Historical Events on Monday, 9th March

09/03/2023

A shooting in the Alsterdorf quarter of Hamburg, Germany, kills eight people and injures another eight.

On 9 March 2023, a mass shooting occurred at a Jehovah's Witnesses Kingdom Hall in the Alsterdorf quarter of Hamburg, Germany. The shooter, identified as 35-year-old Philipp Fusz, entered the building after a service was held there and opened fire, killing six adults and an unborn child, and injuring eight others before killing himself minutes later. Fusz was a former member of the Jehovah's Witnesses, had no previous criminal record, and was not a known extremist. Police received an anonymous letter indicating he was angry at Witnesses and his former employer, which may help them determine a motive.

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09/03/2020

Giuseppe Conte, Prime Minister of Italy, announces in a televised address and signs the decree imposing the first nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in the world.

Giuseppe Conte is an Italian jurist, academic, and politician who served as prime minister of Italy from June 2018 to February 2021. He has been the president of the Five Star Movement (M5S) since August 2021.

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09/03/2015

Two Eurocopter AS350 Écureuil helicopters collide in mid-air over Villa Castelli, Argentina, killing all 10 people on board both aircraft, including French athletes Florence Arthaud, Camille Muffat and Alexis Vastine, as well as producers and guests for the French TV show Dropped.

The Airbus Helicopters H125 Écureuil, or Squirrel, is a single-engine light utility helicopter designed and originally manufactured by the French corporation Aérospatiale, later by Eurocopter, which became Airbus Helicopters. In North America, the H125 is marketed as the AStar. The AS355 Ecureuil 2 is a twin-engine variant, marketed in North America as the TwinStar.

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09/03/2012

A truce between the Salvadoran government and gangs in the country goes into effect when 30 gang leaders are transferred to lower security prisons.

From March 2012 to May 2014, the Salvadoran government, the Catholic Church, and the country's two largest criminal gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the 18th Street gang — came to a truce, known in El Salvador simply as the Gang Truce, to lower the country's rate of homicides and extortions in exchange for improved prison conditions and certain visitation privileges. The truce's principal negotiators were Minister of Public Security David Munguía Payés, former deputy Raúl Mijango, and Bishop Fabio Reynaldo Colindres Abarca, and the negotiations were overseen by President Mauricio Funes.

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09/03/2011

Space Shuttle Discovery makes its final landing after 39 flights.

Space Shuttle Discovery is a retired American Space Shuttle orbiter. The spaceplane was one of the orbiters from NASA's Space Shuttle program and the third of five fully operational orbiters to be built. Its first mission, STS-41-D, flew from August 30 to September 5, 1984. Over 27 years of service it launched and landed 39 times, aggregating more spaceflights than any other spacecraft as of December 2024. The Space Shuttle launch vehicle had three main components: the Space Shuttle orbiter, a single-use central fuel tank, and two reusable solid rocket boosters. Nearly 25,000 heat-resistant tiles cover the orbiter to protect it from high temperatures on re-entry.

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09/03/2000

Nupedia, a multi-language online encyclopedia, is launched.

Nupedia was a multi-language online encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors with relevant subject-matter expertise, reviewed by expert editors before publication, and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief. Nupedia operated from March 2000 until September 2003. It is best known today as the predecessor of Wikipedia. Nupedia had a seven-step approval process to control content of articles before being posted, rather than live wiki-based updating. Nupedia was designed by a committee of experts who predefined the rules. It had 21 articles in its first year, compared with Wikipedia having 200 articles in the first month, and 18,000 in the first year.

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09/03/1997

Comet Hale–Bopp: Observers in China, Mongolia and eastern Siberia are treated to a rare double feature as an eclipse permits Hale-Bopp to be seen during the day.

Comet Hale–Bopp is a long-period comet that was one of the most widely observed of the 20th century and one of the brightest seen for many decades.

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09/03/1987

Chrysler announces its acquisition of American Motors Corporation.

