May 9 in History

Thomas Blood walked into the Tower of London dressed as a clergyman on May 9, 1671, bowed to the elderly Keeper of the Jewels, and then smashed him over the head with a mallet. Blood and three accomplices flattened the St. Edward's Crown with the mallet to fit it under a cloak, filed the Sovereign's Sceptre in half, and stuffed the Sovereign's Orb down a companion's trousers. They nearly made it out. The heist was months in the planning. Blood, an Anglo-Irish adventurer with a history of plots against the crown, had cultivated a friendship with Talbot Edwards, the 77-year-old Assistant Keeper, by posing as a parson and visiting the Tower multiple times. He brought his supposed wife, who feigned illness during one visit to gain Edwards's sympathy. Blood eventually proposed a marriage between Edwards's daughter and his fictitious nephew, arranging for the wedding party to view the Crown Jewels privately. On the morning of the theft, Blood's "nephew" and two other accomplices arrived for the viewing. Once Edwards opened the gated enclosure housing the regalia, Blood threw the cloak over the old man, gagged him with a wooden plug, and hit him with the mallet. Edwards refused to stay quiet, and Blood stabbed him in the stomach with a blade hidden in his cane. The keeper survived. The alarm was raised by Edwards's son, who arrived unexpectedly from military service in Flanders just as the thieves were leaving with the crown, orb, and sceptre. A chase ensued across Tower grounds. Blood fired a pistol at his pursuers but was tackled near the outer gate, reportedly shouting "It was a bold attempt, and I'm not sorry!" What happened next baffled contemporaries and historians alike. Rather than being executed, Blood was brought before King Charles II for a personal audience. The king not only pardoned him but granted him lands in Ireland worth 500 pounds a year. Theories range from Blood being a secret intelligence agent to Charles simply being charmed by the man's audacity. Blood lived freely in London until his death in 1680, and the true reason for his pardon has never been satisfactorily explained.

Aldo Moro's bullet-riddled body was found in the trunk of a red Renault 4, parked on Via Caetani in Rome, equidistant between the headquarters of the Christian Democratic Party and the Italian Communist Party. The symbolism was deliberate. The Red Brigades, Italy's most feared left-wing terrorist organization, had murdered the former prime minister on May 9, 1978, after 55 days of captivity that paralyzed the Italian state and exposed the limits of Western democracies' ability to confront political terrorism. The kidnapping on March 16 was a military-grade operation. A twelve-person Red Brigades commando ambushed Moro's motorcade on Via Fani, killing all five bodyguards in 90 seconds of automatic weapons fire. Moro was pulled from his car and driven to a hidden apartment in Rome, where he was held in a small, soundproofed room and subjected to a "people's trial" by his captors. During his captivity, Moro wrote dozens of letters to political colleagues, family members, and Pope Paul VI, pleading for negotiations. The Italian government, led by Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti and backed by a broad political consensus including the Communist Party, adopted a hard line: no negotiation with terrorists. The decision was agonizing. Moro's letters grew increasingly desperate and bitter toward colleagues he felt had abandoned him. The Red Brigades demanded the release of imprisoned comrades. When the government refused, they voted to execute Moro. He was shot ten times with a silenced pistol in the back of the Renault on the morning of May 9. The car's location between the two party headquarters was a final statement about the political system the Brigades sought to destroy. Moro's murder was the climax of Italy's "Years of Lead," a period of political violence from both left and right that killed over 400 people between 1969 and 1988. Rather than destabilizing Italian democracy as the Red Brigades intended, the killing provoked a massive security crackdown. Most Brigade leaders were arrested within five years. But the questions Moro's letters raised about political loyalty and the state's duty to protect its citizens have never been fully resolved.

