Today in history: May 29-June 1
Hello again! Given the state of the world these days let me just say I hope that you and your loved ones are safe and healthy. We’ll be back to regular operations tomorrow, but for now I thought we’d get caught up on some anniversaries that we passed over the last few days.
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May 29, 1453: The city of Constantinople falls to the besieging Ottomans, marking the end of the Byzantine Empire and, if you prefer the longer view, the Roman Empire.
May 29, 1658: At the Battle of Samugarh, not far from the Indian city of Agra, an army commanded by the Mughal heir apparent, Dara Shikoh, is soundly defeated by forces allied with two of his brothers, Aurangzeb and Murad Baksh. The reigning emperor, Shah Jahan, was critically ill, which sparked a civil war over the succession. Dara Shikoh’s defeat was so comprehensive that he was not only removed as his father’s regent, but Aurangzeb was actually crowned the new emperor. Shah Jahan subsequently recovered, but Aurangzeb determined that he was incapable of ruling the empire and had him more or less placed under medical arrest. This turn of events proved fateful for the Mughal Empire. Aurangzeb took the empire to its greatest territorial extent, but he broke with his predecessors’ religious tolerance and began persecuting India’s substantial Hindu majority. This policy shift began to lay the groundwork for the Mughal Empire’s eventual destruction.
May 29, 1807: Ottoman Sultan Selim III is overthrown in a coup instigated by his own Janissary forces, fearful of his plans to create a new elite military unit meant in part to supplant them.
May 30, 1431: The 19 year old (give or take) Joan of Arc is burned at the stake for heresy. After helping shepherd Charles VII to the throne in 1429, Joan was captured while accompanying an army sent to relieve the English-Burgundian siege of Compiègne in May 1430. The Burgundians transferred her to English custody at Rouens, and despite several French attempts to rescue her she was subject to a very politically motivated religious trial that began in January 1431. Despite a lack of evidence and heavy English interference in what was supposed to be a Church process, Joan was found guilty on the basis of having worn men’s clothing, after having been more or less entrapped into doing so by her captors.
May 30, 1913: The Treaty of London brings the First Balkan War to an end. The victorious Balkan League and the “Great Powers” (Austria-Hungary, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Russia) dictated the terms, which gave Crete to Greece and ceded every remaining Ottoman European territory to the Balkan League, except for the European environs of Istanbul and the territory of an independent Albania whose exact borders were to be determined by the “Powers.” The treaty has the distinction of satisfying almost nobody. The Ottomans were obviously unhappy, the boundaries of the new Albania angered Greeks in the southern part of the new nation and angered Albanians because they left out roughly half of the predominantly Albanian territories in the Ottoman Empire (the running dispute over Kosovo is a legacy of those borders), and the Balkan League quickly fell to discord over how to split up formerly Ottoman Macedonia. That discord led to the Second Balkan War, which began in June and pitted Bulgaria against the other Balkan League members (plus the Ottomans).
May 31, 1223: The Battle of the Kalka River
May 31, 2017:
June 1, 1215: After a lengthy siege during which a substantial portion of its population is believed to have starved to death and after which many more were massacred (actual figures are hard to come by), the city of Zhongdu, known today as Beijing, surrenders to Genghis Khan’s invading Mongolian army. Zhongdu had been the capital of the Jin dynasty, which ruled northern China, and this was the second time in very short order that the Mongols had besieged it. The first siege (1213-1214) ended with a Jin capitulation in which they agreed to become Mongolian vassals. The Jin then moved their court to the city of Kaifeng for security reasons. Ironically, the Jin decision to move their court after that first siege was perceived by the Mongols as provocation and thus triggered the second siege. Because the Mongols turned their attentions west shortly after capturing Zhengdu, the Jin were able to survive at Kaifeng until it (and the dynasty as a whole) fell to the Mongols in 1233.
A miniature depicting the first siege of Zhongdu, taken from a manuscript of historian Rashid al-Din Hamadani’s early 14th century work Jamiʿ al-tawarikh (Wikimedia Commons)
June 1, 1916: The Battle of Jutland, the largest naval battle of World War I and at least by some measures the largest in history to that point, ends in a…well, it’s complicated. It’s so complicated that historians still aren’t completely in agreement as to whether the British Royal Navy Grand Fleet or the German High Seas Fleet won the battle. The Germans sank substantially more British ships and killed substantially more British personnel than vice versa, but these were losses that the British navy could sustain more easily than the Germans. The German government was able to claim victory in the immediate aftermath of the battle, but the British fleet maintained and arguably even increased its naval superiority for the remainder of the war, while keeping the High Seas Fleet largely out of the Atlantic Ocean. Therefore if there is a consensus it seems to be that the battle was a German tactical victory but a British strategic one. One thing that can be said with certainty is that Jutland was the last major naval battle that featured battleships—aircraft carriers displaced them as the primary combat ship for large naval powers.