Today in History: May 11-13
Constantinople is founded, the Mexican-American War begins, and more
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PROGRAMMING NOTE: As I hope you all know, I’ve been taking a bit of time away from the newsletter to deal with some family matters. We’ll return to our regular schedule tomorrow. I hope you’re all doing well, and thanks for reading!
May 11, 330: Roman Emperor Constantine I consecrates the city of Byzantium, located on the strategically vital Bosporus Strait, as his new imperial capital. Constantine had chosen Byzantium as the best site for a new capital city in 324, after he’d assumed sole rule of the empire, because of its position close to both the Danubian and Mesopotamian frontiers. But it took several years to turn what had been a successful commercial city into a grand capital worthy of its official name: Nova Roma (New Rome). Among its many informal names was “Constantinopolitan Rome,” which eventually became Constantinople—though in later imperial times it was usually referred to colloquially as simply “the city,” reflecting its preeminence. Its modern name, Istanbul, is thought to derive from a Greek phrase meaning “to the city.” The name Byzantium survives in “Byzantine Empire,” the modern designation for the later, eastern, Christian, Greek-speaking Roman Empire.
May 11, 868: A woodblock printed copy of a Chinese translation of the Diamond Sutra, a Mahayana Buddhist text, is completed. Why is this noteworthy? Because this particular copy, included among a trove of documents discovered in a cave in Duhuang, China, in 1900, is—at least as far as the British Library is concerned—“the world’s earliest dated, printed book.” Thanks to the intact dedication, scholars know when, by whom, and for whom the document was produced—it reads “Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 15th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong.” That apparently corresponds to May 11, 868.
May 11, 1258: King Louis IX of France and King James I of Aragon sign the Treaty of Corbeil, which proved to have significant ramifications for the development of the modern nations of France and Spain. The main provision from our perspective involved Louis’ surrender of any claim on the region known as the “Hispanic March,” which largely corresponds with the region better known today as Catalonia, including the city of Barcelona. That region became more firmly attached to what would eventually become Spain as a result. James, meanwhile, gave up claims on several future French regions, including Toulouse and (a bit later) Provence.
May 12, 1364: Jagiellonian University is founded as the “University of Kraków” by Polish King Casimir III, making it the oldest university in Poland. The institution hit a rough patch after Casimir’s death in 1370, but had its funding restored and a permanent location obtained for it by King Władysław II Jagiełło (r. 1386-1434). After having been known as the Kraków Academy for much of its existence, the university’s name was changed several times around the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, eventually settling on its current moniker in 1817 in honor of Władysław II’s Jagiellonian dynasty.
May 12, 1551: The National University of San Marcos is founded in Lima, Peru, under a decree from Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Initially called the “Royal and Pontifical University of the City of the Kings of Lima,” it is officially the oldest still active university in the Americas and is sometimes called the “Dean of the Americas” for that reason. The Dominican Republic’s Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo is unofficially even older, having been founded in 1538, but it didn’t receive its official charter until 1558.
May 12, 1998: During a protest against Indonesian dictator Suharto on the campus of Jakarta’s Trisakti University, soldiers open fire on the protesters and kill four of them. The killings triggered riots in Jakarta that quickly spread to the city of Surakarta and involved demands for Suharto’s resignation as well as attacks on ethnic Chinese Indonesian communities. Upwards of 1200 people were killed in the violence, and Suharto resigned on May 21 after more than 30 years in power.
May 13, 1805: The Battle of Derna ends with US and allied mercenary forces in control of that eastern Libyan port city, having driven off a Tripolitanian relief army. Though a relatively small affair, Derna was the climactic battle of the First Barbary War (1801-1805). In its wake the Jefferson administration negotiated a peace deal with the governor of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli, under which the US ransomed its prisoners for a relatively small sum and returned possession of Derna to Tripoli. The issue underpinning the war, North African pirate attacks on US vessels, remain essentially unsettled and the result was the Second Barbary War (1815), whose outcome was considerably more decisive. Despite the ransom payment the US government claimed victory in the war, and the still young nation was able to demonstrate an ability to carry out military action overseas.
May 13, 1846: The US Congress votes to declare war on Mexico, marking the formal start of the Mexican-American War though the fighting had actually begun several days earlier. The war ended formally in February 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which has to be one of the most lopsided treaties ever negotiated, in which Mexico acknowledged US sovereignty over the whole of Texas and ceded most of what is now the southwestern United States.
May 13, 1981: A Turkish man named Mehmet Ali Ağca opens fire on a vehicle carrying Pope John Paul II as it enters Vatican City’s St. Peter’s Square, seriously wounding the pontiff. The Pope famously visited Ağca in prison and forgave him, at his urging then-Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi pardoned Ağca in 2000 after serving 19 years of a life sentence. Ağca was extradited to Turkey, where he served another ten years in prison for the 1979 murder of journalist Abdi İpekçi and assorted other crimes. Several theories abound as to why Ağca and his compatriots attempted to assassinate the Pope, including that it was a KGB operation, that it was a German intelligence operation that was supposed to look like a KGB operation, and that it was the result of a plot within the Vatican. Ağca himself has apparently made multiple contradictory and sometimes bizarre claims about the attack.