FCA US, LLC, conducting business as Stellantis North America and known historically as Chrysler, is one of the "Big Three" automobile manufacturers in the United States, headquartered in Auburn Hills, Michigan. It is the American subsidiary of the multinational automotive company Stellantis. Stellantis North America sells vehicles worldwide under the Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram Trucks nameplates. It also includes Mopar, its automotive parts and accessories division, and SRT, its performance automobile division. The division also distributes Alfa Romeo, Fiat, and Maserati vehicles in North America.

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09/03/1978

President Soeharto inaugurates Jagorawi Toll Road, the first toll highway in Indonesia, connecting Jakarta, Bogor and Ciawi, West Java.

Suharto was an Indonesian military officer and politician who served as the second and longest-serving president of Indonesia from 1967 to 1998. Widely regarded as a military dictator by international observers, Suharto led Indonesia as an authoritarian regime from 1967 until his resignation in 1998 following nationwide unrest. His 31-year dictatorship is considered one of the most brutal and corrupt of the 20th century: he was central to the perpetration of mass killings against alleged communists and subsequent persecution of ethnic Chinese, irreligious people, and trade unionists.

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09/03/1977

The Hanafi Siege: In a 39-hour standoff, armed Hanafi Muslims seize three Washington, D.C., buildings.

The 1977 Hanafi Siege was a terrorist attack, hostage-taking, and standoff in Washington, D.C., lasting from March 9 to March 11, 1977. Three buildings were seized by twelve Hanafi Movement gunmen, who took 149 hostages. During the initial attack and takeover of the buildings, the assailants killed a journalist and mortally wounded a police officer; three others, including a city councilor, were injured. After a 39-hour standoff, the gunmen surrendered and all remaining hostages were released.

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09/03/1976

Forty-two people die in the Cavalese cable car disaster, the deadliest cable car accident in history.

The Cavalese cable car crash is the deadliest cable car crash in history. On 9 March 1976, the steel supporting cable broke as a fully loaded cable car was descending from Mt. Cermis, near the Italian ski resort of Cavalese in the Dolomites, 40 km (25 mi) north-east of Trento. The cause of the disaster was an overlap of the carrier cable with the support cable near the first pylon, which resulted in the carrier shearing the support cable.

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09/03/1974

The Mars 7 Flyby bus releases the descent module too early, missing Mars.

Mars 7, also known as 3MP No.51P was a Soviet spacecraft launched in 1973 to explore Mars. A 3MP bus spacecraft which comprised the final mission of the Mars programme, it consisted of a lander and a coast stage with instruments to study Mars as it flew past. Due to a malfunction, the lander failed to perform a maneuver necessary to enter the Martian atmosphere, missing the planet and remaining in heliocentric orbit along with the coast stage.

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09/03/1967

Trans World Airlines Flight 553 crashes in a field in Concord Township, Ohio, following a mid-air collision with a Beechcraft Baron, killing 26 people.

Trans World Airlines (TWA) was a trunk carrier, a scheduled airline in the United States that operated from 1930 until it was acquired by American Airlines in 2001. It was formed as Transcontinental & Western Air to operate a route from New York City to Los Angeles via St. Louis, Kansas City, and other stops, with Ford Trimotors. With American, United, and Eastern, it was one of the "Big Four" domestic airlines in the United States formed by the Spoils Conference of 1930.

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09/03/1961

Sputnik 9 successfully launches, carrying a dog and a human dummy, and demonstrating that the Soviet Union was ready to begin human spaceflight.

Korabl-Sputnik 4 or Vostok-3KA No.1, also known as Sputnik 9 in the West, was a Soviet spacecraft which was launched on 9 March 1961. Carrying the mannequin Ivan Ivanovich, a dog named Chernushka, some mice and the first guinea pig in space, it was a test flight of the Vostok spacecraft.

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09/03/1960

Dr. Belding Hibbard Scribner implants for the first time a shunt he invented into a patient, which allows the patient to receive hemodialysis on a regular basis.

