In the year 8 AD, the Dalmatae, that ancient Illyrian tribe of
the eastern Adriatic, fell to the Roman general Tiberius on the
banks of the Bathinus. A renowned warrior, Tiberius would
ultimately conquer all of Dalmatia, Pannonia, Raetie and briefly
Germania as he laid the foundations of the northern frontier. A
dark and brooding sovereign, his success on the battlefield did not
evoke the love of his people, nor his love for them.
Four hundred years later, Tiberius’s distant successor
Theodosious II would exile the Ecumenical Patriarch of
Constantinople, Nestorius, to a
far-flung monastery of Egyptian antiquity. Christological
controversies of Nestorianism and Eutychianism exist in
the ether of religious faith, but centuries later, battles were
still fought on land. In 881AD, Louis the Stammerer, king of
Aquitaine and Western Francia, took to the field of
Saucourt-en-Vimeu to defeat the Viking hordes. The victory of
the Frankish force was put to poetry in 59 rhyming couplets of
celebratory verse, still known in Old High German as the Ludwigslied.
In 1031, Olaf II of Norway
— you might remember him as Olav Haraldsson — was canonized Saint
Olaf by the British Bishop of
Selsey, Grimketel. Little is known of the latter, but that he
was brought by the former to convert the pagan Norsemen. Along the
lines of exploratory evangelizing, Christopher Columbus set sail
from Palos de la Frontera across that ocean blue, on this date in
history, in year 1492. Writing in his diary, the Italian explorer
noted the corresponding
expulsion of the Jews, ordered by Ferdinand and Isabella as his
three ships put to sea. 35 years later, the first known letter from
North America was sent back across the Atlantic by John Rut, writing from
Newfoundland. Rut had been dispatched by his liege lord, Henry
VIII, to command the British quest for an elusive Northwest
Passage.
And then there were the wars. 1601 saw the fall of Transylvania
to the hands of Hapsburgs at the battle of Goroszló.
Austria, Wallachia and the fearsome Cossacks sacked Transylvania’s
troops commanded by Sigsmund Bathory, in an early chapter of
military encounters that simmered between the Ottoman Empire and
the European counterparts, known better as the Long
War.
Forty four years later, in the midst of the Thirty Years War,
the second Battle of
Nördlingen was fought between an alliance of the Holy Roman
Empire and her allies Bavarian Catholic League and the combined
forces of France and Protestant Germany. The imperial army of his
Holiness fell back in reasonable order, as the battle provided
little more than breathing room between invasions of the southern
duchy.
Of course, not all battles are fought on land. In 1852, Harvard
University won its first “Boat
Race” against Yale University, and the first American
intercollegiate athletic event. In short order, thereafter, the
Second Maori War ignited in New Zealand, Macedonian rebels in
Kruševo declared the Republic,
thereof. The former lasted years, the latter only days.
On this date, Germany declared war against France, and
Kenesaw Mountain Landis declared the interdiction of eight
notorious Black
Sox. Adolf Hitler collapsed the offices
Reichsprasident and Reichskanzler into a furious
Führer-ver,
before Jesse Owens’
victory in the 100 yard dash offered an American
aperitif in Berlin. Sixty-nine years later, Mahoud
Ahmedinejad became president of Iran.
All of this…and so much more…on this date in history.
