Friday, October 8, 1943. Caserta Palace.

The British troops landed on Terceira Island, one of the Azores, in a little noted operation.

The Azores belong to Portugal and the population of the Azores are Portuguese.  The Allies had made plans to land there by force, much like they had in Iceland, but it proved unnecessary as the Portuguese agreed to lease air bases to the allies.

Portugal and the UK had been allies since the Napoleonic Wars, although Portugal had not entered the war.  They remained on friendly terms in spite of Portugal having a long sitting authoritarian government which would make one presume, in accurately, that it would have been sympathetic to the Germans.  In fact, at the start of the Second World War, Portugal announced that its 500-year-old plus treat with the UK remained in effect.  The UK, wisely, simply chose not to invoke it.  The British did begin, however, to occupy islands in the Azores starting in 1942 under lease from Portugal.

The Azores were known to Europeans prior to the 1370s.  Settlement by Portugal commenced in the 1439.

Today in World War II History—October 8, 1943: 80 Years Ago—Oct. 8, 1943: In Italy, US occupies Caserta Palace, future Headquarters of the US Fifth Army.

Sarah Sundin.

The British 8th Army took Lairon and Guglionesi. 

The last Jewish residents of the Liepaja Ghetto in Latvia were sent to the Kaiserwald concentration camp.

Turkey was once cited as an exception in the Islamic world in that. . .

it seemed to have a stable, and highly secular, government.

Mosaic in the Hagia Sophia of the Virgin Mary and Jesus.

In spite of the way headlines might cause people to believe otherwise, there are other Islamic nations that can make that claim now. At the same time, however, Islam has posed a challenge to political liberalization in areas in which it is strong.  Not all Middle Eastern nations with a Muslim majority, which is most of them, have Islamic or Islamic influenced governments by any means, indeed, not even a majority of them do, but contending with a faith that has seen no distinction between its religious laws and secular laws is a challenge for all of them.  This has brought about revolution in some, such as Iran, and civil war in others, such as Syria and Iraq.  The problem is never far below the surface.

Turkey was an exception as Ataturk aggressively secularized the nation, which he ran as a dictator, with the support of the Turkish Army.  That army, in turn, served to guard the political culture he created for decades after his death, stepping in to run the government whenever it regarded things as getting too far away from that legacy.  But with the election of Turkish Islamist leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the country has been moving more and more in the other direction.

And now the Turkish supreme court, in this new era of Islamization, has ruled that Ataturk's 1935 conversion of the Hagia Sophia from a mosque into a museum was illegal.

Codex depicting the Sophia Hagia under construction.

What was overarchingly illegal, of course, was the occupation of the Hagia Sophia by Islam.  It's a Christian church.

The Hagia Sophia was completed as a Catholic cathedral in 537, having first seen construction in 360.  That is what it was until the Great Schism left it in the Eastern part of Christendom and it served as an Orthodox cathedral from 1054 to 1204, when it reverted to being a Catholic cathedral.  It served as an Orthodox cathedral.  In 1439 a murky end to the Schism was negotiated but which failed to really solve it. That a story for elsewhere, but in its final years the cathedral was once again an Eastern Catholic cathedral but one which also saw Latin Rite masses said in it. The last mass at the Cathedral was in 1453 literally during the fall of Constantinople, when the Ottoman Turkish forces broke into the cathedral and killed the Priests celebrating Mass.

The Ottoman Turks admired much of Byzantium and pressed the cathedral into service as a mosque, but keeping its numerous Christian and Byzantine symbols.  It was used as a mosque from 1453 to 1935, which Ataturk converted its use, as noted, into a museum.

This would mean that the church served as a Christian church for 916 years.  It was used as an Islamic mosque for 482 years.  If we take into account its service as a focus of Christian efforts, it was a Christian site for 1093 years.

Ataturk and his wife in 1924.

Like a lot of the things we discuss here, this story is complicated by World War One.  Going into the Great War Turkey was the Ottoman Empire and claimed to be the caliphate.  Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had been an Ottoman officer who came to see the Ottoman government he served in as effete, ineffective and anti modern.  He became the leader in what amounted to a rebellion against the Ottoman government over the issue of peace as that peace proposed to carve away large sections of Anatolia in favor its its ethnic minorities. This soon lead to the Turkish War of Independence which pitted the Turkish forces first against the Allies but, as time went on, principally against the Greeks.

