February 22 in History

A palace coup executed the Zhang brothers and forced Empress Wu Zetian to abdicate, restoring the Tang dynasty after fifteen years of her Zhou interregnum. Wu Zetian remains the only woman in Chinese history to hold the title of emperor in her own right, and her removal ended one of the most extraordinary — and controversial — reigns in East Asian history.

Pope Formosus crowned Arnulf of Carinthia as Holy Roman Emperor in Rome, cementing an alliance between the papacy and the Carolingian successor state. Arnulf suffered a debilitating stroke almost immediately and withdrew his army back across the Alps, leaving Rome undefended. His incapacitation triggered a power vacuum that rival Italian factions exploited for decades.

Robert II waited 55 years to become king. He was named heir in 1318 as a child. He didn't take the throne until 1371. He was 55 years old — ancient by medieval standards. His legs were so weak from old injuries he could barely walk. His advisors ran most of the government. But his bloodline mattered more than his body. The Stuarts would rule Scotland for 300 years, then England too. All from a king who could barely stand.

Galileo sent Ferdinando II the first copy of his *Dialogue* knowing exactly what he was doing. The book was written as a conversation between three men — one defending Copernicus, one defending Aristotle, and one playing dumb. The dumb one was named Simplicio. Everyone knew Simplicio was the Pope's position. Galileo had gotten approval to publish it. He'd followed the rules, added the required disclaimers. But he'd made the Pope's arguments sound idiotic. Ferdinando read it in Florence while the Vatican was reading it in Rome. Within months, Galileo was summoned to the Inquisition. The book that reached the Grand Duke first would be banned for two hundred years.

A chaotic naval engagement off Toulon saw the combined Franco-Spanish fleet escape destruction due to poor coordination among British captains, several of whom refused to break the line of battle to engage. The resulting courts-martial exposed deep flaws in Royal Navy discipline and prompted Parliament to amend the Articles of War, imposing the death penalty for captains who failed to do their utmost against the enemy.

Ebenezer Richardson panicked. The Boston customs officer was trapped in his house, protesters throwing rocks at his windows. He grabbed his musket and fired blind into the crowd. Christopher Seider, 11 years old, took the shot. He died that night. Five thousand people came to his funeral — a fifth of Boston's population. They carried his coffin through the streets for hours. Ten days later, the Boston Massacre happened. But Seider was first.

Alexander Ypsilantis crossed the Prut River at Sculeni with a ragtag force of students and intellectuals on February 22, 1821. He was a one-armed Greek general in the Russian army betting everything on a gamble: that Romanian peasants would rise up against Ottoman rule and spark a wider Greek revolution. They didn't. The Romanians stayed home. His Sacred Band of 500 volunteers got slaughtered at Drăgășani three months later. But his failed invasion did something he never intended — it triggered the real Greek War of Independence in the Peloponnese. The Greeks there saw his disaster and decided to try anyway. Sometimes the spark matters more than the flame.

Jefferson Davis took the oath of office in a driving rainstorm at Richmond, formally inaugurated as president of the Confederate States for a six-year term. The ceremony replaced his earlier provisional appointment and aimed to project legitimacy to European powers whose recognition the Confederacy desperately sought. The Union Army stood fewer than a hundred miles away.

The Prohibition Party met in Columbus and nominated James Black for president. He was a Pennsylvania lawyer nobody had heard of. They got 5,608 votes — 0.02% of the total. They ran a candidate in every presidential election for the next 148 years anyway. By 1916, they'd helped pass prohibition in 26 states. Four years later, the 18th Amendment banned alcohol nationwide. The party that couldn't win a single county changed the Constitution.

President Grover Cleveland signed the Enabling Act authorizing North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington to draft constitutions and apply for statehood, adding four stars to the American flag in a single legislative stroke. The act accelerated the political incorporation of the western frontier, granting voting representation to hundreds of thousands of settlers. Cleveland deliberately shuffled the Dakota documents so no one would know which state was admitted first.

General Antonio Luna ordered the first Filipino counterattacks against American forces on this day in 1899. His troops had been retreating for weeks. Now they pushed back toward Manila with 4,000 men. Luna was a chemist before the war — he'd studied in Europe, spoke five languages, had a temper that got him into seven duels. He believed in discipline and modern tactics. His own officers hated him for it. The counterattacks failed. Manila stayed American. But Luna kept fighting for four more months until his own men stabbed him to death at a train station. Thirty-two wounds. The Americans didn't kill him. His fellow revolutionaries did.

Britain sold its meteorological station on the South Orkney Islands to Argentina, inadvertently handing Buenos Aires a foothold in the sub-Antarctic that would fuel territorial disputes for over a century. Argentina maintained continuous occupation of the station, using it as evidence for sovereignty claims that London contested when it reasserted control over the islands in 1908. The transaction remains a footnote in the long-running dispute over Antarctic and South Atlantic territories.