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July 3, 1863: The Union Army of the Potomac defeats the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at the Battle of Gettysburg. Their defeat ended a brief Confederate invasion of the north and, combined with the Union victory at Vicksburg, Mississippi, a day later, is often considered the turning point of the US Civil War.

July 3, 1866: The Battle of Königgrätz, the key engagement in the Austro-Prussian War, ends with a decisive Prussian victory. The Austrian army had already suffered a series of defeats and its commander, Ludwig von Benedek, appealed to Emperor Franz Joseph I to make peace with the Prussians but was rebuffed. He drew up his forces for what amounted to a last stand against the far more effective Prussians, and while initially the Austrians held their own against the Prussian First Army and the Army of the Elbe, the arrival of the Prussian Second Army proved too much for the Austrians to handle. The war ended a few weeks later and established Prussia as the dominant German state, paving the way for German unification under Prussian auspices.

July 3, 2013: A military coup led by then-Defense Minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi overthrows the Egyptian government of Mohamed Morsi, ending a brief experiment in democracy and returning Egypt to military rule. Morsi had been elected president in 2012, after Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising the previous year had toppled the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood emerged as the country’s strongest political party. But opposition politicians never fully accepted the Brotherhood’s electoral victories, and a combination of other factors including economic weakness, a rise in terrorist incidents, and foreign financing from the UAE brought about the emergence of a protest movement called “Tamarod” (“rebellion”) by late April 2013. The Egyptian military, which regarded Morsi as a threat to its own economic interests, seized upon the (at least somewhat astroturfed) protests as a pretext to remove Morsi from power. Subsequent protests in support of Morsi were met with brutal suppression, with hundreds of people killed in the crackdown.

July 4, 362 BCE: At the Peloponnesian city of Mantinea, a Theban-led army defeats a Spartan-led alliance in what probably should have been the decisive battle of the Theban-Spartan War. The battle was decisive in the sense that the Spartan defeat more or less put the final nail in the coffin in terms of reviving that city’s lost hegemony. But the Theban victory came at great cost because the city’s leader and the architect of its own hegemony, Epaminondas, died in the fighting along with his two potential successors, Iolaidas and Daiphantus. The political decapitation weakened Thebes as well. If there was a winner here it may have been the future King Philip II of Macedon, whose kingdom’s rise to dominance over the Greeks was aided by the absence of a genuinely powerful Greek city-state.

July 4, 1187: The Battle of Hattin, arguably the greatest disaster of the entire Crusading enterprise, sees the army of Jerusalem under King Guy of Lusignan virtually annihilated by the Ayyubid army under Saladin. Guy, in his regal wisdom, allowed Saladin to draw him a) out of Jerusalem and b) away from water, two decisions that proved to be fatal to most of the men under his command. The decimation of Jerusalem’s army left the city vulnerable and Saladin besieged it in mid-September. After a surprisingly robust defense led by noble Balian of Ibelin, the city fell to Saladin’s forces in early October.

July 4, 1776: The “Declaration of Independence” is published in Britain’s North American colonies. Commemorated annually as Independence Day in the United States.

July 5, 1811: Venezuelan Independence Day, marking the adoption of Venezuela’s Declaration of Independence in a congress of colonial provinces.

July 5, 1960: Several Force Publique military units mutiny against their Belgian officers in the Republic of the Congo-Léopoldville (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo), sparking what has come to be known as the “Congo Crisis.” The Belgian military sent soldiers into Congo-Léopoldville and several parts of the country rebelled. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba appealed to the Soviet Union for assistance, but army chief of staff Mobutu Sese Seko ousted Lumumba in a coup in September and the country began to break apart. The Crisis ended in November 1965, after most of the rebellions had been suppressed and Mobutu, with US support, had ousted President Joseph Kasa-Vubu in a second coup and assumed absolute power.

July 5, 1962: Algeria declares its official independence from France, a few months after the close of the Algerian War. The declaration followed on the heels of an April 1962 referendum in which over 90 percent of French voters agreed with the Évian Accords, the peace treaties that ended the war, and a July 1 referendum in Algeria in which over 99 percent of respondents voted for independence. French President Charles de Gaulle declared Algeria independent on July 3 but the new provisional Algerian government set July 5 as the formal date.

July 5, 1977: Pakistan’s civilian government, under Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, is overthrown in a military coup led by General Zia-ul-Haq. The mostly-conservative Pakistan National Alliance had accused Bhutto and his Pakistan People’s Party of having rigged the country’s March 1977 general election, the second such contest in Pakistani history and first since Bangladesh had won its independence. PNA leaders organized large protests that were met with violence from state security forces that left scores of people dead. Zia stepped in with promises to organize a new election within 90 days—he then ruled Pakistan as president/dictator until his death in a suspicious plane crash in 1988. Claims persist that the coup and Bhutto’s subsequent execution were carried out with at least the acquiescence, if not the encouragement, of the US government.

July 6, 371 BCE: A Theban army defeats the Spartans at the Battle of Leuctra, one of the most significant military engagements of the Greek classical period. Thebes, like the rest of Greece, had come under Spartan hegemony after the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE), but relations between the two cities broke down when Theban leader Epaminondas (d. 362 BCE) attempted to reform the Boeotian League against Spartan wishes. A Spartan army invaded Boeotia and the Thebans met it in battle. Epaminondas employed an innovation on the standard tactics of hoplite warfare, focusing his attack on the strong Spartan right rather than its weaker left and thereby crushing the Spartans’ best troops—killing King Cleombrotus I in the process. The rest of the Spartan army fled. Leuctra almost immediately changed the balance of power in Greece, ending the Spartan hegemony and instituting a brief Theban hegemony before the exhausted city-states eventually came under Macedonian rule.

July 6, 640: An Arab army commanded by Amr ibn al-ʿAs defeats a much larger Byzantine force under the command of a general named Theodore in the Battle of Heliopolis. Amr was the driving force behind the decision to invade Egypt, having convinced Caliph Umar I to let him take a small (around 4000 men) force into the region, possibly on a raid rather than a mission of conquest. Umar subsequently reinforced that army and made it possible to think in terms of permanently seizing territory. The Byzantines, still reeling from losing the Levant to the Arabs, were able to muster an army of around 20,000 men to drive the Arabs out of Egypt, but Theodore made the peculiar decision to pick a battle in the open field in which the Arabs’ superior maneuverability and generalship carried the day and left all of Egypt open to Arab conquest. The loss of Egypt was even more devastating to the Byzantines than the loss of the Levant had been.

July 6, 1917: An Arab army under Bedouin chieftain named Auda Abu Tayi and advised by British officer T. E. Lawrence defeats the Ottomans at the Battle of Aqaba. Coming in the wake of an Arab defeat at Medina, the battle was important for several reasons—it helped the Arab Revolt regain momentum, it opened an important Red Sea port to Britain, it cleared the Egyptian Expeditionary Force’s path north, and it allowed the EEF and the Arabs to link up and coordinate their actions moving forward.

July 6, 1967: The Nigerian Civil War begins when Nigerian forces invade the breakaway Niger Delta region of Biafra. The conflict eventually settled into a Nigerian blockade of Biafra, precipitating a massive humanitarian crisis in which hundreds of thousands of people (high estimates run to around 3 million) died of preventable causes, mostly starvation. A final Nigerian assault in December 1969 led to the Biafran rebels’ surrender a month later.

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June 29, 1444: Albanian rebel leader Skanderbeg (George Castriot) defeats a considerably larger Ottoman army at the Battle of Torvioli by outmaneuvering the Ottomans and striking their forces from behind. This was one of the first major engagements in Skanderbeg’s 1443-1468 rebellion and his surprising victory earned him significant support from Hungary and the papacy. He was for a time able to win independence for an Albanian principality under the “Albanian League,” but a few years after his 1468 death the Ottomans were able to reconquer the region.

June 29, 1613: The Globe Theatre in London is destroyed when, during a performance of William Shakespeare’s Henry VII, a stage cannon malfunctions and sets the structure on fire. Only one person was hurt, apparently. The structure was rebuilt the following year but was closed down for good (or at least until its 1997 revival) by Puritan authorities during the First English Civil War.

June 29, 1881: Sudanese religious leader Muhammad Ahmad declares himself to be the Mahdi and begins to establish an independent political entity, kicking off the 18 year long Mahdist War against the British Empire.

June 30, 1520: During La Noche Triste (“the Night of Sorrows”), Hernán Cortés and his forces are driven out of Tenochtitlan by the Aztecs. He regrouped and returned the following year to besiege and ultimately capture the city.

June 30, 1934: On the “Night of the Long Knives,” Nazi leaders purge their party’s original paramilitary wing, the SA or Sturmabteilung, including its leader Ernst Röhm, and target party opponents like German Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen. Estimates of the death toll range from a low of 85 to a high of somewhere around 1000.

July 1, 1097: The army of the First Crusade defeats a Seljuk army at the Battle of Dorylaeum. The outnumbered Seljuks caught the vanguard of the Crusader army by surprise but were eventually worn down as the day went on and the rest of the Crusaders kept rolling in to relieve their comrades. Leading the Crusader vanguard, Bohemond of Taranto was able to hold out for several hours against a larger Turkish force in what was arguably the First Crusade’s signature moment prior to its conquest of Jerusalem. The victory cleared the Crusaders’ path to Antioch.

July 1, 1569: Polish and Lithuanian nobles agree to the “Union of Lublin,” creating the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth under the rule of Polish King/Lithuanian Grand Duke Sigismund II Augustus (d. 1572). In essence Lublin was a compromise between Lithuanian and Polish nobles, the former agreeing to a stronger union and the latter agreeing to increase support for the Lithuanian nobility in the Livonian War against Russia. The new commonwealth also eased concerns about Sigismund’s poor health and the fact that he had no heir apparent—the formal union ensured that the two polities would remain joined after his death and the institution of an elected monarchy solved the problem of succession. The Commonwealth survived until it was absorbed by Austria, Prussia, and Russia in three 18th century partitions.

July 1, 1968: The “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons” is signed by 62 countries. Nowadays that list has grown to 191 signatories. The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has prevented the spread of nuclear weapons ever since, except for all the times—India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, South Africa—it hasn’t done that.

July 1, 1997: The United Kingdom turns control of Hong Kong over to China, ending 156 years of colonial governance. The handover had been negotiated in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration and was timed to coincide with the end of a 99 year lease the UK had negotiated for control of the New Territories region back in 1898. Under that declaration the Chinese government agreed to allow Hong Kong to maintain its own separate system of governance for 50 years after the transfer, but Western governments (the US in particular) have accused Beijing of violating that term through, for example, the Hong Kong’s 2020 security law. This handover is often characterized as the final end of the British Empire, though the UK government still holds some colonial possessions to the present day.

July 2, 1582: Two vassals of the deceased Japanese daimyō Oda Nobunaga, Akechi Mitsuhide and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, meet at the Battle of Yamazaki, with Hideyoshi’s army emerging victorious. Hideyoshi thus exacted vengeance for Mitsuhide’s rebellion, during which Nobunaga had committed suicide on June 21. Effective political authority passed from the Oda clan to the Toyotomi clan, where it resided until Tokugawa Ieyasu took it from them in 1600.

July 2, 1853: Citing the Ottomans’ supposed failure to protect Christian religious sites as a pretext, Russian Tsar Nicolas I sends an army across the Pruth River to occupy Moldavia and Wallachia, both nominally still Ottoman territories. Nicolas assumed that the European powers would not begrudge him a little annexation, as a treat. He was wrong, and the Crimean War ensued.

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Happy Memorial Day to those who are celebrating! I took a short break for the holiday but we’ll be back to our regular schedule tomorrow. Thanks for reading!

May 22, 853: A Byzantine army/fleet attacks and sacks the Egyptian port city of Damietta. Emperor Michael III was attempting to weaken the Emirate of Crete, the target of several unsuccessful Byzantine offensives since Arab forces took the island in the 820s, by cutting off its Egyptian support. Damietta was an easy target as Arab naval forces in Egypt were primarily tasked with patrolling the Nile rather than defending the Mediterranean coast, and so the Byzantine forces had little trouble taking and looting the city. Their three day occupation didn’t have much in the way of long-term repercussions but it stands as a rare Byzantine military victory over the Abbasids in this period that set the stage for the much more successful “Macedonian Dynasty” that would succeed Michael.

May 22, 1990: The Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen) and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen) are united as the Republic of Yemen. After the formation of a unified government that tended to favor northern Yemen, southern Yemen attempted to secede in 1994, touching off a short (May-July) Yemeni civil war. A lingering southern secessionist movement has once again become prominent amid the current Yemeni conflict.

May 23, 1430: In the early days of their siege of the town of Compiègne, Burgundian forces drive off a sortie by the French garrison and in the process capture none other than Joan of Arc, the heroine of the siege of Orléans. The Burgundians turned Joan over to their English allies in exchange for a substantial ransom, and English authorities quickly put her on trial for blasphemy. Among Joan’s alleged crimes were claiming to have received direct communications from God and wearing “masculine” clothing, which seems inevitable if you’re going to ride into battle but I digress. The verdict was never in doubt, with England intending to discredit French King Charles VII’s claim on the throne by associating him with a “convicted” heretic. Joan was executed on May 30, 1431. As far as the siege was concerned, it ended in November 1430 with a French victory that was not terribly decisive as far as the wider Hundred Years’ War was concerned.

