February 24 in History

King Huneric didn't just persecute bishops — he went after the money men too. In 484, the Vandal ruler expelled Christian bishops across North Africa and shipped some to Corsica. But he reserved special attention for merchants who funded the orthodox church. Victorian, a former proconsul turned trader, was executed at Hadrumetum alongside Frumentius and other businessmen. Their crime: refusing to convert to Arianism, the state-approved version of Christianity that denied Christ's full divinity. Huneric understood something Rome had known for centuries. You don't break a movement by attacking its leaders. You break it by destroying its supply chain.

The English brought 30,000 men to Roslin. The Scots had 8,000. But the English arrived in three separate columns, hours apart. The Scots attacked each one before the next showed up — three battles in one day, all won. By nightfall, they'd captured commanders, horses, supply trains. The English never figured out they'd been fighting the same Scottish force three times. Sometimes timing beats numbers.

John Zápolya and Ferdinand I had been killing each other's soldiers for eleven years over who ruled Hungary. The Ottomans controlled the middle third of the country and watched. At Nagyvárad, they agreed: Zápolya keeps his crown until he dies, then Ferdinand gets everything. Zápolya's infant son got nothing. One year later, Zápolya's son was born. He lived. The treaty fell apart before Zápolya's body was cold.

George Frideric Handel wrote Rinaldo in two weeks. The three-hour opera contained forty arias, and Handel composed it at a pace that astonished even his contemporaries. He recycled melodies from earlier work — borrowing an aria wholesale from a cantata he'd written years before in Italy — but the assembled work was greater than its parts. Rinaldo premiered at the Queen's Theatre in London on February 24, 1711, becoming the first Italian-language opera written specifically for the English stage. The production was spectacular by the standards of the day. Live sparrows were released during the garden scene, a choice that delighted audiences and outraged critics who thought opera should be about music, not birds. Joseph Addison's satirical review in The Spectator mocked the staging mercilessly, but the public ignored him. Handel staged Rinaldo fifteen times in its first season, an extraordinary run that established Italian opera as a permanent feature of London's cultural life. Handel himself had been in London for less than three months when the premiere occurred. He'd arrived from Hanover as a relatively unknown German composer and became the city's most celebrated musician almost overnight. The opera's hit aria, "Lascia ch'io pianga," remains one of the most performed pieces in the operatic repertoire three centuries later. Rinaldo launched Handel's four-decade career in England, during which he would compose Messiah, the Water Music, and dozens of other works that defined the Baroque era. London's embrace of Italian opera, which began with those fifteen performances, would shape English musical culture for the next century.

Nadir Shah's Persian cavalry routed the Mughal army at the Battle of Karnal on February 24, 1739, in barely three hours of fighting. Emperor Muhammad Shah had assembled an army of perhaps 300,000 men, but its size disguised critical weaknesses: the Mughal forces were poorly coordinated, commanded by nobles more interested in protecting their personal retinues than executing a battle plan, and utterly unprepared for Nadir Shah's disciplined cavalry tactics. The Persian forces numbered roughly 55,000 but fought as a unified army under a single ruthless commander. Nadir Shah captured Muhammad Shah himself on the battlefield and forced him to march to Delhi as a hostage. The sacking of the Mughal capital that followed was one of the most devastating acts of plunder in history. Nadir Shah stripped India of the Peacock Throne — the jewel-encrusted seat of Mughal power that had taken seven years to build — and the Koh-i-Noor diamond, then the largest known diamond in the world. The total value of treasure carried back to Persia was so enormous that Nadir Shah exempted his subjects from taxation for three years. The invasion shattered what remained of Mughal imperial prestige. While the Mughal dynasty technically continued until the British formally abolished it in 1858, Karnal marked the point of no return. Regional governors and local rulers who had maintained at least nominal loyalty to Delhi began acting as independent sovereigns. The power vacuum created by Mughal weakness invited further foreign intervention, from the Afghans under Ahmad Shah Durrani to the British East India Company, which would exploit India's fragmentation to build its own empire.

Mexico won independence because two enemies made a deal. Agustín de Iturbide had been hunting Vicente Guerrero for years — Spanish loyalist chasing rebel leader through the mountains. Then Iturbide switched sides. They met in February 1821 and wrote the Plan of Iguala together: Mexico becomes a monarchy, Catholicism stays, everyone gets equal rights. Three guarantees. The Army of the Three Guarantees formed from their combined forces. Spain signed the treaty six months later. The man who'd been trying to kill Guerrero became Emperor. Guerrero became President. Neither guarantee lasted.

