Category Archives: Put to the Sword

1396: Thousands of knights of the Last Crusade

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On this date in 1396, Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I put thousands of Christian Crusaders to the sword — and with them, Christians’ zest for holy war against the Turk.

The day after crushing a European Crusading expedition at the Battle of Nicopolis — where Christ’s multinational divisions might have crippled themselves by opting for political reasons to go with gloryhounding French knights’ demand for a heavy cavalry charge as opposed to sneakier tactics — Bayezid was mighty sore to find that the invaders had executed en masse Muslim prisoners from their last engagement.

Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror relates the result:

The defeat was followed by a frightful sequel. As Bajazet toured the battlefield … he was “torn by grief” at the sight of his losses, which outnumbered the Christian. He swore he would not leave their blood unavenged, and the discovery of the massacre of the prisoners of Rachowa augmented his rage. He ordered all prisoners to be brought before him next morning. … [T]he leading nobles … were … spared [for ransom], as well as all those judged to be under twenty for forced service with the Turks.

The rest, an uncertain figure of several thousand, were marched naked before the Sultan, bound together in groups of three or four, with hands tied and ropes around their necks. Bajazet looked at them briefly, then signed to the executioners to set to work. They decapitated the captives group by group, in some cases cut their throats or severed their limbs until corpses and killers alike were awash in blood. [The Christian nobles being spared] were forced to stand by the Sultan and watch the heads of their companions fall under the scimitars and the blood spurt from their headless trunks…. The killing continued from early morning to late afternoon until Bajazet, himself sickened at the sight or, as some say, persuaded by his ministers that too much rage in Christendom would be raised against him, called off the executioners.

In truth, the era of the Crusade as most readily conceived — a bid to conquer the Holy Land — was long past by this time. But it had been under that tattered old banner that Christendom summoned its vassals to check the rising Ottoman Empire, which by this time had reduced Byzantium to a rump state around Constantinople.

The battle that precipitated this day’s* feast of carrion occurred in Bulgaria, where the Turks’ growing European footprint (and this affair essentially pinched out the Bulgarian Empire of the day) exercised the European courts in figurative as well as literal ways. Though other ventures would hoist the crusading pennant, there would be no major offensive incursions against the Turks until “crusades” had fallen well out of fashion.

None of this gory affair is to be confused with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where a leap of faith proved more felicitous.

* Most sources place the Battle of Nicopolis at September 25, although some say September 28 — the latter date would obviously place this massacre on September 29.

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1918: Tsar Nicholas II and his family

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In the small hours after midnight on the night of July 16-17 90 years ago, the former Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, children, and four family retainers, were shot in a Yekaterinburg basement by their Bolshevik jailers.

Doting family man, vacillating dictator, as weak and rich as Croesus … the doomed Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias was a man small of stature. His reign emerged under a bad star when 1,300 Muscovites were trampled to death in the crush for his coronation largesse; 18 years later, Nicholas‘s support for Serbia against Austria-Hungary was instrumental in pitching Europe into World War I, a blunder for which he reaped a whirlwind long in the making.

When an anti-Bolshevik force approached Yekaterinburg (or Ekaterinburg), where the deposed royals had been stashed in a commandeered private residence,* Yakov Sverdlov (for whom the city was subsequently renamed) ordered the prisoners shot — not only the tsar, but his beloved wife, their hemophiliac heir, and those four daughters who had to be bayoneted because the state jewels secreted in their corsets shielded them from the gunfire.

The executioners (here’s the account of their leader; here’s another guard’s version) did their best to destroy and conceal the remains, helping fuel subsequent rumors that one of the children had survived and escaped.

Those rumors are only now, with post-Soviet investigation and DNA forensics, being debunked, and not yet to the satisfaction of all comers. This very week, Moscow affirmed (though the Orthodox church has not accepted) that the last of Nicholas’s family had been accounted for:

Modern nostalgia for this unimpressive sovereign is making a minor comeback, with Nicholas absurdly contending in a current poll for the title of “greatest Russian” … supported not only by the miseries of the state that succeeded his, but by the family’s decent and accessible private life.

Even a monarchist — especially a monarchist! — shouldn’t reason that the greatest monarch is the one who drove the bus over the cliff. But much is forgiven a martyr. Indeed, like Charles I of England, the last Romanov monarch has been posthumously saddled with divine sanction; he and all the family are certified “passion bearers”. (Update: And possible future relics!)

A handful of the many books about the Romanovs and their fall

* The Ipatiev House where the tsar was held (and shot) no longer stands. On its spot is a church consecrated five years ago yesterday to the Romanov canonization.

Update: The Romanovs were officially rehabilitated by the Russian Supreme Court on October 1, 2008.

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203: Perpetua, the earliest Christian woman whose writings survive

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(Thanks to Jeffrey Fisher [jeffreyfisher at me.com] for the guest post.)

There are many accounts of Christian martyrs in the annals of Christianity, but none quite like that of Perpetua, thrown to the beasts and put to the sword on March 7, 203, in Carthage.

