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.
1815: Led by General Andrew Jackson, American forces decisively defeat an invading British force at the Battle of New Orleans, the largest and final land battle of the war of 1812, fought a month after the formal conclusion of peace at the Treaty of Ghent on December 24th. The lopsided victory helped propel Jackson into a political career that eventually led to the Presidency. The U.S. suffered 333 casualties (55 dead) against the British 2459 (386 dead).
1863: The Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama, under the command of Captain Raphael Semmes, attacks and sinks the USS Hatteras off the coast of Galveston, Texas.
1866: Establishment of the Royal Aeronautical Society, in London, predating the Wright Brothers first flight at Kitty Hawk which was in 1903. The physics of manned flight had been under study for decades before finally achieving success at Kitty Hawk.
1880: Death of San Francisco’s Joshua Norton , self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. It may have been his losses in real estate and rice speculation that sent him over the edge, but he was a beloved public figure in San Francisco. Twain based his character of The King from Huckleberry Finn on Joshua Norton. Norton printed up imperial banknotes in his name, and they became an accepted local currency at the bars and restaurants around town. He persistently called for a suspension bridge to link San Francisco with Oakland via Goat Island. The eventual Oakland Bay Bridge does just that, and Norton is honored with a bronze plaque at the SF terminus of that structure.
1905: Russian workers, infuriated by the slow pace of reform and brought to a fever pitch of discontent by communist agitators, storm the Czar’s Winter Palace in a short, sharp action now known as the Revolution of 1905. Order is restored by Czarist soldiers, but at the cost of scores of civilian lives. The revolution resulted in the establishment of both a constitutional monarchy and of a Duma (representative assembly), and reforms to conscription and workers rights. These changes forced on the Russian government ignited other agitation, particularly from the communist movements.
1918: In southern Arizona, a detachment of U.S. Army troops exchanges fire with Yaqui Indians in the Battle of Bear Valley, the last battle of the U.S. Indian Wars.
1918: In his State of the Union message, President Woodrow Wilson introduces his 14 Points to guide postwar international relations, ten months before the actual armistice which halted the fighting. The Points will form the basis for the Versailles peace negotiations in the aftermath of The World War. I won’t go over all of them, but will highlight here several of the points that tend to come up from time to time: 1) “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at…” laying down the ideal of complete openness in international negotiations; 2) Absolute freedom of navigation on the high seas, with a caveat about closures in support of international covenants. Great Britain objected to the exception clause, and as the U.S. maritime power increased, we adopted the British position; 3) Free trade between nations as a foundation of peaceful relations. The majority of the other points concerned disposition of territories displaced by the war, with final lines drawn under the principle of national self-determination, a term which came into prominence during the Conference. The 14th point opened the discussion of an international organization to enforce the peace.
1964: In his first State of the Union message, President Lyndon Johnson declares a “War on Poverty” that will eventually become the Great Society program he introduced the following year.
About the Author
I feel I am learning more history from these weekly postings than I did in my college Western Civ course. Thanks Wayne!
I feel the same way.
Except to me, this is like a glimpse of the classical education many of the so-called “founding fathers” received back when.
Their knowledge of the history of the world and human events far outstrips that of so many Americans today.
As to the Guelphs, a name I haven’t heard much of lately, the website Florence Inferno tells us they were a rival party to the Ghibellines in medieval Germany and Italy that supported the papal party and the Holy Roman emperors respectively.
But in Italy, the divisions became more a function of rivalries between cities and even local families, and how much like America today that sounds.
In a letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 20 June 1815, he states as follows concerning the Guelphs:
The question before the human race is, Whether the God of nature Shall govern the World by his own laws, or Whether Priests and Kings shall rule it by fictitious Miracles?
Or, in other Words, whether Authority is originally in the People? or whether it has descended for 1800 years in a succession of Popes and Bishops, or brought down from Heaven by the holy Ghost in the form of a Dove, in a Phyal of holy Oil?
Who shall take the side of God and Nature?
Brach-mans,? Mandarins? Druids? or Tecumseh and his Brother the Prophet? or Shall We become Disciples of the Phylosophers?
And who are the Phylosophers?
Frederick? Voltaire? Rousseau? Buffon? Diderot? or Condorcet?
These Phylosophers have shewn themselves as incapable of governing mankind as the Bourbons or the Guelphs.
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He also makes mention of the Guelphs in his encyclopedic “A defence of the constitutions of government of the United States of America, against the attack of M. Turgot in his Letter to Dr. Price,” dated the twenty-second day of March, 1778, as follows:
The most powerful families in Florence, in 1215, were the Boundelmonti and the Uberti ; and next to them the Amadei and Donati : a quarrel happened about a lady, and Messer Boundelmonti was killed.
This murder divided the whole city, one part of it siding with the Boundelmonti, and the other with the Uberti ; and as both of the families were powerful in alliances, castles, and adherents, the quarrel continued many years, till the reign of the emperor Frederick the Second, who being likewise king of Naples, and desirous to strengthen himself against the church, and establish his interest more securely in Tuscany, joined the Uberti, who by his assistance drove the Boundelmonti out of Florence, and thus that city became divided, as all the rest of Italy was before, into the two factions of Guelphs and Ghibellines; the former of which denominated the adherents of the pope, and the latter latter those of the emperor: Guelph being the name of the general of the first army for the church in this controversy, and Ghibelline that of the place of the birth of the general who commanded for the emperor, about 1139.