Belding Hibbard Scribner was an American physician and a pioneer in kidney dialysis.

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09/03/1959

The Barbie doll makes its debut at the American International Toy Fair in New York.

Barbie is a fashion doll franchise created by American businesswoman Ruth Handler, manufactured by American toy and entertainment company Mattel and introduced on March 9, 1959. The toy was based on the German Bild Lilli doll which Handler had purchased while in Europe. The figurehead of an eponymous brand that includes a range of fashion dolls and accessories, Barbie has been an important part of the toy fashion doll market for over six decades. Mattel has sold over a billion Barbie dolls, making it the company's largest and most profitable line. The brand has expanded into a multimedia franchise since 1984, including video games, animated films, television/web series, and a live-action film.

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09/03/1957

The 8.6 Mw  Andreanof Islands earthquake shakes the Aleutian Islands, causing over $5 million in damage from ground movement and a destructive tsunami.

The 1957 Andreanof Islands earthquake occurred at 04:22 local time on March 9 with a moment magnitude estimated at 8.6 and a maximum Modified Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe). It occurred south of the Andreanof Islands group, which is part of the Aleutian Islands arc. The event occurred along the Aleutian Trench, the convergent plate boundary that separates the Pacific plate and the North American plates near Alaska. A basin-wide tsunami followed, with effects felt in Alaska and Hawaii, and strong waves recorded across the Pacific rim. Total losses were around $5 million.

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09/03/1956

Soviet forces suppress mass demonstrations in the Georgian SSR, reacting to Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization policy.

The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, often referred by its shortened name as the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Republic and, from 1922, the Soviet Union. The army was established in January 1918 by a decree of the Council of People's Commissars to oppose the military forces of the new nation's adversaries during the Russian Civil War, especially the various groups collectively known as the White Army. In February 1946, the Red Army was renamed the "Soviet Army". Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was split between the post-Soviet states, with its bulk becoming the Russian Ground Forces, commonly considered to be the successor of the Soviet Army.

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09/03/1954

McCarthyism: CBS television broadcasts the See It Now episode, "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy", produced by Fred Friendly.

McCarthyism is a political practice defined by the political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and a campaign spreading fear of communist and Soviet influence on American institutions and of Soviet espionage in the United States during the late 1940s through the 1950s, heavily associated with the Second Red Scare, also known as the McCarthy era. After the mid-1950s, U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy, who had spearheaded the campaign, gradually lost his public popularity and credibility after several of his accusations were found to be false. The U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren made a series of rulings on civil and political rights that overturned several key laws and legislative directives, and helped bring an end to the Second Red Scare.

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09/03/1946

Bolton Wanderers stadium disaster at Burnden Park, Bolton, England, kills 33 and injures hundreds more.

Bolton Wanderers Football Club is a professional football club based in Horwich, Metropolitan Borough of Bolton, Greater Manchester, England, which competes in League One, the third level of the English football league system.

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09/03/1945

World War II: A coup d'état by Japanese forces in French Indochina removes the French from power.

The Japanese coup d'état in French Indochina, known as Meigō Sakusen , was a Japanese operation that took place on 9 March 1945, towards the end of World War II. With Japanese forces losing the war and the threat of an Allied invasion of Indochina imminent, the Japanese were concerned about an uprising against them by French colonial forces.

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World War II: Allied forces carry out firebombing over Tokyo, destroying most of the capital and killing over 100,000 civilians.

The Allies, or Allied powers, formally referred to as the United Nations from 1942, were an international military coalition formed during World War II (1939–1945) to oppose the Axis powers. Its principal members were the "Big Four"—the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, the United States, and China.

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09/03/1944

World War II: Soviet Army planes attack Tallinn, Estonia.

During World War II, the Estonian capital Tallinn suffered from many instances of aerial bombing by the Soviet air force and the German Luftwaffe. The first bombings by Luftwaffe occurred during the Summer War of 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa. A number of Soviet bombing missions to then German-occupied Tallinn followed in 1942–1944.

