Both numbers are inaccurate, but they contain two essential truths. It was around 50 years ago, as a postgraduate student, that I recognized the great potential of searching for manuscripts in France and started discovering the new or scarcely known charters that have since informed my work and the book. And it was three years ago that I finally felt able to confront the ethical issues involved in writing about a man whose achievements were based on deliberate and often extreme violence.

My ability to make that leap was helped by the realization that everyone writing about William in the 11th and 12th centuries faced the same problem, with the conclusion having to be that William’s life and achievements are ultimately a parable on the eternal moral conundrum of the legitimacy of violence to achieve what its perpetrators believe to be a justifiable end.

All this is so much still with us.

Although its later stages were a massacre, the Battle of Hastings was a hard-fought battle that lasted throughout almost all of the day of October 14, 1066. Its intensity and its remarkable duration show that many people were prepared to fight very hard for William and Harold and that many believed both men had justifiable claims to be king of England.

Why did so many people have sufficient confidence in William to join him in a very risky enterprise?

The answer partly lies in a long-term crisis in England’s history. This crisis was the product, in the long term, of a situation in which rules of succession of the kind we would expect did not exist. The way in which the claims of the senior descendants of the Old English rulers—personified in 1066 by those of the approximately 14-year-old Edgar, usually known as the Ætheling (an Old English word that signifies a prince of royal blood)—were ignored, just as they had apparently been in 1035, 1040, and 1042, says almost all that needs to be said about the politics of the times and the fluidity of succession norms.

The extensive support for Harold, the earl of Wessex and the most powerful man in the kingdom after the king, was a pragmatic response to the crisis. William and the kings of Denmark and Norway all had claims and were expected to invade. The extreme volatility of this situation is important for understanding William’s life and ultimate achievement, with the analysis also needing to take account of the politics of the French kingdom. The crisis took a different form after 1066, but it did not go away.

The surviving English elite’s submission to William at Berkhamsted, and his coronation on Christmas Day 1066 integrated him into a framework of English legitimacy. But this proclaimed continuity does not mean that the history of England, the British Isles, Europe, and indeed of the world, would have been the same if Harold had won at Hastings or if Edgar had been made king. We should never forget that thousands were killed and many more deprived of their livelihoods at and after the Battle of Hastings. The events that followed must be seen in terms of a terrible trauma and the collapse of many certainties—and as a demonstration that it is often harder to make peace than to make war. Memory may also have played a part in all this. England had been conquered 50 years earlier by the Danish King Cnut who had ruled both kingdoms from 1016 to 1035. Awareness of how that process of coming to terms with a conqueror had been managed undoubtedly influenced peacemaking in 1066.

The next four years witnessed a truly exceptional takeover of England’s resources by an elite from Normandy and other regions of northern France. One crucial determinant of events was the absolute requirement that William reward those who had supported him. This is what all medieval rulers were expected to do!

A second was that he guaranteed their security in the midst of continuing resentment, potential rebellion, and the certainty of invasions from Denmark, whose king also had a claim to the English kingdom inherited from the time of Cnut. The result was the dispossession of most of England’s secular and religious elite and their replacement by men and women from France.

Much of this had been done by 1070, with the most notorious aspect thereof being the “Harrying of the North,” William’s destruction of much of Yorkshire in the winter of 1069-70. The scale of the destruction remains a subject of debate and, yes, violence against civilians was a permissible feature of medieval warfare. But William’s ruthlessness was exceptional by his standards and those of others.

Yet the result of the conquest was the establishment of peace in England and a framework of rule that emphasized legality and continuation with the English past. Large new cathedrals were built, with Winchester being a superb example, and a new regime was established, with all integrated into an identity that was proclaimed to be English. At the same time, although retaining distinct identities, Normandy and England became the core of a cross-Channel empire that lasted until 1204 when Normandy was conquered by the French king, Philip Augustus.

To try to understand William’s personality is one of the aims of my book. What I can say here is that we must totally reject the notion that as a child he had had no prospects (that means discarding the whole apparatus of “William the Bastard” and the definition of what might be meant by his illegitimacy). Although his parents were not technically married, he had always been prepared for an aristocratic lifestyle. Psychological analysis must indeed start from the position that he had a secure family background by the standards of his time. His father’s death on pilgrimage to Jerusalem when William was around eight years old may have been an important factor in shaping him. The adult William was able to dominate situations through a mixture of overawing presence, theatricality, fear, and intelligence.

By 1066 his record showed that he could command in war. But also that he knew how to sustain morale. Extensive religious patronage and the dedication of the abbey of La Trinité de Caen, which he and his wife Matilda had founded in June 1066, was part of this. An approximately eight-year-old daughter was handed over to the monastery as a child oblate in the expectation that she would become a nun, as she eventually did.

