72 A.D.: Traditional date for the martyrdom of the apostle Thomas, who spent his life after the Resurrection traveling east from the Roman Empire, spending twenty years introducing Christianity to the people of India.
1485: Birth of Catherine of Aragon, queen consort to England’s Henry VIII. Highly regarded by her contemporaries as a keen intellect and powerful voice for the education of women. She also became the first female Ambassador in history, acting as such for her father, Ferdinand II, at the English Court when his Ambassador died in office.
1497: Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama leads his small fleet of exploration around the Cape of Good Hope, becoming the first European to sail into the Indian Ocean. The fleet eventually makes its way to India’s west coast, and back again to Portugal, providing that country with a secure route to the riches of the Spice Trade without having to traverse either the pirate-infested Mediterranean or the corruption and danger of the overland crossing through Arabia. De Gama’s opening creates a generation-long trade monopoly which makes Portugal rich. His systematic exploration and the immediate economic consequences of his work make him widely regarded as one of the greatest captains of the great age of exploration.
1606: Captain John Smith and the Virginia Company of London, set sail aboard three small ships, Susan Constant, Discovery and Godspeed. The flotilla was under the overall command of Captain Christopher Newport of the Susan Constant. The voyage took five months, including stops in the Caribbean.
1620: After five weeks of surveying the shoreline of Cape Cod Bay, the Pilgrims come ashore at Plymouth Rock to begin their first permanent settlement. The group split their time between the building parties ashore and recuperating aboard the Mayflower, with no fewer than 20 men kept always ashore for defensive purposes. The first winter in the New World took a toll, with exposure, scurvy and other diseases claiming nearly half of the settlers who survived the voyage.
1653: Four years after executing King Charles I and declaring England a Commonwealth, the British Parliament formally invests General Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of the Realm. The Parliament was ready to crown him king, but having used his army to defeat a king, and the Parliament to justify his executing a king, he prudently believed that his assuming a new kingship for himself would be a step too far. He did, however, designate his son, Richard, as heir to the Protectorate
1773: After months of frustration and anger over Parliament’s insistence on their need and their right to tax the American colonies, a group of between 30 to 130 (the count varies depending on the source) Sons of Liberty, in Boston, under the leadership of Samuel Adams, adjourn from a raucous meeting in Faneuil Hall, don elaborate disguises as Mohawk Indians and proceed down to Griffin’s Wharf, where lay the embargoed tea ships, Dartmouth, Eleanor and Beaver. The tax on tea, known as the Townshend Duty, created similar standoffs in New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, but in those colonies, the governors ordered the tea ships back to England. In Boston, the governor was determined to not yield to what he considered an unruly and unreasonable mob. As it goes: the “Indians” boarded the ships and systematically, over the course of three hours, dumped all 342 chests of (very expensive) tea into the waters of Boston Harbor.
1777: After a year of partial victories and major retreats against the Regulars of the British army, General George Washington orders the Continental Army into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
1808: Ludwig von Beethoven personally conducts the premiers of his 5th and 6th Symphonies, in addition to playing the piano for the premier of his 4th Piano Concerto and the Choral Fantasy. The concert lasted 4 hours.
1856: Birth of Frank B. Kellogg U.S. Representative and Senator from Minnesota, and later Secretary of State for Presidents Coolidge and Hoover. He negotiated the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which outlaws war as an instrument of national policy, and for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929. The treaty is still in effect.
1872: Under the sponsorship and direction of the Royal Society, HMS Challenger sets sail from Portsmouth to begin a three year, 70,000 mile voyage of science and discovery. Unlike previous expeditions during the great age of discovery in the centuries prior, this expedition was designed around specific oceanographic scientific research that could answer questions about what lay below the depths of the lead line. Wikipedia summarized it as: “492 deep sea soundings, 133 bottom dredges, 151 open water trawls and 263 serial water temperature observations were taken. Also about 4,700 new species of marine life were discovered.”
1892: Opening night for Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker suite.
1906: Birth of the third First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonoid Brezhnev.
