May 13 in History

The Turkish galleys outnumbered the Latin ships nearly two to one off Pallene's coast. Didn't matter. Humbert II of Vienne led twenty-eight vessels against fifty-five in waters where Constantinople once controlled every harbor. The Turks had been raiding Aegean ports for decades, treating Christian merchants like livestock. Four hours of fighting left Turkish commander Yahya dead and his fleet scattered. But here's what stuck: this wasn't Jerusalem or Acre. The crusaders were protecting Venetian trade routes. The crosses painted on their sails covered account books underneath.

She was thirty years old and dying when Jesus showed up sixteen times in her bedroom. Julian of Norwich spent May 8th, 1373 watching her own body fail—then watching Christ's body fail right in front of her. Blood. Thorns. Suffering she could touch. She recovered. Spent the next decades writing it all down: *Revelations of Divine Love*, the first book in English by a woman with her name on it. But here's what she kept circling back to: in the middle of her worst pain, God told her "all shall be well." She believed him.

They'd already married in secret in Paris—weeks earlier, pregnant and terrified. Mary Tudor had been France's queen for three months before her elderly husband Louis XII died. Her brother Henry VIII promised she could choose her next husband if she'd marry Louis first. She chose Charles Brandon, Henry's best friend. But they couldn't wait for permission. By the time this official Greenwich ceremony happened, they were desperately hoping Henry wouldn't execute them both for treason. He fined them instead: £24,000, roughly $20 million today. Love cost them everything they owned.

Mary rode into battle personally—on horseback, watching from a nearby hill as 6,000 of her troops faced down the regent's forces outside Glasgow. Forty-five minutes. That's how long it took for her army to collapse completely. She fled south with just sixteen attendants, riding ninety miles in a single day to reach England. And Elizabeth I, her cousin, kept her locked up for the next nineteen years. The woman who came begging for help never left. At least not breathing.

Not a single soldier died in the War of Bavarian Succession. They called it the Potato War—armies spent more time foraging for food than fighting. When Prussia's Frederick the Great and Austria's Maria Theresa squared off over who'd inherit Bavaria in 1778, their troops mostly starved and skirmished. A year later, Russia and France brokered peace at Teschen. Austria got back the Innviertel, a sliver of land along the Inn River. But here's what mattered: this was the last time the old powers would solve a German problem without German blood soaking the ground.

Two hundred and fifty-six settlers carved out of the Carolina wilderness needed rules they could live with—or die by. They'd crossed the mountains without permission from any government, squatting on Cherokee land near a bend in the Cumberland River. So they wrote their own constitution. Every man got a vote, even if he didn't own land. Radical, except for one detail: they still called themselves subjects of North Carolina. Democracy practiced in secret, loyalty pledged out loud. The frontier made radicals careful.

The convicts didn't know where they were going. Most had never seen a map of the world. On May 13, 1787, Captain Arthur Phillip sailed from Portsmouth with 1,487 people crammed into eleven ships—about 780 of them prisoners convicted of theft, mostly. Destination: Botany Bay, eighteen thousand miles away. Eight months at sea. The British government had lost America and needed somewhere else to dump their criminals. Today, one in five Australians can trace their ancestry back to someone on those ships. Transportation, they called it. Colonization, it became.

The president declared war before Congress even voted on it. James K. Polk announced hostilities with Mexico on May 11, 1846, citing "American blood shed on American soil"—though that soil, near the Rio Grande, had been Mexican territory for decades. The dispute over Texas borders killed roughly 13,000 Americans and 25,000 Mexicans over two years. When it ended, the United States took half of Mexico's territory: California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico. America gained an ocean-to-ocean empire. Mexico lost its northern half in a war it never wanted.