February 26 in History

Napoleon escaped from exile on Elba on March 1, 1815, with approximately one thousand soldiers, landed on the southern coast of France, and marched north toward Paris. Every regiment sent to stop him defected to his side instead. He reportedly approached one contingent, opened his coat, and said "Let him who wishes to kill his Emperor, fire." No one fired. Within three weeks, the restored Bourbon monarchy had collapsed and Napoleon was back in the Tuileries Palace, governing France again. The episode, known as the Hundred Days, was the most dramatic political comeback in modern European history. Louis XVIII fled Paris without a fight. The other European powers, who had exiled Napoleon just ten months earlier, immediately formed the Seventh Coalition and began mobilizing armies. Napoleon moved to strike first, invading Belgium in June to defeat the British and Prussian armies before they could combine. He came close. At Ligny on June 16, he defeated the Prussian army under Blücher, and at Quatre Bras on the same day, French forces fought Wellington's army to a standstill. But two days later, at Waterloo on June 18, 1815, the British line held long enough for Blücher's regrouped Prussians to arrive on Napoleon's flank. The result was catastrophic. The French army was destroyed. Napoleon abdicated on June 22 and attempted to flee to the United States, but British warships blockaded the port at Rochefort. He surrendered to Captain Frederick Maitland aboard HMS Bellerophon on July 15. He was exiled to Saint Helena, a remote island in the South Atlantic. He died there on May 5, 1821, at age 51.

Ptolemy needed a zero point for his astronomical tables. He chose February 26, 747 BC — the first day of King Nabonassar's reign in Babylon. Not because Nabonassar was important. He wasn't. But the Babylonians kept meticulous records of lunar eclipses from that date forward, and those records survived. Ptolemy could cross-reference them with Greek observations. That synchronization gave historians their first reliable anchor for dating ancient events. Every "in 500 BC" you've ever read traces back to Babylonian priests watching the moon 2,770 years ago.

Solomon had the throne. Géza had the people. By 1074, Hungary was split between the legitimate king and his cousin who controlled two-thirds of the country. They met at Kemej with armies. Solomon won decisively. But here's the thing about winning battles when you've already lost the kingdom: Géza retreated, regrouped, and three years later took the throne anyway. Solomon fled to the German border and spent the rest of his life trying to get back what he'd won at Kemej. He died in exile. Victory doesn't mean much if nobody follows you home.

The siege of Kaifeng killed more people than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Conservative estimates: 600,000 dead, mostly from starvation and disease. The Mongols had surrounded the city for months. People ate tree bark, then leather, then each other. When the walls finally fell in 1233, the Mongols found almost nobody left to kill. The Jin dynasty had held northern China for over a century. It ended not with a battle but with mass starvation.

Charles of Anjou's French army crushed King Manfred of Sicily at the Battle of Benevento on February 26, 1266, ending the Hohenstaufen dynasty's grip on southern Italy and reshaping the Mediterranean balance of power for a generation. Manfred, the illegitimate son of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, had ruled Sicily and southern Italy since 1258, defying papal authority and building alliances with Ghibelline factions across the Italian peninsula. Pope Clement IV, determined to destroy Hohenstaufen power, had invited Charles of Anjou to Italy and crowned him King of Sicily in advance of the battle. Charles brought a professional French army south through the Italian peninsula. Manfred assembled a mixed force of German knights, Saracen archers, and Italian cavalry. The battle turned when Manfred's Italian barons, sensing which way the fight was going, switched sides or fled. Manfred refused to retreat and died fighting, reportedly telling his commanders that he preferred death to flight. His body was found on the battlefield beneath a pile of dead. Charles had him buried under a cairn of stones at the Calore bridge, a deliberately humble grave for a fallen king. Pope Clement reportedly ordered the body exhumed and cast beyond the borders of his lands, though the truth of this story is debated. The Angevin victory transformed southern Italy. French administrators replaced German ones. Papal power reached its medieval zenith in the region. But Angevin rule was harsh and extractive, provoking the Sicilian Vespers uprising sixteen years later, when Palermo's population massacred every French person in the city in a single night. Charles of Anjou's kingdom never fully recovered.

Denmark lost half its kingdom in a single afternoon. The Treaty of Roskilde, signed February 26, 1658, handed Sweden everything it wanted: the provinces of Scania, Blekinge, Halland, and Bohuslan — the entire southern tip of what is now modern Sweden — plus the Norwegian province of Trondheim and the island of Bornholm. It was the greatest territorial loss in Danish history and the single most transformative event in Scandinavian geography. The treaty was the result of one of the most audacious military gambits in European history. In January 1658, Sweden's King Charles X Gustav led his army across the frozen straits of the Great Belt, marching troops, cavalry, and artillery across ice that everyone assumed was too thin to support them. The march covered roughly 20 kilometers of open frozen sea. If the ice had broken, the Swedish army would have drowned. It held. Copenhagen lay undefended ahead of them. King Frederick III of Denmark had no choice but to negotiate. The treaty was signed at Roskilde on February 26, with Denmark ceding approximately half its territory to avoid total conquest. Sweden became the dominant power in the Baltic virtually overnight. But the Swedes overplayed their hand. Eight months after the treaty, Charles X invaded again, apparently hoping to annex what remained of Denmark. The violation triggered international intervention. The Dutch sent a fleet. The war dragged on for two more years. Denmark recovered Bornholm and Trondheim but never got back the southern provinces. Scania, which had been Danish for a thousand years, became permanently Swedish. The border drawn in 1658 remains essentially unchanged today.

