January 3 in History

250 AD: Every person in the Roman Empire had to burn incense to the gods. Except Jews, who had special permission. Everyone else got a certificate proving they'd sacrificed. No certificate, no citizenship. No buying or selling in markets. Emperor Decius wanted religious unity. He got the opposite. Christians refused. They went underground. Some bought fake certificates. Others fled to the desert. Thousands died in the first empire-wide persecution. The certificates were called libelli. Archaeologists still find them. Fragments of papyrus that marked the moment Christianity became illegal. The empire that would eventually bow to Christ first tried to eliminate it entirely. Decius's edict was not specifically anti-Christian. It required every inhabitant of the empire, except Jews who had a longstanding exemption, to perform a sacrifice before local magistrates, pour a libation, and eat sacrificial meat. Those who complied received a signed certificate, the libellus, witnessed by officials. The edict was designed to restore traditional Roman religious practice during a period of military crisis, plague, and political instability. But Christians, whose theology prohibited worshiping other gods, faced an impossible choice: comply and commit apostasy, or refuse and face imprisonment, torture, or execution. The responses varied dramatically. Pope Fabian was arrested and died in prison. Bishop Cyprian of Carthage fled into hiding. Many ordinary Christians, called the lapsi or "lapsed," obtained certificates through sacrifice, through bribes, or through sympathetic magistrates who issued blank forms. The persecution lasted roughly eighteen months before Decius was killed in battle against the Goths in 251 AD, and his successor Gallus quietly dropped the policy. But the aftermath tore the Church apart: the question of how to readmit Christians who had obtained certificates consumed ecclesiastical debates for decades and produced the Novatianist schism.

The Coonan Cross stands in Mattancherry, Kerala. Portuguese missionaries had controlled Indian Christians for 150 years. They banned local customs, imposed Latin liturgy, and appointed only European bishops. On January 3rd, 1653, thousands of Christians gathered at the cross. They swore an oath: never again would they obey Portuguese religious authority.

Benning Wentworth owned 100,000 acres in New Hampshire. Not enough. As colonial governor, he started granting townships west of the Connecticut River in territory that New York also claimed. He issued 135 grants between 1749 and 1764, collecting fees for each one and reserving 500 acres in every township for himself. The grants created an immediate jurisdictional crisis. New York's charter, dating to the Duke of York's 1664 patent, defined its eastern boundary as the Connecticut River. New Hampshire's boundaries were ambiguous. Wentworth exploited the ambiguity, selling land to settlers from Connecticut and Massachusetts who wanted cheap farmland and didn't particularly care which colony administered it. King George III sided with New York in 1764, ruling that the grants fell within New York's jurisdiction. New York demanded that settlers holding New Hampshire titles repurchase their land under New York grants, often at higher prices. The settlers refused. Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys organized armed resistance, burning New York survey markers and threatening anyone who tried to enforce New York authority. The disputed territory became Vermont. During the American Revolution, Allen's militia captured Fort Ticonderoga from the British and briefly explored the possibility of Vermont becoming a separate British province if the revolution failed. Vermont declared itself an independent republic in 1777, with its own constitution that banned slavery, the first American territory to do so. It operated as a sovereign state for fourteen years before joining the Union in 1791. Wentworth's land speculation, driven purely by personal profit, created the conditions for a state.

Washington's army of 2,400 men marched through the night to Princeton, New Jersey, where they surprised 1,200 British troops in an early morning attack that lasted barely fifteen minutes before the redcoats broke and ran. Many of the American soldiers had no shoes and left bloody footprints in the snow during the forced march. The victory, coming just days after the crossing of the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton, transformed American morale, doubled enlistment rates, and convinced skeptical European powers that the Continental Army was a serious fighting force.

Austria, Britain, and France signed a secret defensive alliance on January 3, 1815, directed against Prussia and Russia. The three powers pledged to field 150,000 troops each if either Prussia or Russia attempted to impose territorial settlements by force during the Congress of Vienna negotiations. The Congress had been meeting since September 1814 to redraw the map of Europe after Napoleon's defeat. The central dispute was Poland. Tsar Alexander I wanted to create a Polish kingdom under Russian control. Prussia supported Russia's claim in exchange for all of Saxony, whose king had backed Napoleon. Austria, Britain, and France saw both demands as unacceptable expansions of power. The alliance was negotiated by Austrian foreign minister Metternich, British foreign secretary Castlereagh, and French foreign minister Talleyrand. For Talleyrand, the treaty was a diplomatic masterpiece: barely nine months after Napoleon's abdication, defeated France was treated as an equal partner in a coalition against two of the nations that had beaten it. He had maneuvered France back into the concert of European powers through pure diplomatic skill. The secret held long enough to force compromise. Russia received a smaller Polish kingdom than Alexander wanted. Prussia got two-fifths of Saxony rather than all of it. The alliance lasted until Napoleon escaped from Elba in March 1815 and marched on Paris with a growing army, at which point the five powers reassembled against their common enemy. The Hundred Days campaign ended the secret treaty's relevance, but it demonstrated how quickly wartime alliances could fracture over the spoils of peace.

