TODAY IN HISTORY
July 29, 1014: A Byzantine army under Emperor Basil II defeats a Bulgarian army at the Battle of Kleidion, largely breaking Bulgarian resistance. Bulgarian Tsar Samuel deployed what was effectively his entire army in an attempt to bring an end to annual Byzantine raids, but Basil was able to exploit the terrain to surround and virtually wipe out the Bulgarians. The Byzantines took thousands of prisoners and reputedly sent them back to Samuel in October with nearly all of them blinded (a handful were allowed to keep one eye in order to guide the rest home). Samuel died of a heart attack, ostensibly over the shock of seeing all of those blinded soldiers, and this whole affair earned Basil the epithet “the Bulgar-Slayer.” Still, while their victory left Bulgaria open to continued assault it took the Byzantines another four years to finally force the Bulgarian Empire (the first of two of them) to surrender.
July 29, 1148: The ill-fated Second Crusade reaches its ignominious end with the failure of the Crusaders’ Siege of Damascus. Initially organized as a response to the loss of Edessa to the rising power in the Levant, the Zengid dynasty, the expedition saw open warfare between Crusaders and the Byzantine army, the destruction of two German armies by the Seljuk Turks, and the aforementioned siege of Damascus, which somehow made sense to the Crusaders even though Damascus’s emir was arguably on better terms with the Crusader states than he was with the Zengids. After badly mismanaging the siege, the Crusaders were forced to flee back to Jerusalem before they could be trapped by an oncoming Zengid relief army.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Israeli military (IDF) struck a mosque in Gaza city on Tuesday, killing at least one person and wounding more than 12 others. Another IDF airstrike killed at least one person in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
