Saint Nicholas was dead, to begin with. On 6 December 343, to be precise, in Myra, in present-day Turkey. But, as is the way with saints, death was no hindrance to miracles. Indeed it was an accelerator. Myrrh flowed from his tomb from the moment of interment. Solving problems, giving gifts; that was what he... Continue Reading →
Caspar Hauser: the mystery of the foundling of Nuremberg
Who was Caspar Hauser? No-one knew. He stepped into the world in Nuremberg on Whit Monday in 1828 towards the end of the afternoon. A shoemaker in the Unschlitt Platz – named for the city’s nearby store of fat and tallow – saw him first. Hauser’s posture and gait caught the eye: he struggled to... Continue Reading →
Stations of the dead: London’s Necropolis railway
Death in the Victorian capital of the British Empire was problematic. “London graveyards are all bad,” the Board of Health reported gloomily, “differing only in degrees of badness”. There were 200 of them covering some 218 acres, yet by 1842 they were having to absorb over 50,000 new residents a year. “A London churchyard is... Continue Reading →
Palmares: an African refuge in South America
At first they were called ‘mocambo’: a word from the Mbundu of what is now Angola meaning ‘hideout’. They were communities of escaped slaves that began springing up in colonial Brazil in the 17th-century. Typically they might contain around fifty people, predominantly men. No less typically, the colonial powers – either the Dutch or the... Continue Reading →
The Gunfight at the OK Corral: reality, murder and myth
Gunfights and killings were news in Tombstone, Arizona but not headline news. One town paper had a regular column for such things titled ‘Death’s Doings’; the paper itself was mordantly named The Tombstone Epitaph. Not gallows humour exactly; trigger-finger humour, perhaps. Justice was rough to non-existent in the post-Civil War American south west. A bank... Continue Reading →
Saint Francis: memory, record and afterlife
Why you? It was a good question. Brother Masseo repeated it three times. What do you mean, Francis of Assisi asked him. “You aren’t a handsome man in body,” Masseo explained. “You aren’t someone of great learning, you’re not noble; so why does the whole world come after you?” Because, Francis said, there is no-one... Continue Reading →
John Goff Rand and the invention of Impressionism
Was it true, as Giorgio Vasari wrote in The Lives of the Artists, that oil painting was invented in the 15th century by Jan van Eyck – he calls him Giovanni da Bruggia – and brought to Italy by Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who traveled to Flanders to learn the secret of its making?... Continue Reading →
How Ben Jonson escaped the gallows
The late 16th century was a precarious time to be involved in – or just to meet anyone involved in – the theatre. There was cash flow, of course. And the threat of closure, on either political or health-and-safety grounds. But there were other risks too. One of them was death. For a small group... Continue Reading →
Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man by Peter K Andersson
Was there anything, aside from consanguinity, that united the Tudor dynasty as it lurched back and forth from Catholicism to Protestantism across the middle decades of the 16th century? One answer to that question, surprisingly, was a man named William Somer, Henry VIII’s last and best-loved fool. It is not simply that surviving court accounts... Continue Reading →
The discovery of Pompeii
Locals called the area ‘La Cività’; a clue, perhaps. Antiquarian Lucas Holstenius proposed it as the site of Pompeii as early as 1637. But formal excavations didn’t begin until 1748. The site wasn’t regarded as interesting or valuable in itself, but merely a sources of decorative antiquities for Charles VII, king of Naples. This wasn’t... Continue Reading →
Human rights, Christianity and conquest: the Valladolid debates
In April 1550, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, halted Spanish conquests in the Americas. He needed to know if such conquests were lawful. He had scruples; could they be overcome? A panel of over a dozen theologians, officials and administrators gathered in the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid to hear... Continue Reading →
Thomas Harriot: the first man to map the moon
To have one patron imprisoned in the Tower may be regarded as a misfortune; to have two looks like carelessness. Perhaps Thomas Harriot, Renaissance polymath and client of both Sir Walter Ralegh and the ninth Earl of Northumberland, had good reason to direct his attention from worldly troubles. At 9pm on Wednesday 26 July 1609,... Continue Reading →
“I had not thought death had undone so many”: the unveiling of the Menin Gate
In the beginning, they did not even know how many of the dead were missing. When architect Reginald Blomfield began work on the Menin Gate, a memorial to British soldiers who died at Ypres between 1914 and 1918 and whose bodies had never been found, he was told to make space for 40,000 names. The... Continue Reading →
Antonin Carême: pastry’s greatest architect
“The fine arts are five in number: painting, music, poetry, sculpture, and architecture – whereof the principal branch is confectionery.” It’s a bold point of view, even for a patissier. But Antonin Carême, personal chef to the rich and powerful of early 19th-century imperial France, was nothing if not ambitious. Born on 8 June 1783... Continue Reading →
Susenyos: the first and last emperor of Catholic Ethiopia
When the Jesuits first arrived in Ethiopia in 1557 they encountered a Christian society whose roots rivalled Rome for antiquity. The region had converted in the fourth century; its royal family claimed descent from the bibilical king Menilek and the queen of Sheba. But, from the point of view of western Christendom, it had been... Continue Reading →
Darkness at noon: disaster and redemption at Justinian’s Hagia Sophia
There were already several cracks in the dome of Justinian’s church of Santa Sophia, in Constantinople, and it was barely twenty years old. Two great earthquakes, in October and December 557, had done the damage. Some discerned a divine hand at work: “the shocks… had occurred through God’s benevolence”, John Malalas, a pious contemporary chronicler,... Continue Reading →
Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears
Alexis de Tocqueville saw some of them, in the dead of winter 1831, while researching what would become Democracy in America. They were Choctaw, crossing the Mississippi at Memphis. Among them were the wounded and the sick, new-born babies, old men at the point of death. Snow had frozen hard on the ground; great blocks... Continue Reading →
Cleanse the causeway: murder and mayhem in early-modern Edinburgh
The death of James IV at the battle of Flodden in September 1513 was a catastrophe for his country. He left behind the one-year-old James V to take the throne, and, as regent, his English wife Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, whose army had just deprived the nation of its king. Within a year,... Continue Reading →
The Archpriest Avvakum and the Third Rome that wasn’t
The Archpriest Avvakum Petrov spent the last fourteen years of his life in a pit in Pustozersk, high above the Arctic Circle. Born around 1620 in a small village in Nizhny Novgorod, he had become a leading figure among the Old Believers in the schism that split the Russian church in the 17th century. Patriarch... Continue Reading →
The fall of the son of heaven: the last Ming emperor of China
Zhu Youjian, known as the Chongzhen Emperor, was the last of the Ming dynasty to rule China. He came to the imperial throne of China in October 1627 aged 16, on the death of his older brother. As crown prince he had dreamt of seeing a black dragon coiled around a pillar in the palace,... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 