May 23, 1618: Two Catholic Bohemian nobles, Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice and Vilém Slavata of Chlum, are thrown out of the top floor window of the Bohemian Chancellery in Prague by a group of Protestant nobles angered over the religious policies of the Bohemian king, the future Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II. Both somehow survived the 70 foot drop, but this “Defenestration of Prague” (one of three such incidents but the one most people likely mean when they talk about the Defenestration of Prague) helped trigger the Thirty Years’ War.

May 24, 1667: King Louis XIV of France orders his army to invade the Spanish Netherlands, kicking off a conflict known as the War of Devolution. The name comes from Louis’ contention that sovereignty over the Spanish Netherlands and Franche-Comté had passed (“devolved,” get it?) to him because of his marriage to Spanish royal Maria Theresa. She and Louis had agreed to renounce her inheritance in return for a hefty dowry payment from the Habsburgs, but that dowry never materialized and so Louis argued that the renunciation was null and void. The war was largely concluded on French terms and ended with the May 1668 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (not to be confused with the more famous 1748 treaty by the same name), under which Louis agreed to quit the Spanish Netherlands and Franche-Comté but retained possession of several key northern frontier towns. Those towns proved to be footholds for subsequent French forays into the region.

May 24, 1991: The military arm of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front enters the city of Asmara, securing (as it turns out) Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia and thus marking the end of the Eritrean War of Independence. May 24 is commemorated in Eritrea annually as Independence Day.

May 25, 1521: The Diet of Worms, an assembly called by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in response to the growing “Protestant” reform movement led by Martin Luther, culminates with the Edict of Worms. In that proclamation, Charles declared Luther “a notorious heretic” and promised that “those who will help in his capture will be rewarded generously for their good work.” Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, then “kidnapped” Luther and stashed him in Wartburg Castle for his own safety. Luther remained at Wartburg until the following March, writing and translating the New Testament into German while his reform movement escalated into a schism and Protestantism began to separate from the Catholic Church.

May 25, 1981: Leaders from Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates sign the Gulf Cooperation Council charter in Abu Dhabi, formally marking the birth of that organization.

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April 3, 1559: The Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis ends the Italian War of 1551-1559, the last in a series of Italian conflicts between France and the Habsburgs, with a Habsburg victory. French King Henry II was forced to forfeit his claims on any Italian territory, but for France the war hadn’t been a total bust. The abdication (and then death, in 1556) of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V resulted in the Habsburg realm being split, with Philip II inheriting Spain and its empire while Ferdinand I inherited Austria and control of the Holy Roman Empire. This ended France’s primary national security concern, its potential encirclement by a unified Habsburg Empire. The wars wound up solidifying Habsburg control over much of what would later become Italy, with independent Venice, Genoa, Florence, the Papal States, and several other small polities sandwiched in between imperial possessions in northern Italy, which were brought into the Holy Roman Empire, and in southern Italy, which were controlled by the Spanish Habsburgs.

April 3, 1948: The United States government enacts the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948, AKA “The Marshall Plan,” earmarking $12 billion to the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. This helped quickly rebuild post-war European economies, though its impact has probably been overstated in subsequent American mythologizing. This in turn helped limit the kind of struggling that might have allowed dastardly leftists to gain political traction in Western Europe and laid part of the groundwork for NATO.

April 4, 1841: US President William Henry Harrison dies just one month after his inauguration and after a nine day bout with what modern research has suggested might have been typhoid or paratyphoid fever caused by the presence of raw sewage in the White House’s water supply. Obviously Harrison had no time to build a presidential legacy of his own, but his death and the accession of Vice President John Tyler on April 6 forced a reckoning with a bit of legal ambiguity: whether a vice president would actually become president upon succession or simply assume the “Powers and Duties of the said Office,” which is all that’s stipulated in the US Constitution. Harrison’s cabinet and Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney concluded that, if Tyler took the oath of office, he would become president. This established a precedent that governed all subsequent cases of US presidents dying in office and was eventually codified in the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967.

April 4, 1949: Founding members Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed the North Atlantic Treaty, creating NATO (pending ratification by a majority of the signatories). Those original 12 states have grown to 31, so far, with the admission of Finland just a couple of days ago. This expansion has, I’m told, had no negative consequences whatsoever.

April 4, 1959: The French government creates the autonomous Mali Federation, consisting of Senegal and French Sudan. Exactly one year later, French authorities agreed to grant the federation its independence, effective June 20, 1960. The aggregated state collapsed within two months, in August 1960, leaving in its wake the independent nations of Senegal and Mali. Through all that, Senegal recognizes April 4 as its Independence Day—referring to April 4, 1960, not 1959, but April 4 nevertheless.

April 5, 1722: Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, in search of a very large and very hypothetical southern continent dubbed “Terra Australis” or at least of the equally hypothetical “Davis Land,” finds instead a place he dubbed “Easter Island” after the day upon which he found it. Roggeveen’s expedition never did find either of those other places, probably because they don’t exist. But it did stumble upon a few other islands of note, including Bora Bora and Samoa, before reaching port at Batavia (modern Jakarta) later in 1722.

April 5, 1818: A rebel army commanded by José de San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins defeats a royalist force led by Chilean Governor Mariano Osorio at the Battle of Maipú. The royalists lost around 2000 men, roughly double the casualties incurred by the rebels. Among the more decisive battles of the Spanish-American Wars of Independence, Maipú effectively secured the liberation of Chile, which meant that the Argentine-Chilean army was free to begin moving north to liberate parts of southern Peru.

April 5, 1879: The Chilean government declares war on Bolivia and Peru, kicking off the War of the Pacific. The war’s causes are still debated to some extent but certainly included disputes over control of rich nitrate deposits in the Atacama Desert and a growing competition for economic and political dominance in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. Chile emerged victorious over the Bolivian-Peruvian alliance in 1884, seizing parts of southern Peru as well as the entire Atacama and leaving Bolivia landlocked.

April 6, 46 BCE: At Thapsus, which today is in Tunisia, Julius Caesar’s army decisively defeats a somewhat larger Republican force commanded by Metellus Scipio along with a unit of allied Numidian cavalry under the command of King Juba I. Around 10,000 of the Republican soldiers are believed to have been killed, many after they’d surrendered despite orders from Caesar to treat captives well. Thapsus is known for a few things. It marked the beginning of the end of Republican resistance to Caesar in North Africa, for one thing. It’s also the last time war elephants were put to heavy use in combat in the Roman world, mostly because the Republicans deployed them in large numbers and if anything they proved to be more trouble than they were worth. Most significantly from Caesar’s perspective, the battle led ultimately to the suicides of both Cato the Younger (who was at Utica and opted to kill himself as Caesar’s army was approaching) and Metellus Scipio (who killed himself when Caesar’s naval forces stopped him from fleeing to Hispania. These were two of Caesar’s most prominent political opponents and their deaths were significant in his efforts to consolidate power in Rome.

April 6, 1250: The Battle of Fariskur ends the ill-fated Seventh Crusade. French King Louis IX (the future Saint Louis) and the remainder of his army fled their defeat at Mansurah and attempted to withdraw north to their fortress at Damietta, only to find that Egyptian ruler Turanshah had already dispatched forces north to block their path. With no way to move, Louis kept his army encamped for two months while sending out feelers to Turanshah about trading Damietta for Jerusalem, the expedition’s ultimate objective. But Turanshah had no reason to entertain any sort of deal given that the Crusaders were in an untenable position. Louis finally ordered a mad dash for Damietta, but his army was intercepted and easily defeated.

Turanshah took most of the leading Crusaders prisoner and exchanged them for a sizable ransom and the return of Damietta. He kept Louis in hopes of gaining an even more sizable ransom, but he was overthrown by his slave soldiers (the Mamluks) about a month after the battle and Egypt’s new rulers were content to free Louis for a more modest payment. He spent the next few years as the de facto ruler of Jerusalem, the Mamluks too embroiled in internal conflict to pay him much mind, before returning to France in 1254.

April 6, 1896: The Games of the First Olympiad, AKA the first modern Olympics, open in Athens. The ancient Olympic Games, believed to have begun in the early 8th century BCE, were discontinued either by Roman Emperor Theodosius I, in the 390s, or by Theodosius II, in the 420s. French educator Pierre de Coubertin (d. 1937) was the driving force behind their revival, which led to the creation of the International Olympic Committee in 1894 and the first modern Games two years later. The IOC recognizes 14 nations as having participated but there’s no conclusive record as to which 14 they were. The most commonly cited list is problematic because it includes Australia, which was still five years away from federalization and thus nationhood.

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This is just a reminder that FX is on its annual spring break and will be back to our regular schedule on Tuesday. In the meantime “Week in Review” writer Ashley Gate should be sending out an update on the Iran war tomorrow so please keep an eye out for that. Thanks for reading!

March 30, 1282: Sicilians rebel against the rule of Charles I of Anjou, sparking the War of the Sicilian Vespers. The conflict took its name from the evening prayers on Saturday, March 30, the day before Easter. Sometime during or after that service, a group of Sicilians had an unfriendly encounter with a group of Frenchmen in Palermo. Resentments over Sicily’s relatively low status within Charles’ Mediterranean empire erupted into a six week massacre of Frenchmen on the island. A 20 year war ensued, at the end of which the Angevins retained control over their mainland Italian kingdom, Naples, but Sicily came under the control of Aragon.

March 30, 1856: Representatives of Austria, France, the Ottoman Empire, Prussia, Russia, Sardinia, and the United Kingdom sign the Treaty of Paris, ending the 1853-1856 Crimean War. The war was a serious Russian defeat, and the terms reflected that. The Black Sea was designated as neutral territory, barring all warships—but especially Russian warships—from its waters. Russia was also forced to give up territory in the Danube region and forfeited to France any claim it had as being the protector of Christian subjects in the Ottoman Empire.

March 30, 1867: US Secretary of State William Seward and Russian minister Eduard de Stoeckl agree on a sale price of $7.2 million for the US to purchase Alaska. The sale would be finalized in a treaty that was ratified by the US Senate that October. The Russians had realized they couldn’t hold on to Alaska in the event of a US migration there (a la the California Gold Rush), and the Russian government needed the cash. Reception in the US wasn’t uniformly positive, but the whole “Seward’s Folly” sentiment has been exaggerated in the contemporary consciousness and for the most part the US public seems to have supported the acquisition.

March 30, 1912: Sultan Abd al-Hafid of Morocco and French diplomat Eugène Regnault sign the Treaty of Fez, making Morocco a French protectorate. Abd al-Hafid signed the treaty with a French army encircling the city, so you might say he was well motivated to agree to a lopsided arrangement that looked more like a colonial capitulation than a protectorate along the lines of Egypt’s relationship to Britain. Of course, in fairness, Egypt’s relationship to Britain looked increasingly like a colonial one by this point too. The treaty was not well received by the Moroccan public. Riots broke out the following month in Fez, and concessions made to Spain in the Rif (or “Spanish Morocco”) helped fuel the Rif War, which ended in 1927, between Spain and the Berber tribes of the region.

March 31, 1146: At the Council of Vézelay, charismatic monk Bernard of Clairvaux issues his call for a new crusade to support the suddenly beleaguered Christian principalities in the Levant. In attendance was King Louis VII of France, who took up the cross on the spot for what we now know as the Second Crusade. Suffice to say it did not end well.

March 31, 1492: The proto-Spanish monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile issue the Alhambra Decree, expelling all Jews from their kingdoms by the end of July. The decree’s goal was two-fold. One, the expulsion of practicing Jews was meant to eliminate their influence on the region’s conversos, those who had converted from Judaism to Christianity. Two, the terms of the expulsion—which required those being expelled to finance their own relocation—were made deliberately onerous in order to encourage more Jews to convert to Christianity as an alternative. Isabella seems to have been the driving force behind the decree, likely influenced by her new confessor, future cardinal and grand inquisitor Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros.

March 31, 1854: The United States, in the person of Commodore Matthew Perry, and Japan, amid the waning years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, sign the Convention of Kanagawa, which permits US ships to use the Japanese ports of Hakodate and Shimoda. Kanagawa, negotiated almost literally at gunpoint with Perry threatening to turn his warships loose on Edo, marks the “opening” of Japan to Westerners after a period of near-isolation that stretched back to the early 17th century. Over the next several years Japanese officials would sign a lopsided commercial treaty with the US along with similar capitulations to France, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Internal Japanese discontent with these arrangements helped weaken the Shogunate and contributed to the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

April 1, 1939: The Spanish Civil War comes to its official end when Nationalist leader Francisco Franco announces the surrender of the remaining Republican forces. The March 28 fall of Madrid to Franco’s besieging army had rendered the war pretty much over at that time, so this announcement was a bit anti-climactic. Franco went on to rule Spain, quite brutally as it happens (check out the “White Terror” if you’re unfamiliar, it’s got a very appropriate name), until his death in 1975.

