December 20 in History

The most famous warrior-king in Christendom was seized while traveling in disguise through enemy territory. On December 20, 1192, Richard I of England was captured near Vienna by Duke Leopold V of Austria, beginning over a year of captivity that drained the English treasury and nearly cost Richard his kingdom. Richard was returning from the Third Crusade, where he had fought Saladin to a truce granting Christian pilgrims access to Jerusalem. The overland journey was perilous because Richard had insulted Leopold by tearing down the Austrian banner at the siege of Acre and antagonized Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI by supporting his rivals in Sicily. Traveling in disguise with a handful of companions, Richard was recognized and arrested at an inn near Vienna. Leopold imprisoned him at Durnstein Castle, then transferred him to Emperor Henry VI, who saw an opportunity for ransom and political leverage. The ransom demanded was staggering: 150,000 marks of silver, roughly three times the annual revenue of the English crown. Richard's mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, organized the collection, imposing heavy taxes on every level of society. Churches donated silver plate. Cistercian monasteries gave their wool clip. Meanwhile, Richard's brother John and King Philip II of France conspired to keep him imprisoned, reportedly offering Henry money to hold Richard indefinitely. Richard was released on February 4, 1194, after fourteen months of captivity. He reasserted his authority over John and spent his remaining five years fighting Philip in France. The ransom left England financially weakened for years, demonstrating that even a Crusader king was vulnerable to ordinary medieval politics.

The United States doubled in size for about four cents an acre. On December 20, 1803, the French tricolor was lowered and the American flag raised in the Place d'Armes in New Orleans, completing the formal transfer of the Louisiana Territory from France to the United States. The 828,000 square miles of land, stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, represented the largest peaceful acquisition of territory in history. The purchase was Napoleon Bonaparte's decision, and it stunned everyone involved. President Thomas Jefferson had sent James Monroe and Robert Livingston to Paris with instructions to buy New Orleans and possibly West Florida for up to ten million dollars. Napoleon, facing renewed war with Britain and the collapse of his Caribbean empire after the Haitian Revolution, offered the entire Louisiana Territory for fifteen million dollars. The American negotiators, exceeding their authority by an enormous margin, agreed within days. Jefferson faced a constitutional dilemma. Nothing in the Constitution explicitly authorized the president to acquire foreign territory. The strict constructionist who had argued for limited federal power found himself exercising power that would have horrified him if wielded by anyone else. He briefly considered a constitutional amendment but abandoned the idea when advisors warned that delay might cause Napoleon to change his mind. The Senate ratified the treaty on October 20, 1803, by a vote of twenty-four to seven. Spain transferred Louisiana back to France on November 30, and France transferred it to the United States twenty days later. The French prefect who presided reportedly wept as the tricolor came down. The purchase added territory that would eventually comprise all or part of fifteen states. Jefferson dispatched Lewis and Clark the following spring. The acquisition ensured that the United States would become a continental power stretching to the Pacific within half a century.

The United States invaded Panama with 27,000 troops to arrest one man. On December 20, 1989, Operation Just Cause began at 1:00 AM as American forces attacked military targets across Panama City, deposed dictator Manuel Noriega, and installed democratically elected president Guillermo Endara. The operation was the largest American military action since Vietnam and the first combat use of the F-117 stealth fighter. Noriega had been a CIA asset for decades, providing intelligence on leftist movements in Central America while consolidating power. By the late 1980s, federal grand juries had indicted him on drug trafficking charges. Noriega annulled a May 1989 election won by Endara, and his thugs publicly beat the opposition vice president before television cameras. When an off-duty Marine was killed at a roadblock in December, President George H.W. Bush authorized the invasion. The assault combined special operations raids, airborne drops, and conventional attacks on twenty-seven objectives simultaneously. Navy SEALs disabled Noriega's jet and attacked a patrol boat, losing four men. Rangers parachuted onto the PDF garrison at Rio Hato. The 82nd Airborne secured key infrastructure while mechanized infantry assaulted the Comandancia, the PDF headquarters. The firefight ignited the adjacent El Chorrillo neighborhood, destroying hundreds of homes. Noriega evaded capture for four days before seeking asylum at the Vatican embassy. American forces surrounded the building and blasted rock music at deafening volume. Noriega surrendered on January 3, 1990, was flown to Miami, tried, and convicted of drug trafficking. Official U.S. casualties were twenty-three killed and 325 wounded. Panamanian military casualties numbered roughly 315, but civilian deaths remain disputed, with estimates ranging from 200 to over 1,000.

