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September 12th, 1683:  The Ottoman Empire Begins Its Retreat to Oblivion

First, the official version: Vienna is besieged by the Ottomans but an army led by Poland’s King Jan Sobieski routes the Moslem horde and saves Western Civilization.

Once you have dispensed with the grateful tears and a few bars of Chopin (how else do you thank Poland), I will give you the actual history.

Yes, the Ottomans did besiege Vienna in 1683.  However, this was not the Ottoman Empire of 1483 or 1583, but the bloated parody of its martial glory. Uma Thurman had become Shelley Winters. This Ottoman army was no longer led by warrior kings; the Sultans–now cretins by birth or choice–rarely could find their way out of their harem. The army was now led by whichever courtier had bribed or connived the command.

The commanding pasha at Vienna was Kara Mustafa. He had an army of 140,000 men, but only a third of them were actual soldiers and their weapons were outdated. The other 90,000 men were basically support staff–and the pasha was enjoying the best coffee and cushions. Setting off from Constantinople in April, the Ottoman army lumbered upon Vienna in mid-July. Since an Ottoman horde was hard to ignore, Vienna had ample time to evacuated the civilian population. There was only a garrison of 18,000 left behind the walls of Vienna.

Even with their geriatric armaments, by sheer force the Ottomans could have taken the city. However, that would have been unprofitable for the Pasha. If Vienna were taken by storm, the Turkish soldiers would be entitled to whatever they could loot. On the other hand, if the city were besieged and starved into submission, then the Pasha would receive Vienna’s treasures. Guess which strategy Kara Mustafa preferred?

There are worse places to siege than Vienna in the summer. The Ottoman army enjoyed a pleasant two months of pillaging the Austrian countryside. However, their vacation ended rather abruptly–on this day in 1683–with the arrival of an allied army led by Jan Sobieski. The Pasha evidently had overlooked that possibility. Worse, although Sobieski’s force was half the size of the Pasha’s, the Christian army was composed of soldiers rather than servants. It turned out that the Turkish army was much faster when retreating than advancing. And, indeed, the Ottoman Empire now would be retreating for the next 250 years.

(Yes, in their haste, the Turks left behind sacks of coffee beans.  The Poles were entitled to the pick of the loot but were not interested in a sober beverage; so they gave the Turks’ caffeine to the Viennese who made it into an art.)

For his role in the debacle, Kara Mustafa did not receive the Medal of Freedom. He was strangled and then beheaded. So the Sultan was not a complete cretin.

And was Christendom saved? Well, it never was in danger. The Ottoman Empire had no plans for mosques in Moscow or Turkish baths in Bath. This was simply a turf war between Turkey and Austria, and the winner would get Hungary. Furthermore, if this had been a clash between Islam and Christendom, then Turkey had a very strange ally: the leading power of Western Civilization. You see, the Hapsburgs were fighting on two fronts: in the East against the Turks, and in the West against France. Yes, France and Turkey were allies of long-standing, with over a century of coordinated attacks against the Hapsburgs.

Indeed, while Austria was marshalling and mortgaging its resources against Turkey, there was little left to defend the west bank of the Rhine from Louis XIV. Perhaps the French victories offered some solace to the Turkish Sultan. He may have lost Vienna and then Hungary, but his French buddy now owned Alsace and Lorraine.

September 11, 1649:  Oliver Cromwell never lost a battle.  His honor is another matter. 

Today is the anniversary of his most notorious campaign: the sack of Drogheda. The Irish remember it as a massacre while the English describe it as a siege: they are both right. Drogheda was an Irish town with Royalist sympathies and a backwater garrison whose heroism far surpassed common sense. The town’s 3000 militia and volunteers faced Cromwell’s 12,000 man “model army” and defied the English demand to surrender. What was that garrison thinking? Were there rumors of Cromwell’s affable nature or his military ineptitude? Had the garrison seen visions of St. Patrick doing a jig on the battlements? The punters in Dublin wouldn’t have given Drogheda good odds.

Now, the terms of a surrender should not be confused with a retirement package. The yielding garrison would have an indefinite term of imprisonment; however, it would be spared massacre or slavery–the very fate guaranteed if the garrison refused to surrender. Furthermore, the choice of surrender or death was not even Cromwellian. It was the standard etiquette of siege warfare–and dated back to Troy and Jericho.