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09/03/1942

World War II: Dutch East Indies unconditionally surrenders to the Japanese forces in Kalijati, Subang, West Java, and the Japanese complete their Dutch East Indies campaign.

World War II, or the Second World War, was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis powers. Nearly all of the world's countries participated. Tanks and aircraft played major roles, the latter enabling the strategic bombing of cities and delivery of the only nuclear weapons used in war. World War II was the deadliest conflict in history, causing the death of 60 to 75 million people. Millions died as a result of massacres, starvation, disease, and genocides including the Holocaust. After the Allied victory, Germany, Austria, Japan, and Korea were occupied, and German and Japanese leaders were tried for war crimes.

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09/03/1933

Great Depression: President Franklin D. Roosevelt submits the Emergency Banking Act to Congress, the first of his New Deal policies.

The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty, drastic reductions in industrial production and international trade, and widespread bank and business failures around the world. The economic contagion began in 1929 in the United States, the largest economy in the world, with the devastating Wall Street crash of 1929 often considered the beginning of the Depression. Among the countries with the most unemployed were the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Germany.

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09/03/1916

Mexican Revolution: Pancho Villa leads nearly 500 Mexican raiders in an attack against the border town of Columbus, New Mexico.

The Mexican Revolution was an extended sequence of armed regional conflicts in Mexico from 20 November 1910 to 1 December 1920. It has been called "the defining event of modern Mexican history". It saw the destruction of the Federal Army, its replacement by a revolutionary army, and the transformation of Mexican culture and government. The northern Constitutionalist faction prevailed on the battlefield and drafted the present-day Constitution of Mexico, which aimed to create a strong central government. Revolutionary generals held power from 1920 to 1940. The revolutionary conflict was primarily a civil war, but foreign powers, having important economic and strategic interests in Mexico, figured in the outcome of Mexico's power struggles; the U.S. involvement was particularly high. The conflict led to the deaths of around one million people, mostly non-combatants.

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09/03/1908

Inter Milan is founded on Football Club Internazionale, following a schism from A.C. Milan.

Football Club Internazionale Milano, widely referred to as Internazionale or simply Inter, and commonly known as Inter Milan in English-speaking countries, is an Italian professional football club based in Milan, Lombardy. Inter is the only team to have always participated in the top division of Italian football since its debut in 1909, never being relegated to Serie B. Since 1947, Inter has shared the San Siro stadium, the largest stadium in Italy, with AC Milan, with whom it contests the long-standing Derby della Madonnina, one of the most widely followed rivalries in world football.

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09/03/1883

Demonstration of 9 March 1883: Parisian anarchists, unemployed and carpenters narrowly miss the Presidential palace during a violent protest; first use of the black flag as a symbol of anarchism by Louise Michel.

The demonstration of 9 March 1883 was an anarchist protest in Paris led by approximately 15,000 unemployed people, carpenters, and workers. Louise Michel, Émile Pouget and Émile Digeon, three notable figures of the anarchist movement, took part. Paule Mink also took part in it, charging the police with a revolver. In addition to causing serious disturbances in the French capital, and narrowly missing the Élysée Palace or the French Interior Ministry, the demonstration is known for Michel's action, where she displayed the black flag, making it a central symbol of the anarchist movement.

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09/03/1862

American Civil War: USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (rebuilt from the engines and lower hull of the USS Merrimack) fight to a draw in the Battle of Hampton Roads, the first battle between two ironclad warships.

The American Civil War was a civil war in the United States between the Union and the Confederacy, which was formed in 1861 by states that had seceded from the Union to preserve slavery in the United States, which they saw as threatened because of the election of Abraham Lincoln and the growing abolitionist movement in the North. The war lasted a little over four years, ending with Union victory, the dissolution of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery, freeing four million African Americans.

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09/03/1847

Mexican–American War: The first large-scale amphibious assault in U.S. history is launched in the Siege of Veracruz.