April 1, 1941: An anti-British military coup in Baghdad ousts King Faisal II’s regent, Abd al-Ilah, as well as his prime minister, Nouri al-Saeed, and restores a pro-Axis (not pro-Nazi, necessarily, but definitely friendly with the Germans) former prime minister, Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, to power. Concerned that their empire was about to be severed by a pro-German government in the Middle East, Britain moved in to reverse the coup. The subsequent Anglo-Iraqi War lasted about a month and ended with Gaylani fleeing the country and Abd al-Ilah back in charge in Baghdad.

April 1, 1976: Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne co-found Apple, Inc. If you’ve never heard of Wayne that’s because less than two weeks later he sold his 10 percent stake in the company to the other two for what wound up being $2300. Apple is now worth trillions of dollars, so I think we can all agree he made a smart decision.

April 2, 1917: US President Woodrow Wilson speaks to a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Germany. Wilson made his case for war by appealing to idealistic notions of spreading democracy along with anger over German u-boat attacks on US shipping and fears provoked by the discovery of the Zimmerman Telegram. Congress declared war on April 6.

April 2, 1930: Following the death of Ethiopian Empress Zewditu, her regent and designated heir, Ras Tafari Makonnen, assumes the throne under the regal name Haile Selassie. Over the next 44 years and among other things, Haile Selassie oversaw the adoption of Ethiopia’s first and second constitutions, abolished slavery, and made the country a charter member of both the Organization of African Unity (precursor to the African Union) and the United Nations. He also oversaw a failed effort to integrate Eritrea that sparked a 30 year war of independence. And he’s the central figure in the Rastafari movement. Haile Selassie was overthrown in a military coup in September 1974 and was executed (though the subsequent Derg government claimed that he died of natural causes) about a year later.

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February 7, 1497: In the infamous “Bonfire of the Vanities,” Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola burns thousands of luxury items, including books, in a huge public bonfire in the city of Florence, Italy. Savonarola had arrived in Florence in 1490 and became widely known for his bombastic preaching against what he felt were the immoralities of the Renaissance and of the city’s leading family, the Medicis. This was not his first “bonfire of vanities” but it is the best known and so is generally regarded as the bonfire. Unfortunately for Savonarola, he became so well-known that Pope Alexander VI—noted fan of both the Renaissance and immorality—excommunicated him in May 1497 and in 1498 executed him on heresy and sedition charges.

February 7, 1992: The 12 member states of the European Community—Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and West Germany—sign the Maastricht Treaty, deepening European integration and helping to create the European Union. The EU now consists of 27 member states, while one of these founding dozen, the UK, has very famously quit the bloc.

February 8, 1250: A Crusader vanguard under the command of Robert I, Count of Artois, attacks the Egyptian city of Mansurah in the Nile delta. In doing so he exceeded his orders, which had been to cross the Nile, establish a camp, and wait for the rest of the Crusader army under Robert’s brother, French King Louis IX, to join him. This proved to be a fatal mistake, as the ensuing Battle of Mansurah saw the Fatimid army nearly annihilate Robert’s vanguard and prevent Louis’ army from advancing once it had crossed the river. The now-depleted Crusader force remained stymied in their camp until late March, when the arrival of Fatimid reinforcements forced them to retreat back over the river. Their situation did not improve after that.

February 8, 1904: The Imperial Japanese Navy launches a surprise attack against elements of the Russian Pacific Fleet at Port Arthur (modern Lüshunkou, in China), damaging several ships including the Russian battleship Tsesarevich. The initial night attack was less successful than Japanese commanders had hoped, and after a second engagement the following day they withdrew. This was the opening strike in the Russo-Japanese War, which was formally declared on February 10. Russian and Japanese interests overlapped in Korea and Manchuria and the two empires had been unable to find a way to coexist. The war ended in September 1905 with a decisive Japanese victory that shifted the balance of power in eastern Asia and sent Russia into a political tailspin (which in turn affected the balance of power in Europe).

February 8, 1963: Former deputy Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Salam Arif leads a coalition of Baathists, Nasserists, and other pan-Arab elements in a coup against the Iraqi government of Abd al-Karim Qasim that later became known as the “Ramadan Revolution.” Arif had been Qasim’s deputy when the latter led the 1958 coup that toppled the Hashemite monarchy, but the two men fell out fairly quickly as Arif’s pan-Arabism clashed with Qasim’s skepticism of the concept (and particularly of its most prominent variant at the time, Nasserism). Arif and his supporters, with the approval and possibly support of the US government, ousted and executed Qasim. This is the second of three mid-20th century coups that eventually brought the Baath Party to power in Iraq. Arif and Baath Party leader Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr had their own falling out after this event and Bakr eventually ousted Arif’s brother and successor, Abdul Rahman Arif, in 1968.

February 9, 1234: The Siege of Caizhou ends in victory for the combined Mongol-Song Dynasty besieging army and the end of the Jin Dynasty. The Mongols and the Jin, who ruled northern China, had been at war essentially since Genghis Khan first invaded the region in 1211 and Emperor Aizong of Jin had fled to Caizhou following the Mongol conquest of Kaifeng in February 1233. He sought aid from the Song, who ruled southern China, but they opted instead to ally with the Mongols in what proved to be a pretty big mistake. When it became clear that he would not be able to escape the siege, Emperor Aizong took his own life and thus brought the Jin line to a close. After their victory, the Song attempted to retake areas in northern China that they’d lost to the Jin the previous century but were driven off by the Mongols, who eventually eliminated the Song altogether in 1279.

February 9, 1943: US Army Major General Alexander Patch confirms that Japanese forces have retreated from Guadalcanal, marking the end of the six month long Guadalcanal Campaign. Japan’s retreat allowed the US to establish bases on Guadalcanal and the island of Tulagi to support further Pacific operations. The US victory is regarded as one of the major turning points in World War II’s Pacific Theater, helping to put Japan on the defensive.

February 9, 1964: The Beatles make their first of many appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, drawing a then-record 73 million viewers. The appearance significantly raised The Beatles’ profile in the US and is generally held to mark the start of the 1960s “British Invasion” of the US music and pop culture scene.

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Happy New Year! I hope that 2026 has gotten off to a positive start for all of you! In my case it has not, as I have definitely contracted this mutant flu that is sweeping across the US. I believe I’m on the upswing now, but over the past 12 hours I’ve lurched from feeling OK to feeling the worst I’ve felt yet to feeling pretty good and now back to just OK. There’s also the unfortunate complication that I’ve become Patient Zero for everybody else at FX headquarters, so things are just not functioning too well around here at the moment. This is already more information than you wanted but the upshot is that I don’t think I can promise to get back to the regular grind on Sunday as planned, but I also don’t want to rule it out. “Stay tuned” is the best I can do, sorry.

December 31, 1229: King James I of Aragon enters the city of Medina Mayurqa (modern Palma de Mallorca), completing the Aragonese conquest (or “reconquest,” if you must) of the island of Mallorca. An Aragonese army had besieged the city for three months before finally gaining victory.

December 31, 1907: New York Times owner Adolph Ochs holds the first ever Times Square ball drop to ring in the new year. Ochs had been organizing New Years Eve festivals since 1904, when he did so to celebrate the opening of the Times’ new offices at One Times Square, but decided in 1907 to enhance his usual fireworks show with something bigger and more spectacular. The ball drop has become an annual event save for the years 1942 and 1943, when wartime blackouts were in effect.

December 31, 1992: Czechoslovakia is officially dissolved, with the Czech Republic and Slovakia each going their separate ways under the terms of an act passed by parliament in late November. The so-called “Velvet Divorce” (named after the 1989 Velvet Revolution and to highlight the lack of violence involved) became inevitable when the Slovak National Council declared independence on July 17. Prior to that, negotiations between Czech and Slovak national groups had discussed the possibility of adjusting the nature of their federation, though as the Czechs pushed for a tighter federation and the Slovaks a looser one, there wasn’t much common ground to be had.

January 1, 1001: As was the case with Christmas, January 1 tended to be a popular day for crowning medieval monarchs. There are way too many of those to list here, and anyway most of them turned out to be fairly unimportant. One that was relatively significant was the crowning of Stephen I, the very first king of Hungary. Stephen had been ruling Hungary since 997, but prior to 1001 the ruler of Hungary went by the title “Grand Prince of the Hungarians,” reflecting the fact that they were elected by and subject to the Hungarian nobility. Stephen sought the title of king to demonstrate his authority over the nobles and to put him on par with other national leaders in Europe. He was probably crowned by Pope Sylvester II on January 1, 1001, although thanks to some ambiguous chronicling there’s an outside chance it actually happened on Christmas Day 1000.

January 1, 1801: The Acts of Union, parallel bills passed in the British and Irish parliaments the previous summer, come into effect, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Irish and English crowns had been in personal union since 1542, when the Crown of Ireland Act elevated the Lordship of Ireland into a full Kingship, and that personal union continued when the English crown became the British crown after the 1707 Act of Union merged England and Scotland. So the 1800 Acts of Union merged two kingdoms that were already ruled by the same person. The 1919-1921 Irish War of Independence ended the union for most of Ireland and is the reason why it’s now the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

January 1, 1804: The Haitian Revolution ends when new President Jean-Jacques Dessalines declares Haiti’s independence from France. As with royal coronations, January 1 has also been a popular date for national independence days. In addition to Haiti, this is also Independence Day for Brunei (1984, from the UK), Cameroon (1960, from France and the UK), and Sudan (1956, from Egypt and the UK).

January 1, 1959: The Cuban Revolution ends with dictator Fulgencio Batista fleeing for the Dominican Republic hours after the rebel capture of Santa Clara. Revolutionary forces then entered the cities of Havana and Santiago de Cuba, with revolutionary leader Fidel Castro finally reaching the Cuban capital on January 8 after an extended victory march. Castro’s relationship with the United States went from chilly to hostile as The Gang in Washington began to fear that the revolution would spark other communist uprisings in the Americas. When the new Cuban government nationalized US-owned oil refineries on Cuban soil in August 1960, the US government responded by expanding its embargo on arms exports to Cuba to cover just about everything else. That embargo remains in effect to the present day.

January 2, 1492: The rulers of the Emirate of Granada surrender their polity to the proto-Spanish monarchs King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. Said surrender had been negotiated the previous November so this event was purely a formality, but it is treated as the official end date of the so-called Reconquista.

January 2, 1680: Sunan Amangkurat II, ruler of the Javanese Mataram Sultanate, personally (with a little help) executes rebel leader Trunajaya while the latter is in the custody of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Trunajaya was a claimant to the throne of the island of Madura, located just off of Java’s northeastern coast, and had raised a rebellion against Sunan Amangkurat I in 1674 as the leader of a group of predominantly eastern Javanese nobles who were outraged at the brutality of Amangkurat I’s reign. Amangkurat II appears to have had some early sympathy for Trunajaya and the disaffected nobles, but by the time he succeeded his father in 1677 he was fully opposed to their uprising. While initially very successful—even seizing the Mataram capital of Plered in 1677—Trunajaya’s campaign ultimately faltered after the VOC intervened and he was captured in late December 1679.

January 2, 1963: Despite being outnumbered roughly five to one, a unit of around 350 Việt Cộng fighters defeats a joint South Vietnamese-US force at the Battle of Ấp Bắc in South Vietnam’s Định Tường province, withdrawing only when it began to run out of ammunition. The battle was the first VC victory in a pitched battle against the South Vietnamese military and as such was both a substantial morale boost to their war effort and a major embarrassment for the South Vietnamese government.

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So my plan at this time is still to resume the newsletter on Sunday. However, I did not plan on having a 102 degree fever as of a couple of hours ago so we may be in a wait and see situation at this point. If this is the flu, which I assume it is, hopefully it will be brief—I am vaccinated (sorry Secretary Kennedy)—and it won’t affect my schedule. If that changes I will of course let you all know.

December 27, 537: Byzantine Emperor Justinian I and Patriarch Menas of Constantinople inaugurate the newly-built Hagia Sophia as the imperial capital’s patriarchal cathedral. Believed to have been the largest building in the world when it was built, the Hagia Sophia is regarded as the pinnacle of Roman architecture. The emperors Constantius II and Theodosius II had previously built churches on the same site, but Justinian’s structure is the one that has more or less survived to the present day. The Hagia Sofia was repurposed as a mosque by the Ottomans, then as a museum by the Republican Turkish government, and has now reverted to its previous status as a mosque.

December 27, 1918: The Greater Poland Uprising begins in the city of Poznań. Polish nationalists took advantage of the abdication of German Kaiser Wilhelm II in November to stake a claim on formerly Polish territory that the Allies had planned to leave in German hands following World War I. Their uprising forced the parties to reconsider their postwar plans and greatly influenced the construction of the new Polish state that emerged under the Treaty of Versailles.

December 27, 1945: The International Monetary Fund is established in Washington, DC, as one of the two institutions (along with the World Bank) emerging from the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference to underpin a new postwar international financial system. Envisioned by economist John Maynard Keynes as a fund from which member states could draw money to help weather economic crises, thanks to the influence of US Treasury official Harry Dexter White the IMF was instead created as a global lending institution with the power to impose rigid austerity measures on client states, supposedly to ensure that they repaid their IMF loans on time. Views on its impact vary slightly between “has made a useful contribution to the world economy” and “has underpinned a destructive system of colonialism-by-other-means.”