Perhaps it was prospect of English food or mandatory bible classes, but Drogheda preferred to die. And it did. Cromwell’s army stormed the town, massacring the garrison and much of the civilian population. Some desperate souls sought sanctuary in the town’s Catholic churches; could you imagine a worse place to avoid the fury of Puritans? Even by the fairly lax standards of massacres, setting afire a crowded church was unusually odious.

The Irish have not forgotten Drogheda or Cromwell.

September 10, 210 B.C.:  The Emperor Qin Shi Huang died…but for how long?

How would you react if I said that George Washington was a vampire, Charlemagne a demon and  Peter the Great an extra-terrestrial?  You would think that I was joking or psychotic (although the two are not mutually exclusive).  But what if I made all those aspersions against Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China?  You could say, “Yes, I saw that in a movie.”  He has been a featured villain in “My Date With a Vampire” and “Stargate.”  A  computer-animated version of him recently threatened mankind in “The Mummy:  Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.”  Don’t worry, Brendan Fraser saved you.

So why does Hollywood and the West so hate this Chinese leader who forged feuding states into a great empire, unified his realm with a common language, and built the Great Wall as well as that fabulous tomb with a life-sized terra cotta army to guard him in the afterlife?  Actually, we don’t.  From our perspective, he was so cool that we named the country for him.  Yes, the western pronunciation (equal parts error and arrogance) used to say “Chin” instead of the correct Qin.  We now know better although we have to yet call the country Qina.

He was born in 259 BC and with the less exalted name of Ying Zheng; Qin Shi Huang was a title he would bestow upon himself .  At the time, there was no China but rather seven vying kingdoms.   Qin was one of these kingdoms, and considered a rather backward state.  If dismissed as a barbarian, Ying Zheng embraced the role.  Ascending at the age of 13 to the throne, Zheng made war his study and policy.  His army was better-armed and trained than his rivals, and he eschewed the etiquette that had governed warfare among the kingdoms.  Traditional war had been waged as a ritualized mass duel.  Zheng did not believe in a fair fight; he preferred to be a victorious barbarian than a dead gentleman.  In 221 B.C., by the time he was 38, he had conquered the other six kingdoms.  With no modesty but complete accuracy, he proclaimed himself the First Emperor of Qin:  Qin Shi Huang.

There had been Chinese emperors before him, but they were kings with more pretense than power, asserting a degree of precedence over the other rulers.  But Qin Shi Huang was the real–and unrivaled–sovereign of an empire, and he was going to rule every bit of it.  To govern over this large and diverse realm, he established a centralized bureaucracy.  The empire was divided into provinces, the provinces into prefectures; the corps of administrators had limited powers, sufficient to do the emperor’s will but not challenge it.   The former kingdoms were to be integrated into one.  Where there had seven different systems of weights and measures, there now would only be one uniform system.  Where there had been seven different dialects, now there would be just one  language unifying the educated of China.  Of course, the peasants could maintain their idiomatic garble, so long as they obeyed commands in the official Chinese.  In fact, Qin Shi Huang  had a project for them.  In the north, nomadic tribes threatened China, and the Emperor did not like any barbarians but himself.  He assigned 300,000 laborers to build a wall along the northern border.  I don’t think that particular wall needs a formal introduction.

The Emperor died in 210 B.C..   His tomb, surrounded  by 8000 terra cotta warriors, now commands the tribute of  the world’s tourists.  Unfortunately, the emperor’s  heirs seemed unnaturally eager for their own tombs.  They proceeded to kill off each other without gaining control of the empire.  The provinces revolted and China collapsed into 18 kingdoms.  The last of  Shi Huang’s dynasty abdicated in 207 B.C., hoping to avoid execution.  He only delayed it for a year, but his captor was to establish a dynasty that would last four centuries: the Han.  While  Qin rule may have lasted scarely 20 years, the example of Shi Huang has been followed for 2000 years.  The subsequent imperial dynasties would reestablish Shi Huang’s empire and most of his methods.

