February 22 in History

A palace coup executed the Zhang brothers and forced Empress Wu Zetian to abdicate on February 22, 705, 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, a distinction that no subsequent woman achieved despite the vast sweep of imperial history. Born in 624, she entered Emperor Taizong's court as a concubine at fourteen and, after his death, maneuvered her way into the favor of his successor, Emperor Gaozong. She rose from concubine to empress consort by systematically eliminating her rivals, allegedly smothering her own infant daughter and blaming a competing consort for the death. She ruled effectively as regent after Gaozong suffered a stroke and then deposed her own sons to establish the Zhou dynasty in 690. Her reign was marked by ruthless political control, including an extensive secret police network and a system of copper boxes placed across the empire where citizens could submit anonymous accusations against officials and rivals. She also expanded the civil service examination system, opening government careers to men of talent regardless of aristocratic background, and her patronage of Buddhism produced some of the finest religious art in Chinese history. By 705, she was over eighty and seriously ill, and the Zhang brothers, her young male favorites, had accumulated so much power that senior officials feared they would attempt to seize the throne. The coup leaders killed the Zhangs and surrounded her residence. She accepted the inevitable and ceded the throne to her son, who restored the Tang dynasty. She died later that year. Her tomb marker, by her own instruction, was left blank.

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 was inaugurated for a full six-year term as President of the Confederate States of America on February 22, 1862, in Richmond, Virginia, in a driving rainstorm that many observers noted seemed like an inauspicious omen. He had previously been inaugurated as provisional president in Montgomery, Alabama, on February 18, 1861. The Richmond ceremony replaced the provisional appointment with a constitutional one, giving the Confederacy the appearance of governmental legitimacy it desperately needed for European diplomatic recognition. Davis gave his address standing in the rain without an umbrella, projecting resilience while the Union Army stood fewer than a hundred miles to the north. His speech emphasized the Confederacy's desire for peaceful independence and its determination to resist Northern aggression. He compared the Confederate cause to the American Revolution, casting the seceding states as colonies fighting for self-determination against an overreaching central government. The comparison required omitting the central reason for secession. The election had been uncontested: Davis ran unopposed because the Confederacy's constitution limited the president to a single six-year term, and wartime conditions made partisan politics impractical. The ceremony established Richmond as the permanent Confederate capital and gave Davis the constitutional authority to prosecute a war that had already been raging for ten months. The full term he was inaugurated to serve would never be completed.

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 Omnibus Enabling Act on February 22, 1889, authorizing North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington to draft constitutions and apply for admission as states to the Union. The legislation added four stars to the American flag in a single stroke, accelerating the political incorporation of the American West at a moment when the frontier was closing and statehood carried significant implications for the balance of power in the United States Senate. Each new state meant two new senators, and the Republican Party, which controlled Congress, calculated that the western territories would send Republicans to Washington. They were largely correct. The Dakota Territory presented a unique problem: it was to be divided into two states, but the rivalry between the northern and southern halves was so intense that neither wanted to be second. Cleveland solved this by deliberately shuffling the two Dakota statehood proclamations before signing them, so that no one would ever know which state was admitted first. The proclamations were covered by a sheet of paper as he signed. He never looked at which one he was signing. Both North and South Dakota claim November 2, 1889, as their admission date. The alphabetical convention places North Dakota as the 39th state and South Dakota as the 40th, but this ordering has no constitutional or legal basis. The president who signed them into existence made certain that the question could never be definitively answered.

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.

The United Kingdom sold its meteorological station on Laurie Island in the South Orkney Islands to Argentina on February 22, 1904, in a transaction that seemed routine at the time but created a territorial claim that would fuel disputes for over a century. The station had been established by a Scottish expedition and operated for barely a year before Britain decided the remote outpost wasn't worth maintaining. Argentina purchased the equipment and facilities and began operating the station continuously, establishing the longest unbroken human presence in the Antarctic region. When Britain formally claimed the South Orkney Islands in 1908 as part of the Falkland Islands Dependencies, Argentina protested, pointing to its continuous occupation of the meteorological station as evidence of effective sovereignty. The dispute became part of the broader argument between Britain and Argentina over territorial claims in the South Atlantic and Antarctic regions, an argument that would eventually contribute to the Falklands War of 1982. The sale was never a formal cession of sovereignty. Britain maintained that selling scientific equipment didn't transfer territorial rights. Argentina maintained that continuous occupation and administration demonstrated effective control. The Orcadas Base, as Argentina's station came to be known, has operated without interruption since 1904, making it the oldest continuously occupied research station in Antarctica. A routine real estate transaction became a sovereignty dispute that outlived everyone involved in the original sale.