally came from an article I wrote for C2C Journal two years ago. You can read the original article here.
https://youtu.be/pqdsNY9_AfU The audio-only version is available here: [podcast title="Ask the Professor, October 27"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2016/October/Ask_Professor_60.mp3[/podcast]
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