William and his associates created a cross-Channel empire of remarkable dynamism. The inherited organizational strength and traditions of the English kingdom that had evolved from the 10th century onwards and its traditions were brought into a close relationship with the turbulent politics of the French kingdom. After 1154, the succession of William’s great-grandson King Henry II (1154-89) created an even larger empire that joined Normandy and England with Anjou and Aquitaine.

This cross-Channel empire would certainly not have come into existence if Harold had won at Hastings. And reckoning with that empire was a massive preoccupation for William. The politics of Normandy’s place within the French kingdom meant that he spent around 75 percent of his time in Normandy and France after 1072, after the English had been conclusively defeated. His takeover in 1063 of the county of Maine to the south of Normandy was profoundly influential because it created multiple new preoccupations for him that continued under his successors.

In an article of this kind, I cannot write much about the reinterpretation of detailed topics that are a feature of my book. So, to be topical, I will just say two things.

Firstly, although William the Conqueror’s conquests and the empire he created did change England’s and Britain’s relationship with Europe, they did so by making adjustments within a relationship that already had a long history and which is still with us, and will continue to be.

Secondly, the cross-Channel empire’s final collapse in the time of King John, a man who certainly did not have William’s qualities, brought to the fore in England the tradition that a ruler was morally responsible for maintaining good law. Hence, Magna Carta and all that followed. We cannot of course directly attribute this history to William the Conqueror. But it is another one of the many ways in which his achievements have had an influence that is still with us.

The post How William the Conqueror Became England’s Peacemaker appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Or you can go for the American history. Those who know of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham—fought September 13, 1759 on a plain named for the early French settler Abraham Martin—often remember it as a fight between a French army commanded by Lieutenant General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and a British army commanded by Major General James Wolfe. But few know that this battle helped to make the American Revolution possible.

About one-third of Major General Wolfe’s army had been recruited in the American colonies. Two-thirds of the ships that carried his army up the St. Lawrence River to Quebec had been chartered in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. Hundreds of New England sailors had temporarily joined the Royal Navy to take part in the Quebec campaign.

Visit the National Battlefields Park inside the city and you can walk over the ground where American soldiers fought in 1759. Despite its name, the park—Quebec’s equivalent of Central Park—is well known these days as a recreational area, nature preserve, and outdoor concert venue, rather than as a historic site.

James Wolfe, 1727-1759.

But at National Battlefields Park, you can follow in the footsteps of Wolfe’s advance guard that climbed the cliffs lining the St. Lawrence River by walking up the Plains of Abraham Trail. Walk eastward until you reach the Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec (the Quebec National Fine Arts Museum) and you’re standing at the south end of Wolfe’s line.

Wolfe’s 4,500 British and American soldiers stood there as Montcalm’s army of 3,500 charged across the plains. Wolfe’s disciplined force held their formation and waited for the French to come within range. Montcalm’s army, composed of an uneasy mix of French regulars and Canadian militia, broke apart as a rapid advance over rough ground disrupted its formation and the militia opened fire prematurely, then paused to reload. A series of volleys by Britons and Americans firing flintlock muskets broke the French army and threw Montcalm’s troops into headlong retreat.

By European standards, the battle had been a minor encounter between small bodies of troops. (In the European theatre of the Seven Years’ War, 36,000 Prussians—allied to the British—had defeated 66,000 Austrians—allied to the French—at the Battle of Leuthen in 1757.) Wolfe’s army lost 71 killed, 591 wounded, and three missing; the French had about 600 killed, wounded, and missing. But when the black powder smoke had cleared, a major obstacle to American independence had been eliminated.

That obstacle? The French.

By 1759, the original 13 colonies were potential independent states. They had their own governments, run by local elites and financed by local revenues. And on occasion they organized their own armies and fleets and sent them off to war. New England had sent out expeditions that had besieged Quebec in 1690 and captured Acadia in 1710 and Louisbourg in 1744.

A military plan shows frontline positions of the British and French during the Battle of the Plains of Abraham on Sept. 13, 1759.

But for as long as the French held Canada, independence was out of the question. The British and Americans perceived the French and their Native American allies as a major threat. In wartime, French-Native American war parties raided the American frontier with impunity while privateers from Louisbourg preyed on American shipping. French outposts like Fort Niagara, Detroit, and Louisiana hemmed in the 13 colonies, preventing them from expanding to the west. Americans looked to the Royal Navy and British army to defend the colonies against French aggression.

The Battle of the Plains of Abraham changed all that. A few days after the battle, Quebec surrendered after a brief siege. A year later, following three British-American invasions that converged on Montreal, the rest of Canada capitulated. Now in British hands, Canada no longer posed a threat.