Nelson Mandela had spent 27 years in prison, 18 of them on Robben Island breaking limestone in the quarry. On May 9, 1994, South Africa's newly elected parliament chose him unanimously as the country's first Black president, completing the most improbable political transition of the twentieth century. A man the apartheid government had imprisoned for life became the head of state that replaced it. The election that preceded Mandela's inauguration was itself extraordinary. From April 26 to 29, 1994, nearly 20 million South Africans voted in the country's first universal suffrage election. Lines stretched for miles at polling stations, and many voters waited eight hours or more. For the majority-Black population, it was the first time they had ever cast a ballot. The African National Congress won 62.6 percent of the vote, short of the two-thirds majority needed to write the constitution alone, a result Mandela considered ideal because it required negotiation. The path from prison to presidency had taken four years of negotiations that repeatedly threatened to collapse into civil war. Right-wing Afrikaner groups staged armed resistance. The Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party, under Mangosuthu Buthelezi, boycotted the process until just days before the election. Political violence between ANC and Inkatha supporters killed over 14,000 people between 1990 and 1994. White South Africans hoarded food and withdrew savings, fearing economic collapse. Mandela's genius was reconciliation enacted through personal gesture. He visited Betsie Verwoerd, the widow of apartheid's architect, for tea. He wore a Springbok rugby jersey to the 1995 World Cup final, embracing the sport that had symbolized white South Africa. He appointed his former jailers to positions of honor. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, offered amnesty in exchange for full disclosure of political crimes rather than pursuing mass prosecutions. South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy without civil war remains one of the most remarkable political achievements in modern history. Mandela served one term as president, declining to run for re-election in 1999, and spent his remaining years as a global symbol of moral authority and the possibility of peaceful transformation.

Columbus was 51 years old, arthritic, partially blind, and politically disgraced when he sailed from Cadiz on May 9, 1502, with four small caravels and 150 men on his fourth and final voyage to the Americas. The Admiral of the Ocean Sea, who had once negotiated titles and percentages with the Spanish crown as an equal, departed under strict orders not to stop at Hispaniola, the colony he had founded and where his successor had barred him from landing. The first three voyages had made Columbus the most famous navigator in Europe and then destroyed his reputation. He had discovered the Caribbean and Central American coast for Spain but proved a disastrous administrator. His governance of Hispaniola was marked by forced labor, brutality toward Indigenous peoples, and infighting among the colonists. Francisco de Bobadilla, sent to investigate, had shipped Columbus back to Spain in chains in 1500. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella restored his freedom but stripped him of his governorship. The fourth voyage was Columbus's attempt at redemption. He believed a passage to Asia lay somewhere along the Central American coast, and he spent months exploring the coasts of present-day Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, enduring storms so violent that one tempest lasted 28 days without respite. The crews were terrified. Columbus, navigating from memory and astronomical observation, pressed on. He found no strait to Asia. He did find gold deposits along the Veragua coast of Panama, but hostile Indigenous resistance and conflicts among his own men prevented establishing a permanent settlement. Two of his four ships were abandoned as unseaworthy, eaten through by shipworms. Columbus and his remaining crew were marooned on Jamaica for a year before rescue arrived from Hispaniola. Columbus returned to Spain in November 1504, broken in health and fortune. Queen Isabella, his most powerful patron, died three weeks later. He spent his final eighteen months petitioning King Ferdinand for the restoration of his titles and revenues, dying in Valladolid on May 20, 1506, still believing he had reached the outskirts of Asia. He never knew he had found two continents.

Robert Schuman stood at a lectern in the Salon de l'Horloge at the French Foreign Ministry on May 9, 1950, and read a statement that proposed something no European statesman had ever seriously attempted: placing the coal and steel industries of France and Germany under a joint supranational authority. The Schuman Declaration, drafted primarily by Jean Monnet, launched the process that created the European Union. The proposal's genius lay in its practical simplicity. Coal and steel were the essential raw materials of war. By pooling French and German production under a shared high authority with binding decision-making power, the two nations would make war between them "not merely unthinkable but materially impossible." Any country that did not control its own steel production could not independently arm for war. The timing was urgent. West Germany was recovering economically and would inevitably rebuild its industrial capacity. France faced a choice: contain Germany through restrictions that bred resentment, or bind Germany into a partnership that served both nations' interests. Monnet, who had spent his career as an international economic coordinator, saw supranational institutions as the only path that avoided repeating the failures of Versailles. Schuman, himself a product of the Franco-German borderland, having been born in Luxembourg and raised in Lorraine when it was German territory, understood the human dimension of the rivalry. He had been drafted into the German army in World War I and imprisoned by the Gestapo in World War II. His personal history embodied the absurdity of the conflict the declaration sought to end. Six nations signed the Treaty of Paris in 1951, creating the European Coal and Steel Community: France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The same six signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957, establishing the European Economic Community. The ECSC's supranational structure, with its independent High Authority, Court of Justice, and parliamentary assembly, became the institutional blueprint for every subsequent stage of European integration. May 9 is now celebrated as Europe Day.

