November 27 in History

A French pope stood before a crowd in an open field in Clermont, southern France, and delivered one of the most consequential speeches in human history. Pope Urban II, addressing the Council of Clermont on November 27, 1095, called upon the knights of Christendom to march east, liberate Jerusalem from Muslim control, and reclaim the Holy Sepulchre. The crowd's response, according to chroniclers, was a thunderous shout: "Deus vult!" — God wills it. Urban's motives were layered and strategic. The Byzantine emperor Alexios I had appealed to Western Christendom for military assistance against the Seljuk Turks, who had conquered much of Anatolia after their victory at Manzikert in 1071. Urban saw an opportunity to reunite the Western and Eastern churches, which had split in 1054, while channeling Europe's violent warrior class toward an external enemy. He also offered an unprecedented spiritual incentive: remission of all sins for those who took the cross. The response exceeded anything Urban anticipated. He had appealed to nobles and trained knights, but the message spread uncontrollably through popular preaching. Peter the Hermit raised a chaotic "People's Crusade" of peasants that massacred Jewish communities along the Rhine before being annihilated by the Turks. The organized crusader armies, numbering perhaps 60,000, departed in August 1096 under leaders including Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond of Toulouse, and Bohemond of Taranto. The First Crusade succeeded where subsequent crusades would fail. Jerusalem fell on July 15, 1099, accompanied by a massacre of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. The crusader states established in the Levant survived for nearly two centuries. Urban's speech launched an era of religious warfare that scarred relations between Christianity and Islam for a millennium.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, died of uterine cancer on November 27, 1852, at the age of 36, the same age at which her father, the poet Lord Byron, had died. She left behind a small body of published work, one piece of which would earn her recognition, more than a century later, as the first computer programmer in history. Her notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine contained what is now considered the first algorithm designed for machine execution. Ada Byron was raised by her mother, who separated from Lord Byron a month after Ada's birth and was determined that her daughter pursue mathematics rather than poetry. The strategy worked, though Ada's mathematical imagination retained a distinctly poetic quality. She was tutored by some of Britain's finest mathematicians and became fascinated by Babbage's mechanical computing engines after meeting him at a London party in 1833, when she was seventeen. Babbage's Analytical Engine existed only as a design, never built in his lifetime. In 1843, Ada translated an Italian mathematician's description of the engine and appended her own notes, three times longer than the original article. Note G contained a detailed method for calculating Bernoulli numbers, complete with step-by-step instructions and a diagram resembling what we now call a computer program. More remarkably, she speculated that the engine could manipulate symbols beyond numbers, anticipating the general-purpose computer by a century. Her contributions were largely forgotten until Alan Turing referenced the "Lady Lovelace's Objection" in his 1950 paper on artificial intelligence. The U.S. Department of Defense named its programming language Ada in her honor in 1979. Whether she or Babbage deserves primary credit for the algorithm remains debated, but her vision of computing as something beyond calculation was entirely her own.

Alfred Nobel sat in the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris on November 27, 1895, and signed a will that surprised everyone who knew him. The man who had built his fortune on dynamite and military explosives directed that his estate, roughly 31 million Swedish kronor, be used to establish annual prizes for outstanding contributions to physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. Nobel died the following year, and his family immediately contested the will. Nobel's motivations have been debated ever since. A popular story holds that a French newspaper mistakenly published his obituary when his brother Ludvig died in 1888, headlining it "The Merchant of Death Is Dead." Whether or not this incident occurred, Nobel was aware that his legacy was entangled with destruction. He held 355 patents and founded 90 factories, but his most profitable inventions were instruments of war. He was also a melancholy, literary man who corresponded with Bertha von Suttner, a leading pacifist who may have influenced the peace prize. The will was remarkably vague on logistics. Nobel specified the categories and that awards should go to those who conferred the "greatest benefit to humankind" but provided no selection mechanism. His executors spent five years battling Nobel's relatives and skeptical institutions. The Nobel Foundation was created in 1900, and the first prizes were awarded on December 10, 1901, the fifth anniversary of Nobel's death. The prizes became the world's most recognized measure of intellectual achievement. The Peace Prize, awarded in Oslo while the others are given in Stockholm, has been the most controversial. Nobel's fortune, converted to a managed endowment, has funded over 600 prizes. His name, once synonymous with explosives, now means excellence.

French sailors opened the seacocks and detonated scuttling charges aboard 77 vessels in Toulon harbor, sending the bulk of France's remaining fleet to the bottom rather than allow it to fall into German hands. The scuttling on November 27, 1942, was an act of defiance and despair, destroying ships that neither Free France nor Vichy France nor Nazi Germany would ever use. The crisis was triggered by Operation Anton, Hitler's order to occupy all of Vichy France in response to the Allied landings in North Africa on November 8, 1942. Until that point, southern France had been governed by the Vichy regime under Marshal Pétain, and the powerful fleet at Toulon remained under Vichy control. Hitler feared the fleet would sail to join the Allies and ordered German forces to seize it. The Vichy admiralty had standing orders to scuttle rather than surrender. German troops reached Toulon before dawn on November 27. Admiral Jean de Laborde initially hesitated, hoping to negotiate. When German tanks rolled into the naval base, the order was given. Three battleships, seven cruisers, fifteen destroyers, thirteen torpedo boats, six sloops, twelve submarines, nine patrol boats, and dozens of auxiliary vessels were sunk or destroyed. Five submarines escaped to Allied-controlled North Africa. Most of the surface fleet went down in the harbor. The scuttling eliminated Vichy's last bargaining chip. Germany and Italy salvaged some vessels, but none saw meaningful service. The Allied command, which had hoped the fleet might defect, was disappointed but recognized the act's symbolic weight. The French navy's self-destruction was simultaneously a failure of diplomacy and a final assertion of sovereignty by sailors who chose the sea floor over the swastika.

Dan White climbed through a basement window of San Francisco's City Hall to avoid the metal detectors at the front entrance. He carried a loaded .38 revolver and ten extra rounds. On November 27, 1978, White walked into Mayor George Moscone's office and shot him four times, then reloaded and walked to the office of Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California history, and shot him five times. Both men died within minutes. White had resigned his seat on the Board of Supervisors nine days earlier, then asked Moscone to reappoint him. Moscone, under pressure from Milk and other progressives, decided to appoint someone else. White, a former police officer and firefighter, viewed the rejection as a personal and political humiliation. He represented a conservative district and had clashed repeatedly with Milk on issues including a gay rights ordinance. The murders sent shockwaves through San Francisco and the national gay rights movement. Milk had anticipated the possibility of assassination, recording a tape stating: "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door." Dianne Feinstein announced the deaths from the steps of City Hall, her voice breaking. That evening, an estimated 30,000 people marched in candlelight from the Castro district to City Hall. White's trial produced voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder. His defense argued that depression and junk food had diminished his capacity, a strategy dubbed the "Twinkie defense." The lenient sentence sparked the White Night riots as thousands stormed City Hall and burned police cars. White served five years and committed suicide in 1985. Milk's assassination galvanized the gay rights movement, transforming him into a national symbol.