The Guelphs, thus driven cut of the city, retired into the valley, which lies higher up the Arno, where their strong places and dependencies lay, and defended themselves as well as they could: but when Frederick died, the neutral people in the city endeavoured to re-unite it, and prevailed upon the Guelphs to forget the disgrace they had suffered, and return; and the Ghibellines to dismiss their animosities and receive them.
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Sounds like the Republicans and Democrats in this country today.
In one of his footnotes, John Adams also had this to say:
Ghibellines, have arisen many kings and emperors, as the third, fourth, and fifth Henry.
Of the other, viz. the Guelphs, there had been for many years famous dukes, who contending for power and for credit with the emperors, had very often disturbed the tranquillity of the state.
Under the reign of Henry the Fifth these two families happily united in Alliance, because Fideric duke of Suavia, married Judith, daughter of Henry duke of Bavaria, and sister of Guelph the Sixth, who was at that time the head of the house of Altdorp.
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As to their origins, the Florence Inferno tells us the following:
The designations Guelphs and Ghibellines originated in the 12th century from the names of rival German houses in their struggle for the title of Holy Roman Emperor.
The election of Lothair II (c. 1070–1137), German king from 1125 and Holy Roman emperor from 1133, was favored by the pope and opposed by the Hohenstaufen family of princes.
This was the start of the feud between the house of Welf (Guelph), the followers of the dukes of Saxony and Bavaria, and the house of the lords of Hohenstaufen, whose castle at Waiblingen (near present-day Stuttgart) lent the Ghibellines their name.
Eventually, the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict gave way to a civil war that was finally settled in 1152 by the election of Frederick I (Barbarossa), the son of a Hohenstaufen father and a Welf mother (When Henry the Lion, a Welf, incurred the disfavor of the Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa, a Waiblingen, in 1180, his lands were forfeited to a duke of the Wittelsbach family, a dynasty that was to dominate Bavarian history until the end of World War I.).
It was during the reign of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (1152–90) that the terms Guelf and Ghibelline acquired significance in Italy, as that emperor tried to reassert imperial authority over northern Italy by force of arms.
Frederick’s military expeditions were opposed not only by the Lombard and Tuscan communes, who wished to preserve their autonomy within the empire, but also by the newly elected (1159) pope Alexander III.
Frederick’s attempts to gain control over Italy thus split the peninsula between those who sought to enhance their powers and prerogatives by siding with the emperor and those (including the popes) who opposed any imperial interference.
Frederick’s supporters became known as Ghibellines, while the Lombard League (the medieval alliance formed in 1167 and supported by the pope) and its allies became known as Guelphs.
After being defeated in the Battle of Legnano in 1176, Frederick recognized the full autonomy of the cities of the Lombard League.
During the following struggles between the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II (who reigned between 1220–50), nephew of Frederick Barbarossa, and the popes, the Italian parties took on their characteristic names of Guelph and Ghibelline (beginning in Florence) and contributed to intensifying antagonisms within and among the Italian cities.
Both Frederick II and the Pope wanted universal power.
The Guelphs sided with the Church, while the Ghibellines sided with the Empire.
Guelphs tended to come from wealthy mercantile families, whereas Ghibellines were predominantly those whose wealth was based on agricultural estates.
Guelph cities tended to be in areas where the Emperor was more of a threat to local interests than the Pope, and Ghibelline cities tended to be in areas where the enlargement of the Papal States was the more immediate threat.
The struggle between these two forces gave rise to a series of conflicts and alliances among Italian cities, since some sided with the emperor and others with the Pope.
The same city often changed sides, depending on who took power.
Members of the opposing faction were also often exiled after a revolution of power, just like Dante.
In fact this rivalry was especially ferocious in Florence, where the Guelfs were exiled twice (1248 and 1260) before the invading Charles of Anjou ended Ghibelline domination in 1266.
Sometimes, there could also be different Guelf and Ghibelline factions in the same city.
For example, in Florence after the fall of the Ghibellines, the Guelphs divided into the White Guelphs and Black Guelphs.
Dante belonged to the White Guelphs.
In general, the Guelphs were more often victorious.
Also, in 1266, the Capetian House of Anjou, which belonged to the Guelph party, took the crown of Sicily.
In any case, Guelph and Ghibelline membership quickly changed from its original meaning and in each city often pointed to a choice according to specific economic interests.
In the middle of the fourteenth century, the jurist Bartolo da Sassoferrato wrote an essay on this issue and said that the two labels were no longer linked to the pope and the emperor so that even an opponent of the Church could define himself as a Guelph and vice versa.
Also, the same person could define himself as a Guelph in one place and as a Ghibelline in another.
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As I say, it so much sounds like the Democrats and Republicans in America today it isn’t funny.