The British East India Company's factory on Balambangan Island lasted exactly four years. They'd set it up in 1771 off the coast of Borneo, convinced it would become the next Singapore. Instead, in 1775, Moro pirates from the Sulu Sultanate sailed in and burned it to the ground. They killed most of the garrison and took the survivors as slaves. The Company abandoned the island entirely. They wouldn't try again in the region for another 50 years. Britain's first attempt at controlling Southeast Asian trade routes ended with an empty island and a lesson about underestimating local power.

Alfred Beach built a subway under Broadway without telling New York City's government. He had applied for a permit to construct a pneumatic mail delivery tube beneath the street. What he actually built was a passenger railway. The tunnel ran 312 feet from Warren Street to Murray Street, just one block, but it was the world's first demonstration that underground passenger transit was feasible. Beach's pneumatic transit system used a massive fan — the Roots Patent Force Blast Blower — to push a single elegant wooden car through the cylindrical tunnel on a cushion of air, and then reversed the fan to pull it back. The car seated twenty-two passengers. Beach spent $350,000 of his own money on the project and supervised the construction in secret over fifty-eight nights, smuggling dirt out of the tunnel in bags. The waiting room was designed to impress investors and politicians: it featured a fountain, a grandfather clock, a goldfish tank, a grand piano, and frescoed walls illuminated by gaslights. The system opened to the public on February 26, 1870, and was an immediate sensation. Roughly 400,000 New Yorkers paid twenty-five cents each to ride it in the first year, with all proceeds going to charity. Beach wanted to extend the line to Central Park, but Boss Tweed controlled the city's surface transit franchises and had no intention of allowing a competitor underground. Tweed blocked every expansion permit. When Tweed fell from power, Beach finally got legislative approval, but by then the economic panic of 1873 had dried up investment. The tunnel was sealed and forgotten. Workers rediscovered it in 1912 while excavating for the BMT Broadway Line, finding Beach's car still inside.

Japan forced Korea to sign the Treaty of Ganghwa after sailing warships into Korean waters and staging a fake battle to provoke conflict. Korea had been closed to foreign trade for two centuries. The treaty gave Japanese citizens immunity from Korean law, opened three ports, and severed Korea's tributary relationship with China. Korea got nothing in return. The terms were modeled on the unequal treaties Western powers had imposed on Japan two decades earlier. Japan was doing to Korea exactly what had been done to them. Within 35 years, Japan would annex Korea entirely. The treaty wasn't negotiation. It was rehearsal.

George Lohmann took eight wickets in a single Test innings at the Sydney Cricket Ground on February 25, 1887, the first bowler in cricket history to achieve the feat. He was twenty-one years old, representing England against Australia in the second match of the Ashes series. His figures were remarkable: 8 wickets for 35 runs in 36.3 overs of sustained medium-pace bowling. The Australians, batting first, were dismissed for 119. England won the match by 13 runs in what became a tightly contested encounter. Lohmann's bowling was characterized by devastating accuracy, subtle changes of pace, and the ability to make the ball move off the pitch in ways that batsmen found almost impossible to read. He played for Surrey in county cricket and represented England in 18 Test matches over a career that was cut tragically short. His career bowling average of 10.75 runs per wicket remains the best in Test cricket history among bowlers who played a significant number of matches. Nobody who has bowled more than 20 Test innings has come close to matching it. The record that made him famous at Sydney — eight wickets in an innings — was surpassed just two years later. But his career average, accumulated across 112 wickets in 18 Tests, has proven untouchable for more than 130 years. Lohmann suffered from tuberculosis and spent his later years seeking treatment in South Africa's drier climate. He died in Matjiesfontein in 1901 at the age of thirty-six, far from the English grounds where he had been the most feared bowler of his generation.

Kinemacolor worked by filming through red and green filters at 32 frames per second — twice the normal speed. Then projecting through the same filters, fast enough that your brain blended them into full color. Except it didn't quite work. Actors who moved quickly left red and green ghosts trailing behind them. The system died by 1914. But for five years, audiences paid double to watch dancers shimmer and flags wave in something close to the colors they'd only imagined on screen.

The first jazz recording was made by five white musicians from New Orleans who spelled the genre "jass." The Original Dixieland Jass Band walked into Victor Talking Machine Company's New York studio on February 26, 1917, and cut "Livery Stable Blues" backed with "Dixie Jass Band One-Step." The record sold over a million copies and introduced the sound of New Orleans to Americans who'd never been south of Philadelphia. The band's leader, Nick LaRocca, spent the rest of his life claiming his group had invented jazz — a claim that infuriated Black musicians across the South who knew the truth. The real originators of jazz could not get recording contracts in 1917. Buddy Bolden, widely credited as the first jazz musician, never made a recording and spent his last twenty-four years in a mental institution. Jelly Roll Morton, who had been playing jazz in New Orleans since at least 1902, didn't record until 1923. King Oliver, who trained Louis Armstrong, recorded his first sides in 1923 as well. The technology to preserve their art existed. The willingness to record Black artists did not. Victor and Columbia Records saw commercial potential in jazz but initially wanted white performers to deliver it to a white audience. The ODJB was energetic, entertaining, and safe enough for mainstream America. Their recordings are historically significant as artifacts but musically modest compared to what Black jazz musicians were playing live in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York at the same time. The sound that defined American music in the twentieth century entered the historical record through performers who had adapted it, not the ones who created it. The argument over credit has continued for more than a century.