Today in History: September 25-27, 2020
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Tzom kal to those observing Yom Kippur.
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September 25, 1396: The Crusade of Nicopolis
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: The North Yemen Civil War begins
September 26, 1799: A Republican French army under André Masséna outflanks and defeats a Russian-Austrian force at the Second Battle of Zürich. The French victory recovered what Masséna had lost in his defeat at the First Battle of Zürich in June and led to Russia’s decision to quit the Second Coalition. Shortly afterward Napoleon returned to Paris from Egypt and made himself First Consul, and the French Revolutionary Wars began to go in a whole new direction.
September 26, 1983: The Soviet Union’s early warning network determines that the United States has launched one intercontinental ballistic missile and recommends retaliating, but an air force lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov, under the assumption that the US would not launch a nuclear first strike with a single weapon, decides that it must be malfunctioning. He made a similar determination when the system later showed four more US missiles in fight, and turned out to be correct—Soviet satellites were somehow misreading sunlight reflecting off of high altitude clouds as missiles. Petrov’s decision not to rely on the warning system probably single-handedly prevented World War III.
September 27, 1669: The Siege of Candia ends
September 27, 1822: French orientalist Jean-François Champollion (d. 1832) publishes the first results of his translation of the Rosetta Stone, the first true breakthrough in the effort by European scholars to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. Two years later he published Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens, which cemented his reputation as the “Father of Egyptology.”
The Rosetta Stone on display at the British Museum (Claudio Divizia via Shutterstock.com)
September 27, 1996: The Afghan Taliban seize control of Kabul from forces commanded by Ahmad Shah Massoud, overthrowing the Islamic State of Afghanistan and replacing it with the Taliban-led Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.