Today in History: July 13-15
The Ogaden War begins, Parisians storm the Bastile, and more
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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 The treaty superseded the earlier Treaty of San Stefano, which ended the 1877-1878 war between Russia and the Ottomans but was so lopsided in Russia’s favor that Britain and France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.