March 7 in History

Rome got two emperors for the price of one when Marcus Aurelius refused to rule alone. His adoptive father Antoninus Pius had just died, and Marcus immediately insisted the Senate elevate his adoptive brother Lucius Verus to equal rank—unprecedented power-sharing in an empire built on singular authority. Marcus commanded the legions, handled the Germanic wars, and wrote Stoic philosophy by campfire. Lucius? He partied in Antioch while generals fought the Parthians in his name. The arrangement lasted eight years until Lucius died of a stroke. Marcus's son Commodus, who'd eventually fight as a gladiator in the Colosseum, proved that choosing family over merit wasn't always wise—something Marcus understood perfectly when he picked his brother but somehow forgot with his own child.

The 80-year-old governor was reading poetry when the mob arrived demanding he become emperor. Gordian I hadn't sought power—African landowners rebelled against Maximinus Thrax's crushing taxes and needed a figurehead with imperial bloodline. He refused three times. His son finally convinced him. Twenty-two days later, both were dead. But their desperate gambit worked: the Senate seized the moment to declare Maximinus a public enemy, triggering the Year of the Six Emperors. Rome's soldiers discovered that provinces could make emperors too—not just legions on distant frontiers. An old man's reluctant acceptance fractured the empire's power structure forever.

Venice surrendered Cyprus without ever setting foot on the island to fight for it. The 1573 peace treaty handed over their most profitable Mediterranean colony—source of cotton, sugar, and the crucial salt trade—because the Holy League had already collapsed. Spain pulled out. The Pope lost interest. And Venetian admiral Giacomo Foscarini sat in Crete with 60 galleys, watching Ottoman forces massacre 20,000 defenders at Famagusta the year before, doing nothing. The Republic's treasury was hemorrhaging 15,000 ducats daily just to maintain the fleet. So Venice's diplomats did what Venice always did best: they negotiated, paid 300,000 ducats in reparations, and went back to trading with the Ottomans within months. They'd rather do business than die for honor.

Napoleon's doctors begged him not to do it. After capturing Jaffa on March 7, 1799, Bonaparte faced 2,000 Albanian prisoners—too many to guard, too dangerous to release, too expensive to feed during his Egyptian campaign. His chief of staff Alexandre Berthier protested that executing surrendered soldiers violated military honor. Napoleon ordered the massacre anyway, marching the captives to the beach where French troops bayonetted them over three days to save ammunition. The atrocity haunted his reputation for decades, but here's what's rarely mentioned: a plague outbreak hit his army just days later, killing more French soldiers than the entire Jaffa siege. Some saw divine retribution in the timing.

He convinced a 15-year-old heiress her father was bankrupt and dying, then drove Ellen Turner through the night to Gretna Green for a forced marriage. Edward Gibbon Wakefield's scheme lasted four days before her uncles tracked them down in Calais. Parliament annulled the marriage and sent him to Newgate Prison for three years. But here's the twist: while locked up, Wakefield wrote treatises on "systematic colonization" that became the blueprint for settling South Australia and New Zealand. The man who kidnapped a schoolgirl to steal her fortune became the architect of British colonial policy in the Pacific. Sometimes history's visionaries are just criminals with time to think.

She was fifteen when Edward Gibbon Wakefield convinced her that her father had gone bankrupt and sent him to rescue her. The elaborate lie worked—Ellen Turner married the thirty-year-old schemer at Gretna Green before her wealthy family discovered the abduction. Parliament passed a special act to annul the marriage, and Wakefield spent three years in Newgate Prison, where he wrote the colonization theories that would reshape the British Empire. He'd later found settlements in New Zealand and Australia, always insisting his kidnapping conviction was a youthful mistake. The girl he manipulated into marriage died at nineteen, while the criminal who deceived her became one of the most influential colonial theorists of the Victorian age.

Union forces under General Samuel Curtis routed a larger Confederate army at Pea Ridge, securing federal control over Missouri and northern Arkansas for the remainder of the Civil War. The three-day battle eliminated the last organized Confederate threat west of the Mississippi and freed Union troops for campaigns deeper into the South.

Hitler's generals begged him not to do it. They'd prepared retreat orders in case French troops moved to stop the 22,000 Wehrmacht soldiers marching into the demilitarized Rhineland on March 7, 1936. The Führer's hands trembled as he waited—if France responded, he later admitted, Germany would've had to withdraw "with our tails between our legs." But France didn't move. Neither did Britain. The bluff worked. Within three years, that same hesitation would embolden Hitler to invade Poland, but the real tragedy? France had 100 divisions that could've crushed the German force in hours. Sometimes the wars you don't fight guarantee the ones you can't avoid.