December 27, 1979: The Soviet-Afghan War begins when Soviet soldiers seize control of government buildings in Kabul and execute Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin. The Soviets installed a government led by the less radical Parcham faction of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (as opposed to Amin’s Khalq faction), hoping to fend off a full-blown rebellion in an increasingly unstable Afghanistan, but the intervention had the opposite effect and united a hitherto fragmented opposition against the Soviets.

December 28, 1659: An army of the nascent Maratha Empire, under its founder Shivaji, defeats a substantially larger Adilshahi army at the Battle of Kolhapur. Shivaji had begun carving territory out of the Adilshahi Sultanate of Bijapur several years earlier, and his victory at Kolhapur continued the early growth of what would become India’s dominant political entity prior to the arrival of the British.

December 28, 1836: Mexican ambassador Miguel Santa María and Spanish representative José María Calatrava sign the “definitive treaty of peace and friendship between Mexico and Spain,” more simply known as the “Santa María–Calatrava Treaty,” in Madrid. Under the treaty’s terms, the Spanish government agreed to recognize the independence Mexico had won during its 1810-1821 revolution and to stop making attempts to reconquer its former colony.

December 28, 2006: Somali forces under the provisional “Transitional Federal Government” and their Ethiopian allies enter Mogadishu. The Somali capital had been under the control of the Islamic Courts Union since June, the ICU having been the first entity to fully consolidate the city since the collapse of the Somali Democratic Republic in 1991. The Ethiopian military invaded Somalia that same month to bolster the rival TFG (along with substantial US support), and by December the ICU was crumbling and on the run. It dissolved the following month, but a jihadist faction called al-Shabab survived and began an insurgency against the Somali government that has continued to the present day.

December 29, 1170: Four knights who believe they are acting on orders from English King Henry II assassinate the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, in Canterbury Cathedral. Becket and Henry had struggled through a series of major disagreements over the extent of the king’s authority over the Catholic Church in England. A final dispute over the coronation of Henry the Young King in June allegedly prompted King Henry to exclaim “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” and that statement supposedly convinced at least these four knights that their king wanted Becket dead.

Whether Henry actually said this, or something like it, is a matter of some debate, but whatever he said it’s thought to be unlikely that he intended it to result in Becket’s murder. It may be noteworthy that Henry didn’t arrest the four knights, nor did he punish them in other ways—by, say, confiscating their estates. On the other hand, he didn’t put in a good word on their behalf with Pope Alexander III, who excommunicated the lot of them and later sent them on Crusade as penance. It seems reasonable to conclude that Henry didn’t necessarily want Becket killed but that he wasn’t exactly bereft when it happened—though he distanced himself from the murder after the fact.

December 29, 1911: The Qing dynasty, which had ruled China since 1636, gives way to the Republic of China as Sun Yat-sen is named China’s first provisional president (he formally took office on January 1, 1912). Outer Mongolia also declares its independence from China and names Bogd Khan (d. 1924) as its new ruler. Commemorated annually as Mongolian Independence Day.

December 29, 1928: The Chinese National Revolutionary Army concludes its “Northern Expedition” with the surrender of the Beiyang government. The Beiyang administration was internationally recognized as the legitimate government of China in the wake of the 1911 revolution (see above). In two phases, beginning in July 1926, the Kuomintang’s NRA campaigned against Beiyang and a number of regional warlords in order to unite China under KMT control.

December 30, 1066: A mob in the city of Granada bursts into the royal palace, seizes and crucifies ruler Badis al-Muzaffar’s Jewish vizier, Joseph ha-Nagid, and finally marches through the city slaughtering hundreds or perhaps thousands of Jewish residents. The Granada Massacre, as it’s called, appears to have been borne of little more than anti-Jewish animus directed toward the powerful vizier. It shows that even in the “Convivencia” period, considered a golden age for religious tolerance and coexistence in Europe, people weren’t necessarily all that tolerant.

December 30, 1460: Amid England’s Wars of the Roses, a Lancastrian army defeats an army led by Richard, Duke of York, at the Battle of Wakefield. Richard was killed and his army decimated, though this did not end the Yorkist claim to the English throne and thus didn’t end the civil war. The Lancastrians were subsequently able to free King Henry VI from Yorkist control at the Second Battle of St. Albans in February, but Richard’s son Edward managed to hold on to London and had himself declared King Edward IV in March. The Wars of the Roses continued until the victory of Henry Tudor, or Henry VII if you prefer, in the 1480s.

December 30, 1906: The All-India Muslim League is founded on the final day of the All-India Muhammadan Educational Conference in the city of Dhaka (in modern Bangladesh). The League’s advocacy for a Muslim majority state in British South Asia was instrumental in convincing the UK government to partition its colony into predominantly Muslim Pakistan (which at the time included Bangladesh) and predominantly Hindu India in 1947.

December 30, 1922: The “Treaty on the Creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” is adopted, marking the formal birth of the USSR. The new state was a legal merger of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (which at the time included the future Central Asian SSRs), the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (a union of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia), the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. All were already de facto united, but the treaty made it official.

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December 23, 962: A Byzantine army under the empire’s eastern military commander, Nikephoros Phokas, enters and sacks the city of Aleppo. Once an important Byzantine city, Aleppo was captured by the invading Arabs in 637. This 962 sack was emblematic of the Byzantine Empire’s military resurgence in the 10th century and is arguably the most dramatic of Nikephoros’s many victories as one of the greatest Byzantine generals. More than any of those other victories, this is the one that helped propel him to the throne the following year.

December 23, 1916: Britain’s ANZAC forces defeat the Ottomans at the Battle of Magdhaba in the Sinai. The British victory secured its earlier capture of the city of Arish and began (slowly), their advance northwards along the eastern Mediterranean coast.

December 24, 1144: The governor of the cities of Mosul and Aleppo, Imad al-Din Zengi, conquers the city of Edessa, capital of the Crusader County of Edessa. Count Joscelin II, who found himself without allies thanks to internal struggles within both the Byzantine and Jerusalem courts, made friends with the Muslim ruler of Diyarbakır, Kara Arslan, against the increasingly powerful Zengids. He brought his army out of Edessa to come to Kara Arslan’s aid…at which point Imad al-Din slipped in behind him and besieged the city in late November. His forces took Edessa after undermining its walls. The capture sent a panic through Christendom that spawned the Second Crusade, which… didn’t go very well. In case you were wondering, Joscelin abandoned the city when he learned it was under siege and tried to hold on to what was left of his county. He briefly retook Edessa in 1146 after Imad al-Din’s death but lost it in a matter of weeks to the latter’s son and heir, Nur al-Din Zengi. The Zengids finally took him prisoner in 1150 and he died in 1159 after several years in captivity.

December 24, 1814: The US and UK sign the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812 and restoring everything to status quo ante bellum. On the one hand, the war achieved nothing and cost thousands of people their lives and thousands more their livelihoods. On the other hand, the United States got a national anthem out of it. So overall I guess you could say it was a wash.

December 24, 1951: A unified Libya declares its independence under King Idris I. Libya’s three provinces—Cyrenaica, Fezzan, and Tripolitania—were still technically Italian colonies at the time, but they’d come under British and French administration in the wake of World War II. Commemorated annually as Libyan Independence Day.

December 25, 336: The first recorded celebration of Christmas in Rome. This is not to say it was the first Christmas, or the first time Christmas was celebrated on December 25, or even the first time Christmas was celebrated on December 25 in the city of Rome. But it is the earliest record of a Christmas celebration by what could be considered the official Christian Church.

December 25, 800: As you might expect, a lot of Christian monarchs over the centuries have chosen Christmas as their coronation date. Perhaps the most famous of these occurred in 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne “Emperor of the Romans” during Christmas mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. Traditionally it was believed that Leo did this as a surprise, in order to butter up the Frankish king (who ironically wasn’t particularly happy about being crowned). But this seems like a stretch, and most scholars nowadays tend to believe that Charlemagne knew what was coming and feigned surprise in order to appear humble.

December 25, 1100: We don’t need to get into all the various Christmas coronations, like William the Conqueror’s in 1066, but one other of interest happened in 1100, when Baldwin of Boulogne was crowned King Baldwin I of Jerusalem at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Baldwin was the brother of Godfrey of Bouillon, who was in every meaningful way king of Jerusalem but who eschewed the title of “king” in favor of “defender of the Holy Sepulchre,” arguing that Christ was the only true king of Jerusalem. High-minded religious rationales aside, Godfrey probably turned down the title in an attempt to soothe resentments among the other leaders of the First Crusade. Baldwin had no such concerns, so he accepted the title and therefore was, in an extremely technical sense, the first Crusader king of Jerusalem.

December 26, 1492: Christopher Columbus orders the construction of a fortress, Puerto de la Navidad (“the Port of Christmas”), on the northern coast of modern Haiti. The fort was the first Spanish settlement in the Americas and was built with lumber from the wreckage of Columbus’s flagship, the Santa María, which had run aground two days earlier. Although he professed no concerns about the settlement’s safety, on his second voyage Columbus returned to find the whole thing razed to the ground, along with a nearby village, and all the Spanish personnel dead. The fort’s location was eventually forgotten and, while archeologists seem to have a general sense of where it was located, the precise site remains unknown.

December 26, 1990: The Slovenian government announces the results of the country’s December 23 independence referendum, in which voters overwhelmingly opted to leave Yugoslavia. Commemorated as “Independence and Unity Day” in Slovenia.

December 26, 1991: The Soviet Union officially dissolves in a vote by the Supreme Soviet. The vote took place in compliance with the Belovezha Accords, signed earlier that month by the leaders of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, which declared the USSR kaput and created the “Commonwealth of Independent States” in its place. That agreement was then followed by the Alma-Ata Protocol, signed on December 21, in which the leaders of 11 of the USSR’s 15 republics (the Baltic states and Georgia were the holdouts) declared their membership in the new CIS. The breakup hastened and exacerbated the economic meltdown that attended the former Soviet states’ transition to “Shock Doctrine” capitalism.

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December 19, 1946: The Battle of Hanoi marks the start of the 1946-1954 First Indochina War. The battle began when Việt Minh forces bombed Hanoi’s power plant and under cover of darkness began attacking French forces in the city. The Việt Minh eventually had to withdraw in the face of superior French numbers in February 1947, though of course they would eventually win the war. The outcome was a partition of Vietnam into northern and southern states—which ended when North Vietnam won the Vietnam War—and the ouster of French forces from the region.

December 19, 1984: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang sign the Sino-British Joint Declaration in Beijing. The declaration set July 1, 1997, as the date upon which the British government would turn control of Hong Kong, including Kowloon and the New Territories, over to the Chinese government.

December 20 (or thereabouts), 1192: Duke Leopold I of Austria imprisons King Richard I of England as the latter is returning home from the Third Crusade. Leopold had several grievances with Richard. Richard had personally treated him badly during the Crusade, for example. But his chief complaint was that Richard had (allegedly…OK, probably) arranged the assassination of the proclaimed King of Jerusalem, Conrad of Montferrat, who was Leopold’s cousin. Pope Celestine III excommunicated Leopold for his transgression, while Leopold turned Richard over to Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who had his own grievances with England (Celestine also excommunicated Henry). Henry, who needed money more than he needed to punish Richard, ransomed him back to England for the tidy sum of 150,000 marks.

December 20, 1960: The government of North Vietnam formally establishes the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, better known to history as the Viet Cong. The group was organized around southern Vietnamese supporters of the Viet Minh who had moved north after the Geneva Conference in 1954 and were sent back south with North Vietnamese support. Informally the term “Viet Cong” had been used in South Vietnamese media since the mid-1950s but this is the NLF’s official founding date. The NLF was subsumed into the “Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam,” though it didn’t officially cease to exist until 1977, after Vietnamese unification.

December 20, 1989: In “Operation Just Cause,” the US military invades Panama with the goal of removing dictator Manuel Noriega from power. Publicly Noriega, an erstwhile US ally, had run afoul of the Reagan and then Bush administrations by playing both sides of the drug trade—something he’d started doing alongside the US as part of the Iran-Contra operation. Theories abound as to the real justification for the invasion, from the Pentagon’s desire to test out new military hardware, Noriega’s involvement with and therefore knowledge of Iran-Contra, George Bush’s political need to look tough, and Noriega’s diplomatic outreach to countries like Castro-led Cuba and Sandinista-run Nicaragua. According to the US military its invasion killed just over 200 civilians, but more credible assessments put that figure somewhere between 500 and 3000.

December 21, 69: The Roman Senate acknowledges a general named Titus Flavius Vespasianus, aka Vespasian, as emperor, one day after rival emperor Vitellius’s assassination. Vespasian had already been declared emperor by armies in Egypt, the Levant, and along the Danube (who were marching on Rome to express their political views in the strongest possible way). Vespasian’s elevation ended the “Year of the Four Emperors,” so named because…well, OK, that’s kind of obvious I guess. He finally restored stability after that period of inter-dynastic upheaval (following the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty) and ruled until his death in 79. He and his sons, Titus and Domitian, comprise the Flavian dynasty.