So how did Qin Shi Huang acquire the  diabolical  reputation that Hollywood loves to exploit?  However forceful and dynamic we might think him, the Chinese intellectuals hated him.  History, while often written by the victor, is always written by the literate.  These Chinese intellectuals condemn the Emperor for suppressing the teachings and writings of Confucius.  Shi Huang’s new empire had no place for the values and ideas of the old kingdoms; he regarded their contemplative nature and reverence for tradition as weaknesses.  The writings of Confucius were burned; on a number of occasions, so were Confucian scholars.  The suppression was so relentless that only incomplete works of Confucius now survive.  Of course, subsequent generations of Chinese scholars revered Confucius and so they reviled Shi Huang, condemning him for what he actually did as well anything they could imagine.

Their version of the Emperor was of shameful birth, the son of a pregnant concubine foisted upon a naive king.  And that duplicitous start was the portent of an evil life.  A demon in human form, he immersed himself in the black arts, aspiring to immortality.  (Given the quality of his heirs, an immortal emperor would have been preferable.)  According to one tale, Shi Huang took doses of mercury to attain eternal life.  Well, mercury certainly would stop him from getting any older.  He was all of 50 when he took up residence in his palatial tomb.

But could such a fiend stay dead?  He is still plotting crimes and avoiding assassination in Chinese films,  and Hollywood certainly keeps his supernational version vicariously alive.    But has China actually seen the return of the ruthless, dynamic, perhaps even charismatic tyrant?  Mao Zedong seems a likely reincarnation.

September 9, 9:  Three Legions March into a German Forest; You Might Still Find the Body Fragments

Rome presumed that it controlled Germany from the Rhine to the Elbe, but the Germans were unaware of it. Their response to Roman tax collectors was to murder them. In A.D. 9, Rome sent three legions to crush German resistance. The Roman commander was Quinctilius Varus, whose chief qualification was being Augustus’ grandnephew-in-law. Varus did have talent for suppression. While governor of Syria, he taught Roman etiquette in Galilee, crucifying 2,000 unappreciative Jews, none of whom became celebrities.

Perhaps Varus expected an equal demand for crucifixions in Germany and wanted an ample supply of wood. He marched his legions into the Teutoburg Forest. They never came out. Actually, Varus’ head did, a momento from the German leader to Augustus. Rome launched punitive expeditions under more of Augustus’ in-laws. Fortunately, they were better generals and averted annihilation. When the Romans came upon the battle site of the Teutoburg Forest, even hardened legionaires were amazed at German etiquette. The captured Romans had been burned alive.  Setting the decor standards for Biedermeier, Roman skulls were nailed to the trees.  However, the most impressive expression of the German personality was that the Roman horses had been hanged! Rome decided that the Rhine was a satisfactory border for the Empire.

So, the Romans did not subdue Germany. Otherwise, Munich now would be called Monaco, and Wagner’s operas would be three hours shorter and far more melodious.

p.s.  For more information on Germania–or whatever it is called:  https://finermanworks.com/your_rda_of_irony/2006/10/02/a-mystery-of-the-map/

p.p.s.  And if your memory is as bad as the Scottish army was in 1513, here is another anniversary: https://finermanworks.com/your_rda_of_irony/2008/09/09/on-this-day-in-1513/

September 7, 1533:  Anne Boleyn’s Labor Day

Her father declared her a bastard and beheaded her mother, her half-sister imprisoned her as a traitor and nearly ordered her execution.  Elizabeth I would seem entitled to a psychosis or two, but she regarded these “episodes” as part of her job description.

Aside from the obvious dysfunction, the Tudors were unique for royalty:  they were intelligent and hard-working.  The Tudors actually earned the throne.

After 85 years of civil war, the English throne had become quite democratic: anyone could seize it. Henry Tudor was a middle-class Welsh adventurer who even lacked the distinction of being legitimate. His claim to royal blood was as the half-second cousin, once-removed, of Henry VI. The successful usurper, proclaiming himself Henry VII, sought immediate respectability by marrying the eldest daughter of the rival royal house. (He then made sure that the rest of her family disappeared: in convents, the Tower of London, you get the idea) The crafty king took nothing for granted. He certainly didn’t trust the nobles, most of whom had better claims to the throne than he did.

To control a restless aristocracy, Henry VII created a force that remains as terrifying now as it was then:  the civil service.  His bureaucracy remorsely taxed the nobility into a passive stupor: nobles could still afford all of their vices but not an armed rebellion.  In dealing with his other subjects–townspeople and small landowners–Henry had a novel approach:  good government.  The King had a most solicitous attitude.   Any proposal or project that would resolve problems and nurture prosperity had his support.  (That’s how the nobles’ taxes were spent.) 

