Very Interesting Mr Simon Jenkins

Listening to Simon Jenkins' A Short History of Europe, I ponder...

The relationship between John Wycliffe and John O Gaunt.  Vicar of Lutterworth in Leciestershire, and John O Gaunt, Earl of Leicester, now featuring as a small village north of Leicester. On one day a year you can visit the John O Gaunt cellar at Leicester Castle, reputed to have been a prison during the Napoleonic wars.

John Wycliffe

John O Gaunt

John O Gaunt Viaduct

I learn about how the Napoleonic troops broke into the Sistine chapel and graffitied the walls.
The chapel was created by Pope Sixtus IV (hence Sistine), in 1477. Michelangelo started painting in 1508 and took four years. Sixtus did not see the creation as he died in 1484.

My Polish barber told me how the Polish army sacrificed itself for the sake of Europe, preventing 'us' being over run by the Ottoman Empire.  And all the thanks they got was for Catherine the Great to carve up the nation with Prussia.  Jenkins reports that it was the Poles and the Austrians in this battle. The Austrians went on to rule much of Europe, so clearly very unfair. Perhaps one reason Roman is in the U.K. And I am not in Poland.

Was it the crippling of Germany through the 30 years war, and onwards, and its sense of being landlocked, that led to the apparent need to flex military muscle? In 1913 Willheim III of Germany opened the memorial to defeat of Napoleon in Leipzig in its centenary. He declared that it was the monument to the end of war.

That strip of land first called Lothairingia.  Has caused much turmoil in Europe.  The land was created after the death of Lothair I as Charlemagne's ancient empire was carved up between his three sons.  The middle bit has been caught up in tussles between France and Germany ever since.

The Purple bit

During the famous year with no summer, 1816, when the volcano Krakatoa, on Java irrupted and sent ash into the stratosphere, Mary Shelley, Byron and their set wrote books instead of going on walks by Lake Geneva.  Jenkins states that when Napoleon was told that he was being sent to St Helena in 1815, he declared that he was the modern Prometheus, chained to a rock and made to see his liver being eaten everyday for eternity. Shelley went on to call her creation 'Frankenstein', the modern Prometheus.

And we end "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."  

Emmanuel Kant.