Infinite Wisdom

"The role of the commander is to command the troops and direct their blades, not to wield a sword."

La Triviata

• King Alfonso X of Castile, Leon, and Galicia (r. 1252-1284), a doughty warrior who campaigned against the Moors, the Portuguese and the French, was also a noted scholar, astronomer, and mathematician, whose “Alfonsine Tables” were the most accurate guides to planetary motion for several centuries, thus earning him the sobriquet “El Sabio – The Wise.”
• Promoted in 1939, François Darlan, the Vichyite naval officer who came over to the Allies after the landings in North Africa in 1942 (only to be assassinated soon after), was the only man in French history to hold the rank of Admiral of the Fleet.
• Studies of y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA indicate that a majority of Icelanders are descended from Scandinavian men and Celtic women, as a result of Viking slave raids on Ireland.
• While studying ship building at Deptford during his visit to England in 1689, Tsar Peter the Great resided for about three months at the nearby Sayescourt estate, on which he and his entourage inflicted an estimated £150 in damages, perhaps £250,000 in modern money.
• At about the time he was promoted to captain, in 1792, Napoleone Buonaparte reportedly was so desperately short of cash that he was only saved from total poverty by a loan from his friend the actor François Joseph Talma, who feared the young officer might commit suicide in despair of money.
• So well seasoned were most of Julius Caesar’s troops during his Gallic and Civil Wars, that on one occasion he referred to two legions that had been through a half-dozen battles in two years of active service as still being green.
• Frédéric François Xavier Ghislain de Mérode (1820-1874), graduated from the Belgian Military Academy in 1843, campaigned with the French Army in Algeria in 1844-1847 (winning the cross of the Légion d'honneur) and then abruptly left military service, entered the seminary, was ordained a priest, became a member of the papal household, and later served as Minister of War for the Papal States.
• Returning from command of the Mediterranean Squadron in 1838, Commodore Jesse Elliot brought with him the sarcophagus of the Roman Emperor Alexander Severus (r. 222-235) and offered it to Andrew Jackson for his final resting place; but “Old Hickory” rejected it as unsuitable for an American president, leaving the sarcophagus among the holdings of the Smithsonian Institution.

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