Henry VIII had his father’s political shrewdness.  He may have been a serial husband but he maintained a monogamous romance with Parliament.  That English institution had been founded in 1265 by English barons who realized that the Magna Carta had left a few loopholes. Its assembly of gentry, clergy, and burghers formed a permanent council: no law could be enacted without its consent.  For two centuries, however, the Parliament had acted only like a notary public: approving and filing the royal decrees.

But to the crafty Tudors, Parliament was more than a bureaucratic eccentricity. Its members represented constituencies; the town burghers and small landowners were potential allies against the aristocracy and even the Catholic Church.  Henry VIII applied his seductive skills to wooing Parliament.  If a serenade of Greensleeves was insufficient, a knighthood on a status-starved burgher  or the deed to an estate (freshly confiscated from the Catholic Church) usually proved irresistible.  Of course, Henry’s approach also had an element of menace.   Imagine the choice confronting a member of Parliament: the King’s munificent patronage or being publicly disemboweled. Under those circumstances, you, too, might agree that the King was entitled to a divorce and that Thomas More was just being obnoxious.

If Elizabeth I could survive her family, she could easily contend with Spain, the Jesuits and her idiot cousin Mary.  She possessed all of the Tudors’ talents, few of their vices (just a bit of her father’s vanity), and a charm uniquely her own.  Unfortunately, a Virgin Queen is bad for a dynasty.

But the Tudors did save their best for last.  Happy Birthday, Your Majesty!

September 6, 1901:  President McKinley Becomes a Trophy

If it weren’t for the inconvenience of being assassinated, William McKinley should have been flattered.  Anarchists did not kill just anyone.  Those homicidal nihilists may not have respected any government, but they certainly worshipped status.  They would never waste a bullet on a postmaster or an alderman: only the most prestigious targets would do.  And the United States apparently had acquired some glamour, no longer the detritus of Britain, a failed attempt at Australia.  No, America was a world power and its President worth shooting.  The Spanish-American War really had paid off!

On this day in 1901, President McKinley was shot.  He did not die until September 14th, when he succumbed to gangrene.  No doubt our modern medicine would have saved him, if his health insurance had permitted it.  (I’m sorry, Mrs. McKinley but we can’ t be sure if that hole in your husband’s stomach and pancreas was not a pre-existing condition.  You wouldn’t expect us to pay for an old Civil War wound, would you?) 

The assassin was Leon Czolgosz, whose very name was linguistic anarchy.  Although his two bullets did not topple the American government and return mankind to Eden, Czolgosz did elevate McKinley above Benjamin Harrison into a very distinguished company of corpses: presidents, prime ministers and kings.  Between 1894 and 1913, the anarchists acquired quite a collection of big game trophies and made royalty an endangered species.

The inadvertent trendsetter was President of France, Sadi Carnot; he encountered an anarchist with a knife.  That anarchist soon after encountered a guillotine.  In 1897, an anarchist with a pistol spared Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Canovas the embarrassment of losing the Spanish-American War.  The following year, while on vacation in Switzerland, Empress Elizabeth of Austria had the misfortune to bump into an anarchist with a shoemaker’s awl; initially Frau Hapsburg could not discern the stabbing from the usual pain of wearing a corset. 

Umberto I of Italy actually might have been the Anarchist’s first trophy.  An anarchist tried stabbing him in 1878; a gun in 1900 proved more effective.  The royal family of Portugal found itself in a shooting gallery in 1908:  King Carlos and Crown Prince Luis Filipe were killed, while Prince Manuel was wounded and suddenly king; he seemed rather amenable to the idea of abdication.  In 1912, Jose Canalejas learned how Spanish Prime Ministers often retire.  The following year George I of Greece, possibly the only ruler in his dynasty who did not deserve to be shot, was. 

Occasionally the anarchists did fail.  The reprehensible Leopold II of Belgium–exploiter extraordinaire and mass-murderer of the Congo–was a target in 1902.  Two bullets hit nothing and the third broke a window   The gunman was so abysmal, bystanders wondered if he was shooting blanks; however he was a veteran of the Italian army, so that might explain his marksmanship.  And one assassination would have set the standard for bad taste.  In 1906, an anarchist hurled a bomb at King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenia on their wedding day.  Neither was hurt and they lived to be forced into abdication.   

