September 23 in History

A fifty-year power struggle between popes and emperors ended with a handshake and a piece of parchment. On September 23, 1122, Pope Callixtus II and Holy Roman Emperor Henry V signed the Concordat of Worms in the German city of that name, settling the Investiture Controversy that had torn medieval Europe apart and redefined the boundary between church and state. The conflict centered on a deceptively simple question: who had the right to appoint bishops and abbots? Since the early Middle Ages, secular rulers had invested clergy with both spiritual authority (symbolized by the ring and staff) and temporal lands. Popes tolerated the arrangement until 1075, when Gregory VII declared that only the papacy could appoint church officials. Emperor Henry IV responded by declaring Gregory deposed. Gregory excommunicated Henry. What followed was decades of war, rebellion, and political chaos. Henry IV famously stood barefoot in the snow at Canossa in 1077, begging Gregory's forgiveness. The reconciliation was temporary. Armies loyal to popes and emperors clashed across Germany and Italy. Anti-popes were installed, bishops were deposed and reinstated, and the German nobility exploited the chaos to expand their own power at the emperor's expense. The Concordat of Worms split the difference. The emperor gave up the right to invest bishops with ring and staff, acknowledging the pope's spiritual authority over the clergy. In return, the pope conceded that the emperor could be present at elections of German bishops and invest them with secular lands and obligations. In practice, both sides retained significant influence over church appointments. The compromise mattered far beyond its immediate terms. By formally distinguishing spiritual from temporal authority, the Concordat established a principle that would echo through Western political thought for centuries: the idea that religious and governmental power operate in separate spheres. Every subsequent debate about church-state separation, from the English Reformation to the First Amendment, drew on precedents shaped by this medieval quarrel.

John Paul Jones was losing his ship and winning the battle. On September 23, 1779, his aging converted merchantman Bonhomme Richard engaged the British frigate HMS Serapis off Flamborough Head on the Yorkshire coast in one of the most ferocious naval actions of the American Revolution. When the British captain asked if Jones was ready to surrender, his reply became legend: "I have not yet begun to fight." The engagement was part of a daring raid along the British coastline. Jones, commanding a small Franco-American squadron, had been terrorizing merchant shipping in the North Sea for weeks. The Serapis and its escort, the Countess of Scarborough, were protecting a convoy of Baltic merchantmen when they intercepted Jones's force. The two ships closed to point-blank range and became entangled, their rigging locking them together in a death grip. For over three hours, the crews poured musket fire, grenades, and cannon shot into each other at distances measured in feet. The Bonhomme Richard was holed below the waterline and burning in multiple places. Water flooded her hold faster than pumps could manage. One of Jones's own cannons exploded, killing its crew. The turning point came when a seaman from the Bonhomme Richard crawled along a yardarm and dropped a grenade through an open hatch on the Serapis, igniting a chain of powder cartridges that killed or wounded dozens of British gunners on the lower deck. Captain Richard Pearson struck his colors shortly after 10:30 PM. Jones transferred his crew to the captured Serapis and watched the Bonhomme Richard sink the following morning. The victory made Jones the first genuine naval hero of the United States. Congress awarded him a gold medal, Louis XVI gave him a sword, and the battle proved that American warships could take on the Royal Navy in its own waters. Pearson, for his part, received a knighthood for saving his convoy. Jones supposedly quipped that if he ever met Pearson again, he would make him a lord.

Mathematics found a planet before any telescope could see it. On September 23, 1846, German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle pointed the Berlin Observatory's refractor at coordinates calculated by French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier and found Neptune within one degree of the predicted position, completing one of the most spectacular triumphs of theoretical science in history. The search began with an anomaly. Since William Herschel's discovery of Uranus in 1781, astronomers had noticed that the planet refused to follow its predicted orbit. Something massive and unseen was pulling it off course. By the 1840s, two mathematicians working independently tackled the problem: Le Verrier in Paris and John Couch Adams in Cambridge. Both used Newtonian gravitational theory to calculate where an unknown planet must be to produce the observed perturbations in Uranus's orbit. Adams finished his calculations first but struggled to get anyone to look. The Astronomer Royal, George Biddell Airy, was skeptical and slow to act. The Cambridge Observatory conducted a desultory search but failed to recognize Neptune in their own observations. Le Verrier, facing similar indifference in France, wrote directly to Galle in Berlin. Galle received the letter on September 23 and began observing that same night. His student Heinrich d'Arrest suggested comparing the sky against a recently published star chart. Within an hour, they identified an object that was not on the chart. The next night confirmed it had moved: a planet. The discovery ignited a bitter priority dispute between Britain and France that echoed through scientific institutions for decades. Adams's supporters argued he had solved the problem first; Le Verrier's camp pointed out that his calculations actually led to the discovery. Modern historians generally credit both mathematicians while giving Galle the observational discovery. Neptune's detection validated Newtonian mechanics on a cosmic scale and demonstrated that mathematics could reveal objects invisible to the human eye. The planet itself turned out to be an ice giant 17 times Earth's mass, orbiting so far from the Sun that it takes 165 years to complete a single circuit.

