November 22nd in history

November 22, 1428 was the birthdate of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, better known to history as the Kingmaker. He was an interesting man and I like writing about his power struggle with his cousin Edward, whom he foolishly underestimated, but my sympathies were always with his brother John. And on November 22, 1220, Frederick II, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor; he was the only son of Richard I’s nemesis, Heinrich von Hohenstaufen, and the very courageous Constance de Hauteville, who’d invited the women of Jesi to watch her give birth in order to disprove the rumors that she was not really pregnant. Frederick was also King of Sicily, his mother’s legacy,, and King of Jerusalem through his marriage to the sad little teenage Queen of Jerusalem, whom he wed at fourteen and who died in childbirth at sixteen. (Her mother had died giving birth to her, at age twenty.)
November 22nd is also, of course, a dark day in American history, the fiftieth anniversary today of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Those of us old enough to remember that traumatic event will never forget where we were when we heard, just as another generation remembered where they were when the news of Pearl Harbor broke.