1099The crusaders storm Jerusalem
The First Crusade had set out from Europe in 1096 at the call of Pope Urban II. After three years of marching, sieges and hunger, the survivors reached Jerusalem on 7 June 1099. The city was held by the Fatimid rulers of Egypt, who had taken it from the Turks only the year before. The crusaders, reduced to perhaps 1,200 to 1,500 knights and some 12,000 foot soldiers, settled down to a siege and built wooden siege towers.
The towers were pushed up to the walls on 13 and 14 July, and on 15 July 1099 the men of Godfrey of Bouillon fought their way onto a stretch of the northern wall. Others followed on ladders, and a gate was opened. The governor surrendered to Raymond of Toulouse in the Tower of David and was escorted out, but the crusaders then killed a great many of the city’s Muslim and Jewish inhabitants; how many is still disputed. Godfrey became the city’s first Latin ruler, and a Fatimid relief army was beaten at Ascalon a few weeks later.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Crusades, the siege of Jerusalem ↗
1410Poland and Lithuania crush the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald
The Teutonic Knights, a German crusading order, had built a powerful state in Prussia on the Baltic coast and spent two centuries fighting their pagan neighbours in Lithuania. When the Lithuanian grand duke Jogaila married the queen of Poland in 1386, became King Władysław II Jagiełło and accepted Christianity, the knights refused to believe the conversion was sincere. In 1409 their Grand Master, Ulrich von Jungingen, declared war on both countries.
On 15 July 1410 the armies met between the villages of Grunwald and Tannenberg in Prussia. Jagiełło and his cousin Vytautas, grand duke of Lithuania, led a host of Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians and Tatars against the knights and their foreign volunteers, in one of the largest battles of medieval Europe. By evening the order’s army was destroyed and von Jungingen lay dead. The victors failed to take the knights’ fortress at Marienburg, but the order never recovered its strength, and Poland-Lithuania rose to be a great power. Grunwald remains a national symbol in Poland and Lithuania.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Battle of Grunwald (1410) ↗
1799French soldiers unearth the Rosetta Stone
In 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt, taking with him not only an army but also a large party of scholars to study the country. In the summer of 1799 French soldiers were repairing an old fort near the town of Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta, in the Nile Delta. On 15 July 1799, while digging foundations, they came upon a broken slab of dark stone that had been built into an ancient wall. The officer in charge, Pierre-François Bouchard, saw that it was important, although it was probably an Egyptian labourer who first spotted it.
The stone carried a decree issued by priests at Memphis in 196 BC in honour of King Ptolemy V, written three times over: in hieroglyphs, in the everyday Egyptian script called demotic, and in ancient Greek. Because the Greek could be read, it offered a key to the lost hieroglyphs. When the French in Egypt surrendered in 1801, the stone passed to the British, and it has been in the British Museum since 1802. Working from it, Jean-François Champollion announced in 1822 that he had cracked the hieroglyphic script.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: British Museum: The Rosetta Stone, everything you need to know ↗
1888Mount Bandai blows apart in northern Japan
Mount Bandai rises above the north shore of Lake Inawashiro in what is now Fukushima Prefecture. Farming villages lay on its lower slopes. On the morning of 15 July 1888 steam and groundwater trapped inside the volcano exploded. There was no fresh lava; instead the blast tore away the northern side of its peak, Ko-Bandai.
A huge avalanche of rock and earth swept down the northern slopes and ran on for around 11 kilometres, burying several villages, while blasts and mudflows raced down the other side. More than 450 people were killed. The debris dammed rivers and created new lakes, among them Hibara, Onogawa and Akimoto, which today form the scenic Urabandai area. Japanese scientists studied the disaster closely, and geologists still use ‘Bandai-type’ to describe eruptions in which a volcano’s side collapses.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program: Bandaisan ↗
1974A coup in Nicosia overthrows Archbishop Makarios
Cyprus became independent from Britain in 1960 with a constitution meant to share power between its Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities, but it soon broke down amid violence between them. Many Greek Cypriots still wanted enosis, union with Greece. The president, Archbishop Makarios III, had drifted away from that goal, and after a hard-line faction of Greece’s military junta took power in Athens in 1973, relations with him grew bitter. When Makarios moved to reduce the Greek officers’ hold on the island’s National Guard, Athens struck first.
On 15 July 1974 units of the National Guard, led by officers from mainland Greece, attacked the Presidential Palace in Nicosia and seized key points on the island. Makarios escaped and was flown out of the country by the British, and Nikos Sampson, a veteran of the anti-British EOKA campaign, was installed as president. Five days later Turkey invaded, saying it was acting to protect the Turkish Cypriots. Sampson soon stepped down and the Athens junta collapsed, but by mid-August Turkish forces held the north of the island, which remains divided today.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Cyprus, the Republic of Cyprus ↗
