753 BC Romulus founded a city, killed his brother, named it for himself, and reigned for 36 years
1494 King Charles VIII of France like most of his line a little dotty in the head invaded Italy with the intention of asserting a slender claim to the throne of Naples, just then occupied by a cadet branch of the House of Aragon. As the French Army was the best in the world at the time, it quickly overran most of the Peninsula, taking Naples itself on March 31, 1495. In mid-June, the conquest seemingly complete, Charles left some 20,000 troops to occupy his new kingdom, and began the long trek back to France. Meanwhile, King Ferrante II of Naples appealed for support to his uncle, King Ferdinand of Aragon, better known to history as part of the famous team of "Ferdinand and Isabella.
Now Ferdinand was a notorious pinch-penny (remember how Isabella supposedly had to hock her jewels to finance Columbus?), but even before the French had taken Naples he could see the necessity of supporting his kinsmen. So he sent Ferrante some money, and Gonzalvo Fernandez de Cordoba y Aguilar, a commander who had proven himself in the wars against the Moors in Spain and the Turks in the Ionian Islands.
Commanded by Cordoba, Sicilian, Neapolitan, and Spanish troops landed near Naples. The commander of the French garrison in the city foolishly offered battle outside the walls. Scarcely had his troops marched out when the Neapolitans rose, slaughtered the few troops he had left inside the city, and closed the gates against him. Threatened by Cordoba's army in front and the raging people of Naples to his rear, the French commander retreated. Naples was recovered for King Ferrante on July 7, 1495, just two weeks after Charles VIII had marched north! Cordoba quickly went on to clear the French out of the rest of the kingdom. This was an arduous task, for other French garrison commanders were by no means as stupid as the one who had lost Naples; the "storied headland fortress" of Gaeta, for example, garrisoned by 2,500 French and turncoat-Neapolitans, held out for 71 days. Thus it was not until late in 1496 that the last French garrison was rooted out.
With that, King Ferdinand instructed Cordoba whom the Italians nicknamed "The Great Captain," which the Spanish quickly adopted and by which he is forever known to press on to Rome. Although of Spanis indeed Aragonese descent, Pope Alexander VI, a miserable excuse for a pontiff, had collaborated with the French invaders, and Ferdinand appears to have wished to "impress" upon His Holiness the importance of supporting the Spanish Crown.
Thus it was that early in 1497 El Gran Capitan and his army entered Rome, to a great reception staged by the Pope. As the army passed in review before him, Pope Alexander, clearly not knowing how parsimonious or maybe just cheap King Ferdinand was, expressed shock when he saw how ragged was the appearance of the troops.
In response to the Pope's inquiry, Cordoba replied, "At least, Your Holiness, no one will think of attacking them for the sake of loot
1865 Abraham Lincoln's funeral train leaves Washington
1870. Hermann Frölich (1839-1900) was a German military surgeon who ultimately rose to Oberst-Stabsarzt (medical colonel) in the Royal Saxon Army. His years of peacetime training and his field service in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 (in which Saxony was allied to Austria) and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 (with Saxony allied to Prussia) had made him a specialist in wounds and their treatment, about which he wrote extensively.
Like any educated man of his day, Frölich was well versed in the classics, and could read ancient texts in the original Greek and Latin. Some time during the 1870s, perhaps after once again reading The Iliad, Homer’s grim tale of the great war between the Greeks and Trojans, Frölich started to think about the poet’s description of military medicine around 1250 BC. So he began to study the text in great detail, searching for evidence of the medical practice of the time, the nature of wounds, and the treatments provided.
Frölich published his results as Die Militärmedicin Homers. In a slim volume of only 65 pages, he gave a brief outline of military practice and medicine as described by Homer, and then presented the results of his analysis of 147 instances in which a wound was described with sufficient detail to permit some conclusions to be drawn. The principal weapons were, of course, spears (both stabbing and throwing types), swords, arrows, and rocks, the latter often grabbed up during desperate hand-to-hand fights.Of Frölich’s 147 cases, 114 were fatal (78 percent). Spears were the most dangersou weapons accounting for 84 deaths (57 percent). Wounds to the head were always fatal, and those to the torso resulted in death in 84 percent of the cases, followed by those to the neck, 82.3 percent, while those to the arms and legs were much less deadly, at 20 percent and 9 percent respectively.
A more recent look at casualties in The Iliad in Richard A. Gabriel’s Man and Wound in the Ancient World, breaks them down somewhat differently, considering only the range at which wounds were inflicted. This means more cases are included, since Frölich limited his work to injuries for which some detail was given. In Gabriel’s analysis of 213 casualties, 192 died, about 90 percent. The largest number of casualties, 147 were injured at “close-range,” in hand-to-hand fighting, of whom 138 died, 93 percent, while of the 66 injured at “long-range,” 54 died, 82 percent. Interestingly, Gabriel’s analysis of casualties from Virgil’s epic The Aeneid, composed about six or seven centuries after The Iliad, yielded figures that were not particularly different from those in earlier epic. In The Aeneid, 180 men were wounded, of whom 164 died, about 91 percent. Of these casualties, 120 were injured at “close-range,” with 115 perishing, 96 percent, while of 60 men injured at “long-range,” 49 died, 81.6 percent.
Despite the somewhat different bases of calculation, the figures found by Frölich and those found by Gabriel are not very different.
1918. Manfred "The Red Baron" von Richthofen, ground fire after his aircraft had been disabled in air-to-air combat, at 25
1967 Barnabus Collins returns to his family to Collinsport.
Topic: This Day in History (Read 209245 times)