Today in History: April 15-18
The Battle of Megiddo takes place (give or take), Superman makes his comic book debut, and more
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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 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).