March 10 in History

In 1975, during the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese troops attacked Ban Me Thuot, a strategic move that ultimately led to the fall of Saigon. This event marked a significant escalation in the conflict and foreshadowed the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Maximian rode into Carthage celebrating victory over the Berbers, but he'd actually spent five years struggling to control tribes who knew every mountain pass and desert route better than his legions ever could. The emperor needed this triumph — back in Rome, his co-emperor Diocletian was the strategic genius, leaving Maximian to prove himself through constant warfare. He'd resorted to scorched-earth tactics across Mauretania, burning villages and displacing entire populations just to claim he'd "pacified" the region. Within a decade, those same Berber groups would be raiding Roman territory again, and Maximian would be dead by suicide, forced out by the very power-sharing system he'd helped create. His grand entrance into Carthage wasn't a victory lap — it was an aging soldier desperately trying to justify his half of an empire.

The bishop ran out of wind. Fray Tomás de Berlanga was sailing from Panama to Peru in 1535 when his ship hit the doldrums — dead calm for six days straight. Ocean currents dragged them 500 miles off course to volcanic rocks nobody knew existed. His crew found giant tortoises so tame they could ride them, and birds that didn't fly away when approached. Berlanga wrote to Spain's King Charles V describing the islands as worthless — no fresh water, barely any vegetation, utterly useless for colonization. He couldn't have known those same fearless creatures would help Darwin crack the code of evolution three centuries later. Sometimes the most important discoveries are the ones nobody wanted to make.

The pretender won because his enemy's spiritual leader insisted on joining the battlefield. Abuna Petros II, patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, rode alongside Yaqob's forces at Gol in Gojjam—an unprecedented move that backfired spectacularly. When Susenyos I's army crushed them in 1607, he didn't just claim the throne. He captured the church's highest authority. For the next decade, Susenyos would use this victory to attempt something no Ethiopian emperor had dared: converting his ancient Christian empire to Catholicism, triggering civil wars that nearly destroyed the kingdom. Sometimes the greatest threat to a throne isn't the rival army—it's the holy man who thinks God fights on his side.

He was twenty-two and everyone expected him to appoint another minister to run France. Instead, Louis XIV shocked his court by announcing he'd rule alone — no prime minister, no regent, just him. The next morning, he made officials report directly to him in his bedchamber, forcing dukes and princes to wait like servants. His finance minister Nicolas Fouquet threw a lavish party at his château three months later to impress the young king. Bad move. Louis had him arrested for embezzlement and spent the next fifty years building Versailles to dwarf anything a subject could own. Turns out the best way to control aristocrats wasn't execution — it was making them compete for the privilege of watching you wake up.

The Persian upstart who'd crowned himself shah was so terrifying that Russia — fresh off decades of expansion — simply handed back the Caspian. Nadir Shah had spent just three years reconquering territories the Safavids lost, and near Ganja in 1735, Russian negotiators agreed to withdraw from Baku and Derbent without a single major battle. Peter the Great's hard-won southern gains? Gone. Nadir's reputation alone was enough to make Catherine I's government retreat from fortified positions along the western Caspian coast. Within thirteen years, he'd carve out an empire stretching from the Caucasus to Delhi, proving that Russia's southern ambitions weren't inevitable — they just needed the right person to say no.

The judges broke Jean Calas on the wheel for two hours before strangling him, certain the 63-year-old merchant had murdered his son to prevent a conversion to Catholicism. His son had actually hanged himself. Voltaire heard about the case three years later and couldn't let it go—he spent three years gathering evidence, writing pamphlets, and badgering anyone with power until the king's council exonerated Calas posthumously in 1765. The widow got 36,000 livres. But here's what mattered: Voltaire's *Treatise on Tolerance* came directly from this obsession, and suddenly France's intellectuals had a martyr who proved what religious paranoia actually cost. One broken body on a wheel in Toulouse became the argument that helped dismantle Europe's religious prosecutions.