Today in History: July 9-12
The Fatimids conquer Egypt, Zheng He begins his "treasure voyages," and more
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July 9, 969: The Fatimid general Jawhar ibn Abdallah leads the communal Friday prayer in the Amr ibn al-As Mosque in Fustat in the name of the Fatimid Caliph al-Muʿizz li-Din Allah, putting the final symbolic touch on the dynasty’s conquest of Egypt. The Fatimids had emerged in the North African region of Ifriqiya (roughly corresponding to modern Tunisia plus parts of eastern Algeria and western Libya) in 909 as a branch of the Ismaʿili Shiʿa line leading a predominantly Berber army. They made repeated attempts to take Egypt from the rival Abbasid Caliphate but were unsuccessful until the 960s, when the Abbasid polity had all but collapsed and the caliphs had fallen under the “protection” of the Iranian Buyid dynasty. The autonomous governors of Egypt, the Ikhshidid dynasty, were weakened by a series of external challenges and poor harvests along the Nile River and thus were unable to resist another Fatimid incursion. The caliphate eventually moved its capital from Ifriqiya to a new city that Jawhar began building near Fustat that eventually grew to encompass it: Cairo.
July 9, 1816: The United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata declares independence from Spain. As most of those provinces went on to form Argentina, this is commemorated as Argentine Independence Day.
July 9, 1944: In one of the more decisive engagements of World War II’s Pacific Theater, the United States emerges victorious from the Battle of Saipan. Control of Saipan, the largest of the northern Mariana Islands, put the US military in position to begin B-29 bombing attacks against Japan itself. The island served as a staging point for the US reconquest of the Philippines later in 1944. The defeat also led to the resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō.
July 10, 1883: With a dramatic bayonet charge, a Chilean army defeats a Peruvian force at the Battle of Huamachuco, the last major engagement of the 1879-1883 War of the Pacific. The Peruvians suffered 800 killed out of an army that was around 1880 strong and were forced to accept the Treaty of Ancón in October, which ended the war largely on Chilean terms. The treaty ceded considerable territory to Chile and ultimately triggered the collapse of Peruvian President Miguel Iglesias’s government and the subsequent 1884-1885 Peruvian Civil War.
July 10, 1943: In a pre-dawn landing the Allies begin their invasion of Sicily, codenamed “Operation Husky.” Although it wasn’t until mid-August that Sicily was in Allied hands the Italian military began evacuating forces from the island in late July, and the seemingly inevitable defeat proved to be the last straw for Benito Mussolini’s government, which fell on July 25. The Sicilian operation marked the first phase of the Allied invasion of Italy.
July 10, 2017: Iraqi authorities declare the city of Mosul liberated from the Islamic State, marking the recapture of the last major city in Iraq that had still been in IS’s hands. Two more large campaigns followed in Tal Afar and Hawija, but once Mosul was retaken the outcome of the campaign against IS in Iraq was no longer in doubt.
July 11, 1405: Chinese admiral Zheng He sets sail on the first of his “treasure voyages.” Between 1405 and 1433 Zheng led his fleets to destinations around Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean, visiting India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and East Africa. There’s even some creative pseudo-history out there that argues he visited South America and Europe, though the “evidence” for these claims is either non-existent or invented. The voyages ended as suddenly as they began, for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear but probably involved the restoration of older Ming Dynasty policies that had been overridden by the Yongle Emperor (d. 1424).
July 11, 1804: In a duel fought in Weehawken, New Jersey, US Vice President Aaron Burr kills former US Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. The two men had been locked in an increasingly nasty political rivalry since Burr defeated Hamilton’s father in law, Philip Schuyler, for a US Senate seat in 1791, a rivalry that greatly intensified when Hamilton orchestrated Thomas Jefferson’s victory over Burr in the US House of Representatives in the 1800 presidential election. Burr eventually issued a challenge in response to what he considered slanderous comments by Hamilton that undermined Burr’s candidacy for governor of New York in 1804. Burr briefly fled to Georgia but eventually returned to Washington to serve out the remainder of his term as VP. He was charged with murder in New York and New Jersey but was never tried in either state.
July 11, 1995: The Srebrenica massacre begins. Bosnian Serb forces killed almost 8400 Bosniak men and boys in and around Srebrenica over the next couple of weeks, and carried off an estimated 25,000-30,000 women, children, and elderly.
July 12, 1191: The Crusader Siege of Acre ends with a technical Crusader victory that set the stage for the ultimate failure of the Third Crusade. Begun in 1189 by Guy of Lusignan, the titular “King of Jerusalem” who by this point was no longer actually king of Jerusalem (or anywhere else, for that matter), the siege quickly became a potential disaster for the Crusaders when Saladin arrived with a large relief army. But Saladin failed to lift the siege, and the 1191 arrival of new European armies led by Philip II of France and Richard I of England turned the tide. However, disputes between the two kings prompted Philip to pack up and head home once Acre’s garrison had surrendered, and the remaining army under Richard was too small to achieve the expedition’s main objective of retaking Jerusalem.

July 12, 1575: At the Battle of Rajmahal, the Mughal Empire eliminates the Karrani Dynasty, capturing and executing its final ruler Daud Khan Karrani, and annexes the Sultanate of Bengal. The Mughals had partially occupied Bengal until the dynasty’s second ruler, Humayun, was temporarily dethroned by the Sur dynasty in 1540. The Pashtun Karranis emerged after the Mughals defeated the Sur and an independent Bengal Sultanate reemerged. The third Mughal emperor, Akbar I, invaded the sultanate and made relatively short work of it, though the region of Bengal wasn’t fully under Mughal control until the end of the century.