Explore 13 October

Explore 13 October: the Templars are seized at dawn across France, a cornerstone is laid for the President’s House in Washington, Ankara becomes the capital of a new Turkey and Italy turns and declares war on Germany. Meet Margaret Thatcher, Paul Simon and Nana Mouskouri, born on this date.

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Jacques de Molay, last grand master of the Knights Templar, in a nineteenth-century portrait.

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1307

The Templars are seized at dawn

On 13 October 1307, on the orders of Philip IV of France, every Templar the king’s officers could find was arrested in a single coordinated operation, the grand master Jacques de Molay among them. The order had been founded during the Crusades and had become extraordinarily rich; Philip was extraordinarily short of money.

The charges were heresy and immorality - worshipping an idol in the shape of a bearded head, worshipping a cat, sodomy and a long list of others. On 24 October, almost certainly under torture, Molay confessed to some of them, then retracted when the pope’s own investigators arrived. He was burned as a relapsed heretic in 1314, and the order had been dissolved two years before that.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Jacques de Molay ↗

The north (top) and south (bottom) fronts of the White House.

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(top)Cezary p(bottom)MattWade · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.

1792

The first stone of the President’s House

Work on the President’s House in the new federal city began on 13 October 1792, with a masonic ceremony. A procession formed at Suter’s Tavern in Georgetown - the mayor, the town council, the district commissioners, freemasons and guests - and a brass plate was buried under the stone. It read: ‘This first Stone of the President’s House was laid the 13th Day of October, 1792, and in the 17th Year of the Independence of the United States of America.’

The design was by James Hoban, an Irish-born architect whose entry had won a competition that summer. Shortages forced changes: two main floors instead of three, and cheaper brick made on site behind the sandstone facing. Enslaved people worked at every stage of the building, from the quarries at Aquia Creek to the roof, from 1792 to 1800.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: White House Historical Association: Building the White House ↗

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who made Ankara the seat of the new Turkish state.

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1923

Ankara replaces Istanbul as Turkey’s capital

Ankara was declared the capital of Turkey on 13 October 1923. Mustafa Kemal had set up the Grand National Assembly there on 23 April 1920, after Allied forces occupied Istanbul and shut down the Ottoman parliament, and the inland town had been the headquarters of the national movement ever since.

By late 1923 the war was won, the sultanate abolished and the Treaty of Lausanne signed. Moving the capital away from the old imperial city on the straits was a statement about what the new state intended to be. The republic itself was proclaimed sixteen days later, on 29 October.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Ankara ↗

Marshal Pietro Badoglio, prime minister of Italy in 1943.

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1943

Italy turns and declares war on Germany

Italy declared war on Germany on 13 October 1943, under an agreement Marshal Pietro Badoglio had made with Eisenhower on 29 September. Italy had signed an armistice with the Allies on 3 September, announced on the 8th, and Badoglio had already dissolved the Fascist Party.

Switching sides did not free the country. German forces had moved into Rome and most of central and northern Italy within days of the armistice, and Kesselring was being reinforced. Italy became a co-belligerent rather than an ally, and the fighting up the peninsula went on until the last weeks of the war in Europe.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: World War II, the Allies’ invasion of Italy and the Italian volte-face, 1943 ↗

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