Today in History: November 24-27
Today in History: November 24-27
The Winter War begins, Pope Urban II calls for a Crusade, and more
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November 24, 1642: Dutch explorer Abel Tasman and his crew sight an island off the southeastern coast of Australia. They were the first Europeans to locate what they named Van Diemen’s Land, after Dutch East Indies governor Anthony van Diemen. Tasman’s mission was to locate the famed “Province of Beach,” a land with allegedly vast gold deposits that Europeans—based on a misreading of Marco Polo’s travelogue (possibly fueled by some creative license on the part of Polo himself) and a vast overestimation of the size of Australia—believed would be found south of the Solomon Islands. Van Diemen’s Land eventually became a British colony, which in 1856 changed its name to Tasmania. Today it is part of Australia.
November 24, 1859: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is published. Its theory of evolution by natural selection became a fundamental tenet of modern biology.
November 24, 1965: Congolese army chief of staff Mobutu Sese Seko leads a bloodless coup that installs him as the unquestioned ruler of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mobutu ruled his repressive totalitarian state, which he renamed “Zaire” in 1971, until he was overthrown in the First Congo War in 1997. He died several months later in exile.
November 25, 1120: The White Ship sinks after striking a rock off the coast of Normandy en route to England. What made this particular shipwreck notable is that the vessel was carrying William Ætheling, the only legitimate son of King Henry I of England, as well as Henry’s illegitimate son Richard of Lincoln. This meant that when Henry died in 1135 his only heir was his daughter Matilda, which was problematic because she was married to the Count of Anjou, Geoffrey Plantagenet. Oh, and also because she was a lady. English nobles didn’t like Geoffrey but they really didn’t like the idea of being ruled by a woman, and in this case the true royal line would have passed through Matilda, not her husband. They decided instead to make Henry’s nephew, Stephen of Blois, their new king. This kicked off a civil war known as “The Anarchy,” essentially pitting Norman England against Norman Normandy. That war (1135-1153) ended in a compromise, the Treaty of Wallingford, which left Stephen as king but ensured the succession of Matilda’s son, the future Henry II.
November 25, 1177: A Crusader army under King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem nearly annihilates a larger Muslim force under Saladin at the Battle of Montgisard. Baldwin’s victory forced Saladin to retreat to Egypt accompanied by only around ten percent of the soldiers he’d brought with him and thus thwarted Saladin’s first attempt to capture Jerusalem.
November 25, 1491: The Treaty of Granada marks the surrender of the last Islamic emirate on the Iberian peninsula. Nasirid Sultan Abu Abdullah Muhammad XII (“Boabdil” to the Christians) agreed to hand Granada over to King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile. The victorious monarchs agreed, for their part, to protect Muslim property rights and freedom of worship, and to ensure that Muslims living under their jurisdiction would be ruled according to Islamic law and would not be forced to convert to Christianity. Boabdil’s departure to North Africa on January 2, 1492 marked the final end of the “Reconquista.” Following a revolt by Granadan Muslims in 1499, Ferdinand and Isabella repudiated the treaty and expelled any Muslims who refused to convert.
November 25, 1510: Portuguese forces under Afonso de Albuquerque capture the port city of Goa from the Bijapur Sultanate for the second time. Goa became the capital of Portuguese India, a colonial possession that survived in one form or another from the early 16th century until 1961, though it lost most of its towns and cities in the 17th and 18th centuries.
November 26, 1939: The Russian village of Mainila is struck multiple times by artillery shells, which Soviet authorities blamed on the Finnish military. In reality the Red Army had staged an attack on the village as a justification for tearing up the USSR’s non-aggression treaty with Finland. A long-planned Soviet invasion and kicking off the “Winter War.” The conflict ended in March 1940 with Finland agreeing to make some territorial concessions to the Soviets—either more than Moscow wanted or much less than it was hoping to gain, there’s some academic debate about this. There’s a bit more consensus that, regardless of outcome the Red Army struggled to a surprising degree in confronting the far weaker (on paper, anyway) Finnish military. Among other ramifications of this conflict, the Red Army’s difficulties helped convince Adolf Hitler that the Soviet Union was vulnerable to invasion, which needless to say didn’t quite turn out the way he’d assumed it would.
November 26, 2008: Ten members of the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba begin a four day killing spree of bombings and shootings across the Indian city of Mumbai. When it ended on November 29, at least 174 people had been killed (including nine of the attackers) and over 300 more wounded. The attack continues to affect relations between India and Pakistan to the present day.
November 27, 602: A very disaffected Byzantine army under a general named Phocas executes Emperor Maurice, but only after forcing him to watch the execution of six of his sons. They seem nice. This mutiny set in motion the events that led to the 602-628 Byzantine war against the Sasanian (Persian) Empire, as almost immediately after Phocas became emperor the Byzantine governor of Mesopotamia, Narses, declared a rebellion. He appealed to the Persians—whose emperor, Khosrow II, had been crowned in part due to Maurice’s aid—for help, and there’s your war. The lengthy conflict saw the Persians conquer the Levant and Egypt before they overextended themselves in a failed siege of Constantinople. That gave the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, who overthrew Phocas in 610, an opening to counterattack and restore the status quo ante bellum, while Khosrow’s disenchanted nobles overthrew him in favor of his son, Kavad II. The conflict battered the two great empires, which worked to the benefit of a new regional power that was just beginning to emerge in western Arabia.
November 27, 1095: During the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II issues his call for what we now know as the First Crusade. There is disagreement in the surviving sources about what, exactly, Urban said. But all seem to agree that he railed against Christian-on-Christian violence in Frankish Europe and called on Frankish Christians to channel their violent impulses into a war against “the Turks” in defense of Christian peoples to the east.