Have you noticed an omission?  Where is Russia among the site of assassinations?  The anarchists really weren’t lurking there.  It wasn’t just the climate; it was also a matter of professional courtesy.  Most of the assassinations in Russia–and there were quite a few–were carried out by a radical group known as the Socialist Revolutionaries.  They never lacked for tyrannical targets–from Russian Grand Dukes to a rather dogmatic  fellow called Lenin (and they nearly killed him, leaving him a semi-invalid).  Given the Socialist Revolutionaries’ expertise and enthusiasm, the anarchists stayed out of their way.

And returning to our original topic and victim, you can see that William McKinley was in excellent company.  To Die For.

September 5, 1698:  Peter the Great Imposes a Beard Tax

Peter the Great had inherited a medieval empire. Unfortunately, the 17th century really was an inopportune time to be medieval. Even Spain was only a century behind the times. The young Tsar was determined to modernize Russia, and he wanted to see western progress for himself. So, in 1697, he travelled “in cognito” through Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Britain. Peter was not as “in cognito” as he hoped, being 6’7″ and traveling with a large entourage. The King of England did not normally greet every tourist. And most tourists ask for fresh towels rather than an alliance against the Ottoman Empire. Nonetheless, Peter found the experience to be edifying and he returned home with plans to impose progress on Russia.

Peter would have a modern army and, for the first time in six centuries, a navy. (The last Russian fleet had been incinerated by the Byzantines.) However, modern armaments would be wasted as long as the Russian mind remained medieval. Peter was determined to modernize the society as well, starting with the aristocracy. The Russian nobility had been recycling Byzantine fashion for five centuries: retro is one thing but this was stagnation. Peter demanded that his nobles look like their peers in the west.

The ladies of the court found the new fashions immodest; in their traditional Muscovite garb, a neckline was literally a neckline. For the men of the court, the transistion was worse. In place of majestic enveloping robes, they now had to wear breeches, leaving no doubt as to the shape of their legs and anywhere else in the area. But Peter made those men feel truly naked by demanding that they shave. Russian men took great pride in their beards, but Peter regarded the look as an embarrassing anachronism. No, his subjects would be as clean-shaven as Western Europeans–or else. On this day in 1698, Peter imposed a beard tax of 100 rubles annually on every Russian male except peasants and priests. In fact, even payment was no definite protection. If Peter was in one of his zanier moods, he personally would shave his hirsute subject.

Peter’s policies and tantrums did transform the aristocracy. By the early 19th century, the nobles of St. Petersburg would have been indistinguishable from those of London. (The nobles of Paris generally could be distinguished by their lack of heads or their employment as tutors in London and St. Petersburg.) The Russian aristocracy only spoke Russian to their servants; among themselves, ils parliaent francais. Indeed, when Tsar Alexander I met Napoleon in 1807, it was noted that the Russian spoke the better French. The scholarship kid from Corsica had a thick accent and would have sounded like a French Tony Danza.

For the rest of Russian society, however, Peter’s reforms were either meaningless or just an added burden. The serfs probably had to work harder to pay for master’s western wardrobe. Peter had not addressed Russia’s injustices or brooding turbulence. He had merely transformed an isolated, backward nation into an aggressive, backward nation.

Our idea of a stock market–the trading of shares in a business–dates back to 17th century Netherlands.  To raise money for commercial ventures, Dutch merchants would sell shares of any profits from the business.  The speculation was whether the venture would prove profitable.  Ships sometimes sank, trade might be disappointing; there was always the unexpected.  And the difference  between the risk and the expectation–the nervous and the optimistic investor– created a market for those stock shares.  One of the Dutch ventures was a fur-trading outpost called New Amsterdam;  so New York City itself  began as a stock.

New Amsterdam was protected by a wooden wall.  Outside the northern boundary the Dutch set up an area for a market.  There, the Native Americans were welcome to trade; they were not trusted within the town itself.  However, it actually was an old European practice to have a market just outside a town’s walls.  Farmers, herders and merchants had room to set up their stalls, and the town did not have to worry about animals and strangers wandering through.  In fact, the word “stock” is derived from this arrangement.  An old English word, stock originally meant “log.”  Many towns and villages of medieval England were protected by wooden walls: a stockade.  Beginning as a slang term, the goods and produce sold outside the stockade came to be known as stock. 