There is no doing justice to the Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity in a brief essay such as this; the fifteen minutes or so it takes to read the original document, which includes the earliest writing we have from a Christian woman (Perpetua herself), will be well spent.

In short, the twenty-two-year-old Perpetua, her slave girl Felicity, their friend Saturninus (whose first-person account is included in the Passion), and two of their companions were arrested for converting to Christianity, Septimius Severus having forbidden conversion on pain of death. As you might suspect, the document recounts their being browbeaten and intimidated, until eventually they are killed in public, as a matter of sport.

But this isn’t what’s really interesting about the story.

Women are common as saints and martyrs, and they often must resist or convert a pagan man, typically a husband. While Perpetua’s husband is peculiarly absent from her story, her pagan father appears repeatedly, pleading with her, begging her for his sake to renounce her Christianity and save her own life. Her retellings of these episodes are striking for the very human sympathy she has for her father, despite, or perhaps in part because of, the spare prose in which she relates it. She insists on maintaining her faith, but grieves for her father’s suffering, and not only when he is beaten before her eyes by the Roman governor.

Children also figure prominently in the Passion. Perpetua nurses her newborn son while in prison. At one point during prayer, she has a vision of her seven-year-old brother, who had previously died a horrible death, and is assured in a second vision that her fervent prayers for him had brought him peace. Felicitas worries that she will not be able to die with Perpetua and the others due to rules against executing pregnant women. Thankfully, the group’s prayers are answered and Felicity gives birth a mere three days before they are to be killed.

The most famous aspect of Perpetua’s account is a dream in which she climbs a ladder, arriving at a garden where a man in shepherd’s clothing, milking sheep, gives her some of the curd he has from the milk. The questions it presents are interesting but also perhaps at once too obvious and too thorny to enter into here.

More interesting for us, perhaps, is the description of the martyr’s death, which (like the account of her comforting her dead brother) does have some controversial elements. Suicide is not martyrdom, and while martyrs will submit to death (like Christ), there is a line (sometimes a blurry one) that divides willingness from desire. It is a key trick of any martyr to be able to persuade us that God could have saved her had God chosen to do so (and this persuasion often involves the failure of initial attempts to kill the martyr), but that God chooses to give the persecutor “victory” of a sort even as God grants greater victory to the martyr. Similarly, the martyr must be willing to die, even happy to die, and at the same time convey that this is only for special people at special times, because God created human beings to live their lives.

Consider the following from the account of Perpetua’s death, when the soldier comes to deliver the coup de grace:

But Perpetua, that she might have some taste of pain, was pierced between the bones and shrieked out; and when the swordsman’s hand wandered still (for he was a novice), herself set it upon her own neck. Perchance so great a woman could not else have been slain (being feared of the unclean spirit) had she not herself so willed it.

This cannot of course be precisely true, or she should have lived. But we are also supposed to understand that it is only through some concession to the weakness of the persecutor that the persecuted is finally slain. In this respect, the editor of the Passion might be said to do his subject a disservice, as she has rendered herself so much more “great a woman” than he (most likely a he) with his martyrologist’s tropes. He has, however, done her and us a tremendous service in preserving and handing down her story as she herself wrote it.

Part of the Themed Set: The Written Word.

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1002: St. Brice’s Day Massacre

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On this date over a millennium past, according to the chronicle of John of Wallingford, King Ethelred the Unready of England conducted a massacre of Danes living in the realm.

The character of this sanguinary event — named after a fourth-century French bishop whose feast day Nov. 13 happens to be — lies half-buried in history’s shifting sands. Surely the slaughter of every Dane in a Britain then very much in the Scandinavian orbit would have been not only morally reprehensible but logistically unimaginable.

The accepted, albeit sketchy, story has it that to consolidate his own authority — or to check an actual or suspected plot against him — Ethelred ordered the surprise apprehension and summary execution of some sizable number of Danish lords and mercenaries. British historian Thomas Hodgkin characterizes it as a sort of coup d’etat.

On this date, it was the Danes who were unready for Ethelred.

But whatever its true extent or immediate object, it occurred within the context of intensifying conflict between the English crown and Scandinavian aspirants. Ethelred was to spend the better part of his life struggling — both militarily and through the ruinous tribute of Danegeld — to hold back the incursions of the Viking king Sweyn I.

The St. Brice’s Day Massacre exacerbated those tensions. Sweyn’s sister was apparently among those massacred, and — whether driven by vengeance or simply availing a pretext — Sweyn resumed harrying the English kingdom in the following years.

By 1013, Sweyn had driven Ethelred to Normandy and ruled all of England, welding together a Norse empire fringing the whole north of Europe.

But the empire — and England’s place in it — proved an historical cul-de-sac. Authority in England would be contested for another half-century, gradually sapping the crown’s strength until the Norman Conquest in 1066 swept aside Viking power and set England on a course that would redefine its history.

Update: The story of Ethelred, Normandy, and the Vikings told in Episode 3 of Lars Brownworth’s Norman Centuries podcast:

[audio:http://c4.libsyn.com/editions/58550/17915/03-richard-the-good.mp3]

The British History Podcast covers the St. Brice’s Day Massacre in episode 328.

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