1916: After eleven months of unrelenting artillery barrages, sniper fire, and fruitless attacks and counter-attacks across mere yards of torn up ground, the German Army makes a strategic retreat back to the heavily reinforced trenches from whence it began the Verdun offensive back in February. German General Erich von Falkenhayn claims he had achieved his objective of “bleeding the French white,” and French General Philippe Petain claims he had succeeded in preventing a German breakthrough into the interior of France: “Ils ne passeront pas!” (‘They shall not pass’ was his battle cry). At their farthest advance, the German army moved a little over a mile across the Muse River toward the city of Verdun, capturing several strategic forts in the French defensive line. With the French counter-offensive in the late summer, the line and the forts returned to French control, culminating in the final shots of the battle this day. As occurred in the mud of Flanders, bodies of dead soldiers remained where they fell, eventually churned and mixed into the soil as the artillery shells continued their assault. The battle of Verdun was the destination for freshly trained regiments that were sent into the trenches to relieve units who had been under fire, and whose casualty rates reduced them to 10-15% within weeks or less. French casualties around 542,000 (over 162,308 killed); German casualties 434,000 (over 100,000 killed). French artillery numbered 2,708 tubes, firing over 16,000,000 shells into the German lines; the Germans claimed over 21,000,000 shells into the French.
1989: The Brandenburg Gate re-opens to two-way travel in Berlin, effectively ending the division of East and West Germany.
About the Author
1989 – The opening of the wall ended the division of the German Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic. The GDR was not “East Germany.” East Germany was the German lands east of the Oder-Neisse line, from which 15 million Germans were expelled in 1945 with about 2.5 MILLION dead. East Germany was given to Poland and the USSR and was resettled with Polish, Russian and Ukrainian settlers. East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, were depopulated and so, what we called “East Germany” was in fact central Germany, or better yet, the German Democratic Republic (Communist).
Perhaps we should leave historical debates like this to the dead. Otherwise, we will need to count the number of Poles killed in German concentration camps and use the Piast Polish borders of 1025 as the “correct” ones.
The utter fascination with Germans, Jews, Nazis, and Concentration Camps has never ceased to amaze me. It is almost as strong as the Black’s fascination with slavery. Just as no American, alive today, was ever a slave or ever owned a slave….it will be a very short time before the same will apply to the Nazis and the Jews. Tuck those raw nerves back in and run along….there is nothing new to see here.
Ah, yes, Prussia.
One does not hear much, if anything, about Prussia today, but there was a time when success on the battleground against Austria and other powers proved Prussia’s status as one of the great powers of Europe.
And yes, Prussia did participate in the First Partition of Poland with Austria and Russia (1772), an act that geographically connected the Brandenburg territories with those of Prussia proper.
Under Frederick the Great, the first “King of Prussia”, who practiced enlightened absolutism, introducing a general civil code, abolishing torture and establishing the principle that the Crown would not interfere in matters of justice, while also promoting an advanced secondary education system emulated in various countries, including the United States, Prussia’s borders were opened to immigrants fleeing from religious persecution in other parts of Europe, such as the Huguenots, so that Prussia became a safe haven in much the same way that the United States welcomed immigrants seeking freedom in the 19th century.
Prussia was deemed a bearer of militarism and reaction by the Allies and was officially abolished by an Allied declaration in 1947.
Former eastern territories of Germany that made up a significant part of Prussia lost all of their German population after 1945 as the People’s Republic of Poland and the Soviet Union both absorbed these territories and had most of its German inhabitants expelled by 1950.
The term Prussian has often been used, especially outside Germany, to emphasize professionalism, aggressiveness, militarism and conservatism of the Junker class of landed aristocrats in the East who dominated first Prussia and then the German Empire.
The name Prussia derives from the Old Prussians, who were the indigenous peoples from a cluster of Baltic tribes that inhabited the region of Prussia.
In the 13th century, the Teutonic Knights—an organized Catholic medieval military order of German crusaders—conquered the lands inhabited by them.
Many Old Prussians were also killed in crusades requested by Poland and the popes.
At the beginning of Baltic history, the Old Prussians were bordered by the Vistula and the Memel – earlier Mimmel – river, which outside of Prussia is called Neman Rivers with a southern depth to about Thorn at the Vistula river, which was Prussian, and the line of the River Narew.
The Kashubians and Pomeranians were by the year AD 1000 on the west, the Poles on the south, the Sudovians on the east and further south, the Skalvians on the north, and the Lithuanians on the northeast, while the Sudovians began at about Suwałki.
In 1308, the Teutonic Knights conquered the region of Pomerelia with Gdañsk (Danzig).
Their monastic state was mostly Germanised through immigration from central and western Germany and in the south, it was Polonised by settlers from Masovia.
