When actors fight with writers

In ancient Greece and Rome, the theatre could be brutal, but it had not yet gone as far as Elizabethan London. Playwrights might serve, actors might brawl, and festivals could explode. What they rarely did was meet in a field with rapiers and leave one man dead of a six-inch wound.

The clearest military example is Aeschylus. He fought at Marathon in 490 BC; his brother Cynaegirus died there. Tradition also links him with Salamis and Plataea. He acted in his own plays. The epitaph he is said to have composed for himself mentions Marathon and says nothing about his tragedies. Sophocles held the civic-military office of strategos. That is command, not arena fighting.

Rome usually kept the professions apart. Livy records that professional actors—histriones—were not enrolled in the legions, and that a citizen who took up acting was struck from his tribe. Players of Atellan farce were an exception, because that form stayed closer to amateur performance. Actors and gladiators both carried infamia: legal disgrace. They could not hold certain offices; their testimony and marriage rights were restricted. They were adjacent low-status spectacle trades, not the same job.

Violence still gathered around the theatre. Competition was fierce. Alcibiades punched a rival chorus-producer—and, in some accounts, a chorus boy—in the Theatre of Dionysus during the Great Dionysia. Decades later Meidias punched Demosthenes in the same theatre. Those were political-religious festival assaults, not stage fights. In Rome, actor cliques and their partisans could riot. Livy and later writers describe faction feeling that ran to bloodshed, in the same register as the circus crowds. Audiences pelted performers.

Elizabethan London closed the gap. On 22 September 1598, in the fields at Hoxton—then Hogsden or Hoggesdon Fields, in Shoreditch—the twenty-six-year-old playwright Ben Jonson killed the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel. Spencer died on the spot from a rapier thrust six inches deep and an inch wide into his right side. Jonson was indicted for manslaughter, pleaded guilty, and escaped the gallows only by claiming benefit of clergy.

Spencer was a rising player with the Admiral’s Men under Philip Henslowe. He already had a violent reputation. In December 1596, in a Shoreditch barber’s house, he drove a still-sheathed rapier into the eye of James Feake, a goldsmith’s son, after Feake threatened him with a candlestick. Feake died three days later. There is no record that Spencer was punished.

The two men had also been locked up together the year before. In 1597 Jonson co-wrote the lost satirical play The Isle of Dogs with Thomas Nashe. The Privy Council judged it seditious, closed the London theatres, and imprisoned Jonson, Spencer, and another actor, Robert Shaa, in the Marshalsea. Nashe fled. The company broke up and Spencer had to find new work. No one recorded why they later fought. Later guesses include leftover anger over that scandal, or Spencer calling Jonson a bricklayer—the trade Jonson had been trained in and disliked.

Years afterwards Jonson told William Drummond that Spencer had challenged him, arrived with a sword ten inches longer than Jonson’s, and wounded him in the arm first. The indictment is colder: Benjamin Johnson, “yeoman,” “feloniously and wilfully” assaulted Spencer in the fields with a rapier worth three shillings and gave him the mortal wound. Spencer “died instantly.”

Henslowe wrote to Edward Alleyn four days later: “I have lost one of my company, which hurteth me greatly, that is Gabriel, for he is slain in Hogsden Fields by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer.”

Jonson was held in Newgate. At the Old Bailey he confessed to manslaughter. The penalty was hanging. He then claimed benefit of clergy: a medieval privilege that, by Elizabeth’s reign, any literate man could use once. He read Psalm 51—the “neck verse”: “Have mercy upon me, O God…” The court recorded that he “read like a clerk,” branded him on the thumb with the letter T, the Tyburn T, and confiscated his goods. He could not use the plea again.

While in prison he converted to Roman Catholicism, possibly under the influence of the Jesuit Thomas Wright, who worked among prisoners. He later returned to the Church of England. The same year his first major success, Every Man in His Humour, was on the stage. Enemies do not seem to have used Spencer’s death against him much afterwards. Some contemporaries thought Spencer had it coming.

Jonson had already, by his own later account, killed a man in single combat while serving in the Low Countries. The 1598 duel is the one that left a mark on his thumb and nearly ended the career that produced Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair.

Aeschylus could fight Persians and still be buried as a soldier. Sophocles could hold a generalship and still be Sophocles. Rome kept actors off the roll of honour. London put the writer and the player in the same marsh and the same field, with steel in their hands.

Today it tends to be certain drugs that spark the violence. That is not limited to actors.

'Deep state' continues playing games in opposition to Trump.

Those games have serious consequences for those doing their job under Trump administration.

Has Massie’s dart landed? Not in the only place that counts. Hegseth is still Secretary of War. The House did not impeach him. Speaker Mike Johnson cancelled Thursday and sent the chamber home until after the midterms, which is how a privileged resolution dies without anyone having to put their name on the knife. Johnson called it a stunt. Massie called it the “Hegseth holiday.” Both descriptions can be true at once.