The overplaying of the Allied hand in Turkey caused one of the great tragedies of the immediate post World War One world.  The Allied powers were, by that time, too fatigued to bother with a long protracted war and occupation of Anatolia, which is what defeating the Turks would really have meant. Their presence as victors, however, gave real hope to ethnic minorities inside of Turkey, with those minorities uniformly being Christian.  Moreover, they gave hope to the Greek government of amazingly recovering a portion of Anatolia that Greeks had not governed since 1453.  Not only did the Greeks seek to do so, but they sought to expand their proposed territory in Anatolia far beyond those few areas that had sizable Greek populations and into areas where those populations were quite limited. Giving hope to those aspirations, moreover, caused the struggle for that goal to rapidly become genocidal on both sides.

The European Allies lost interest pretty quickly in shedding blood for Greek territorial aspirations and in October 1922 the war came to an end in a treaty which saw 1,000,000 ethnic Greeks depart Anatolia as refugees, bringing nearly to an end a presence there that stretched back into antiquity, and which at one time had defined Greek culture more than Greece itself.  Some Greeks remained, but it was a tiny minority.  It was a tiny minority, however that continued to be identified by its Christianity, with both Orthodox and Catholic Greeks remaining.

Ataturk and one of his twelve adopted children.

Ataturk's victory of the Allies did not prove to be a victory for Islam.  Taking an approach to governance that might be best compared to that of Napoleon Bonaparte, he was a modernizing and liberalizing force who sought to accomplish those goals effectively by force.  As part of that, he saw the influence of Islam as a retrograde force that needed to be dealt with.

Indeed, Ataturk's relationship with Islam has remained a source of debate and mystery, like much of his personal life in general.  He was born into an Islamic family and had received religious instruction, but its clear that he held a highly nuanced view of the faith.  He was not personally observant in at least some respects and was a life long heavy drinker, a fact which lead to his early death.  He spoke favorably of the role of religion in society but it was clear that role was not to extend to influencing government.  Comments he made about Islam suggest that he thought a reformed Islam needed to come about or even that he personally did not believe in its tenants.  He was quoted to a foreign correspondent to the effect that Turkish muslims didn't grasp what Islam really was because the Koran was in Arabic, and once they really were able to read it in Turkish, they'd reject it.

As part of all of this his approach to governance, therefore, was Napoleonic, being a liberalizer and modernizer by force.  Like Napoleon, his day ended short, although his rule was far more successful than Napoleon's and his Turkey became modern Turkey up until Turkey's current leadership, which seems intent to go backwards in time.

One of the things that Ataturk managed to do was to reach a treaty with Greece in 1930 in which Greece renounced its claims on  Turkish territory.  As Ataturk continued to advance modernization in the 1930s, the Hagia Sophia's occupation as a mosque came to an end in 1935.  It became a museum dedicated to the history of Anatolia and a spectacular example of Anatolia's history and culture.

Now that's coming to an end, along with what seems to be Turkey's long period of regional exceptionalism.

Hagia Sophia translates as Holy Wisdom. This move by the Turkish government is neither holy, nor wise.

May 16, 1920. The Canonization of Joan d'Arc

A doodle of Joan d'Arc by Clément de Fauquembergue on the margin of the protocol of the Parliament of Paris from May 10, 1429, two years prior to her death.  Clément de Fauquembergue was the parliamentary registrar and the news of the her victory at Orleans had just reached Paris.  The doodle is the only know illustration of her done during her lifetime.

On this day in 1920, Pope Benedict XV canonized Joan d'Arc, the 15th Century peasant girl who lead French forces in a revived effort to recapture lost grounds from the English after hearing voices commanding her to act for the French crown.  She ultimately paid for her efforts with her life, being burned at the stake after being falsely convicted of heresy, a charge now universally regarded as absurd and which was itself reversed in 1456.

Even no less of figure as Winston Churchill regarded Joan as a saint.  That the illiterate farm girl was able to gain access first to the French crown and then the army in the field commander was and is proof of her divine mission. With the army, she offered advice to its noble commanders which was frequently taken and French fortunes against the English in fact reversed and their army started to do remarkably well.

She is believed to have been born in 1412 in a region of Lorraine that retained loyalty to the French crown during the Hundred Years War, a contest between the Plantagenets, the Norman rulers of England, and the House of Valois, the rulers of France, over who should rule France. The house she grew up in and the village church there still stand.  As those who have ready Henry V know, the English long maintained that they should rule both kingdoms and they often regarded France as more important than in England.  That contest commenced in 1337 and featured a long running series of campaigns.  Trouble in the French royal family had been taken advantage of by Henry V who had been able to greatly expand the amount of English controlled territory in the 1415 to 1417 period.  By 1429, when Joan commenced her mission, half of France was controlled directly by England or by French duchies that were loyal to England.