The Second Peace of Thorn (1466) split Prussia into the western Royal Prussia, a province of Poland, and the eastern part, from 1525 called the Duchy of Prussia, a fief of the Crown of Poland up to 1657.
As to the Teutonic Order, in 1211, Andrew II of Hungary granted Burzenland in Transylvania as a fiefdom to the Teutonic Knights, but in 1225, he expelled them again, and they had to transfer to the Baltic Sea.
Meanwhile, Konrad I, the Polish duke of Masovia, unsuccessfully attempted to conquer pagan Prussia in crusades in 1219 and 1222, so that in 1226, Duke Konrad invited the Teutonic Knights, a German military order of crusading knights, headquartered in the Kingdom of Jerusalem at Acre, to conquer the Baltic Prussian tribes on his borders.
During 60 years of struggles against the Old Prussians, the order created an independent state that came to control Prûsa.
After the Livonian Brothers of the Sword joined the Teutonic Order in 1237, they also controlled Livonia (now Latvia and Estonia).
The initially close relationship of the Teutonic Knights with the Polish Crown deteriorated after they conquered Polish-controlled Pomerelia and Danzig (Gdañsk) in 1308.
Years later, upon the death of Albert Frederick in 1618, who died without male heirs, John Sigismund, the Elector of Brandenburg, was granted the right of succession to the Duchy of Prussia, which was still a Polish fief.
Then, in 1641, Frederick William I went to Warsaw to render homage to King Wadyslaw IV Vasa of Poland for the Duchy of Prussia, which was still held in fief from the Polish crown.
In the first phase of the Second Northern War (1654–1660), he took the duchy as a fief from the Swedish king who later granted him full sovereignty in the Treaty of Labiau.
In 1657, this grant was renewed by the Polish king in the treaties of Wehlau and Bromberg.
With Prussia, the Brandenburg Hohenzollern dynasty now held a territory free of any feudal obligations, which constituted the basis for their later elevation to kings.
On 18 January 1701, Frederick William’s son, Elector Frederick III, upgraded Prussia from a duchy to a kingdom and crowned himself King Frederick I.
Frederick I was succeeded by his son, Frederick William I (1713–1740), the austere “Soldier King”, who did not care for the arts but was thrifty and practical.
He is considered the creator of the vaunted Prussian bureaucracy and the professionalized standing army, which he developed into one of the most powerful in Europe, and in view of the size of the army in relation to the total population, Mirabeau said later: “Prussia, is not a state with an army, but an army with a state.”
Frederick William also settled more than 20,000 Protestant refugees from Salzburg in thinly populated eastern Prussia, which was eventually extended to the west bank of the River Memel, and other regions.
So there is a bit of history on that subject.
In terms of Poland, don’t forget to include the number of Poles killed by Mother Russia in the Praga Massacre after the Battle of Praga or the Second Battle of Warsaw of 1794, which was a Russian assault of Praga, the easternmost suburb of Warsaw, during the Kosciuszko Uprising in 1794.
And yes, that is the same Thaddeus Kosciuszko who figured prominently in the Battle of Saratoga in the Revolutionary War up this way where I am.
He gave his Revolutionary War pay to Thomas Jefferson to free Jefferson’s slaves, so that Jefferson could show the world that Jefferson was not really a hypocrite who would at the same time hold humans as slaves while proclaiming to an English king that all men are created equal, but Jefferson never did free his slaves, and after Jefferson died, and the slaves were auctioned off as property to help settle Jefferson’s massive debts, it was found that that money had essentially disappeared, with Jefferson using some of it to pay his bills, and the rest filtering away through various other hands. including a lawyer who was supposed to settle Jefferson’s many debts.
As to Prussia, during the reign of King Frederick William II (1786–1797), Prussia annexed additional Polish territory through further Partitions of Poland.
Under the Treaties of Tilsit in 1807, Prussia lost about one third of its area, including the areas gained from the second and third Partitions of Poland, which now fell to the Duchy of Warsaw.
After the defeat of Napoleon in Russia, Prussia quit its alliance with France and took part in the Sixth Coalition during the “Wars of Liberation” (Befreiungskriege) against the French occupation.
Prussian troops under Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher contributed crucially with the British in the Battle of Waterloo of June 1815 to the final victory over Napoleon.
Prussia’s reward in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna was the recovery of her lost territories, as well as the whole of the Rhineland, Westphalia, 40% of Saxony and some other territories.