The dart still drew blood. That is the point of these games.

Massie is not a deep-state apparatchik. He is a lame-duck libertarian who already lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger Hegseth campaigned for. He has spent a career voting no on wars, surveillance, and spending. He aimed at Hegseth rather than Trump because Hegseth is the man executing the orders and ignoring the War Powers clock. That is a constitutional argument, and it is also a political weapon fired by a man with nothing left to lose inside the party. The effect is the same either way: force Republicans onto the record against a wartime secretary weeks before an election, or force leadership to look as if it is hiding. Leadership hid. That is not victory for Massie. It is not clean for the administration either.

The serious consequence is not the 34-page resolution. It is the climate around the people doing the job. A secretary running a seven-month campaign against Iran, a maritime campaign against drug boats, and the seizure of Nicolás Maduro is now spending part of every week answering process attacks, leak stories, and impeachment theatre. Officers and civilians under him learn the lesson fast: anonymous sourcing is safer than loyalty, and the press will treat a casualty-accounting dispute as proof of a cover-up. That is how institutions punish an administration they did not choose, without ever winning a vote.

Look at the Washington Post piece that dropped three days after Massie spoke. The headline machinery said more U.S. troops have died “amid” the Iran war than the Pentagon has disclosed. The body of the story is thinner. Official public count: 18. Anonymous officials: at least 22, maybe 23. Then the caveat the headline does not want: not all of the extra deaths were tied directly to combat in Iran. Some were personnel in the Middle East while the war was on. Hegseth called the story a lie. The paper called it accountability. Readers were invited to hear “they’re hiding bodies in Iran.” What they were given was framing plus unnamed insiders. That is not the same thing as a suppressed battlefield toll. It is the same method used for years against this president and almost never against the last one when the last one’s wars, withdrawals, and body counts were the story.

None of that requires pretending civilian death is imaginary. A school in Minab was hit early. Children died. A preliminary U.S. assessment said America was likely responsible and did not intend the school. Drug-boat strikes have killed people the administration calls traffickers and Massie calls victims of extrajudicial force. Wars kill people who were not the target. The relevant comparison is intent and method. Trump’s Iran and Venezuela campaigns have been notable for constraint by the standards of American expeditionary history: no occupation army, no nation-building brief, no invitation to linger for twenty years. That is not sainthood. It is not the reckless bloodlust the coverage implies either.

Massie wrapped four different fights into one instrument: War Powers on Iran, civilian-harm law, Kelly’s speech, Maduro, and Yemen. Some of that is a real argument about Article I. Some of it is an attempt to criminalize policy. Kelly reminding troops they may refuse unlawful orders is not sedition. Hegseth treating a sitting senator as if he were still on the Navy’s punishment roster was a political error even if the legal theory was clever. Mixing those counts with the war itself is how an impeachment document becomes a press package.

So: did the dart land?

It did not remove Hegseth. It did not stop the war. It did not command a Republican majority. It did force the Speaker to choose between a midterm roll call and a recess, and Johnson chose the recess. It did feed a week of copy in which “impeachment” and “hidden deaths” travelled farther than the caveats. It did tell every official still working the problem that the opposition’s preferred battlefield is process, leaks, and moral vocabulary, not a declaration of war they will not vote and not an alternative strategy they will not own.

That is the game. It has always been the game against this administration. The people under Trump pay for it in time, morale, and the permanent suggestion that doing the job is itself the scandal. Massie threw the dart at Hegseth so it would stick in Trump. It stuck in the news cycle. It did not stick in the statute book. When the House comes back in November, Johnson says the resolution will be tabled. Believe him. Then watch the next leak. That is where the next dart is already being cut.

When Jerusalem was Christian and the king spoke French
Lost when Lusignan eschewed defence to look strong, while Saladin united his peoples

The road to Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem in 1187 is an eighty-eight-year arc: a Latin kingdom planted by massacre in 1099, expanded along the coast, then slowly encircled as Muslim Syria and Egypt were reunited under one commander.

By late 1098 the First Crusade had already taken Antioch. The Fatimid vizier of Egypt, al-Afdal, used the chaos to snatch Jerusalem from the Seljuks and installed Iftikhar al-Dawla as governor. The Franks who reached the walls on 7 June 1099 were no longer fighting the Turks of Urban II’s sermon. They were fighting Cairo. On 15 July Godfrey’s men broke the northern wall. A massacre of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants followed. Godfrey would not take the title of king. On 12 August the Crusaders smashed a Fatimid relief army at Ascalon. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was born.

It was always a coastal garrison with a holy city attached. Baldwin I seized the ports that kept it alive — Arsuf, Caesarea, Acre, Beirut, Sidon — because Italian fleets made that possible. Inland, the Franks never had the numbers. They were a thin military caste ruling Eastern Christians, Muslims, and the remnant of a Jewish community they had all but erased in 1099. Templars and Hospitallers became the standing army the kingdom lacked. Four Latin states sat in a chain: Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch, Edessa.

