May 9 in History

Thutmose III chose the narrow Aruna pass over safer routes, ignoring every advisor who told him it was suicide. His gamble worked. The Canaanite coalition waited at the wrong exits while Egyptian chariots emerged single-file, reformed, and caught them completely exposed on the plain. The siege of Megiddo itself dragged seven months—long enough that we know this detail because Thutmose's scribe Tjaneni actually bothered writing it down. First battle account in history that reads like someone was actually there. Everything before this is myth and poetry. After: military records.

Melus of Bari had already tried once to throw off Byzantine rule and failed. But in 1009, this Lombard nobleman tried again, rallying forces in the port city that Constantinople had controlled for decades through its Catepanate of Italy. The timing wasn't random—he'd found allies willing to fight. For two years, the revolt actually worked. Then the Byzantines sent their best general, and Melus had to run. But those two years proved something: Norman mercenaries who'd come to help noticed just how weak Byzantine Italy really was. They'd be back for themselves.

The wine was the thing. England needed Portuguese ports to break France's stranglehold on Bordeaux, and Portugal needed English archers to keep Castile from swallowing them whole. So on May 9, 1386, they signed a deal in Windsor Castle. King Richard II and João I promised mutual defense forever—not for five years, not until the next war ended, but forever. And they meant it. Portugal called on England in the Napoleonic Wars. England called on Portugal in both World Wars. Six centuries later, NATO strategists still plan around a treaty signed when longbows were cutting-edge technology.

He ruled for six years and died in his bed. Sort of. 'Abd al-Latif, who'd blinded his own father Ulugh Beg to seize the Timurid throne in 1449, got strangled by his military commanders while sleeping in Samarkand. The irony wasn't lost on anyone: he'd ordered his astronomer-king father executed after the blinding, thinking brutality bought loyalty. It didn't. His commanders installed his uncle within weeks, continuing the Timurid tradition of brilliant architecture and catastrophic succession. The dynasty that built some of Central Asia's most beautiful mosques couldn't manage a peaceful transfer of power.

The Crown Jewels sat behind wire mesh and one wooden door. Thomas Blood had spent a year befriending the elderly keeper, Talbot Edwards, pretending to be a parson. He brought his "nephew" to meet Edwards' daughter. Built trust. Then on May 9, 1671, Blood and three accomplices knocked Edwards unconscious, flattened the crown with a mallet to fit under a cloak, and filed the scepter in half. They made it to the Tower gate before guards caught them. King Charles II, baffled by the audacity, pardoned Blood completely and gave him Irish lands worth £500 annually. Crime paid.

The artists hung their own work because nobody else would show it. Spring Gardens, 1761—130 paintings crammed into rented rooms, admission one shilling. Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough among them, selling directly to whoever walked in off the street. No royal academy existed yet. No official art establishment at all. Just painters tired of begging dealers and auctioneers for wall space, deciding they'd rather collect coins at the door than wait for permission. They called it the Society of Artists. It worked so well the King noticed. Eight years later, he gave them a charter.

A wooden fleet beat ironclads. Denmark's navy—outdated, outgunned, and facing the combined might of Prussia and Austria—sailed straight at them off Heligoland and won. Commander Edouard Suenson had two frigates against an entire fleet. He closed to pointblank range where his wooden guns could actually penetrate armor. Three Austrian ships limped away damaged. Zero Danish losses. The land war? Denmark lost everything, surrendered Schleswig-Holstein within months. But for one afternoon in the North Sea, wood trumped iron and the smaller navy owned the waves.

The wave that hit Hawaii fourteen hours later was still twenty feet tall. The 1877 Peruvian earthquake—magnitude 8.8—didn't just kill 2,541 people along the coast near Iquique. It sent a tsunami racing across the Pacific at 500 miles per hour, drowning people in Hilo and reaching as far as Yokohama. Coastal towns like Ilo vanished entirely, swept clean. And here's what stuck: it convinced scientists that earthquakes could kill you an ocean away, that the seafloor could weaponize water across 10,000 miles. The earth doesn't respect borders or distance.