In exchange, Prussia withdrew from areas of central Poland to allow the creation of Congress Poland under Russian sovereignty.
As to Congress Poland, the Kingdom of Poland, informally known as Congress Poland or Russian Poland, was created in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna as a sovereign state of the Russian part of Poland connected by personal union with the Russian Empire under the Constitution of the Kingdom of Poland until 1832.
Then, it was gradually politically integrated into Russia over the course of the 19th century, made an official part of the Russian Empire in 1867, and finally replaced during the Great War by the Central Powers in 1915 with the nominal Regency Kingdom of Poland.
Though officially the Kingdom of Poland was a state with considerable political autonomy guaranteed by a liberal constitution, its rulers, the Russian Emperors, generally disregarded any restrictions on their power.
Thus effectively it was little more than a puppet state of the Russian Empire, with its autonomy being severely curtailed following uprisings in 1830–31 and 1863, as the country became governed by namiestniks, and later divided into guberniya (provinces).
Thus from the start, Polish autonomy remained little more than fiction.
As to the Battle of Praga or the Second Battle of Warsaw of 1794, after the Battle of Maciejowice, General Thaddeus Kosciuszko was captured by the Russians, and the internal struggle for power in Warsaw and the demoralisation of the city’s population prevented General Józef Zajczek from finishing the fortifications surrounding the city both from the east and from the west.
At the same time the Russians were making their way towards the city with two battle-hardened corps under Generals Aleksandr Suvorov and Ivan Fersen.
Suvorov took part in the recent Russo-Turkish war, then in the heavy fighting in Polesie and finally in the Battle of Maciejowice, while Fersen fought for several months in Poland, but was also joined by fresh reinforcements sent from Russia.
Each of them had approximately 11,000 men.
The Polish forces consisted of a variety of troops.
Apart from the rallied remnants of the Koœciuszko’s army defeated in the Battle of Maciejowice, it also included a large number of untrained militia from Warsaw, Praga and Vilnius, a 500-man Jewish regiment of Berek Joselewicz as well as a number of scythemen and civilians.
Altogether, the Polish commander had less than 20,000 men.
The Russian forces reached the outskirts of Warsaw on November 3, 1794, and immediately upon arrival, the Russian forces started artillery barrage of the Polish defenses. which made the Polish commander think that the opposing forces were preparing for a long siege.
However, Suvorov’s plan assumed the fast and concentrated assault on the Polish defences rather than a bloody and lengthy siege.
At 3 o’clock in the morning of November 4 the Russian troops silently reached the positions just outside the outer rim of Polish field fortifications and two hours later started an all-out assault.
The Polish defenders were completely surprised and soon the Polish lines were broken onto several isolated pockets of resistance, bombarded by the Russians with canister shots with a devastating effect.
General Zajczek was slightly wounded and retreated from his post, leaving the remainder of his forces without command.
This made the Poles retreat towards the centre of Praga and then towards Vistula.
The heavy fighting lasted for four hours and resulted in a complete defeat of the Polish forces.
Joselewicz survived, being severely wounded, but almost all of his command was annihilated; Jasiñski was killed fighting bravely on the front line.
Only a small part managed to evade encirclement and retreated to the other side of the river across a bridge; hundreds of soldiers and civilians fell from a bridge and drowned in the process.
After the battle ended, the Russian troops, against the orders given by Suvorov before the battle, started to loot and burn the entire borough of Warsaw, allegedly in revenge for the slaughter or capture of over half the Russian Garrison in Warsaw during the Warsaw Uprising in April 1794, when about 2,000 Russian soldiers died.
Almost all of the area was pillaged and inhabitants of the Praga district were tortured, raped and murdered.
The exact death toll of that day remains unknown, but it is estimated that up to 20,000 people were killed.
Suvorov himself wrote: “The whole of Praga was strewn with dead bodies, blood was flowing in streams.”
After the battle the commanders of Warsaw and large part of its inhabitants became demoralised.
To spare Warsaw the fate of its eastern suburb, General Tomasz Wawrzecki decided to withdraw his remaining forces southwards and on November 5, Warsaw was captured by the Russians with little or no opposition.
So there is a bit more history on that subject of just how violent people can be towards each other, and like March Hen above here, I too am surprised by the fact that people are surprised at that – just how violent people actually can be and are.