431Bishops at Ephesus depose the patriarch of Constantinople
Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople from 428, caused uproar by objecting to the popular title Theotokos, ‘God-bearer’, for the Virgin Mary. He preferred to call her the mother of Christ, arguing that the human and divine natures in Jesus should be kept distinct. His great rival, Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, accused him of splitting Christ in two, and the emperor Theodosius II called a general council of the church to meet at Ephesus, on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, in 431.
Cyril did not wait for everyone to arrive. On 22 June 431 he opened the council without the bishops travelling from Syria under John of Antioch, and in a single day’s sitting the assembly condemned Nestorius’s teaching and deposed him, with about 200 bishops signing the sentence. When John arrived five days later he held a rival meeting that deposed Cyril in turn. The emperor finally let the verdict against Nestorius stand, and he died in exile. The council’s affirmation of Mary as Theotokos became part of mainstream Christian doctrine, while churches further east that honoured Nestorius went their own way.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent): Council of Ephesus ↗
1527Fatahillah drives the Portuguese from the port that became Jakarta
Sunda Kelapa, at the mouth of the Ciliwung river on the north coast of Java, was the chief port of the Hindu kingdom of Sunda, busy with the pepper trade. In the early 1520s the kingdom, worried by the rise of the Muslim sultanate of Demak, made an agreement with the Portuguese, who had taken Malacca in 1511, allowing them to build a fort at the harbour. A carved stone pillar, or padrão, marked the pact.
The Portuguese never secured their foothold. Forces from Demak and Cirebon under the commander Fatahillah seized Sunda Kelapa, and when Portuguese ships arrived they were driven off. The city’s own government records the attack on 22 June 1527, and Jakarta has kept that day as its anniversary. Fatahillah renamed the port Jayakarta, meaning roughly ‘great victory’. In 1619 the Dutch East India Company took the town and built Batavia on its ruins, but the old name survived, and as Jakarta it became the capital of independent Indonesia.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Jakarta Provincial Government: Sejarah Jakarta ↗
1774The Quebec Act gives French Canada its own law and faith
After Britain won New France in the Seven Years’ War, it tried at first to govern the St Lawrence colony like any other British province, with English law and oaths that barred Roman Catholics from office. That made little sense in a colony whose people were almost all French-speaking Catholics, and governors James Murray and Guy Carleton urged London to change course.
The Quebec Act, which received the royal assent on 22 June 1774, did so. It guaranteed Catholics the free practice of their religion, let the church collect its tithes, restored French civil law for property and family matters while keeping English criminal law, and replaced the anti-Catholic oath with one of loyalty to the king. It also stretched Quebec’s borders south-west into the Ohio valley. To the thirteen colonies further south, already angry over the punishment of Boston, the act looked like a threat, and it was counted among the grievances that led to the American Revolution. For French Canadians it became a foundation of their survival as a distinct people.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: The Canadian Encyclopedia: Quebec Act, 1774 ↗
1941Germany invades the Soviet Union
In August 1939 Hitler and Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact, and for almost two years the two dictatorships traded with each other while Germany conquered much of Europe. But Hitler had long seen the east as ‘living space’ for Germans, and he regarded the Soviet state as his real enemy. In December 1940 he ordered plans for an invasion under the code name Barbarossa.
At about 3.15 on the morning of Sunday 22 June 1941 more than three million German troops, with their Finnish, Romanian and other allies, attacked along a front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It was the largest invasion force in history. Stalin had ignored many warnings, and in the first weeks the Red Army lost vast numbers of men in great encirclements. Yet the Soviet Union did not collapse. The German advance was halted before Moscow in December, and the war in the east, the most destructive in human history, went on for nearly four more years until the Red Army reached Berlin.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Operation Barbarossa ↗
1948The Windrush passengers step ashore at Tilbury
The Empire Windrush was a troopship on its way back to Britain from Australia when it called at Kingston, Jamaica, in May 1948. Britain was short of workers after the war, and the British Nationality Act passing through Parliament that year confirmed the rights of people across the empire as British subjects. Tickets were advertised, and many of those who bought them had served in the Royal Air Force or other forces during the war.
The ship anchored in the Thames at Tilbury on 21 June 1948, and the next day, 22 June, its passengers came ashore. The passenger list held by the National Archives records 1,027 people, more than 800 of whom gave a last address in the Caribbean. Some stayed at first in a deep shelter under Clapham Common and found work nearby in Brixton. The ship’s name came to stand for the whole generation who came to Britain from the Caribbean between 1948 and the early 1970s, and since 2018 the United Kingdom has marked 22 June as Windrush Day.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: The National Archives: Empire Windrush, Caribbean migration ↗