The English commenced a a siege of the FRench city of Orleans in 1428, a town that was a holdout in its region for the French king, Charles VII.

Joan began to have visions in 1425, at which time she was 13 years old.  She identified the first figures she saw as St. Michael, St. Catherine and St. Margaret, who told her to drive the English out of France and take the Dauphin to Reims for his consecration.  At age 16 she made demands upon a relative to take her to see the crown which were received with scorn.  Nonetheless she was taken to Vaucouleurs where she demanded an armed escort to the royal court, which was denied. Returning the following year, she secured the support of two soldiers and their urgings and support she was conducted to the court after she reported the results of a distant battle she had not been at two days prior to messengers arriving to report it.  She as then escorted to the court disguised as a male soldier as it involved crossing hostile Burgundian territory.  At that time she was 17 years old and Charles VII 26.

She secured permission to travel with the army, which was granted.  Everything she used in the mission was donated to her, including the banner that she used.  She never used any weapons in battle but rode under her banner. She did, however, gain access to councils of war and was listened to. As noted, the fortunes of the French reversed in this period.  The siege of Orleans was broken by the French and Reims taken. The Dauphin was crowned as a result in Reims.

After a brief truce between the English and the French she was captured in battle in 1430 and put on trial for heresy.  Heresy being a religious offense, she was tried by English and Burgundian clerics, but the English officers oversaw the trial.  The trial was irregular and conducted without religious authority and without the individual commissioned to find evidence against her being able to find any.  Her conviction hinged on her having worn male clothing when under escort across hostile Burgundian soil.  She was convicted by this tribunal of heresy and burned at the stake in May 31, 1431.  Her executioner later greatly feared that his service in this role would result in his damnation.

In spite of her death, the dramatic reversal in French fortunes continued on and by 1450 the English had been pushed off the continent.  In fact, French borders surpassed their current ones, as France's resulting borders included what is now part of Belgium, a not surprising result given that Belgium is a multiethnic state.

A regular canonical trial to examine the first one's propriety was convened in 1455 and reversed the conviction in 1456.

She's been a popular figure ever since her death and in any age the nature of her mission is hard to deny.  Illiterate and born in a region separated from the retreating French royal lands, she nonetheless managed to convince the French crown and the chivalric leaders of its army that she had a divine mission, something that was aided by her knowledge of things that she could not have known but for her commission.  Under her, in spite of the fact that she was a teenage girl with no experience in military matters, French military fortunes permanently reversed.

It's no doubt her youth and gender that have caused her popularity to remain outside of France, but she is a saint whose nature should cause moderns to pause.

MKTH photograph of the statue of St. Joan d'Arc in Notre Dame de Paris.

She was not, as some no doubt imagine her, as some sort of proto feminist teenage leader in an age of male patrimony and would not have seen things that way.  She was singularly devout and saw her mission as a religious one.  She was known to be opposed to the heresies of her era and Islam. She was intensely Catholic and caused the army she lead to be adherent to the faith.  The war for control of France changed from a contest between two royal families to a war with religious overtones and even, as viewed from a modern eye, as one involving nationalism in an early form.  Her modern fans would do well to take note of her mission and the fact that its impossible to imagine it without crediting the divine voices that she attributed it to.

And indeed, her mission did have impacts on the religious map of Europe in ways that would not be possible to appreciate at the time of her execution at age 19 in May, 1430.  England was pushed off the continent in 1450 by which time Henry VI was king. That same year he was forced to put down a rebellion against the crown in England.  In 1533, a mere 83 years later during a period of time in which events often moved slowly, King Henry VIII would take the formerly devout England away from the Church and marry his pregnant mistress Anne Boleyn, bringing the Reformation to England in a personal effort to generate a male successor through a fertile female. The following acts would result in crown licensed theft of church property, murder and decades of strife and war.  While France would fall to secularism in 1790, its position up until that time remained stalwart.

Some Gave All: St. Joan D'Arc, Notre Dame de Paris

Some Gave All: St. Joan D'Arc, Notre Dame de Paris: Memorial to St. Joan D'Arc, the patron saint of France, at the Cathedral de Notre Dame de Paris.

Sunday, April 18, 1909. St. Joan d'Arc beatified.

 St. Joan d'Arc was beatified by Pope Pius X before a crowed of 30,000 in St. Peter's Square.

Drawing of St. Joan d'Arc made during her lifetime.  

A patron saint of France who lived from 1412 to 1431 before being executed, her canonization would follow in May, 1920.

Remarkably, an example of her signature exists.

The 1909 St. Louis Cardinals were photographed.

Last prior edition:

Saturday, April 17, 1909. Soccer riots.

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