Long before Mario, Link, or Pikachu, there were hanafuda cards. On September 23, 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai in Kyoto, Japan, to manufacture and sell handmade playing cards painted with flowers, birds, and seasonal motifs. The modest card company would take nearly a century to become the most influential name in video gaming. Hanafuda cards had a complicated history in Japan. Western-style playing cards, introduced by Portuguese traders in the 16th century, had been repeatedly banned by the government because of their association with gambling. Japanese manufacturers responded by redesigning the cards with abstract images to evade the bans, creating hanafuda. By the time Yamauchi started his business, the cards occupied a gray area between legitimate entertainment and underground gambling dens. Yamauchi's cards earned a reputation for quality, and Nintendo became the largest playing card company in Japan. The business passed through three generations of the Yamauchi family. In 1949, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the founder's great-grandson, took over the company at age twenty-two and spent the next decade trying to expand beyond cards. He experimented with a taxi company, a love hotel chain, and instant rice, all of which failed. The pivot to toys and electronics in the 1960s changed everything. Nintendo developed the Ultra Hand, a novelty extending arm that sold over a million units. Engineer Gunpei Yokoi's inventions led to the Game & Watch handheld series in 1980 and the Game Boy in 1989. Shigeru Miyamoto, a young artist hired in 1977, created Donkey Kong in 1981 and Super Mario Bros. in 1985, games that rescued the North American video game industry from its post-crash collapse. The company that Fusajiro Yamauchi built by hand-painting flower cards in a small Kyoto shop now controls some of the most valuable intellectual properties in entertainment, with a market capitalization exceeding $60 billion.

Richard Nixon's political career was about to end before it really began. In September 1952, the Republican vice presidential candidate faced accusations that wealthy California donors had maintained an $18,000 slush fund for his personal expenses. With Dwight Eisenhower's advisors urging that Nixon be dropped from the ticket, the thirty-nine-year-old senator gambled everything on a single televised address. On the evening of September 23, 1952, Nixon appeared before an estimated 60 million viewers, the largest television audience in American history at that time. For thirty minutes, he delivered a masterclass in political theater. He laid out his modest finances in painstaking detail: his 1950 Oldsmobile, his wife Pat's "respectable Republican cloth coat" rather than a mink, the mortgage on their house in Washington. Then came the dog. Nixon acknowledged that one supporter had given the family a cocker spaniel puppy that his six-year-old daughter Tricia had named Checkers. "Regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it," Nixon declared, his voice cracking with emotion. The audience loved it. The speech was a calculated manipulation of the new medium of television, and it worked spectacularly. The Republican National Committee received over four million letters, telegrams, and phone calls running roughly 350-to-1 in Nixon's favor. Eisenhower kept him on the ticket, and the pair won the November election in a landslide. The Checkers speech demonstrated for the first time that a politician could bypass party bosses and newspaper editors to appeal directly to voters through television. Every subsequent political figure who has gone on TV to save their career owes something to Nixon's template. The address also revealed Nixon's instinct for self-pity and combativeness, traits that would define his presidency two decades later. Political historians consider it a turning point in American campaigning, the moment when television permanently displaced print and radio as the dominant force in electoral politics.

A young English captain named Francis Drake watched from the deck of the Judith as Spanish warships destroyed his fleet at San Juan de Ulúa, and he swore revenge. The battle off the coast of Veracruz on September 23, 1568, was a minor naval engagement by European standards, but its consequences rippled across the Atlantic for decades. John Hawkins had led a small English fleet to the Caribbean on a slaving expedition, capturing hundreds of Africans in West Africa and selling them to Spanish colonists in violation of Spain's trade monopoly. Battered by storms on the return voyage, Hawkins's squadron of six ships limped into the fortified harbor at San Juan de Ulúa for repairs. The next day, a Spanish fleet of thirteen ships carrying the new viceroy of Mexico arrived and anchored alongside. Both sides agreed to a truce while Hawkins completed repairs, but the Spanish attacked without warning on September 23. The assault was devastating. Spanish soldiers and sailors overwhelmed the English positions on the island fortress and turned the harbor's cannons on the trapped ships. Hawkins lost four of his six vessels along with most of his men. Only the Minion, under Hawkins, and the Judith, commanded by the twenty-two-year-old Drake, escaped into the open sea. The voyage home was a nightmare. The Minion was so overcrowded that Hawkins put half his crew ashore in Mexico, where most died or were captured by the Inquisition. Of the roughly 400 Englishmen who sailed into San Juan de Ulúa, fewer than 70 made it back to England. Drake never forgot the betrayal. Over the next three decades, he waged a personal war against the Spanish Empire, raiding ports from Panama to Cádiz and circumnavigating the globe. Hawkins reformed the Royal Navy's ship designs, creating the fast, low-profile warships that would defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588. The humiliation at San Juan de Ulúa, more than any treaty or royal decree, launched England's transformation from a minor maritime power into Spain's most dangerous rival.