The walls of New Amsterdam could keep out the Native Americans but not the English.  They conquered the colony in 1664 and renamed it for the Duke of York. New York City quickly grew beyond its original boundaries.  Where the northern stockade once stood, there now was an avenue called Wall Street; but it still remained a trading center.  By the 18th century, however, the transactions usually were done by contracts rather than the physical delivery of crops, livestock and merchandise.  If there were to be a market for stock shares, Wall Street would be the logical site.

While 18th century Britain had a stock market, its American colonies did not.  The thirteen colonies were an incongruous assortment.  Some were crown colonies, ruled directly by England.  Other were little more than personal estates; the Penn family ruled Pennsylvania.  Even among the crown colonies, the local governments and financial laws varied and clashed.  There was no common foundation for a national economy.  Ironically, America’s independence only made the incongruities worse.  At least under Britain, the colonies had a common currency.  In the newly independent republic, each state was a semi-independent nation, issuing its own currency and setting up tariffs for trade with the other states.  The Continental Congress, what passed for a central government, also issued currency which traded at one seventh of its face value. 

This economic chaos ended up with the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.  Among the powers of the new Federal Government  were “To coin money and regulate the value thereof….To regulate Commerce…All Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”  In 1789 President George Washington entrusted these responsibilities to a 34 year-old New Yorker named Alexander Hamilton.  As the first Secretary of the Treasury,  Hamilton had inherited the debts of the Continental Congress: millions in devalued bonds.  He could have defaulted on them or paid them off at their depreciated market rate.  Instead of that, the Federal government assumed  and paid  all the debts at their face value.   Doing so, Hamilton established the financial reliability of the new government.  (A number of speculators–including friends of Hamilton–had the “foresight” to buy the discounted bonds and make a 600 percent profit.)  Hamilton also sponsored a reliable network for banking, establishing a central bank to regulate and facilitate transactions between regional banks.

Now that America had a sound financial foundation, investors were willing to trade bonds and stocks.  And within two years, America had its first stock market scandal.  The culprit was William Duer (1743-1799)  a New Yorker who attempted to corner the market in bank stocks.  Duer had a long, profitable and disreputable history as a speculator.   His bookkeeping never withstood examination and he was known to cheat his partners.  Yet he never lacked for investors.  In 1791, in his attempted stranglehold of bank stocks, he promised his backers to double their money in six months.  But in his aggressive buying of stocks, he soon ran out of his investors’ money and began taking millions in loans with no collateral other than wishful thinking.  Duer was dangerously overextended and very vulnerable.  In March, 1792, his creditors began to panic and demanded payment.  Of course, he could not.  His losses and debts amounted to five million dollars.  At the time, that was the property value of  New York City itself.  Duer voluntarily went to jail; he was safer there than on the street.  He spent the rest of his life in prison. 

Of course, Duer’s scandal had incriminated the entire stock market.  How could such a fiasco have happened in the first place?  Even Alexander Hamilton, a stalwart friend of capitalism and New York, said “There must be a line of separation between honest Men and knaves, between respectable stockholders…and mere unprincipled Gamblers.”  The stock market had yet to develop any procedures or regulations; in this unfettered environment Duer had first flourished and then bankrupted himself and much of the market.  If the New York investment community hoped to redeem its reputation, it had to establish a  system to monitor the market and enforce some sense of order. 

A buttonwood tree on Wall Street was a common meeting place for stockbrokers to conduct business.  There, on  May 17, 1792,  twenty-four stockbrokers signed an agreement that became the basis for the New York Stock Exchange.  They pledged the following:  “We the Subscribers, Brokers for the Purchase and Sale of the Public Stock, do hereby solemnly promise and pledge ourselves to each other, that we will not buy or sell from this day to any person whatsoever, any kind of Public Stock, at least one quarter of one percent Commission on the specie and that we will give preference to each other in our Negotiations.” 

