Today in History: July 16-18
The Iraqi Baath Party takes power, Edward I issues his Edict of Expulsion, and more
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July 16, 1212: An allied Iberian Christian army under Castilian King Alfonso VIII defeats a substantially larger Almohad army under Caliph Muhammad al-Nasir at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in what is today southern Spain. The battle is mostly notable for what happened in its immediate aftermath. Muhammad al-Nasir died the following year and his successor, Yusuf II, died without an heir in 1224 which sent the Almohad dynasty into a tailspin from which it never recovered. Forced to focus on internal struggles in North Africa, the Almohads were unable to counter the now onrushing Christians, who captured the key Andalusian cities of Córdoba and Seville by mid-century.
July 16, 1945: The United States conducts the first successful detonation of an atomic weapon at Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico, code named “Trinity.” The 25 kiloton test, one of several such tests conducted as part of the “Manhattan Project,” involved an implosion-type plutonium device dubbed “the Gadget,” which became the model for the “Fat Man” device later dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The 15 kiloton “Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a gun-type fissile uranium device, a type that had not been tested prior to its use.
July 16, 1979: Iraqi President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr cites health reasons in stepping down from his post. Bakr does seem to have been a relatively frail guy and he did die in 1982, but at this point his main health consideration was probably “my vice president is going to murder me if I don’t resign.” His resignation allowed that vice president, Saddam Hussein—who was already Iraq’s de facto ruler anyway—to make it official by replacing him as president. I’m fuzzy on what happened after that but I’m sure it all worked out great.
July 17, 1203: In what could be considered a dry run of their later conquest of the city, the armies of the Fourth Crusade attack Constantinople and force the Byzantine Emperor, Alexios III Angelos, to flee into exile. The Crusaders had been enticed by Alexios’ nephew, also named Alexios, with promises of financial support if they put him upon the throne. A couple of things then went very wrong. First, the people of Constantinople restored the younger Alexios’ father, Isaac II, to the throne contrary to the Crusaders’ wishes (and despite the fact that Alexios III had blinded Isaac when he took power). Second, the now co-emperor Alexios IV found himself unable to make good on his financial promises, and his costly attempts to do so drew outrage from Constantinople’s residents. When Isaac died in January 1204 the people revolted and overthrew Alexios IV, prompting the Crusaders to launch another, substantially more consequential, assault on the city.
July 17, 1936: The Spanish military, led by a cadre of nationalist officers including Francisco Franco, begins a coup against Spain’s Popular Front government starting in Morocco, the Canary Islands, and the Balearic Islands. The intent was to secure those outlying areas before swiftly moving into Spain proper to oust the government the following day, but the effort quickly stalled and the result instead was the Spanish Civil War. Franco and the Nationalists ultimately won but only after hundreds of thousands were killed.
July 17, 1945: Leaders of the three Allied nations—Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, and Harry Truman—meet in Postdam to hash out details concerning the end of World War II in Europe. On August 1 the three leaders, Churchill having been replaced by Clement Attlee in the interim because of the Labour Party’s victory in the UK’s July 5 election, released the “Potsdam Agreement,” which mostly set out terms for the post-war occupation and reconstruction of Germany.
July 17, 1968: In a bloodless coup sometimes called the “17 July Revolution,” the Iraqi Baath Party ousts President Abdul Rahman Arif and takes power under its leader, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. To this day the circumstances surrounding the coup remain murky, but the result is not—the Baathists controlled Iraq until the US invasion in 2003 ousted them. Bakr himself hung around until 1979, all the while slowly losing authority to his deputy, Saddam Hussein, until Hussein forced him out and assumed the presidency himself.
July 18, 1195: The Almohad Caliphate defeats a Castilian army at the Battle of Alarcos in southern Spain. The victory strengthened the Almohads position in Iberia, though political unrest back in their North African heartland limited their ability to capitalize on their success.
July 18, 1290: English King Edward I (or Edward “Longshanks”) issues his Edict of Expulsion, forcing an estimated 16,000 Jews out of England. Edward, financially broken by wars on the Continent, cut a deal with English nobles in which he traded the expulsion of the Jews for the right to levy new taxes (the chance to seize abandoned Jewish property must also have appealed to him). But he was also building on a long tradition of English anti-semitism, much of it the product of his father’s reign. Anti-semitism had steadily risen throughout England since the Norman conquest and the expulsion was the culmination of a series of insults that began with Henry III’s 1218 “Edict of the Badge” that required Jews in the kingdom to wear badges that marked them as Jews. Henry, who viewed himself as the new Edward the Confessor, had a particular hatred for England’s Jewish community that manifested in punitive taxation and in the 1253 Statute of Jewry and 1275 Statute of the Jewry, which intensified the segregation of Jews from the rest of English society and finally outlawed the lending of money at interest, one of the few economic niches available to Jews in the kingdom. The edict’s ban on Jews living in England lasted until Oliver Cromwell lifted it in 1657.