Today in History: July 1-4
Today in History: July 1-4
Prussia is victorious at Königgrätz, the Crusaders are crushed at Hattin, and more
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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). Several factors caused grandees of both principalities, Sigismund perhaps above all, to push for creating a formal union featuring an elected monarch in place of the existing personal union held by the Jagiellonian dynasty. Lithuanian nobles were particularly concerned by the threat emanating from Moscow, which at the time was winning the Livonian War. They wanted greater support from Polish nobles who were already irritated that most of the taxes they paid to the joint crown were going to support the Lithuanian war effort. A stronger union was a concession to the Poles but also a compromise on the full annexation that many of them seemed to want but that Lithuanian nobles resisted.
In general nobles in both principalities were concerned that Sigismund was a) in poor health and b) childless. With no heir apparent, a formal union was necessary to keep the two polities bound together and the elected monarchy would solve 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.
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.