So when the British parliament decided to tax the American colonies, there was nothing to stop British colonials from rising up to fight—first for their rights as Englishmen, then for their freedom as Americans. British soldiers who served at the Plains of Abraham ended up on both sides of the American Revolution. William Howe, who led Wolfe’s advance guard during the landing at Quebec, served as British commander-in-chief from 1775 to 1778. Richard Montgomery, one of Wolfe’s officers, joined the American rebels and returned to Quebec in 1775 as the commander of an American invasion of Canada.

The post The Quebec Battle That Opened the Door to America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Unlike the much more famous Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, when American Indians annihilated George Armstrong Custer’s command, there was nothing epic or heroic in the disaster of 1791. The American troops proved no match for Indian warriors executing a coordinated battle plan and after three hours of ineffective resistance they broke and fled, abandoning arms, equipment, and wounded comrades to the enemy.

Some Americans see no point in remembering an event that didn’t change the course of history and that reflects little credit on their country. But the Indian victory mattered a great deal in 1791. The new Republic had hostile powers on its borders and few national loyalties binding Western settlers. The future of the United States was not secure—and that battle in Ohio had lasting consequences. We miss a lot if we ignore those three hours of American history.

In 1791, settlers and land speculators were eager to get their hands on the rich lands of Ohio but were meeting resistance from American Indians. So President Washington dispatched General Arthur St. Clair and some 2,000 men to the center of that resistance, a group of villages on the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio.

Arthur St. Clair by Charles Wilson Peale, from life, 1782-174.

The American army—poorly equipped, badly trained, delayed and demoralized by administrative mismanagement, contractor fraud, and bad weather, and its ranks thinned by sickness, desertion, and the expiration of enlistment terms—was out of its element. At dawn on November 4, about 1,000 warriors from a coalition of Indian nations—Shawnees, Miamis, Delawares, Wyandots, Kickapoos, Ojibwas, Ottawas, Potawatomis, Iroquois, and others—encircled and attacked the American encampment on the bank of the Wabash River. Moving rapidly from tree to tree and firing from cover, Indian marksmen systematically picked off the officers and the gun crews, depriving the raw American soldiers of leadership and artillery. American bayonet charges proved ineffective and discipline unraveled as casualties mounted. When General St. Clair ordered a retreat, the survivors fled for their lives. The Americans suffered 630 killed and almost 300 wounded; on the Indian side, there were about 25 killed and perhaps 50 wounded.

In the long run, perhaps, the American defeat along the Wabash River didn’t really matter. The U.S. rebuilt its army and, three years later, General Anthony Wayne defeated the Indian coalition at the Battle of Fallen Timbers—thus opening up all of Ohio’s rich land to settlement.

Little Turtle, a Miami war chief, one of the leaders of the Indian coalition, lithograph reputedly based on a portrait by Gilbert Stuart

As Americans flooded across Ohio and beyond, they could ignore the Indian victory; but at the time the battle generated a deluge of correspondence, opinions, and debates in the press. It fueled growing political divisions. It produced the first congressional investigation in American history—which in turn led to the birth of the principle of executive privilege, as Washington and his cabinet debated which documents to make available and which to hold back. It changed how Americans regarded, organized, and paid for their armies—only a well-funded professional army, properly supplied, and trained in Indian fighting could accomplish the task. It increased the president’s power to raise troops and it increased the federal government’s role in expanding the American republic westwards, with the army as its key instrument in policing the frontier and suppressing Indian resistance.

If we miss so much by ignoring those three hours in 1791, imagine what we miss by ignoring 10,000 or 20,000 years of human habitation on our continent before Jamestown in 1607, or Plymouth in 1620, or even Philadelphia in 1776. The first European colonists touched the edges of a vast Indian world, like the blind man feeling the elephant—a world where indigenous civilizations developed, flourished, and declined, and numerous nations organized around kinship practiced intercultural diplomacies and conducted foreign policies with other Indian nations to build and maintain alliances, make war and peace, and share and contest resources.

In many places and for many years, European colonists depended on Indians—for food, guidance, knowledge of the continent, trade, and alliance against other Indians and against other colonial powers. Then Americans built a new nation on Indian land. Without Indians, American history is, well, mythology.

Telling or writing American history with American Indians is not an exercise in feeling guilty about the past, turning yesterday’s heroes into villains, or running down America—although, of course, there are dark sides to the story. Reconstructing a forgotten battle gives the Indian victors their due, but it also tells us something important about the forgotten Americans who died there, about the nation that sent them there, and about the process of building that nation.

The post The Biggest Forgotten American Indian Victory appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.