June 26 in History

Elagabalus adopted Alexander Severus because his grandmother forced him to. Julia Maesa had already decided her grandson was a disaster — too erratic, too strange, too obsessed with his Syrian sun god. She needed a backup. Alexander was 13, calm, manageable. Elagabalus almost immediately regretted it and tried to have Alexander killed. Failed. The Praetorian Guard mutinied, dragged Elagabalus from a latrine where he'd been hiding, and murdered him. Alexander became emperor anyway. The adoption was meant to secure Elagabalus's power. It ended it.

Julian took a spear to the liver while retreating from Persia — and nobody knows who threw it. His own soldiers were suspects. The last pagan emperor of Rome had dragged his army deep into Sassanid territory, then burned his own supply fleet to force commitment. It didn't work. Stranded, starving, and desperate, the troops needed someone new fast. They picked Jovian, a junior officer who lasted eight months. But Julian's death ended Rome's last serious attempt to roll back Christianity. One anonymous spear changed everything.

A government feared a hermit who talked to demons. En no Ozuno spent years alone on Mount Yoshino, mixing medicines, commanding spirits — or so people believed. That reputation got him exiled to Izu Ōshima in 699, a volcanic island off Japan's coast, essentially a place to be forgotten. But exile didn't erase him. Shugendō — the mountain ascetic tradition he's credited with founding — survived and spread, blending Buddhism, Shinto, and folk magic into something authorities couldn't easily categorize or control. The man they banished became the religion.

Poland hadn't had a king in over 200 years. Then Przemysł II walked into Gniezno Cathedral and changed that in a single ceremony. The Archbishop of Gniezno placed the crown on his head — the first Polish king since 1079. And onto the royal seal went a white eagle on a red field, a symbol Przemysł chose deliberately to unify fractured Polish duchies under one identity. He was murdered eleven months later. But the eagle stayed. It's still on Poland's coat of arms today. The king didn't last. The symbol outlived everything.

Three popes walked into 1409, and none of them would leave. The Council of Pisa met to *fix* the Western Schism — two rival popes, two obediences, decades of chaos — and somehow made it worse. Petros Philargos, a Cretan-born Franciscan friar who'd clawed his way from orphan to cardinal, was crowned Alexander V in June. But Gregory XII in Rome and Benedict XIII in Avignon refused to budge. The cure tripled the disease. And the Church wouldn't untangle the mess until Constance, 1417.

Warwick didn't come home quietly. He landed with Edward at the head of a rebel force and marched straight for London — because London was the war. Hold the capital, hold the crown. Edward was eighteen. Warwick was the power behind him, the man they'd soon call "the Kingmaker." But that nickname cuts both ways. A maker can unmake. Within a decade, Warwick switched sides entirely, abandoned Edward, and died fighting against him at Barnet. He built a king. Then couldn't live under one.

Spanish regulars, free Black militia members, and allied Indigenous warriors overran a British garrison occupying Fort Mose near St. Augustine during the War of Jenkins' Ear. The counterattack was notable for the free Black soldiers who fought to defend the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in what would become the United States.

Britain didn't win Hong Kong Island in battle. They won it at a negotiating table after the First Opium War — a war China lost partly because Britain was protecting its drug trade. Qing official Qiying signed away the island "in perpetuity" in 1843, probably believing the British would eventually leave. They didn't. Not for 156 years. And when they finally handed it back in 1997, the handover ceremony lasted exactly one minute past midnight. The "perpetuity" had an expiration date all along.

Fluorine had already killed or blinded every chemist who'd tried to isolate it. Moissan knew that. He tried anyway, working in a cold cellar in Paris to slow the gas down, using platinum-lined equipment because fluorine dissolves almost everything else. It worked — but the exposure still damaged his eyes and likely shortened his life. He won the Nobel Prize in 1906. And died three months later. The element that defeated a generation of scientists finally got him too. Just slower than expected.

America had been watching Europe bleed for three years before finally stepping in. The first U.S. troops — the 1st Division, roughly 14,000 men — docked at Saint-Nazaire on June 26, 1917, to enormous French crowds desperate for hope. But here's the thing: they weren't ready to fight. Months of training followed before they saw real combat. And when they finally did, the war had already consumed millions. America didn't save Europe. It prevented Europe from losing.

The Marines who took Belleau Wood in June 1918 were told it would take hours. It took three weeks. James Harbord's men crawled through wheat fields in the open, absorbing machine gun fire the U.S. Army hadn't trained them to survive. But they didn't stop. The Germans called them *Teufelshunden* — Devil Dogs. The name stuck. What nobody mentions: the French nearly ordered a retreat before the assault began. Pershing refused. That stubbornness cost 1,800 American lives — and handed the Marines their defining myth forever.