L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health hit bookstores on May 9, 1950, and sold 150,000 copies in its first year, an astonishing figure for a book that claimed to have discovered the single source of all human mental and physical illness. Hubbard, a prolific science fiction writer with no formal training in psychology or medicine, presented Dianetics as a revolutionary system that could cure everything from poor eyesight to criminal behavior through a technique he called "auditing." The book's central theory was straightforward. Hubbard argued that the human mind contained a "reactive mind" that stored recordings of painful experiences called "engrams." These engrams, accumulated from birth onward and even in the womb, caused irrational behavior, psychosomatic illness, and emotional distress. Through auditing, a process in which a trained practitioner guided a subject to recall and re-experience traumatic memories, the reactive mind could be cleared, producing a state Hubbard called "Clear." The American psychological establishment reacted with alarm. The American Psychological Association passed a resolution cautioning members against using Dianetics techniques. Academic reviewers noted that Hubbard offered no controlled studies, no peer review, and no evidence beyond anecdotal claims. The book's scientific language masked a complete absence of scientific method. None of this slowed the movement's growth. Dianetics groups formed spontaneously across the United States, with enthusiasts auditing each other in living rooms. Hubbard became a celebrity, lecturing to packed halls and training auditors through a foundation he established in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The foundation's finances were chaotic, and it went bankrupt within a year, but the demand for Hubbard's system was undeniable. By 1954, Hubbard had repackaged and expanded Dianetics into Scientology, incorporating past-life recall, a cosmological mythology, and a hierarchical organizational structure. The Church of Scientology eventually gained tax-exempt religious status in the United States and established operations in over 160 countries. Dianetics remains its foundational text, still sold in airports and bookstores, the starting point of a system that generated billions of dollars and attracted both devoted followers and fierce criticism.

Romania's Chamber of Deputies declared independence from the Ottoman Empire on May 9, 1877, with Foreign Minister Mihail Kogalniceanu reading the declaration to a chamber that erupted in celebration. The formal break had been building for decades, but the timing was dictated by Russia's war against the Ottomans, which gave Romania the military cover to make its proclamation stick. The Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia had united in 1859 under Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza, creating a de facto state that still technically owed suzerainty to the Ottoman Sultan. Cuza was overthrown in 1866 and replaced by Prince Carol I, a Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen prince imported from Germany to give the new state dynastic credibility. Carol spent a decade modernizing the army and building alliances while waiting for the right moment to sever Ottoman ties. That moment came when Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire in April 1877, ostensibly to protect Christian populations in the Balkans. Romania allowed Russian troops to transit its territory and joined the war as a co-belligerent. Kogalniceanu's declaration cited Ottoman violations of Romanian autonomy and the need to establish full sovereignty, but the practical calculation was simpler: with Russian armies engaging Ottoman forces to the south, Constantinople could not spare troops to punish Romania's defiance. Romanian forces played a critical role at the Siege of Plevna in Bulgaria, where they helped break an Ottoman defensive position that had stalled the Russian advance for five months. Over 10,000 Romanian soldiers were killed or wounded in the campaign. The sacrifice gave Romania leverage at the peace table, though Russia's dominant position meant Romanian interests were not always respected. The Treaty of Berlin in 1878 recognized Romanian independence but required the country to cede southern Bessarabia to Russia in exchange for the less valuable Northern Dobruja. The loss was bitterly resented. Nevertheless, independence was achieved, and Romania was proclaimed a kingdom in 1881 with Carol I as its first king. May 9 became Romania's Independence Day, commemorating the moment a vassal state declared itself sovereign.