Samuel Slater carried the secrets of British industrialization in his head and built America's first successful cotton mill from memory. On December 20, 1790, Slater's mill began operations in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, using water-powered machinery replicating the spinning technology of Richard Arkwright's English factories. British law made it a crime to export textile machinery or technical drawings, so Slater emigrated with nothing but his knowledge. Slater had apprenticed for six years under Jedediah Strutt, a partner of Arkwright and one of England's leading cotton manufacturers. He learned every aspect of the water-frame spinning system, from roller design to factory layout. At twenty-one, seeing an advertisement from American merchants seeking someone who could build Arkwright-style machinery, he decided to cross the Atlantic. Arriving in New York in 1789, Slater contacted Moses Brown, a wealthy Rhode Island merchant who had been attempting to mechanize cotton spinning. Brown had purchased crude spinning equipment, but no one in America knew how to operate it. Slater examined the machinery, declared it worthless, and offered to build new equipment from scratch. Working from memory with local craftsmen, Slater constructed a water-powered carding and spinning system beside the Blackstone River. The mill employed nine children between ages seven and twelve to tend the machines, establishing a pattern of child labor that would characterize American textile manufacturing for the next century. Slater's mill proved immediately profitable. Within a decade he owned multiple factories, and his system spread throughout New England. The technology transfer he accomplished launched the American Industrial Revolution, transforming the nation from an agricultural economy into a manufacturing power within two generations. The British called him "Slater the Traitor." Americans called him the Father of Manufacturing.

John Steinbeck died on December 20, 1968, in New York, at sixty-six. The FBI had kept a file on him for thirty years. His novels made powerful people uncomfortable, not in the abstract, but specific powerful people: the ones who ran the camps where Dust Bowl migrants worked for pennies, the ones who owned the canneries in Monterey, the ones who profited from the systems he described. The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939, followed the Joad family from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to the California labor camps, documenting exploitation so precisely that California growers tried to ban the book. They burned copies. They demanded libraries remove it. Eleanor Roosevelt publicly defended it. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and has never gone out of print. Of Mice and Men, published two years earlier, became one of the most banned and most taught books in American education, a combination that suggests the people who fear literature and the people who teach it have identified the same power in the same text. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, a decision that surprised him and irritated some critics who considered his best work behind him. The Swedish Academy cited his "realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, he drew his material from the agricultural communities of the Salinas Valley, where he worked as a ranch hand and laborer during summers. His other major works include East of Eden, Cannery Row, and The Winter of Our Discontent. He never quite believed he deserved the Nobel. The books suggest otherwise.

After five months of siege, the last Crusader stronghold in the eastern Mediterranean fell to the Ottoman Empire. On December 20, 1522, Suleiman the Magnificent accepted the surrender of the Knights Hospitaller on Rhodes, ending two centuries of Christian military presence in the Aegean. In a gesture of chivalric respect, Suleiman allowed the surviving knights and civilians to depart with their weapons and possessions. The Knights of St. John had held Rhodes since 1310, transforming the island into a fortified base from which they raided Ottoman shipping and sheltered Christian corsairs. Their presence was a perpetual irritation, sitting astride crucial sea lanes connecting Constantinople to Egypt and the Levant. Suleiman launched his campaign in June 1522 with roughly 400 ships and perhaps 100,000 men. Grand Master Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam commanded only 7,000 defenders, including 500 knights. The fortifications had been extensively modernized, and the defenses proved formidable. Ottoman engineers dug miles of trenches and tunnels, attempting to breach the walls through mining while artillery pounded from above. Multiple assaults were repulsed with heavy losses. But the defenders were hopelessly outnumbered, received no reinforcements from Christian Europe despite desperate appeals, and suffered from dwindling supplies. A Portuguese knight convicted of passing information to the Ottomans weakened the defense further. With ammunition exhausted and the population starving, L'Isle-Adam negotiated terms on December 20. Suleiman, who had lost an estimated 50,000 men, granted generous conditions. The knights sailed to Crete, then wandered the Mediterranean for seven years before Emperor Charles V granted them Malta in 1530. As the Knights of Malta, they faced Suleiman again at the Great Siege of 1565.