Today in History: April 11-14
Napoleon is forced into exile, the Lebanese Civil War begins, and more
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April 11, 1241: A Mongolian army defeats King Béla IV of Hungary at the Battle of Mohi. While Béla survived the battle he temporarily lost control of his kingdom to the Mongols, who were able to sack the city of Pest and occupy most of Hungary. But they withdrew in early 1242, as their leader Batu had to return east to defend his interests amid the succession of a new Great Khan. Béla was able to regain control and the Mongols wouldn’t seriously threaten Hungary again for over 40 years.
April 11, 1713: Five separate treaties are signed between the various participants in the War of the Spanish Succession, becoming the first of several accords that would come to be known as the Peace of Utrecht. The war, fought between the Habsburg and Bourbon claimants to the throne of Spain, ended with a qualified Bourbon victory that saw French King Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip V, ratified as Spanish king but only on the condition that he renounce his place in the French line of succession, thus preventing a merger of the two kingdoms. Because it enshrined the demand that the French and Spanish crowns remain separate, Utrecht is regarded as a significant milestone in the development of both the nation-state and the “balance of power” concept in geopolitics. Britain is generally thought to have benefited the most from the peace, as it secured naval supremacy over its continental rivals and forced the French monarchy to recognize the Hanoverian dynasty’s accession to the British throne and drop its support for the rival Stuart dynasty.
April 11, 1814: The Treaty of Fontainebleau ends the War of the Sixth Coalition and forces the defeated French Emperor Napoleon into his first (and, as it turned out, temporary) exile on the island of Elba. Having forced the surrender of the French army at Paris on March 31, the victorious coalition decreed that it would no longer deal with Napoleon as the ruler of France and forced his abdication. Napoleon attempted to step down in favor of his son, but the treaty stipulated that neither Napoleon nor any member of his family should continue to rule France. A restoration of the pre-revolution French monarchy under Louis XVIII followed, though his reign was interrupted when Napoleon returned from exile on March 20, 1815 and began the “Hundred Days” epilogue to his career.
April 11, 1979: The Tanzania People’s Defense Force, along with a group of Ugandan opposition fighters called the Uganda National Liberation Front, seizes Kampala and forces Ugandan dictator Idi Amin to flee into exile after over eight years in power. Amin sought sanctuary first in Libya and later in Saudi Arabia, where he lived until his death in 2003. His time in power is remembered mostly for its brutality toward ethnic minorities and political opponents, with estimates of the number of people killed on Amin’s orders ranging from around 100,000 at the lower end to upwards of 500,000 at the higher end.
April 12, 1204: The army of the Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople, temporarily doing away with the Byzantine Empire. In many respects the true culmination of the Crusading enterprise, the Fourth Crusade can either be viewed as a deliberate plot against the Byzantines or the unplanned result of a military campaign going completely off the rails—this is still a matter of some debate among historians. What is indisputable is that the Byzantine Empire, though it managed to reconstitute itself and retake Constantinople under the Palaiologos family in 1261, never really recovered from this event.
April 12, 1861: Batteries from the new “Provisional Forces of the Confederate States” open fire on Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, kicking off the American Civil War. The garrison commander, Major Robert Anderson, agreed to surrender and evacuate the fort the following day. Two US soldiers were killed the day after that when some ammunition in the fort exploded during a ceremonial salute to the US flag, but they were the only two fatalities connected with the battle. The fort remained in Confederate hands until they evacuated it in 1865 during William T. Sherman’s war-ending Carolinas campaign.
April 13, 1953: Central Intelligence Agency director Allen Dulles orders the creation of Project MKUltra, a program for human experimentation into “mind control” drugs and techniques. Among its more unsavory components were experiments in which human subjects, often pulled involuntarily from prisons and mental institutions, were dosed with drugs (LSD in particular), usually without their consent. Some of the techniques MKUltra tested eventually found their way into George W. Bush’s “enhanced interrogation” (torture) program, and it has spawned innumerable conspiracy theories since the revelation of its existence in the 1970s.
April 13, 1975: An attack by Christian Phalangist militia fighters on a bus carrying Palestinian fighters and civilians in eastern Beirut triggers the Lebanese Civil War. That conflict, which fed on religious and sectarian tensions that were inherent in the structure of the Lebanese state and were exacerbated by the influx of Palestinian refugees following the 1948 and 1967 wars and by the arrival of the Palestine Liberation Organization after the Black September 1970 event in Jordan, lasted some 15 years and killed anywhere from 150,000 to 250,000 people.
April 14, 43 BCE: The legions of Mark Antony win a victory and suffer a defeat on the same day in the Battle of Forum Gallorum in northern Italy. Antony was was confronted by a Republican army under the command of that year’s consuls, Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Vibius Pansa, bolstered by a group of Julius Caesar’s veterans led by Octavian. Antony’s army attacked Pansa’s part of the army and won a fleeting victory before an attack by Hirtius forced Antony to withdraw. Pansa was badly wounded and would die on April 22. The outcome of Forum Gallorum was inconclusive and led to a second, decisive engagement, the Battle of Mutina, a week later.
April 14, 1912: Shortly before midnight, the allegedly unsinkable ocean liner RMS Titanic strikes an iceberg and, well, begins sinking. In part due to the fact that it carried enough lifeboats for only about half of the passengers on board (and a third of the passengers it could have carried at full capacity), the Titanic’s sinking became one of the biggest maritime disasters in history, killing more than 1500 people.