The Choctaw ceded 11 million acres of land east of the Mississippi River under the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, proclaimed on March 24, 1831. It was the first removal treaty executed under the Indian Removal Act that Andrew Jackson had signed into law the previous year, and it established the template for the ethnic cleansing of the southeastern United States. The treaty negotiations took place over three days in September 1830 at a site in Noxubee County, Mississippi. U.S. commissioners arrived with whiskey, threats, and promises. The majority of Choctaw leaders opposed the treaty and left the negotiations in protest. Those who remained and signed were offered personal land grants, cash payments, and political positions. The tribe as a whole received $15,000 total and land in what is now southeastern Oklahoma, territory the government promised would be theirs "as long as grass grows and water runs." Within three years of the treaty's ratification, roughly 15,000 Choctaw were forced to march westward, mostly on foot, during winter months. The government provided almost nothing: no food, no shelter, no medical care. Approximately one-third of the deportees died on the route from disease, exposure, and starvation. A Choctaw leader described the march as a "trail of tears and death," a phrase that would later be applied to the Cherokee removal of 1838. The land the Choctaw were promised as a permanent homeland was progressively reduced through subsequent treaties and federal actions. The "forever" guarantee lasted less than 20 years. Five more southeastern tribes would follow the same path of forced removal, and the Choctaw experience served as the grim prototype for each one.

Grieg hated writing the Peer Gynt music. Ibsen kept demanding trolls and wedding dances. Grieg called the play "the most unmusical subject" he'd ever encountered. He finished it anyway. The première in Christiania used 90 musicians. "In the Hall of the Mountain King" — now one of the most recognizable pieces in classical music — was background noise for a scene about trolls trying to eat the protagonist. Grieg never thought anyone would remember it.

Armed revolt erupted in the town of Baire near Santiago de Cuba on February 24, 1895, igniting the Cuban War of Independence against Spain. The uprising was coordinated by Jose Marti, the poet, essayist, and revolutionary leader who had spent years in exile organizing the independence movement from New York City. Marti had founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892 and spent three years raising money, smuggling weapons, and unifying the fractious exile community behind a coherent plan. The Grito de Baire was the signal for simultaneous uprisings across eastern Cuba. Not all of them materialized, and the early fighting went poorly. Spanish forces suppressed several of the initial revolts within days. Marti himself landed in Cuba in April and was killed in a skirmish at Dos Rios on May 19, just weeks into the conflict. His death robbed the revolution of its intellectual leader but turned him into a martyr whose legend galvanized the movement. The war that followed was brutal. Spain sent 200,000 troops and implemented a reconcentration policy that herded Cuban civilians into camps, where tens of thousands died from disease and starvation. The guerrilla campaign dragged on for three years, devastating the Cuban economy and exhausting Spanish resources. The United States watched from across the Florida Strait with increasing agitation. When the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor in February 1898, America entered the conflict, transforming it into the Spanish-American War. Spain's defeat ended four centuries of colonial presence in the Americas and launched the United States as an imperial power in the Caribbean and Pacific.

The Governor-General of Korea opened Jahyewon clinic on Sorokdo Island in 1916. It wasn't a hospital. It was a prison disguised as medical care. Hansen's disease patients were forcibly removed from their families and shipped to the island. No trial. No appeal. Just a diagnosis and a boat. The clinic performed forced sterilizations and vasectomies on patients — over 6,000 procedures by the 1940s. Japan called it public health policy. The patients called it what it was: elimination by another name. Sorokdo became the largest Hansen's disease colony in Asia. Some patients lived there for seventy years. The island is still there. So are the graves.

British intelligence intercepted Germany's most catastrophic diplomatic blunder on January 16, 1917, but didn't hand it to the U.S. ambassador in London until February 24. The Zimmermann Telegram was a coded message from German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann to the German ambassador in Mexico, proposing a military alliance against the United States. If America entered World War I, Germany would help Mexico reconquer Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico — territories lost in the Mexican-American War seventy years earlier. British codebreakers in Room 40 of the Admiralty decoded the telegram but faced a problem: revealing it would expose that they had cracked Germany's diplomatic codes. They spent weeks constructing a cover story, arranging for the telegram to appear to have been intercepted in Mexico rather than decoded in London. The British handed the message to U.S. Ambassador Walter Hines Page on February 24. President Wilson released it to the press on March 1. American public opinion, which had been deeply divided on entering the European war, shifted dramatically. Zimmermann then committed one of the great own-goals in diplomatic history: instead of denying the telegram's authenticity, he confirmed it publicly, apparently believing his proposal was perfectly reasonable. Congress declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, less than six weeks later. The telegram wasn't the only cause, but it was the catalyst that made intervention politically possible. Germany's attempt to keep America out of the war became the thing that brought America in.