May 18 in History

Louis II waited twenty-eight years between his first and second coronations as Holy Roman Emperor. First crowned at age nineteen while his father Lothair still lived, he ruled in shadow. Now forty-seven, crowned again in Rome in 872, he finally held the title alone. But here's the problem: by this point, the emperor had already been captured and humiliated by Muslim forces in southern Italy three years earlier. They'd released him only after he swore never to return. The second coronation couldn't restore what the ransom had already cost him.

Baibars sent a letter to the Count of Antioch describing, in present tense, exactly what his soldiers were doing to the city's residents while the count sat safe in Tripoli. Four days of methodical destruction. The Mamluks killed or enslaved every single person—seventeen thousand gone. Not one Christian remained. Antioch had survived earthquakes, Persian sieges, and Byzantine reconquests for twelve centuries. It took less than a week to become permanent Muslim territory. The count received Baibars's letter after the city had already fallen. He was reading about corpses.

The Mongol cavalry saw the dust cloud too late. General Lan Yu had force-marched his Chinese troops across the Gobi, gambling everything on surprise at Buyur Lake. When the Northern Yuan warriors finally wheeled their horses to fight, Lan Yu's men were already among them. Tögüs Temür, the last khan who could claim Genghis's bloodline and real power, fled north with just sixteen riders. His empire scattered into the steppe. The Yuan dynasty that had ruled China for a century became a footnote. Sixteen survivors from an army of thousands.

The oath came second. First, John Winthrop had to build somewhere to take it—Dorchester was barely eight months old, still more settlement than town, still burying colonists faster than they could frame houses. He'd been elected governor while still aboard the Arbella crossing the Atlantic, but Massachusetts had no government buildings, no ceremony hall, no witness stands. Just mud and timber. So on this day in 1631, Winthrop swore in as the first Governor of Massachusetts wherever they could gather enough survivors to watch. The Puritans wanted a city on a hill. They got a governor in a clearing.

They arrived with no houses waiting for them. Over 3,000 Loyalists sailed into Parrtown's harbor in May 1783, expecting refuge from a new United States that had confiscated their farms and burned their homes. Instead: wilderness, tents, and a brutal winter ahead. Women and children outnumbered men two-to-one—most of the husbands were still serving with British regiments. Within two years, they'd built what became Canada's first incorporated city. The refugees renamed it Saint John. Their choice to stay loyal had cost them everything once. Now they'd build from nothing.

Jose Artigas led radical forces to victory over a Spanish royalist garrison at Las Piedras, winning the first major military triumph of Uruguay's independence movement. The battle galvanized resistance across the Rio de la Plata region and elevated Artigas to the status of national hero, a title Uruguay still accords him as the father of the country.

The whole trial took one day. John Bellingham shot Prime Minister Spencer Perceval in the lobby of the House of Commons on May 11th, walked calmly to a bench, and said "I am the unfortunate man." His defense? The government had ignored his pleas for compensation after he'd been wrongfully imprisoned in Russia for five years. The jury deliberated fifteen minutes. He hanged eight days after pulling the trigger—still the only British Prime Minister ever assassinated. Perceval left behind twelve children and a wife who received no state pension for three years.

Grant's men started digging trenches on May 18th knowing they'd be there for weeks. They were. Forty-seven days, actually. The Union army surrounded Vicksburg so completely that residents carved caves into hillsides to escape the artillery—some families lived underground for over a month. Confederate soldiers inside the city got so desperate they ate mules and rats. When Vicksburg finally surrendered on July 4th, it gave the Union complete control of the Mississippi River, cutting the Confederacy in half. The city didn't celebrate Independence Day again for 81 years.

Free beer and souvenir cups—that's what drew half a million Russians to Khodynka Field for Nicholas II's coronation celebration. Rumors spread that there weren't enough gifts. At dawn, the crowd surged. People fell into unguarded trenches left from military exercises. Trampled. Suffocated. 1,389 dead by morning. Nicholas wanted to cancel the festivities. His uncles convinced him to attend the French ambassador's ball that same night. He danced while families collected bodies. Russians would remember their tsar waltzing on the day of the crush for the next twenty-one years.