1431Joan of Arc dies at the stake in Rouen
Two years after she had helped lift the siege of Orléans and seen Charles VII crowned at Reims, Joan of Arc was a prisoner of the English. Captured by Burgundian troops in 1430 and handed over to their English allies, she was tried at Rouen by a church court led by Bishop Pierre Cauchon, a supporter of the English cause, on charges that included heresy.
Worn down by months of questioning, she signed a recantation, but within days she had taken back her words and returned to wearing men’s clothes. The court declared her a relapsed heretic, and on 30 May 1431, aged about 19, she was burned in the old market square of Rouen. A later church inquiry overturned the verdict in 1456, and in 1920 she was made a saint, with 30 May as her feast day.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Saint Joan of Arc ↗
1967Biafra breaks away from Nigeria
Seven years after independence, Nigeria was being pulled apart. Two military coups in 1966 were followed by the killing of thousands of Igbo people in the north, and huge numbers fled home to the Igbo-dominated Eastern Region. Its military governor, Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, came to believe that the east could no longer be safe inside the federation, and talks with the federal leader Yakubu Gowon failed.
On 30 May 1967 Ojukwu proclaimed the region an independent state, the Republic of Biafra. The federal government in Lagos treated this as rebellion, and fighting broke out in July. The war that followed lasted two and a half years; a blockade brought famine to Biafra, and hundreds of thousands of people died, many of them from hunger, before Biafra surrendered in January 1970.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Nigerian Civil War ↗
1876Ottoman ministers depose Sultan Abdülaziz
Abdülaziz had ruled the Ottoman Empire since 1861. He spent heavily on the navy and on palaces, and by the mid-1870s the empire had defaulted on its debts while revolts spread through its Balkan provinces. A group of reforming ministers, led by the statesman Midhat Pasha, became convinced that only a change of sultan, and a constitution, could save the state.
On 30 May 1876 they deposed Abdülaziz and placed his nephew Murad V on the throne. A few days later the former sultan was found dead, and his death was declared a suicide. The shock, and the murder of several ministers soon afterwards, left Murad in mental collapse; he was replaced in August by his brother Abdülhamid II, who granted the empire’s first constitution that December.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Abdülaziz ↗
1961The Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo is killed
Rafael Trujillo, an army officer, seized control of the Dominican Republic in 1930 and held it for more than thirty years, whether or not he was officially president. His regime renamed the capital after him, made him one of the richest men in the Americas and dealt ruthlessly with opponents, and in 1937 his troops killed thousands of Haitians living near the border.
By 1961 opposition at home was growing and he had lost the support of the United States and his neighbours. On the night of 30 May a group of conspirators ambushed his car on the road out of the capital as he was being driven to his farm at San Cristóbal, and shot him dead. Many of the plotters were hunted down, but his family’s grip on power soon collapsed.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Rafael Trujillo ↗
1913A treaty in London ends the First Balkan War
In October 1912 Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro went to war together against the Ottoman Empire, and within weeks their armies had overrun most of its remaining lands in Europe. Peace talks opened in London under the watchful eye of the great powers, broke down, and resumed after more fighting, including the fall of the great Ottoman fortress city of Edirne in March 1913.
On 30 May 1913 the Treaty of London was signed. The Ottomans gave up almost all their European territory apart from a strip near Constantinople, and the powers insisted on an independent Albania. But the victors could not agree how to share out Macedonia. Just a month later Bulgaria attacked its former allies, starting a Second Balkan War that ended with Bulgaria losing much of what it had won.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Treaties of London ↗