Historians call it the Buttonwood Agreement.  It is a single sentence, and a cumbersome one at that,  but it meant that they alone–no outsiders–would serve as brokers for the stock market, adhering to a code of conduct and commissions.  They would be the equivalent of a guild, setting and maintaining the standards of the stock market.  Their private association would not even have an official name until 1817, when its now 35 members adopted a more detailed code of business and named themselves the New York Stock and Exchange Board.    

Today, that association has some 1400 members and trades 2700 stocks.  It is the largest stock market in the world, quite a difference from a group that once could meet under a single tree.  But in those intervening centuries, the name of the New York Stock Exchange has barely changed and neither has the location.  The traders still meet at Wall Street, and the felonious spirit of William Duer lingers.

September 3rd:  Happy Birthday to Diane de Poitiers

Henri II deserves to be more popular. The French king (1519-1559) may have been stupid (he never demonstrated any evidence to the contrary) and he certainly was bigoted (ask any Huguenot who survived him), but his form of adultery should earn him considerable admiration. Henri left his wife for an older woman!

And I do mean older. His mistress Diane de Poitiers was 20 years his senior. Freud might have had something to say about that, although it would have only incited Henri to start persecuting Jews. Diane (1499-1566) was a woman of great charm and beauty; that could not be said about Henri’s wife: Catherine de Medici. (Catherine was quite intelligent, but Henri would have resented that.) Unfortunately, in his enthusiasm for Diane, Henri was continually affronting his wife. Guess who received court precedence or the pick of the best chateaux? Henri must have thought that his wife was good-natured. Did I mention that he was stupid?

In 1559, Henri apparently confused jousting with soccer, and attempted to catch a lance with his eye. It was not good for his health, or for Diane’s career. The new king of France was 15 years old and not in the market for a 60 year-old mistress. Besides, the Queen Mother had a definite grudge against Diane. The unemployed courtesan did survive, but it was not a pleasant retirement. From a deluxe suite at the Louvre and a Loire estate at Chenonceau, Diane now found herself in the equivalent of a studio apartment frigidly far from anywhere of interest. She did seem to die of natural causes. Either Catherine did not live up to her murderous reputation or for once really got away with a crime.

Finally, by the standards of the 16th century, Diane had a very eccentric habit. She bathed daily. Of course, we now surmise that was the basis of her allure.

  As you see from the portrait on the right, 16th century France had its own version of iCloud.

September 2, 31 B.C.:  Why You’ve Never Heard of the Egyptian Navy

Octavian (or at least his tougher friend Agrippa) won the naval battle of Actium, triumphing over a drunk and a trollop. (Marc Antony and Cleopatra would have had a better chance in a barroom brawl.)

Mr. and Mrs. Antony had prepared for this showdown with that annoying Caesar boy by constructing a fleet of massive battleships. Just the name quinquereme suggests that they were twice the size of your standard trireme. The bows were stoutly built to withstand ramming and further protected with brass plating; you’d think that these naval fortresses might still be afloat. Of course, fortresses are not terribly mobile, and neither was the Antonys’ fleet. The ships were too massive, and the fleet’s oarsmen could barely move the deadnoughts. Yes, the quinqueremes would have crushed anything directly in their path, but Octavian’s fleet was not that obliging. The young Caesar’s ships kept moving and shooting, riddling the paralyzed behemoths until they literally were dead in the water.

Not feeling particularly suicidal that day, Cleopatra fled the battle and sailed home to Egypt. Seeing her flight, Antony abandoned his flagship and hitched a ride on Cleopatra’s galley. The rest of his fleet did not have that option, and either incinerated or surrendered. Watching the debacle from the Greek shore was Antony’s army. Without the support of the navy or the presence of their commander, Antony’s 19 legions soon surrendered to Octavian.

Marc Antony once had possessed such respect and charisma that, after losing a battle, he persuaded the victorious army to defect to him. Now, for the decadent sot, the opposite was true. He commanded neither respect nor even a viable army. His forces in Egypt either deserted or defected. Puny, reptilian Octavian had won. In any case, you have seen the movie. The drunk with the beautiful speaking voice stabbed himself, and the beauty with the annoying speaking voice snaked herself.

And that brings us to the first episode of “I, Claudius.”

p.s.  Also on this day:  https://finermanworks.com/your_rda_of_irony/2008/09/02/on-this-day-in-1898/