Britain reasserted control over the Falkland Islands when HMS Clio arrived under Captain John Onslow's command with orders to raise the Union Jack and remove the Argentine garrison. Argentina had claimed the islands since 1820, but Britain had maintained a dormant sovereignty claim dating to the eighteenth century. Onslow informed the approximately twenty-six settlers that the islands were now under British authority and requested the Argentine flag be lowered. Argentina never accepted the loss, and the dispute over sovereignty would eventually lead to the 1982 Falklands War 149 years later.

Joseph Jenkins Roberts was born free in Virginia in 1809. His family moved to Liberia when he was 20. The American Colonization Society had founded the colony as a destination for free Black Americans, a project supported by slaveholders who wanted to remove free Black people from the United States and by some abolitionists who doubted racial integration was possible. Roberts became a merchant in Monrovia, trading in camwood, palm oil, and ivory. His commercial success and political connections elevated him quickly in the colony's small settler elite. He became lieutenant governor in 1839 and governor in 1841. When the American Colonization Society, facing financial difficulties, pushed the colony toward independence, Roberts oversaw the transition. Liberia declared independence on July 26, 1847, and Roberts became its first president. His government wrote a constitution modeled on the American one, with a notable exception: citizenship was restricted to people of African descent, excluding the indigenous population. The Americo-Liberian settlers, never more than five percent of the population, would dominate the country's politics for over a century. Roberts served as president from 1848 to 1856, navigating the difficult task of gaining international recognition for a small African republic. Britain recognized Liberia in 1848. France followed in 1852. The United States, unwilling to accredit a Black ambassador, didn't recognize Liberia until 1862. Roberts served a second term as president from 1872 to 1876 and died in 1876. The system of minority settler rule he helped establish persisted until 1980, when a military coup by indigenous Liberians overthrew the Americo-Liberian government.

General Louis Faidherbe commanded France's Army of the North, a force composed largely of National Guard volunteers and reservists, in an attack on Prussian positions at Bapaume during a January snowstorm in 1871. The Prussians, surprised by the aggression of troops they considered inferior, retreated toward Arras in one of the few French tactical victories of the Franco-Prussian War. The success lifted French morale temporarily, but Prussia's overall military superiority proved overwhelming, and France was forced to accept defeat and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine.

The Lick Observatory telescope was first used on January 3, 1888, atop Mount Hamilton in California. At 36 inches, it was the largest refracting telescope in the world. James Lick, a real estate millionaire who'd made his fortune in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, paid for it. He's buried under the telescope pier, the only person interred beneath a working observatory. Lick died in 1876 before the observatory was completed, leaving $700,000 for its construction. The 36-inch lens took Alvan Clark and Sons eighteen months to grind and polish to the required precision, a process so delicate that a single scratch or internal flaw would have required starting over. The lens pair, an objective and a corrector, weighed over 300 pounds combined. The observatory's mountaintop location at 4,209 feet, east of San Jose, was chosen for its clear skies and distance from city lights. A road had to be built to the summit, switchbacking through oak woodland and grassland for nineteen miles. The construction employed teams of laborers for several years and cost nearly as much as the telescope itself. The telescope's discoveries justified the expense immediately. In 1892, Edward Emerson Barnard used it to discover Amalthea, the fifth moon of Jupiter, the first new Jovian moon found since Galileo discovered the original four in 1610. Astronomers at Lick also made important observations of Mars, measured double stars, and contributed to early spectroscopic studies that helped determine the chemical composition of stars. The telescope remained the world's largest refractor until the Yerkes Observatory's 40-inch telescope was completed in 1897.

Two Latvian anarchists who had killed three police officers during a botched jewelry robbery in Houndsditch were cornered by police and soldiers in a house on Sidney Street in London's East End. The six-hour gun battle that followed drew Home Secretary Winston Churchill to the scene, where photographers captured him in a top hat observing the building as it caught fire and burned. The anarchists died in the blaze. Critics accused Churchill of grandstanding and inserting himself into a police operation for publicity, a charge that would follow him for years.