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This is just a reminder that I will be away from FX for the next couple of weeks as I get my daughter off to college and take a bit of a breather. We will be back to our regular schedule ob October 1. Thanks for reading!
September 20, 1066: An invading army under Norwegian King Harald Hardrada, who was attempting to stake his claim to the throne of England, defeats an army under the earls of Mercia and Northumbria at the Battle of Fulford. Harald was joined by Tostig Godwinson, brother of the newly crowned and heavily disputed English King Harold Godwinson, who also felt he had a claim on the throne. Their victory at Fulford allowed their combined army to occupy the city of York and forced Harold to march north from London to confront them. He defeated them at the Battle of Stamford Bridge a few days later, but then had to hurriedly march south to meet the invading Norman army under another claimant, Duke William. It’s reasonable to conclude that the exhaustion that Harold’s forces suffered after Fulford and Stamford Bridge contributed to their defeat to the Normans at the subsequent Battle of Hastings.
September 20, 1519: Ferdinand Magellan sets sail with a small fleet intending to circumnavigate the globe. Magellan became the first European to encounter what would later be dubbed the “Strait of Magellan,” cutting through the southern tip of South America. Hostile natives killed Magellan in a battle on the island of Mactan (today part of the Philippines), so he didn’t survive the voyage. But one of his ships—the Victoria—did, arriving in Spain in September 1522 under the command of Juan Sebastián Elcano and becoming the first vessel to successfully circle the Earth.
September 20, 1792: At the Battle of Valmy in northeastern France, a French revolutionary army defeats the invading Prussians under the Duke of Brunswick. The battle is also known as the “Cannonade of Valmy” because it never advanced beyond the opening artillery duel. The professional French gunners held their own with their Prussian counterparts and Brunswick abruptly called off his attempted infantry advance and retreated despite there having been only around 500 casualties on both sides. The importance of Valmy probably cannot be overstated, as it prevented the Prussians from marching on Paris and potentially snuffing out the French Revolution before it really began.
As a test of the revolution’s concept of a “citizen army,” the French victory—their first in the War of the First Coalition—was a tremendous boost to morale, even if the role of “citizen soldiers” in the French army may have been a tad overblown (the French artillery corps, the key to the battle, was largely professional military). After the battle and partly because of it, the French National Convention abolished the monarchy on September 21 and the French Republic was born.
September 20, 2001: George W. Bush, in an address to Congress, declares war on Terror. And we all lived happily ever after.
September 21, 1857: The Siege of Delhi ends with a British victory, snuffing out the last remnants of the Mughal Empire and doing much to undercut the 1857-1859 Indian Rebellion.
September 21, 1860: A combined British and French army defeats a Qing Dynasty army at the Battle of Palikao, named for a bridge in the eastern part of Beijing. The defeat caused the Xianfeng Emperor to flee his capital, leaving the city in European hands and hastening the end of the Second Opium War.
September 22, 1965: The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, fought over Kashmir, ends with a UN-brokered ceasefire. Although the outcome was indecisive, India was able to prevent a Pakistan-backed insurgency in Kashmir and demonstrate military superiority over its rival while sending the Pakistani economy into a rough patch. The war also caused India and Pakistan to look for new allies, as the US and UK imposed an arms embargo on both countries and criticized both the Indian and Pakistani governments for their conduct. Pakistan’s current relationship with China and India’s Cold War relationship with the Soviet Union developed as a result.
September 22, 1980: The Iran-Iraq War begins with a massive Iraqi air bombardment that was intended to destroy Iran’s air power preemptively. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein feared that the fervor of the recent Iranian Revolution might spread to Iraq, particularly though not necessarily within Iraq’s Shiʿa majority. Hussein and his government also harbored longstanding resentments over Iran’s control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which links the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the Persian Gulf. This initial air barrage failed to achieve its objectives and Hussein’s other strategic aim, turning the Arab population of Iran’s Khuzestan region against Tehran, also largely fizzled out. Iran seemed to be gaining the upper hand until Hussein, with Western help, turned to chemical weapons as an equalizer. The conflict settled into a brutal stalemate that finally ended in August 1988 with hundreds of thousands dead on both sides.
September 23, 1803: A small British army defeats a Maratha army as much as six or seven times its size at the Battle of Assaye. The British victory helped establish military supremacy in the Deccan, the Maratha Empire’s home turf, and led to Britain’s victory in the Second Anglo-Maratha War. It also boosted the military career of the British commander, Major General Arthur Wellesley, who would later be made the first Duke of Wellington and become a major thorn in Napoleon’s side.
September 23, 1932: Abdulaziz “Ibn Saud” unites his two kingdoms, the Nejd and the Hejaz, into one, the new Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Commemorated annually as Saudi National Day.
September 24, 1645: Amid the First English Civil War, parliamentarians defeat a royalist army at the Battle of Rowton Heath. The parliamentarians killed some 600 royalist soldiers and took some 900 more prisoner (parliamentarian casualties are apparently unknown). For the royalists, the defeat scuppered their chances of relieving the besieged Chester, the last English port still loyal to King Charles I, which eventually surrendered in February 1646.
September 24, 1877: The Japanese Army defeats a heavily outnumbered and even more heavily outgunned samurai force under the command of rebel leader Saigō Takamori, whose entire 500 man army was wiped out, in the Battle of Shiroyama. The battle ended the Satsuma Rebellion and the role of the samurai as Japan’s warrior class. The 2003 film The Last Samurai depicts a heavily fictionalized, and (arguably) quite ahistorical, version of this battle and the wider rebellion.
September 25, 1396: An Ottoman army under Sultan Bayezid I defeats a “Crusader” force at Nicopolis (modern Nikopol, in Bulgaria). The outcome was so overwhelming that it broke the nascent Crusade in one fell swoop and left the way open for the Ottomans to march on Vidin and put an end to the Second Bulgarian Empire.
September 25, 1513: Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a Spanish explorer and the governor of Veragua (a territory including the Caribbean coasts of modern Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama), leads a small detachment of men across Panama to what they knew as the “South Sea,” thereby becoming the first European in the New World to lay eyes on the Pacific Ocean. Balboa spent several years exploring his “South Sea” but eventually ran afoul of the governor of Panama, Pedrarias Dávila, and was executed in 1519.
September 25, 1962: A military coup against the Mutawakkilite ruler of northern Yemen, Muhammad al-Badr, sparks the 1962-1970 North Yemen Civil War. The conflict quickly expands from a domestic insurrection to an outlet for the “Arab Cold War,” pitting republican Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who supported the insurrectionists, against an old guard of Arab monarchies led by Saudi Arabia, which supported the Mutawakkilites (despite their sectarian differences with the Yemeni Shiʿa). In the end the republicans emerged victorious, but Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 Six Day War left Nasser greatly weakened so the “Arab Cold War” began to fizzle out.