1494Spain and Portugal divide the world at Tordesillas
When Christopher Columbus came home in 1493 with news of lands across the Atlantic, Spain moved quickly to secure them. Pope Alexander VI issued a series of bulls drawing a line down the ocean and granting Spain the lands to the west of it. King John II of Portugal was unhappy: the line left his sailors too little room on their routes down the coast of Africa, and he opened direct talks with Ferdinand and Isabella.
Their envoys reached agreement in the Castilian town of Tordesillas, and the treaty was signed on 7 June 1494. It moved the line to 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, running from pole to pole: new lands to the east would belong to Portugal, those to the west to Spain. Nobody could yet measure longitude accurately, so its exact position was argued over for centuries. But the shift gave Portugal its claim to Brazil, reached by Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500, which is why Brazilians speak Portuguese today. The treaty is now on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: UNESCO Memory of the World: Treaty of Tordesillas ↗
1099The First Crusade reaches the walls of Jerusalem
In 1095 Pope Urban II called on the knights of western Europe to march east and win Jerusalem for Christendom. After three years of hunger, disease and hard fighting across Anatolia and Syria, including a long siege of Antioch, the surviving crusaders turned south towards the Holy City. Jerusalem was then held by the Fatimid rulers of Egypt, whose governor was well supplied and expected help to arrive from Cairo.
On 7 June 1099 the crusader army, by then shrunk to perhaps 1,200 to 1,500 knights and some 12,000 foot soldiers, camped before the walls. They had few siege engines until Genoese and English ships reached the port of Jaffa ten days later with rope and timber, which the crusaders used to build siege towers, ladders and a battering ram. On 15 July they broke into the city, and a massacre of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants followed. The kingdom they founded lasted less than a century.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: The Crusades, the siege of Jerusalem ↗
1692An earthquake drags Port Royal into the sea
After England seized Jamaica from Spain in 1655, the town of Port Royal grew up at the tip of the long sandy spit that guards Kingston Harbour. Merchants, sailors and privateers made it the busiest and richest English port in the Americas, and a notorious haven for buccaneers. By 1690 between 8,000 and 10,000 people lived there, crowded into brick and timber buildings on ground that was little more than loose sand.
A few minutes before noon on 7 June 1692 a violent earthquake struck. The sandy ground turned to liquid, and about 32 acres of the town slid beneath the waters of the harbour, while a wave swept across the bay. Around 2,000 people died that day, and many more in the sickness that followed. Survivors moved across the harbour to found the new town of Kingston, now Jamaica’s capital. The sunken streets of old Port Royal are one of the most important underwater archaeological sites in the Americas.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Texas A&M University, Nautical Archaeology Program: History of Port Royal ↗
1893Gandhi is thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg
In 1893 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a shy young lawyer trained in London, sailed to the British colony of Natal to help an Indian trading firm with a legal case. Soon after landing in Durban he set off by train for Pretoria, with a first-class ticket. Colonial South Africa was bound by rules that kept Indians and Africans out of spaces reserved for white people, and the journey was about to show him what that meant.
When the train stopped at Pietermaritzburg on the night of 7 June 1893, a white passenger objected to sharing the compartment. Gandhi refused to move to another carriage, so he was forced off the train and spent a cold night in the station waiting room. He later saw that night as a turning point. He stayed in South Africa for more than twenty years, organising Indians against discriminatory laws and developing satyagraha, his method of non-violent resistance, which he later took home to India.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: South African History Online: M.K. Gandhi is forcibly removed from a whites-only train carriage ↗
1917Nineteen mines erupt beneath Messines Ridge
Since 1914 German troops had held the low ridge between the Belgian villages of Wytschaete and Messines, south of Ypres, from which they could look down on the British lines. For more than a year British, Canadian and Australian tunnelling companies dug deep shafts and galleries beneath it in secret, fighting an underground war against German miners, and packed the chambers at the end with around a million pounds of explosives.
At 3.10 in the morning on 7 June 1917, nineteen mines were fired almost at once. The blast was said to have been heard in London, and it killed thousands of German soldiers in an instant. Behind a creeping barrage from more than 2,000 guns, nine divisions from Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand advanced and took the ridge within hours. The battle ran on until 14 June, a rare clear success on the Western Front. The largest crater, at Spanbroekmolen, is now a quiet pond called the Pool of Peace.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Imperial War Museums: What you need to know about the Battle of Messines ↗
