History Notes this Week of July 14

64AD: The Great Fire of Rome; beginning in the residential area near the Circus Maximus, the fire becomes a firestorm that burns for five days before coming under control, then reignites and burns for four more days. 2/3 of the city is consumed by the flames. Emperor Nero, away at a summer palace when the fire starts, is widely blamed for either setting it or ignoring it.

1099:  The First Crusade enters Jerusalem as a conquering army. The ensuing slaughter of Saracens and Jews on the Temple Mount was such that contemporary witnesses wrote that the knights rode in blood up to their stirrups. The full story is violent and complex, and if you ask me what I think of the Crusades I will tell you it was, at its core, a counter-offensive against years of Muslim aggression against not only Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land, but territorial aggression in Europe that spread across the Pyrenees in the west and to the gates of Vienna in the east. 

1203: Venetian armies of the Fourth Crusade capture Constantinople, driving the sultan into exile and setting into motion the eventual death of the Christian Byzantine Empire. 2020 Flashback-Forward: I’m sure you noted this week that Turkey’s Islamist president Recep Erdogan has decided to return the Byzantine Church of Haggia Sophia to active use as a mosque, to which it was converted after the Seljuk Turk conquest in 1453, and which was converted to a museum by the secular government of Ataturk in 1935. And you probably also noted the commentary in most of the articles took pains to point out that the loss was a direct fallout from the sack by Christian Crusaders.

1606: Birth of Rembrandt van Rijn (d.1669). The great Dutch painter was one of those rare artists who was both a commercial and critical success in his own lifetime, to say nothing of his stunning reputation and acclaim today. His masterpieces epitomize the dramatic use of light, composition and mood. FYI- the “van Rijn” part of his name means “…of the Rhine” (river), a branch of which wends its way past his house in his hometown of Leiden, one of the most beautiful cities in the Netherlands.

1762: Catherine the Great assumes the throne as Empress of all the Russias after the assassination of Peter III.

1769: Father Junipero Serra, a Spanish Franciscan monk, founds Mission San Diego Alcala, the first of 21 Franciscan missions in Alta California. The missions are carefully sited approximately one long day’s ride (or a three day walk) from each other, and formed the nucleus of most of California’s early cities. The trail between them became known as the El Camino Real (“The Royal Road”), which also became the first historically commemorated road in the country. The only surviving original adobe mission structure remains at San Juan Capistrano. The missions themselves run north between San Diego and Sonoma.

1789: In Paris, France, general riots broke out all around the city on with virtually no reaction from the army or police. On the 13^th, with further fears growing of an impending attack, the mob was then incited by Camille Desmoulins, a Masonic agitator, who mounted onto a table, pistol in hand and exclaimed: “Citizens! There is no time to lose- the dismissal of Necker is the knell of Saint Bartholomew for the patriots! This very night all the Swiss and German battalions will leave the Champ de Mars to massacre us all; one resource is left: to arms!” The mob roared its approval and surged to the massive arsenal of Saint-Lazaire and stole hundreds of muskets, pistols, and barrels of powder. Early in the morning of the 14^th, 500 or so of the more energized among them appeared before the gates of the medieval-era Bastille prison, which held only seven prisoners but also contained a large cache of weapons and ammunition. After fruitless negotiations with the warden, the mob finally attacked. The ensuing one-sided battle killed 98 of the attackers to one of the prison guards. But recognizing the inevitable, the warden, Governor de Launay, surrendered the facility around 3:00 in the afternoon. The mob then bundled him back to the square at Palais Royale, where they jostled him around as they tried to determine his fate. Exasperated, he finally cried out “Enough! Let me die!” and he kicked a baker named Dulait in the groin. The enraged mob then began stabbing him and sawed off his head, which they mounted on a pike and paraded through the streets. As evening closed in, the mobs established barricades in the streets to protect themselves from an expected counter attack. In the end, the Fall of the Bastille had zero military effect, but because of the symbolism of a royal facility falling to the citizens of the country it became the touchstone for the entire French Revolution, and is celebrated today as the National Holiday, Bastille Day.

1792: American naval hero Captain John Paul Jones dies in Paris (b.1747). After his exploits in the American Revolution he served briefly in Saint Petersburg as Catherine the Great’s naval. His Russian tour complete, Jones was back in Paris awaiting his appointment letter as United States Consul to Algiers when he died. His mortal remains today rest in a crypt beneath the US Naval Academy chapel.

1793: Four days after sending Marat to his reward, Charlotte Corday is executed via guillotine. Immediately after her head fell into the basket, the executioner’s associate pulled it out and slapped her cheek, and the Jacobin council ordered an autopsy to determine if she was a virgin (she was, to the council’s great disappointment).  France’s post-Revolutionary decades saw Corday’s legacy undergo a major revision. After being the she-devil incarnate and Enemy of the People, she became more widely known as a woman of integrity and virtue who sacrificed herself to halt the gross excesses of le Terreur.  

1798: President John Adams signs into law the fourth of four bills collectively known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed in response to a high level of Francophile agitation against the Quasi-War [DLH 7/7] with that country. The Sedition Act signed today made it a federal offense to write, publish or utter a false or malicious statement against the United States government. Thomas Jefferson was particularly vocal against the law, a dispute which cause a deep breach in their friendship. This law, although it had an expiration date of the last day of Adams’ term, was eventually overturned based on a 10^thAmendment ruling on Congress overstepping its enumerated powers, rather than a more predictable First Amendment argument.