Edessa fell to Zengi in 1144. The Second Crusade failed in front of Damascus and left the Franks weaker. Nur ad-Din then unified Muslim Syria and made jihad policy. Baldwin III and Amalric I tried to pre-empt him in collapsing Fatimid Egypt. They imported the man who would finish them. Shirkuh brought his nephew, Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub. In 1169 Saladin became vizier of Egypt. In 1171 he abolished the Fatimid caliphate. When Nur ad-Din died in 1174, Saladin took Damascus. By the early 1180s Egypt and Syria answered to one commander. The old Frankish trick — play Cairo against Damascus — was dead.

Baldwin IV, the leper king, bought time. At Montgisard in 1177 his small army routed Saladin. It was the kingdom’s last great field victory. Saladin stopped gambling on one raid and wore the frontier down: Marj Ayyun, Jacob’s Ford, pressure on Kerak and Montreal. Baldwin’s body failed faster than his will. Faction formed around his sister Sibylla.

Baldwin IV died in 1185. The child Baldwin V died in 1186. Sibylla crowned her husband, Guy of Lusignan. Raymond of Tripoli and much of the baronage opposed him. Raymond even made a local arrangement with Saladin to protect Tiberias. The kingdom split at the moment the enemy was ready.

Then Raynald of Châtillon, lord of Kerak, broke the truce and looted a caravan on the Egypt–Damascus road. Saladin had his pretext. On 1 May 1187, at Cresson, a Templar–Hospitaller force was cut to pieces. In late June Saladin crossed the Jordan. On 2 July he took Tiberias and trapped Raymond’s wife in the citadel. That was bait.

Guy’s host — the levy of the kingdom, the military orders, the True Cross as standard — lay at well-watered Sepphoris. Raymond said stay. Guy, pressed by Ridefort and Raynald and unwilling to look weak, marched on 3 July across dry hills in midsummer. Saladin’s horse-archers never let them drink. On 4 July, pinned against the Horns of Hattin, the army broke. The True Cross was taken. Guy was captured. Saladin killed Raynald as an oath-breaker. Captured Templars and Hospitallers were executed. The field army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem ceased to exist.

The towns fell in weeks. Balian of Ibelin knighted burgesses in a city that had almost no knights left. Saladin arrived on 20 September. Jerusalem surrendered on 2 October. Compared with 1099, the sack was limited. Latin rule in the city ended after eighty-eight years. Richard Lionheart later recovered a coastal strip centred on Acre. He did not recover Jerusalem.

That is what happened. The harder question is what need not have happened.

Had the Franks not evicted and slaughtered the Jews?
In 1099 they burned a people who had lived in the city under Muslim rule as a protected minority. They gained a reputation for holy murder and lost a population that knew the country, the languages, and the trade routes. A Latin kingdom that had protected the Jewish remnant, taxed it, and used it as a bridge to older communities in Egypt and Syria would still have been a minority regime. It would not have become loved. It would have been less isolated. Later kings allowed small Jewish return — Benjamin of Tudela found congregations — but the founding crime was never unwritten. You cannot build a durable holy city by emptying it of the people whose scriptures you claim.

Had they worked with factions of Islam?
They did, when it suited them, and they stopped when pride or panic intervened. Fatimid envoys in 1099 offered peace if Jerusalem were left alone. The Crusaders refused and then spent the next eighty years trying to manage the split they had declined to use. The kingdom survived longest when Cairo and Damascus hated each other more than they hated Acre. Amalric’s Egyptian wars were an attempt to keep that split open. They produced Saladin instead. Raymond’s 1187 understanding with Saladin was the last local bargain. Guy treated it as treason rather than as the only strategy a small state had left. Working with a faction of Islam was never conversion and never trust. It was the recognition that a coastal garrison cannot fight a united Egypt and Syria at once. When the Franks forgot that, they marched to Hattin.

Had they maintained defence?
This is the one that was still available in July 1187. Sepphoris had water. Tiberias was a town, not the kingdom. Raymond was right. Guy left a sound position to look like a king. The military orders, built to hold walls and crossings, were spent in a thirst-march to relieve a citadel that could have waited. Defence, for a state this small, was not cowardice. It was the whole art: hold the ports, hold the water, refuse battle until the invader’s coalition frays. Baldwin IV understood that in his bones. Lusignan did not. Saladin united peoples. Guy needed to look strong. Jerusalem was lost in that difference, on a dry plateau, two months before the first stone left a mangonel at the Mount of Olives.

A French-speaking court on the Judean hills was always a wager. The wager was not piety. It was numbers, ports, and the enemy’s divisions. Massacre at the founding narrowed the numbers. Refusal to live with Muslim split narrowed the time. A king who would not sit still behind water spent the last army. After that, Saladin only had to walk to the gate.