December 21, 1620: The first landing party from the Mayflower comes ashore at Plymouth. Two days later work crews from the ship began to build the colonists’ first shelters on the site, and it was a couple of weeks before the Pilgrims were able to begin disembarking and occupying their new home. The Mayflower finally departed back for England in April 1621, after a harsh winter that saw 45 of the 102 colonists perish and after the survivors had made their first peaceful contact with Indigenous peoples of the area.

December 21, 1832: An Egyptian army under Ibrahim Pasha defeats the Ottomans at the Battle of Konya. Egypt, nominally an Ottoman province, had by this point established near total autonomy following the effective restoration of the Mamluks, Napoleon’s invasion, and finally the rise of the Albanian governor Muhammad Ali in the early 19th century. After coming to the Ottomans’ aid in the Greek War of Independence only to see his entire fleet wiped out by a combined European armada in 1827, Muhammad Ali demanded the governorship of Syria as restitution. When the Ottomans refused, a sort of quasi-civil war was the result—“quasi” in that Egypt was still part of the Ottoman Empire in only a bare technical sense by this time. A European-mediated settlement ended the war with Muhammad Ali in control of Syria, though he lost that control in a second war against the Ottomans in 1839-1841.

December 21, 1907: The Chilean army massacres a group of striking miners and their families in the city of Iquique. The killings are known as the Santa María School massacre, named after the Domingo Santa María school where the striking miners had made camp. The death toll is thought to have been between 2000 and around 3600—a definitive count is all but impossible since the authorities dumped the bodies into a mass grave that wasn’t exhumed until 1940. The massacre broke the strike and set back the Chilean labor movement.

December 22, 1522: The Siege of Rhodes ends with an Ottoman victory and the displacement of the Knights of Rhodes. That military order, which had began during the Crusades as the Knights Hospitaller, established itself on the eastern Mediterranean island of Rhodes after the fall of the last Crusader kingdom, Acre, in 1291, taking it from a Byzantine Empire that wasn’t really in much position to contest the seizure. From that perch, the order spent much of its time interfering with Ottoman shipping. It survived an Ottoman assault on the island in 1480 but this time, with a much larger army and the empire near the height of its power, the Knights were able to put up a surprisingly robust six month resistance but eventually had to agree to terms. They evacuated to Malta, where the Ottomans would unsuccessfully attempt to eliminate them in 1565.

December 22, 1769: The Sino-Burmese War ends with a Burmese victory. The border between Qing China and Burma was weakly demarcated if at all, which prompted several efforts on both sides to encroach on the frontier. This “war” actually consisted of four separate Chinese invasions starting in 1765, each of which was defeated by the Burmese. The outcome went a long way toward defining the Chinese-Burmese/Myanmar border as it exists today. It also, as a side effect, forced the Burmese to give up their designs on Siam (modern Thailand), since they couldn’t invade Siam and guard against Chinese invasion at the same time.

December 22, 1894: French army captain Alfred Dreyfus is convicted of treason for supposedly passing classified information to German intelligence. The ensuing “Dreyfus Affair,” which ended with his pardon in 1906, was a public scandal that focused on the absurd weakness of the evidence against Dreyfus and a bizarre criminal proceeding that managed to convict him twice while acquitting the actual spy, French counter-intelligence officer Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. At the core of the Dreyfus case was deeply-rooted antisemitism, whose very public emergence motivated journalist Theodor Herzl to organize the First Zionist Congress in 1897. That congress is generally regarded as the start of the Zionist movement.

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REMINDER: FX is on its annual Thanksgiving break and will return to regular programming on November 30. Thanks for reading!

November 25, 1120: The White Ship sinks after striking a rock off the coast of Normandy en route to England. What made this particular shipwreck notable is that the vessel was carrying William Ætheling, the only legitimate son of King Henry I of England, as well as Henry’s illegitimate son Richard of Lincoln. This meant that when Henry died in 1135 his only heir was his daughter Matilda, which was problematic because she was married to the Count of Anjou, Geoffrey Plantagenet. Oh, and also because she was a lady. English nobles didn’t like Geoffrey but they really didn’t like the idea of being ruled by a woman, and in this case the true royal line would have passed through Matilda, not her husband. They decided instead to make Henry’s nephew, Stephen of Blois, their new king. This kicked off a civil war known as “The Anarchy,” essentially pitting Norman England against Norman Normandy. That war (1135-1153) ended in a compromise, the Treaty of Wallingford, which left Stephen as king but ensured the succession of Matilda’s son, the future Henry II.

November 25, 1177: A Crusader army under King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem nearly annihilates a larger Muslim force under Saladin at the Battle of Montgisard. Baldwin’s victory forced Saladin to retreat to Egypt accompanied by only around ten percent of the soldiers he’d brought with him and thus thwarted Saladin’s first attempt to capture Jerusalem.

November 25, 1491: The Treaty of Granada marks the surrender of the last Islamic emirate on the Iberian peninsula. Nasirid Sultan Abu Abdullah Muhammad XII (“Boabdil” to the Christians) agreed to hand Granada over to King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile. The victorious monarchs agreed, for their part, to protect Muslim property rights and freedom of worship, and to ensure that Muslims living under their jurisdiction would be ruled according to Islamic law and would not be forced to convert to Christianity. Boabdil’s departure to North Africa on January 2, 1492 marked the final end of the “Reconquista.” Following a revolt by Granadan Muslims in 1499, Ferdinand and Isabella repudiated the treaty and expelled any Muslims who refused to convert.

November 25, 1510: Portuguese forces under Afonso de Albuquerque capture the port city of Goa from the Bijapur Sultanate for the second time. Goa became the capital of Portuguese India, a colonial possession that survived in one form or another from the early 16th century until 1961, though it lost most of its towns and cities in the 17th and 18th centuries.

November 26, 1939: The Russian village of Mainila is struck multiple times by artillery shells, which Soviet authorities blamed on the Finnish military. In reality the Red Army had staged an attack on the village as a justification for tearing up the USSR’s non-aggression treaty with Finland. This staged assault became the justification for a long-planned Soviet invasion of Finland that kicked off the “Winter War.” That conflict ended in March 1940 with Finland agreeing to make some territorial concessions to the Soviets—either more than Moscow wanted or much less than it was hoping to gain, there’s some academic debate about this. There’s a bit more consensus that, regardless of outcome, the Red Army struggled to a surprising degree in confronting the far weaker (on paper, anyway) Finnish military. Among other ramifications of this conflict, the Red Army’s difficulties helped convince Adolf Hitler that the Soviet Union was vulnerable to invasion, which needless to say didn’t quite turn out the way he’d assumed it would.

November 26, 2008: Ten members of the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba begin a four day killing spree of bombings and shootings across the Indian city of Mumbai. When it ended on November 29, at least 174 people had been killed (including nine of the attackers) and over 300 more wounded. The attack continues to affect relations between India and Pakistan to the present day.

November 27, 602: A very disaffected Byzantine army under a general named Phocas executes Emperor Maurice, but only after forcing him to watch the execution of six of his sons. They seem nice. This mutiny set in motion the events that led to the 602-628 Byzantine war against the Sasanian (Persian) Empire, as almost immediately after Phocas became emperor the Byzantine governor of Mesopotamia, Narses, declared a rebellion. He appealed to the Persians—whose emperor, Khosrow II, had been crowned in part due to Maurice’s aid—for help, and there’s your war. The lengthy conflict saw the Persians conquer the Levant and Egypt before they overextended themselves in a failed siege of Constantinople. That gave the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, who overthrew Phocas in 610, an opening to counterattack and restore the status quo ante bellum, while Khosrow’s disenchanted nobles ousted him in favor of his son, Kavad II. The conflict battered the two great empires, which worked to the benefit of a new regional power that was just beginning to emerge in western Arabia.

November 27, 1095: During the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II issues his call for what we now know as the First Crusade. There is disagreement in the surviving sources about what, exactly, Urban said. But all seem to agree that he railed against Christian-on-Christian violence in Frankish Europe and called on Frankish Christians to channel their violent impulses into a war against “the Turks” in defense of Christian peoples to the east.

November 28, 1814: The Times of London is published via a new steam-powered printing press, making it the first major newspaper so produced. The use of the faster steam press took newspapers from a niche business to a mass market one, in the process boosting efforts to increase literacy.

November 28, 1912: Taking advantage of Ottoman weakness and the onset of the First Balkan War, Albania declares its independence from the Ottoman Empire. The move was both opportunistic and defensive, as the Balkan League—Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia (particularly Serbia)—had talked about partitioning the empire’s remaining European territories rather than creating any new independent nations and the Albanians wanted to secure their own state. Declaring independence was their way of forcing themselves into the conversation. Commemorated as Albanian Independence Day.

November 28, 1943: Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin begin the Tehran Conference, the first of three major World War II meetings between the leaders of the UK, US, and USSR. The main outcome of Tehran was that Roosevelt and Stalin managed to get Churchill to commit to an invasion of France, in part to force Germany to pull forces away from their eastern front with the Soviets. They also discussed the eventual partition of Germany and creation of the United Nations.

November 28, 1980: The Iranian military’s Operation Morvarid, in the early stages of the Iran-Iraq War, results in the destruction of most of southern Iraq’s air defenses, several of Iraq’s oil facilities, and around 80 percent of the Iraqi navy. The success helped Iran blunt Iraq’s initial offensive and forced the conflict into a stalemate that gave the Iranians time to prepare their own offensive.

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REMINDER: FX is on its annual Thanksgiving break and will return to regular programming on November 30. Thanks for reading!

November 21, 1386: The Turco-Mongolian warlord Timur, or “Tamerlane,” sacks Tbilisi and carries off Georgian King Bagrat V, who manages to save his own life by agreeing to convert to Islam. Bagrat’s son, the future King George VII, was able to free his father from captivity and forestall his conversion. This was the first of a whopping eight times Timur invaded Georgia between 1386 and 1403. Each of his invasions was successful from a military and plunder standpoint but indecisive from a political standpoint and very destructive from the Georgians’ standpoint.

November 21, 1877: A hitherto relatively obscure inventor named Thomas Edison announces his latest product: the phonograph. Edison had been working on a device to record telephone communications, and his initial rudimentary invention involved a grooved cylinder wrapped in tin foil. As you might expect, the sound quality wasn’t good and the recordings could only be replayed a few times before degrading. Edison seems to have regarded the phonograph as no big deal but (spoiler alert) it made huge waves with the public. It was the first of Edison’s inventions to gain him widespread attention and the modern ubiquity of streaming services I think speaks to the enduring demand for recorded music.

November 21, 1894: The First Sino-Japanese War’s Battle of Lüshunkou, also known as the Battle of Port Arthur, ends with a decisive Imperial Japanese victory. The capture of Lüshunkou was a major achievement for the Japanese, but the battle may be better remembered for what followed, the alleged “Port Arthur Massacre.” Over the following 2-3 days, possibly in retaliation for earlier atrocities committed by Chinese soldiers, Japanese forces are said to have killed between 2600 and 20,000 people in the city (some estimates go as high as 60,000, but 20,000 seems a more plausible upper bound).

November 21, 1920: On one of several days that would earn the moniker “Bloody Sunday,” British security forces conducting a search operation in Dublin open fire on a crowd at a Gaelic football match and kill 14 people while wounding more than 60. The operation came in response to violence earlier in the day, in which Irish Republican Army operatives killed or fatally wounded 15 people, most of them members of the “Cairo Gang,” a group of British intelligence operatives covertly stationed in the city. The killing severely damaged Britain’s reputation in Ireland and raised support for the IRA.

November 22, 498: Rival groups of Roman clergy separately elect two different popes, Symmachus and Laurentius, to replace the departed Anastasius II (who had died on November 19). This papal election took place at the height of the Acacian Schism, a period during which the western and eastern Christian churches were at odds over the growth of Miaphysitism (the belief that Jesus was of one unified human-divine nature as opposed to the orthodox view that Jesus was of two separate natures, one human and one divine) in the east. Roman clergy were divided between a majority who supported a hard line against eastern church leaders (who elected Symmachus) and those who supported reconciliation (who elected Laurentius). After several tense years, Laurentius left Rome and tacitly abandoned his claim to the papacy in 506 under the threat of an intervention by Ostrogothic ruler Theodoric the Great. The schism ended under Symmachus’s successor, Pope Hormisdas, in 519.

November 22, 1963: US President John F. Kennedy is assassinated, either by Lee Harvey Oswald or [REDACTED]. Oswald was later arrested and then was himself killed while in police custody on November 24, either by Jack Ruby or [REDACTED]. Successive US presidents have promised to declassify documents related to the assassination, but those promises have so far been [REDACTED].

November 23, 1248: The Muslim military commander in the city of Seville, Axataf, surrenders the city to King Ferdinand III of Castile (later Saint Ferdinand) in the capstone of the so-called “Early Reconquista.” Fueled primarily by the retreat of the Almohad Caliphate back to North Africa, the 20 years from 1228 to 1248 saw Christian kings conquer the entire Iberian Peninsula save for the Emirate of Granada, which was reduced to the status of Castilian vassal. Things remained more or less frozen that way until 1482, when Ferdinand and Isabella began the campaign that eventually eliminated Granada and left all of soon-to-be Spain in Christian hands.

