1709Peter the Great breaks the Swedish army at Poltava
At the start of the 18th century Sweden was the leading power of northern Europe, and its young king Charles XII had won a string of victories in the Great Northern War against Russia, Poland and Denmark. In 1708 he marched on Moscow, then turned south into Ukraine, hoping for support from the Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa. A bitterly cold winter cost him thousands of men, and in the spring of 1709 his depleted army laid siege to the fortress town of Poltava.
Peter the Great brought up a much larger Russian army and dug in close by. Charles had been wounded in the foot and could not lead in person, but he chose to attack the Russian camp on 8 July 1709 (27 June in the Russian calendar of the day, 28 June in the Swedish one). Britannica puts the Russian army at some 80,000 men against about 17,000 Swedes. The assault broke down, the Swedish army was routed, and most of the survivors surrendered by the Dnieper a few days later. Charles escaped into Ottoman territory. Poltava ended Sweden’s time as a great power and announced Russia as the new force in eastern Europe.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Battle of Poltava ↗
1853Commodore Perry’s black ships arrive off Japan
For more than two centuries Japan’s Tokugawa shoguns had kept the outside world at arm’s length. Foreign trade was confined to a small number of Dutch and Chinese merchants at Nagasaki, and Western ships that approached elsewhere were turned away. The United States wanted Japanese ports open to its steamers and whalers, for coal, supplies and the safe return of shipwrecked sailors, and President Millard Fillmore sent Commodore Matthew C. Perry with a letter asking for a treaty.
On 8 July 1853 Perry’s squadron of two steam frigates and two sailing sloops anchored off Uraga, at the entrance to Edo Bay, the bay of present-day Tokyo. The dark, smoking steamers, far better armed than anything Japan possessed, became known as the black ships. Perry refused to go to Nagasaki and insisted that the letter be accepted where he was; a few days later Japanese officials received it on shore. He promised to return for an answer, and came back in 1854 with a larger fleet. The treaty signed that year opened two ports to American ships and began the end of Japan’s long isolation.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Library of Congress: Perry in Edo Bay, the dawn of the U.S.-Japanese relationship ↗
1758Montcalm holds Fort Carillon against a far larger British army
In the Seven Years’ War, Britain and France fought for control of North America. Fort Carillon, which the French had built at the southern end of Lake Champlain, guarded the water route between the Hudson valley and the St Lawrence, and in the summer of 1758 Major General James Abercromby advanced on it with some 15,000 to 16,000 British regulars and American colonial troops. The most able of his commanders, Lord George Howe, was killed in a skirmish in the woods on 6 July.
The French commander, the Marquis de Montcalm, had only about 3,600 men. Rather than wait inside the fort, he built a wall of logs on the ridge in front of it, screened by a mass of felled trees with sharpened branches pointing outwards. On 8 July 1758 Abercromby sent his infantry against this line in repeated frontal assaults. They could not get through, and about 2,000 British and colonial soldiers were killed or wounded. Abercromby withdrew to Lake George. The British took the fort the following year and renamed it Ticonderoga.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Battle of Carillon ↗
2018The leaders of Ethiopia and Eritrea meet in Asmara
Eritrea became independent of Ethiopia in 1993, but five years later the two countries went to war over their shared border. Tens of thousands of people were killed before the fighting ended in 2000, and a boundary commission’s ruling in 2002 was never put into effect. For the next sixteen years the border stayed closed and heavily armed, with no flights, trade or telephone links between the neighbours, a state often described as no war, no peace.
Abiy Ahmed became Ethiopia’s prime minister in April 2018 and quickly said he wanted peace. On 8 July 2018 he flew to Asmara, the first meeting between the leaders of the two countries in some twenty years. President Isaias Afwerki met him at the airport, and crowds lined the streets waving both countries’ flags. The next day the two men signed a joint declaration of peace and friendship that ended the state of war. Embassies, flights and telephone links were restored within weeks, and in 2019 Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, above all for his initiative with Eritrea.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: NobelPrize.org: The Nobel Peace Prize 2019, press release ↗
