Today in History: December 22-25
The Ottoman Empire captures the island of Rhodes, the Byzantines sack Aleppo, and more
For those who are celebrating it, a very Merry Christmas to you and yours from Foreign Exchanges! The newsletter is on its annual Holiday break, but we’ll be back to regular programming in 2022! FX can only survive through the support of our paid subscribers. If you’re not already one of those, please consider becoming one today and taking advantage of our holiday offer (25% off your first year):
December 22, 1522: The Siege of Rhodes ends with an Ottoman victory and the displacement of the Knights of Rhodes.
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 beginning of the Zionist movement.
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. 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. The capture sent a panic through Christendom that spawned the Second Crusade, which, ah, didn’t go very well.
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.

Incidentally, there is a disagreement among historians as to whether this date marks the birth of the “Holy Roman Empire.” Charlemagne’s “Holy Roman Empire” was basically a relabeling of his Carolingian Empire, and the title of “emperor” lost its luster as Charlemagne’s descendants mismanaged and eventually lost their patrimony. The crowning of Otto I as emperor in 962 (on February 2) revived the concept in the form we generally recognize it today (among other things as a precursor to modern Germany), so there is a school of thought that traces the empire’s origins to that date instead. The actual name “Holy Roman Empire” doesn’t seem to appear until the mid-13th century.
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.