630: Arab warlord and putative prophet Mohammad, leading an army of some 10,000 soldiers from his hometown of Medina, conquers nearby Mecca in a nearly bloodless assault that puts the city at the heart of Mohammad’s burgeoning new religion
1297: The Genovese warlord and leader of the Guelph faction, Francesco Grimaldi, disguises himself as a monk and ingratiates his way into the fortress at the Rock of Monaco, capturing it along with his cousin Rainier I and a small group of armed men. He held the citadel for four years, and on his death in 1309 deeded it back to his cousin Rainier I, from whom the current Grimaldi ruling family is descended.
1349: A pogrom sweeps through the Jewish sector of Basil, Switzerland, triggered by a panic over the onset of Black Death in the city. Virtually the entire Jewish population of Basil is rounded up and taken to an island in the middle of the Rhine River, where the children are separated from their parents and forcibly baptized. The remaining Jews, more than 600 of them, are crammed into a specially built wooden barn, into which they are subsequently locked, and burned alive. The Basil pogrom is the first of a series of pogroms that swept through the Rhine valley in subsequent months, with massacres occurring even in towns where there was no Black Death.
1729: Birth of Edmund Burke, Member of the British Parliament, who also supported the cause of the American Revolution, based on his admiration of its dependence on the principles of classical liberalism and the Scottish Enlightenment. His writing defined the “Old Whigs” of the 18th Century. He was a critic of the excesses of the French Revolution, best known in this regard for his Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which he noted that a government unconstrained by external morality would descend into tyranny. Wikipedia notes that Burke is widely considered the father of modern Conservatism. Wikipedia quotes, “The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.” –from his book, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756).
1755: Birth of Alexander Hamilton , on Nevis Island in the St. Vincent and Grenadines chain in the Caribbean, British Crown territory.
1735: Birth of John Jervis, 1st Earl St. Vincent, one of the Royal Navy’s greatest commanders, and primary mentor of Horatio Nelson. [Read more…]