1799: In the Egyptian village of Rosetta (a.k.a. Rashid), French Captain Pierre-Francois Bouchard finds a portion of an ancient stele, with inscriptions in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian Deotic script, and ancient Greek. The common inscriptions, written in honor of the 13 year old Ptolemy V, provided the first viable translations of hieroglyphics. When the British army defeated the French in Egypt in 1801, they assumed possession of the Rosetta Stone as part of the Treaty of Alexandria. It was immediately put on display in the British Museum, where it remains to this day.

1815: Four weeks after his decisive loss at Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte surrenders himself aboard HMS Bellerophon, which immediately transports him and a small retinue into permanent exile on the tiny island of Saint Helena, deep in the South Atlantic. 

1853: Commodore Mathew Perry, USN, sets foot in Araga, Japan [DLH 7/8] and begins his first negotiations to open that country to outside trade interests, i.e., the United States.

1861: Two and a half months after the secession crisis degenerated into the Confederate firing on Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln orders a Union army of 35,000 under Brigadier General Irvin McDowell to begin a march into Virginia, with the object of defeating the gathering Confederate army and putting pressure on Richmond. McDowell heads west out of Washington, DC toward the Manassas junction, with the joyful cries of “On to Richmond!” from the press and fellow citizens ringing in the army’s ears.

1862: Captain David Farragut is promoted to Rear Admiral, becoming the United States Navy’s first flag officer. 

1863: The army’s first all-black military regiment, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry makes its combat debut, in a valiant but ultimately unsuccessful attack on Fort Wagner near Charleston, SC. Their leader, Colonel Robert Shaw, was killed in the attack and buried by the Confederate victors in a mass grave with his fallen men. The grave site no longer exists, washed into the eternal sea by years of Atlantic storms.

1870: Georgia becomes the final former Confederate state re-admitted to the Union.

1917: Three years into WWI, King George V issues a very British proclamation that his descendants will bear as their surname “Windsor,” after the castle in which the family lived, vice “von Saxe-Coberg and Gotha” which derived from Queen Victoria’s Germanic consort Prince Albert.

1925: Seven months after his release from Landsberg Prison, Adolf Hitler publishes his magnum opus: Mien Kampf. 

1936: The Spanish Civil War begins. Two years after a wrenching election that installed its second left wing socialist-Marxist government since 1931, Spain awakens to a widespread army revolt instigated from the Canary Islands by General Francisco Franco. Government forces (the Republicans) quickly respond, but the army (the Nationalists) possess nearly overwhelming force against the chaotic efforts of the leftist ideologues running the government. Both sides consolidate their hold on territory by executing thousands.The vicious guerrilla war lasts through March 1939, leaving an estimated one million dead in its wake. Franco remained Caudillo (lit: guardian; actually: dictator) of Spain until his death in 1975, after which the Bourbon monarchy was restored. Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany used Spain as a live-fire testing ground for new military concepts (i.e. Blitzkrieg combined arms raids) and political instigation.

1942: Opening guns of the German army’s assault on Stalingrad. The Kursk campaign, which sealed Germany’s defeat in the south of Russia. On this day German assault got underway: the siege lasted nearly a full year through a bitter winter of inadequate clothing, sniping and counter-assaults by the Red Army.

1944: General Hideiki Tojo resigns as Prime Minister of Japan. He can’t avoid the noose in 1948 for war crimes. 

1945: Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, and President Harry S. Truman meet in Potsdam, in the outskirts of the ruined capital of Berlin, to discuss and decide on the fate of post-war Germany and the rest of Allied-occupied Europe.

1945: Scientists from the Manhattan Project detonate the world’s first atomic blast, code named Trinity, in the desert wastes of White Sands, New Mexico. President Truman, notified of the successful test during his summit meeting in Potsdam, told Stalin on the 25^th  “We have a new weapon of unusually destructive force.” Stalin, showing no emotion during the exchange, privately held his own explosion with his aides and American interlocutors that he was not told of it sooner. 

1948: Death of General of the Armies John J. Pershing (b.1860).

1955: Volkswagen introduces the Karmann-Ghia. The car eventually becomes a display in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and remains in production until 1974. 

1955: Opening day for Disneyland, a world of dreams, built from scratch in a parcel of distant orange groves in Anaheim, California.

1958:  A military coup, led by Major General Abdul Karim el Qasim, overthrows the Iraqi monarchy, killing the young king and his uncle the crown prince. Qasim himself is overthrown in a 1963 coup led by the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. 

1960: USS George Washington (SSBN-598) conducts the first underwater launch of a ballistic missile, the Polaris A1. 

1969: Apollo 11 launches to the moon with astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Mike Collins.

1975: First docking between American and Russian spacecraft. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) tested the limits of Soviet-American cooperation in each nation’s premier technology demonstration project. In addition to fundamental issues of trust and language compatibility, technical hurdles included differing measuring systems, different spacecraft and therefore different mating adapters and docking systems, different air pressures and different gas mixtures. 

1979:  Sandinista rebels under Daniel Ortega capture Managua, Nicaragua and institutes a new Marxist regime in Central America.

1996: Paris-bound TWA flight #800 explodes 12 minutes after takeoff from JFK International Airport, killing all 230 souls on board. After a four month investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board issues a finding that the most likely cause was a fuel explosion in the center fuselage tank.