8 September—Today is celebrated by most Catholic sects as Christ’s mother’s birthday because it’s conveniently nine months after the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The year of the Virgin Mary’s birth isn’t known. And if it were known, we certainly wouldn’t publish it.

Today also is the 868^th birthday of King Richard I of England. Richard is popularly known as Lionheart (Cœur de Lion in his preferred language) because he was supposed to have been a skilled military commander, even though his costly crusading was ultimately unsuccessful: he failed to retake Jerusalem from Saladin for the Christians and was later held for a humongous ransom by a former ally.

It seems that Richard publicly insulted Duke Leopold V of Austria during the Siege of Acre in the Third Crusade in 1192. So naturally Leopold captured Richard and then cunningly handed him over to politically ambitious Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who needed financing for his invasion of Sicily. Inbred royals will be inbred royals, after all.

No piker he, Henry VI set the ransom at 150,000 silver marks, roughly 3,500 kilograms. In terms of 2025 dollars, with silver at a delightful $41.50 per Troy ounce today, that comes out to not too far under $50 million. It’s estimated to have been two to three times the annual income of Richard’s government in Blighty. That’s all!? Wouldn’t even buy a decent used 747.

Bupkes or not, luckily, Richard’s doting mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was able to raise the ransom and spring Richard in 1194. Eleanor used traditional, tried and true, guaranteed effective fund-raising devices to come up with the scratch to free her darling heroic son, including but not limited to taxing property owners a quarter of their property’s arbitrarily assessed value and confiscating gold and silver from churches. Such is a mother’s love. And there was no First Amendment to protect churches or for churches to abuse back then and there.

Of course, even without the egregious temporary (?) surtax, as it were, Richard I’s subjects had been oppressively taxed anyway, in order to fund his questionable military campaigns.

Truth be told, Richard I’s reputation as a beneficent monarch—a good king—is due to two things: his younger brother who followed him to the throne, King John of Magna Carta fame, was an absolutely terrible, tyrannical monarch, even worse than Richard himself; and it was easy for the myths and legends about a composite character called Robin Hood, including Sir Walter Scott’s novel “Ivanhoe,” historically inaccurate to say the least, to popularize an absentee ruler centuries after the fact . . .