November 23, 1733: Slaves on the island of Saint John, in the Danish West Indies, revolt against their overseers and plantation owners in one of the earliest slave insurrections in the Americas. The uprising began at a Coral Bay plantation and the insurrectionists were in short order able to seize control of the fort in that town. The revolt spread to other plantations in Coral Bay and from there across the island. Danish officials requested assistance from the French colony of Martinique, and in April 1734 an armed French-Swiss detachment arrived from that island to put down the uprising. This force was successful, finally capturing the last of the rebelling slaves in late August. The Danish government finally abolished slavery in its island colonies in 1848.

November 23, 1934: British and Ethiopian (Abyssinian) officials discover an Italian-Somali fortress in the town of Walwal, which is well beyond the designated borders of Italian Somaliland and thus is regarded as a provocation by those same British and Ethiopian officials. The ensuing “Abyssinia Crisis” led into the 1935-1937 Second Italo-Ethiopian War and the Italian annexation of Ethiopia.

November 24, 1642: Dutch explorer Abel Tasman and his crew sight an island off the southeastern coast of Australia. They were the first Europeans to locate what they named Van Diemen’s Land, after Dutch East Indies governor Anthony van Diemen. Tasman’s mission was to locate the famed “Province of Beach,” a land with allegedly vast gold deposits that Europeans—based on a misreading of Marco Polo’s travelogue (possibly fueled by some creative license on the part of Polo himself) and a vast overestimation of the size of Australia—believed would be found south of the Solomon Islands. Van Diemen’s Land eventually became a British colony, which in 1856 changed its name to Tasmania. Today it is part of Australia.

November 24, 1859: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is published. Its theory of evolution by natural selection became a fundamental tenet of modern biology.

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Hey folks, I’m taking a badly needed break from the newsletter and will return to normal programming on Sunday. Thanks for reading!

September 22, 1965: The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, fought over Kashmir, ends with a UN-brokered ceasefire. Although the outcome was indecisive, India was able to prevent a Pakistan-backed insurgency in Kashmir and demonstrate military superiority over its rival while sending the Pakistani economy into a rough patch. The war also caused India and Pakistan to look for new allies, as the US and UK imposed an arms embargo on both countries and criticized both the Indian and Pakistani governments for their conduct. Pakistan’s current relationship with China and India’s Cold War relationship with the Soviet Union developed as a result.

September 22, 1980: The Iran-Iraq War begins with a massive Iraqi air bombardment that was intended to destroy Iran’s air power preemptively. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein feared that the fervor of the recent Iranian Revolution might spread to Iraq, particularly though not necessarily within Iraq’s Shiʿa majority. Hussein and his government also harbored longstanding resentments over Iran’s control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which links the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the Persian Gulf. This initial air barrage failed to achieve its objectives and Hussein’s other strategic aim, turning the Arab population of Iran’s Khuzestan region against Tehran, also largely fizzled out. Iran seemed to be gaining the upper hand until Hussein, with Western help, turned to chemical weapons as an equalizer. The conflict settled into a brutal stalemate that finally ended in August 1988 with hundreds of thousands dead on both sides.

September 23, 1803: A small British army defeats a Maratha army as much as six or seven times its size at the Battle of Assaye. The British victory helped establish military supremacy in the Deccan, the Maratha Empire’s home turf, and led to Britain’s victory in the Second Anglo-Maratha War. It also boosted the military career of the British commander, Major General Arthur Wellesley, who would later be made the first Duke of Wellington and become a major thorn in Napoleon’s side.

September 23, 1932: Abdulaziz “Ibn Saud” unites his two kingdoms, the Nejd and the Hejaz, into one, the new Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Commemorated annually as Saudi National Day.

September 24, 1645: Amid the First English Civil War, parliamentarians defeat a royalist army at the Battle of Rowton Heath. The parliamentarians killed some 600 royalist soldiers and took some 900 more prisoner (parliamentarian casualties are apparently unknown). For the royalists, the defeat scuppered their chances of relieving the besieged Chester, the last English port still loyal to King Charles I, which eventually surrendered in February 1646.

September 24, 1877: The Japanese Army defeats a heavily outnumbered and even more heavily outgunned samurai force under the command of rebel leader Saigō Takamori, whose entire 500 man army was wiped out, in the Battle of Shiroyama. The battle ended the Satsuma Rebellion and the role of the samurai as Japan’s warrior class. The 2003 film The Last Samurai depicts a heavily fictionalized, and (arguably) quite ahistorical, version of this battle and the wider rebellion.

September 25, 1396: An Ottoman army under Sultan Bayezid I defeats a “Crusader” force at Nicopolis (modern Nikopol, in Bulgaria). The outcome was so overwhelming that it broke the nascent Crusade in one fell swoop and left the way open for the Ottomans to march on Vidin and put an end to the Second Bulgarian Empire.

September 25, 1513: Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a Spanish explorer and the governor of Veragua (a territory including the Caribbean coasts of modern Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama), leads a small detachment of men across Panama to what they knew as the “South Sea,” thereby becoming the first European in the New World to lay eyes on the Pacific Ocean. Balboa spent several years exploring his “South Sea” but eventually ran afoul of the governor of Panama, Pedrarias Dávila, and was executed in 1519.

September 25, 1962: A military coup against the Mutawakkilite ruler of northern Yemen, Muhammad al-Badr, sparks the 1962-1970 North Yemen Civil War. The conflict quickly expands from a domestic insurrection to an outlet for the “Arab Cold War,” pitting republican Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who supported the insurrectionists, against an old guard of Arab monarchies led by Saudi Arabia, which supported the Mutawakkilites (despite their sectarian differences with the Yemeni Shiʿa). In the end the republicans emerged victorious, but Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 Six Day War left Nasser greatly weakened so the “Arab Cold War” began to fizzle out.

September 26, 1799: A Republican French army under André Masséna outflanks and defeats a Russian-Austrian force at the Second Battle of Zürich. The French victory recovered what Masséna had lost in his defeat at the First Battle of Zürich in June and led to Russia’s decision to quit the Second Coalition. Shortly afterward Napoleon returned to Paris from Egypt and made himself First Consul, and the French Revolutionary Wars began to go in a whole new direction.

September 26, 1983: The Soviet Union’s early warning network determines that the United States has launched one intercontinental ballistic missile and recommends retaliating, but an air force lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov, under the assumption that the US would not launch a nuclear first strike with a single weapon, decides that it must be malfunctioning. He made a similar determination when the system later showed four more US missiles in fight, and turned out to be correct—Soviet satellites were somehow misreading sunlight reflecting off of high altitude clouds as missiles. Petrov’s decision not to rely on the warning system probably single-handedly prevented World War III.

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Hey folks, I’m taking a badly needed break from the newsletter and will return to normal programming on September 28. Thanks for reading!

September 19, 634: The siege of Damascus ends with the Arabs conquering the city, one of the most important in the Byzantine Empire at the time. One of the first major victories of the Arabs’ 7th century conquests, primary sources say that the siege ended when the Arab commander, Khalid ibn al-Walid, took advantage of a celebration inside the city to exploit an undefended portion of the wall. To that point the siege had more or less stalemated as the Arabs lacked proper siege machinery. It’s suggested that Khalid was tipped off by a Monophysite Damascene priest, which if true highlights the sectarian problem that the Byzantines faced throughout the Levant and Egypt.

September 19, 1356: An English-Gascon army under Edward, the Black Prince, defeats a substantially larger French army under King John II at the Battle of Poitiers. John’s initial assaults broke on a strong English defensive line, and his final attempt was routed after the appearance of a small English cavalry unit. The battle ended with John a captive of the English army. Edward brought him to London where protracted, fitful negotiations with English King Edward III—sandwiched around England’s (largely unsuccessful) Reims campaign in northern France in 1359—eventually produced the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360. That pact ceded about a third of modern France to the English along with a very large ransom for John’s return, in return for which King Edward gave up his claim on the French throne. The treaty was meant to be decisive and indeed ended the “Edwardian” phase of the Hundred Years’ War, but fighting resumed (the “Caroline” phase) in 1369.

September 19, 1893: New Zealand Governor David Boyle, Earl of Glasgow, gives royal assent to a bill instituting women’s suffrage. This made New Zealand the first country in the world to recognize women’s right to vote in national parliamentary elections. This was the result of a concerted campaign that began in the late 1860s, inspired by similar movements in the UK and US though while it began later than those movements it achieved success substantially faster than they did. New Zealand’s November 1893 election was the first in which women exercised the right to vote in parliamentary races and also saw Elizabeth Yates elected mayor of the town of Onehunga. She was the first woman elected mayor anywhere in the British Empire.

September 20, 1066: An invading army under Norwegian King Harald Hardrada, who was attempting to stake his claim to the throne of England, defeats an army under the earls of Mercia and Northumbria at the Battle of Fulford. Harald was joined by Tostig Godwinson, brother of the newly crowned and heavily disputed English King Harold Godwinson, who also felt he had a claim on the throne. Their victory at Fulford allowed their combined army to occupy the city of York and forced Harold to march north from London to confront them. He defeated them at the Battle of Stamford Bridge a few days later, but then had to hurriedly march south to meet the invading Norman army under another claimant, Duke William. It’s reasonable to conclude that the exhaustion that Harold’s forces suffered after Fulford and Stamford Bridge contributed to their defeat to the Normans at the subsequent Battle of Hastings.

September 20, 1519: Ferdinand Magellan sets sail with a small fleet intending to circumnavigate the globe. Magellan became the first European to encounter what would later be dubbed the “Strait of Magellan,” cutting through the southern tip of South America. Hostile natives killed Magellan in a battle on the island of Mactan (today part of the Philippines), so he didn’t survive the voyage. But one of his ships—the Victoria—did, arriving in Spain in September 1522 under the command of Juan Sebastián Elcano and becoming the first vessel to successfully circle the Earth.

September 20, 1792: At the Battle of Valmy in northeastern France, a French revolutionary army defeats the invading Prussians under the Duke of Brunswick. The battle is also known as the “Cannonade of Valmy” because it never advanced beyond the opening artillery duel. The professional French gunners held their own with their Prussian counterparts and Brunswick abruptly called off his attempted infantry advance and retreated despite there having been only around 500 casualties on both sides. The importance of Valmy probably cannot be overstated, as it prevented the Prussians from marching on Paris and potentially snuffing out the French Revolution before it really began.

As a test of the revolution’s concept of a “citizen army,” the French victory—their first in the War of the First Coalition—was a tremendous boost to morale, even if the role of “citizen soldiers” in the French army may have been a tad overblown (the French artillery corps, the key to the battle, was largely professional military). After the battle and partly because of it, the French National Convention abolished the monarchy on September 21 and the French Republic was born.

September 21, 1857: The Siege of Delhi ends with a British victory, snuffing out the last remnants of the Mughal Empire and doing much to undercut the 1857-1859 Indian Rebellion.

September 21, 1860: A combined British and French army defeats a Qing Dynasty army at the Battle of Palikao, named for a bridge in the eastern part of Beijing. The defeat caused the Xianfeng Emperor to flee his capital, leaving the city in European hands and hastening the end of the Second Opium War.

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Happy Labor Day to those who are celebrating! I’m on a bit of a break but we’ll return to our regular schedule tomorrow.

August 29, 1526: The first of two battles involving the Ottoman Empire near the town of Mohács, in what is now southern Hungary, ends in a decisive Ottoman victory. The Ottomans were concerned about potential Habsburg expansion into the Balkans (prompted by King Louis II of Hungary’s 1515 marriage to Mary of Habsburg) and were being encouraged by their emerging French allies to attack their common Habsburg foe from the east. Louis died during a panicked retreat and his Jagiellonian dynasty died with him. Hungary effectively ceased to exist as a kingdom, with its northern and western portions coming under Habsburg rule and the rest held as an Ottoman vassal. The battle opened central Europe up to the Ottomans, a state of affairs that would reach a high water mark of sorts in their failed 1529 siege of Vienna.

August 29, 1842: Britain and Qing China sign the Treaty of Nanking, ending the 1839-1842 First Opium War. China was obliged to pay reparations to Britain and Hong Kong became a British colony, which it remained until 1997. The treaty also ended China’s “Canton System,” which had forced all foreign trade to run through the port city of Guangzhou (Canton) and was the means by which the Chinese government controlled those foreign commercial interactions, and forced the Qing to accept unequal conditions on Chinese-British trade.

August 30, 1363: The navies of two competing factions of the Red Turban rebels vying to replace the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty—one led by Zhu Yuanzhang and the other by Chen Youliang—begin a five week battle on China Lake Poyang. When it was over, Chen Youliang was dead and Zhu Yuanzhang’s faction was ascendant. Zhu and his forces eventually overthrew the Yuan and he took the throne as the Hongwu Emperor, the first ruler of China’s Ming Dynasty.

August 30, 1922: The Republican Turkish army defeats an occupying Greek force at the Battle of Dumlupınar in western Anatolia. In their victory the Turks destroyed the better part of an entire Greek army corps and began driving the rest of the Greek army toward the western Anatolian coast. The Greek position was untenable and they withdrew completely from Anatolia in mid-September.

August 31, 1907: Britain and Russia sign the Anglo-Russian Convention, which closes arguably the last chapter in their “Great Game” rivalry in Asia, at least until the 1917 Russian Revolution. The two empires, having already agreed to mark Afghanistan as the frontier between their domains, further agreed to divide Iran into spheres of influence (Russian in the north, British in the south), to recognize Afghanistan as part of Britain’s sphere of influence, and not to interfere in Tibetan affairs. There’s a case to be made that the Cold War brought the “Great Game” back, but historians generally mark that as something different and consider the true Great Game to have ended with this convention.

August 31, 1957: The Malayan Declaration of Independence is proclaimed by Tunku Abdul Rahman, then-Chief Minister of the Federation of Malaya. The declaration acknowledged the end of the British protectorate over the nine Malay states that made up the federation. This date is annually commemorated as Malaysian Independence Day, but there is a bit of controversy about that because Malaysia didn’t come into existence until 1963, when the former British colonies of North Borneo, Sarawak, and Singapore joined the federation (Singapore left a couple of years later). Some folks in North Borneo and Sarawak take issue with their “independence day” commemorating an event that took place before they were part of the country.

September 1, 1880: A decisive British victory at the Battle of Kandahar ends the Second Anglo-Afghan War. British authorities deposed Afghan Emir Ayub Khan Barakzai and replaced him with his more pliable cousin, Abdur Rahman Khan.

September 1, 1939: Nazi Germany invades Poland. The German offensive began a week after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the USSR and a day after the pact’s ratification by the Supreme Soviet. The initial German invasion overwhelmed the outgunned Polish military, and a subsequent invasion by the Red Army on September 17 sealed Poland’s fate and resulted in a partition of the country. The invasion is regarded as the start of World War II, as it triggered French and British declarations of war against Germany.

September 1, 1969: The Libyan Free Officers Movement, led by a young colonel named Muammar Gaddafi, overthrows King Idris of Libya in a coup d’état. Idris had been broadly unpopular, seen as siphoning off a disproportionate share of Libya’s newfound oil wealth and viewed as tyrannical by tribes that were accustomed to a great deal of autonomy. He was also in poor health, and when it became known that he planned to abdicate in favor of his nephew on September 2 the officers moved to preempt that. Gaddafi declared the founding of the “Libyan Arab Republic” and then set about implementing a political and economic program aligned with that of his idol, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, including its tenets of Arab socialism and pan-Arabism as well as its authoritarian elements.

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REMINDER: Foreign Exchanges is on its annual summer break. We will return to regular programming on Sunday. Thanks for reading!

July 16, 1212: An allied Iberian Christian army under Castilian King Alfonso VIII defeats a substantially larger Almohad army under Caliph Muhammad al-Nasir at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in what is today southern Spain. The battle is mostly notable for what happened in its immediate aftermath. Muhammad al-Nasir died the following year and his successor, Yusuf II, died without an heir in 1224 which sent the Almohad dynasty into a tailspin from which it never recovered. Forced to focus on internal struggles in North Africa, the Almohads were unable to counter the now onrushing Christians, who captured the key Andalusian cities of Córdoba and Seville by mid-century.

July 16, 1945: The United States conducts the first successful detonation of an atomic weapon at Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico, code named “Trinity.” The 25 kiloton test, one of several such tests conducted as part of the “Manhattan Project,” involved an implosion-type plutonium device dubbed “the Gadget,” which became the model for the “Fat Man” device later dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The 15 kiloton “Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a gun-type fissile uranium device, a type that had not been tested prior to its use.

July 16, 1979: Iraqi President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr cites health reasons in stepping down from his post. Bakr does seem to have been a relatively frail guy and he did die in 1982, but at this point his main health consideration was probably “my vice president is going to murder me if I don’t resign.” His resignation allowed that vice president, Saddam Hussein—who was already Iraq’s de facto ruler anyway—to make it official by replacing him as president. I’m fuzzy on what happened after that but I’m sure it all worked out great.

July 17, 1203: In what could be considered a dry run of their later conquest of the city, the armies of the Fourth Crusade attack Constantinople and force the Byzantine Emperor, Alexios III Angelos, to flee into exile. The Crusaders had been enticed by Alexios’ nephew, also named Alexios, with promises of financial support if they put him upon the throne. A couple of things then went very wrong. First, the people of Constantinople restored the younger Alexios’ father, Isaac II, to the throne contrary to the Crusaders’ wishes (and despite the fact that Alexios III had blinded Isaac when he took power). Second, the now co-emperor Alexios IV found himself unable to make good on his financial promises, and his costly attempts to do so drew outrage from Constantinople’s residents. When Isaac died in January 1204 the people revolted and overthrew Alexios IV, prompting the Crusaders to launch another, substantially more consequential, assault on the city.

July 17, 1936: The Spanish military, led by a cadre of nationalist officers including Francisco Franco, begins a coup against Spain’s Popular Front government starting in Morocco, the Canary Islands, and the Balearic Islands. The intent was to secure those outlying areas before swiftly moving into Spain proper to oust the government the following day, but the effort quickly stalled and the result instead was the Spanish Civil War. Franco and the Nationalists ultimately won but only after hundreds of thousands were killed.

July 17, 1945: Leaders of the three Allied nations—Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, and Harry Truman—meet in Postdam to hash out details concerning the end of World War II in Europe. On August 1 the three leaders, Churchill having been replaced by Clement Attlee in the interim because of the Labour Party’s victory in the UK’s July 5 election, released the “Potsdam Agreement,” which mostly set out terms for the post-war occupation and reconstruction of Germany.

July 17, 1968: In a bloodless coup sometimes called the “17 July Revolution,” the Iraqi Baath Party ousts President Abdul Rahman Arif and takes power under its leader, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. To this day the circumstances surrounding the coup remain murky, but the result is not—the Baathists controlled Iraq until the US invasion in 2003 ousted them. Bakr himself hung around until 1979, all the while slowly losing authority to his deputy, Saddam Hussein, until Hussein forced him out and assumed the presidency himself.

July 18, 1195: The Almohad Caliphate defeats a Castilian army at the Battle of Alarcos in southern Spain. The victory strengthened the Almohads position in Iberia, though political unrest back in their North African heartland limited their ability to capitalize on their success.

July 18, 1290: English King Edward I (or Edward “Longshanks”) issues his Edict of Expulsion, forcing an estimated 16,000 Jews out of England. Edward, financially broken by wars on the Continent, cut a deal with English nobles in which he traded the expulsion of the Jews for the right to levy new taxes (the chance to seize abandoned Jewish property must also have appealed to him). But he was also building on a long tradition of English anti-semitism, much of it the product of his father’s reign. Anti-semitism had steadily risen throughout England since the Norman conquest and the expulsion was the culmination of a series of insults that began with Henry III’s 1218 “Edict of the Badge” that required Jews in the kingdom to wear badges that marked them as Jews. Henry, who viewed himself as the new Edward the Confessor, had a particular hatred for England’s Jewish community that manifested in punitive taxation and in the 1253 Statute of Jewry and 1275 Statute of the Jewry, which intensified the segregation of Jews from the rest of English society and finally outlawed the lending of money at interest, one of the few economic niches available to Jews in the kingdom. The edict’s ban on Jews living in England lasted until Oliver Cromwell lifted it in 1657.

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REMINDER: Foreign Exchanges is on its annual summer break. We will return to regular programming on July 20. Thanks for reading!

July 13, 1402: The Ming Dynasty’s capital city, Nanjing, falls to the forces of Zhu Di, prince of Yan, ending an uprising he’d begun back in 1399 known as the “Jingnan campaign.” Zhu Di was the son of former Chinese emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming Dynasty better known as the Hongwu Emperor. He had chafed at the selection of Zhu Yuanzhang’s grandson, Zhu Yunwen, as the Jianwen Emperor in 1398. The Jianwen Emperor’s attempt to arrest Zhu Di in late 1398 triggered the rebellion. After fighting the imperial army to a standstill through late 1401, Zhu Di’s forces went on an offensive that brought them to the gates of Nanjing in July 1402, where the city fell without a fight. Zhu Di, now the Yongle Emperor, eventually moved his court back to Beijing.

July 13, 1878: The Treaty of Berlin (temporarily) settles the “Great Eastern Crisis” over Russia’s threat to the Ottoman Empire. The treaty superseded the earlier Treaty of San Stefano, which ended the 1877-1878 war between Russia and the Ottomans but was so lopsided in Russia’s favor that Britain and France felt compelled to step in and quash it. The Berlin do-over recognized the independent states of Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia and an autonomous (effectively independent) Bulgaria. It shrunk Bulgaria down from the size envisioned under San Stefano and forced the Russians to return some territory to the Ottomans. Austria-Hungary was allowed to effectively annex Bosnia and Herzegovina, which it formally annexed in 1908.

July 13, 1977: The Somali National Army, working with a rebel group called the Western Somali Liberation Front, invades Ethiopia, beginning the Ogaden War. Basically the Somalis thought they could take advantage of a moment of internal weakness in Ethiopia to seize the predominantly Somali Ogaden. As both countries were Soviet clients at the time, Moscow had a decision to make, and it chose Ethiopia. With Soviet aid and Cuban reinforcements, the Ethiopians turned the tide and pushed the SNA back into Somalia by March 1978. Somalia then shifted its Cold War allegiance to the United States.

July 14, 1789: A crowd of Parisians, having been out in the streets demonstrating for two days over King Louis XVI’s sacking of finance minister Jacques Necker, attacks the Bastille to seize the arms and ammunition stored inside. The Bastille was mostly used at this point as an armory, but its reputation as a political prison also made it a potent symbol of royal abuse. The “Storming of the Bastille” is generally regarded as the event that triggered the French Revolution, as the insurrection then spread from Paris throughout the country.

July 14, 1958: The Iraqi military’s “Free Officers Movement,” modeled after the similarly named and more famous cabal in Egypt, overthrows the Hashemite monarchy in what’s become known as the 14 July Revolution. Like their Egyptian role models, Iraq’s “Free Officers” were frustrated (as was much of the Iraqi public) by the monarchy’s enthrallment to British colonial authority, which led to Iraq’s inclusion in the UK-led (and US-encouraged) “Baghdad Pact” in 1955 and to the monarchy’s decision to reject an offer to join Gamal Abdel Nasser’s United Arab Republic. Fueled in part by a sense of Arab nationalism, they captured and executed the triumvirate at the head of the Iraqi government—King Faisal II, regent Abd al-Ilah, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Said. The Gang’s leaders, General Abd al-Karim Qasim and Colonel Abdul Salam Arif, quickly fell out over Qasim’s less-than-full commitment to Arab nationalism and his own reluctance to join the UAR, possibly connected to his mother’s Shiʿa background (“pan-Arabism” tended to be more popular among Sunnis than among Shiʿa). Qasim soon had Arif arrested, but the latter would come out on top following the 1963 Ramadan Revolution that overthrew Qasim.

July 15, 1099: The army of the First Crusade emerges victorious from its Siege of Jerusalem, capturing the city and thus achieving its stretch goal. Despite a potentially calamitous lack of readily available fresh water, the Crusaders were fortified by a shipment of raw materials from Europe that enabled them to construct siege towers and overwhelm the city’s enfeebled Fatimid garrison. There is still some debate over the extent of the massacre that followed, partly due to the difficulty in separating deaths during the siege from deaths in the immediate aftermath of the siege. Much to the consternation of Crusader grandee Raymond of Toulouse, the other nobles offered the throne of the newly conquered Jerusalem to Godfrey of Bouillon. In deference to religious sensibilities Godfrey refused the title of “king,” adopting something more modest (possibly “Protector of Jerusalem,” though that may be apocryphal). His successors, beginning with his brother Baldwin I, went with “king.”

July 15, 1799: An officer on Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, Captain Pierre-François Bouchard, discovers an artifact later dubbed “the Rosetta Stone.” The stone, containing three versions of the same decree—in hieroglyphs, demotic Egyptian, and Ancient Greek—enabled scholars to finally translate hieroglyphs and was a landmark in the development of the field of Egyptology.

July 15, 1974: Greece’s military government engineers a coup in Cyprus in order to install a government favorable to union with Greece. The coup prompted Turkey to intervene to prevent Cyprus from joining Greece, partitioning the island and leaving it in a state of frozen conflict that continues to the present day.

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REMINDER: Foreign Exchanges is on its annual summer break. We will return to regular programming on July 20. Thanks for reading!

July 10, 1883: With a dramatic bayonet charge, a Chilean army defeats a Peruvian force at the Battle of Huamachuco, the last major engagement of the 1879-1883 War of the Pacific. The Peruvians suffered 800 killed out of an army that was around 1880 strong and were forced to accept the Treaty of Ancón in October, which ended the war largely on Chilean terms. The treaty ceded considerable territory to Chile and ultimately triggered the collapse of Peruvian President Miguel Iglesias’s government and the subsequent 1884-1885 Peruvian Civil War.

July 10, 1943: In a pre-dawn landing the Allies begin their invasion of Sicily, codenamed “Operation Husky.” Although it wasn’t until mid-August that Sicily was in Allied hands the Italian military began evacuating forces from the island in late July, and the seemingly inevitable defeat proved to be the last straw for Benito Mussolini’s government, which fell on July 25. The Sicilian operation marked the first phase of the Allied invasion of Italy.

July 10, 2017: Iraqi authorities declare the city of Mosul liberated from the Islamic State, marking the recapture of the last major city in Iraq that had still been in IS’s hands. Two more large campaigns followed in Tal Afar and Hawija, but once Mosul was retaken the outcome of the campaign against IS in Iraq was no longer in doubt.

July 11, 1405: Chinese admiral Zheng He sets sail on the first of his “treasure voyages.” Between 1405 and 1433 Zheng led his fleets to destinations around Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean, visiting India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and East Africa. There’s even some creative pseudo-history out there that argues he visited South America and Europe, though the “evidence” for these claims is either non-existent or invented. The voyages ended as suddenly as they began, for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear but probably involved the restoration of older Ming Dynasty policies that had been overridden by the Yongle Emperor (d. 1424).

July 11, 1804: In a duel fought in Weehawken, New Jersey, US Vice President Aaron Burr kills former US Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. The two men had been locked in an increasingly nasty political rivalry since Burr defeated Hamilton’s father in law, Philip Schuyler, for a US Senate seat in 1791, a rivalry that greatly intensified when Hamilton orchestrated Thomas Jefferson’s victory over Burr in the US House of Representatives in the 1800 presidential election. Burr eventually issued a challenge in response to what he considered slanderous comments by Hamilton that undermined Burr’s candidacy for governor of New York in 1804. Burr briefly fled to Georgia but eventually returned to Washington to serve out the remainder of his term as VP. He was charged with murder in New York and New Jersey but was never tried in either state.

July 11, 1995: The Srebrenica massacre begins. Bosnian Serb forces killed almost 8400 Bosniak men and boys in and around Srebrenica over the next couple of weeks, and carried off an estimated 25,000-30,000 women, children, and elderly.

July 12, 1191: The Crusader Siege of Acre ends with a technical Crusader victory that set the stage for the ultimate failure of the Third Crusade. Begun in 1189 by Guy of Lusignan, the titular “King of Jerusalem” who by this point was no longer actually king of Jerusalem (or anywhere else, for that matter), the siege quickly became a potential disaster for the Crusaders when Saladin arrived with a large relief army. But Saladin failed to lift the siege, and the 1191 arrival of new European armies led by Philip II of France and Richard I of England turned the tide. However, disputes between the two kings prompted Philip to pack up and head home once Acre’s garrison had surrendered, and the remaining army under Richard was too small to achieve the expedition’s main objective of retaking Jerusalem.

July 12, 1575: At the Battle of Rajmahal, the Mughal Empire eliminates the Karrani Dynasty, capturing and executing its final ruler Daud Khan Karrani, and annexes the Sultanate of Bengal. The Mughals had partially occupied Bengal until the dynasty’s second ruler, Humayun, was temporarily dethroned by the Sur dynasty in 1540. The Pashtun Karranis emerged after the Mughals defeated the Sur and an independent Bengal Sultanate reemerged. The third Mughal emperor, Akbar I, invaded the sultanate and made relatively short work of it, though the region of Bengal wasn’t fully under Mughal control until the end of the century.

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Happy Memorial Day to those who are celebrating! I took a short break for the holiday but we’ll be back to our regular schedule tomorrow. Thanks for reading!

May 23, 1430: In the early days of their siege of the town of Compiègne, Burgundian forces drive off a sortie by the French garrison and in the process capture none other than Joan of Arc, the heroine of the siege of Orléans. The Burgundians turned Joan over to their English allies in exchange for a substantial ransom, and English authorities quickly put her on trial for blasphemy. Among Joan’s alleged crimes were claiming to have received direct communications from God and wearing “masculine” clothing, which seems inevitable if you’re going to ride into battle but I digress. The verdict was never in doubt, with England intending to discredit French King Charles VII’s claim on the throne by associating him with a “convicted” heretic. Joan was executed on May 30, 1431. As far as the siege was concerned, it ended in November 1430 with a French victory that was not terribly decisive as far as the wider Hundred Years’ War was concerned.

May 23, 1618: Two Catholic Bohemian nobles, Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice and Vilém Slavata of Chlum, are thrown out of the top floor window of the Bohemian Chancellery in Prague by a group of Protestant nobles angered over the religious policies of the Bohemian king, the future Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II. Both somehow survived the 70 foot drop, but this “Defenestration of Prague” (one of three such incidents but the one most people likely mean when they talk about the Defenestration of Prague) helped trigger the Thirty Years’ War.

May 24, 1667: King Louis XIV of France orders his army to invade the Spanish Netherlands, kicking off a conflict known as the War of Devolution. The name comes from Louis’ contention that sovereignty over the Spanish Netherlands and Franche-Comté had passed (“devolved,” get it?) to him because of his marriage to Spanish royal Maria Theresa. She and Louis had agreed to renounce her inheritance in return for a hefty dowry payment from the Habsburgs, but that dowry never materialized and so Louis argued that the renunciation was null and void. The war was largely concluded on French terms and ended with the May 1668 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (not to be confused with the more famous 1748 treaty by the same name), under which Louis agreed to quit the Spanish Netherlands and Franche-Comté but retained possession of several key northern frontier towns. Those towns proved to be footholds for subsequent French forays into the region.

May 24, 1991: The military arm of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front enters the city of Asmara, securing (as it turns out) Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia and thus marking the end of the Eritrean War of Independence. May 24 is commemorated in Eritrea annually as Independence Day.

May 25, 1521: The Diet of Worms, an assembly called by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in response to the growing “Protestant” reform movement led by Martin Luther, culminates with the Edict of Worms. In that proclamation, Charles declared Luther “a notorious heretic” and promised that “those who will help in his capture will be rewarded generously for their good work.” Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, then “kidnapped” Luther and stashed him in Wartburg Castle for his own safety. Luther remained at Wartburg until the following March, writing and translating the New Testament into German while his reform movement escalated into a schism and Protestantism began to separate from the Catholic Church.

May 25, 1981: Leaders from Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates sign the Gulf Cooperation Council charter in Abu Dhabi, formally marking the birth of that organization.

May 26, 1908: A British drilling operation discovers a commercially-viable oil deposit at Masjed Soleyman, in Iran’s Khuzestan province. This was the first oil find in the Middle East and obviously began the region’s transformation into the stable, economically advantaged paradise it is today. The strike was made under the terms of the “D’Arcy Concession,” a 1901 agreement between British oil baron William Knox D’Arcy and Iranian ruler Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar that gave D’Arcy exclusive rights to explore for oil in Iran in exchange for a payment of 20,000 pounds and a mere 16 percent of any future profits. Let’s just say this led to some problems down the road and leave it at that.

May 26, 1918: The short-lived Democratic Republic of Georgia declares independence from the considerably shorter-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic, which in turn formed out of the collapse of the Russian Empire. Although Georgia fell to a Red Army invasion in early 1921 and became a Soviet republic, this not-quite-three year period of independence was formative in terms of the development of Georgian nationalism, and after the country regained its independence from the USSR the Georgian government established May 26 as Independence Day.

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This is just a reminder that Foreign Exchanges is on its annual Spring Break. We will return to regular programming on Sunday. Thanks for reading!

April 15, 1395: The Turco-Mongolian warlord Timur defeats the army of the Mongolian “Golden Horde” khanate at the Battle of the Terek River. Timur’s victory ended a threat against his empire by the Golden Horde’s ruler, Tokhtamysh, and allowed him to destroy all of the major cities in the khanate. In doing so he was able to divert commerce along the “Silk Road” from its northern branch, which ran through the Horde’s territory, to a more southernly route that ran through Timur’s territory.

April 15, 1450: In one of the final engagements of the Hundred Years’ War, a French army under Jean de Clermont nearly annihilates an English force commanded by Sir Thomas Kyriell at the Battle of Formigny, in Normandy. The loss of an entire field army left England unable to defend its remaining holdings in Normandy and the region came under French control in the succeeding months. The battle is notable from a military history perspective as perhaps the first recorded use (by the French) of battlefield artillery in Europe. It’s debatable how effective the guns actually were, but their noise did alert French constable Arthur de Richemont to the battle. The arrival of his ~2000 man army on the field was decisive in turning a likely defeat into an overwhelming French victory.

April 15, 1947: Jackie Robinson makes his Major League Baseball debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers. In doing so, he became the first African-American to play in the MLB, breaking the color barrier that had been entrenched in the league since the 1880s. Two years later he became the first African-American to win his league’s Most Valuable Player award for the 1949 season, and he was inducted in the the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.

April 16, 1457 BCE: This is the date most commonly cited for the Battle of Megiddo, the earliest well-documented (reasonably, anyway) battle in human history. An Egyptian army under Pharaoh Thutmose III defeated a group of rebelling Canaanite kingdoms at Megiddo, a city that was the site of so many battles in the ancient world that it gave its name to the hypothetical apocalyptic “Battle of Armageddon.” They followed up by besieging the city, which fell seven months later. Thutmose’s victory restored Egyptian preeminence in the Levant and enabled the greatest territorial expansion in Ancient Egyptian history.

April 16, 73: This is the traditional date for the fall of Masada, a Jewish fortress whose capture by the Romans effectively ended the First Jewish-Roman War (66-74). According to the Jewish rebel leader-turned-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, the surviving defenders of Masada chose mass suicide over capture. Modern archeological work on the site, which also questions the dating of the siege, suggests the Romans massacred most of the survivors and that Josephus was either misinformed or deliberately formulated the suicide narrative to cover up the atrocity. The traditional narrative and its story of Jewish fighters choosing death over capture holds a prominent place in modern Israeli national consciousness.

April 16, 1746: The Battle of Culloden sees a British army basically destroy a Jacobite uprising led by pretender prince Charles Edward Stuart. The Jacobite Uprising of 1745 began in August of that year on behalf of Charles’s father, James Francis Edward Stuart, then the Stuart pretender to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Britain was preoccupied with the War of the Austrian Succession on the continent and Charles had received assurances from King Louis XV that France would invade England to support him. After some initial success in Scotland The Gang invaded England in early November, but the French invasion mostly fizzled aside from a few reinforcements and English Jacobites didn’t hop on the bandwagon, so the Jacobites retreated back into Scotland about 6 weeks after they’d entered England. They started to run out of food and supplies and finally decided that they had to fight an open field battle against the British army in Scotland. Needless to say they got pulverized. Charles survived and continued to claim the British and Irish thrones but the 1745 uprising was over and so pretty much was the Jacobite movement as a whole. Culloden has been called the “last pitched battle” ever fought on British (British, not Irish, so please don’t email me with attempted corrections) soil, which I guess is true but I am not a British historian so don’t quote me.

April 17, 1895: Representatives of the Empire of Japan and China’s Qing Dynasty sign the Treaty of Shimonoseki, ending the First Sino-Japanese War. Reflecting the decisive Japanese victory, the treaty obliged the Qing to renounce Chinese claims on Korea, cede islands in the Taiwan Strait (including Taiwan itself) to Japan, pay reparations, and establish “most favored nation” trade status with Japan. European powers France, Germany, and Russia intervened to force Japan to give up control of the Liaodong Peninsula, which had been another stipulation of the treaty. The newly independent Korea quickly fell under Japan’s sway, which brought the Japanese into Russia’s orbit and led to the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War.

April 17, 1975: The Cambodian Civil War ends with the Khmer Rouge capture of Phnom Penh and the ouster of the short-lived Khmer Republic. The Khmer Rouge briefly restored the Cambodian monarchy before embarking on one of the most brutal genocides in history, in which upwards of 25 percent of the Cambodian population was killed through a mix of mass executions, forced labor, and other more indirect forms of violence. That genocide finally ended when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979 and removed the Khmer Rouge from power.

April 18, 1775: Dozens of American Patriot riders fan out across the Massachusetts Bay colony to warn “Minutemen” militia fighters that a British army is approaching. The nighttime ride was crucial in alerting the militia and enabling their victories at the ensuing Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first major engagements of the American Revolution. The event gave birth to the legend of Paul Revere, the Boston silversmith and engraver who was one of the operation’s planners, and has been memorialized as “Paul Revere’s Ride” in the title of a famous 1861 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

April 18, 1897: The Ottoman Empire declares war on Greece, marking the official start of the Greco-Turkish War (which had unofficially begun the previous month). Fought primarily over control of the island of Crete, which had repeatedly revolted against Ottoman rule, the war ended in mid-May with a decisive military victory for the larger and better armed Ottoman army. Then the European Great Powers intervened. The Treaty of Constantinople, negotiated primarily by the Powers, gave the Ottomans a few limited territorial conquests but forced the empire to return most of the Greek territory it had seized and to recognize Cretan autonomy. Under the guise of that autonomy, the island moved further and further into the Greek orbit, finally becoming part of Greece in the 1913 settlement to the First Balkan War.

April 18, 1938: Action Comics debuts with issue #1, published by National Allied Publications as an anthology meant to replicate and complement the success founder Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson had achieved when he began publishing Detective Comics the previous December. The first story in the issue was called “Superman,” from writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, and marks the first appearance of their character by that name. The story was an instant success, arguably birthing the modern superhero genre (Detective Comics wouldn’t introduce its famous star, Batman, until the following year), and today Action Comics #1 is regarded as the most valuable comic book ever published (a near-mint copy sold for over $3 million in 2014).