The Mexican–American War, also known in the United States as the Mexican War and in Mexico as the United States intervention in Mexico, was an invasion of Mexico by the United States. It followed the 1845 American annexation of Texas, which Mexico still considered its territory because it refused to recognize the Treaties of Velasco, signed by President Antonio López de Santa Anna after he was captured by the Texian Army during the 1836 Texas Revolution. The Republic of Texas was de facto an independent country, but most of its Anglo-American citizens who had moved from the United States to Texas after 1822 wanted to be annexed by the United States.

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09/03/1842

Giuseppe Verdi's third opera, Nabucco, receives its première performance in Milan; its success establishes Verdi as one of Italy's foremost opera composers.

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian composer best known for his operas. He was born near Busseto, a small town in the modern province of Parma, to a family of moderate means, receiving a musical education with the help of a local patron named Antonio Barezzi.

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The first documented discovery of gold in California occurs at Rancho San Francisco, six years before the California Gold Rush.

Gold is a chemical element; its chemical symbol is Au and atomic number 79. In its pure form, it is a bright-metallic-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal, a group 11 element, and one of the noble metals. It is one of the least reactive chemical elements, being the second lowest in the reactivity series, with only platinum ranked as less reactive. Gold is solid under standard conditions.

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09/03/1841

The U.S. Supreme Court rules in the United States v. The Amistad case that captive Africans who had seized control of the ship carrying them had been taken into slavery illegally.

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on questions of U.S. constitutional or federal law. It also has original jurisdiction over a narrow range of cases, specifically "all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party". In 1803, the court asserted itself the power of judicial review, the ability to invalidate a statute for violating a provision of the Constitution. It is also able to strike down presidential directives for violating either the Constitution or statutory law.

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09/03/1815

Francis Ronalds describes the first battery-operated clock in the Philosophical Magazine.

Sir Francis Ronalds FRS was an English scientist and inventor, and arguably the first electrical engineer. He was knighted for creating the first working electric telegraph over a substantial distance. In 1816 he laid an 8-mile (13 km) length of iron wire between wooden frames in his mother's garden and sent pulses using electrostatic generators. He also is known for creating the first electric clock in 1814.

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09/03/1811

Paraguayan forces defeat Manuel Belgrano at the Battle of Tacuarí.

Manuel José Joaquín del Corazón de Jesús Belgrano, usually referred to as Manuel Belgrano, was an Argentine public servant, economist, lawyer, politician, journalist, and military leader. He took part in the Argentine Wars of Independence and designed what became the flag of Argentina. Argentines regard him as one of the main Founding Fathers of the country. He was also a supporter of free trade.

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09/03/1796

Napoléon Bonaparte marries his first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais.

Napoleon I was Emperor of the French from 18 May 1804 until his first abdication in 1814, with a brief restoration during the Hundred Days in 1815. He rose to prominence as a general during the French Revolution and led a series of military campaigns across Europe and North Africa during the Napoleonic Wars. He was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo and exiled to Saint Helena, where he died in 1821. As a statesman, he enacted the Napoleonic Code, which continues to influence legal systems worldwide, and reformed education by establishing state lycées.

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09/03/1776

Scottish philosopher Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations, ushering in the classical period of political economy.

Adam Smith was a Scottish economist and philosopher who was a pioneer in the field of political economy and key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment. Seen by many as the "father of economics", or the "father of capitalism", he is primarily known for two classic works: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The latter, often abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is regarded as his magnum opus, marking the inception of modern economic scholarship as a comprehensive system and an academic discipline. Smith refuses to explain the distribution of wealth and power in terms of divine will and instead appeals to natural, political, social, economic, legal, environmental and technological factors, as well as the interactions among them. The work is notable for its contribution to economic theory, particularly in its exposition of the concept of absolute advantage.

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09/03/1765

After a campaign by the writer Voltaire, judges in Paris posthumously exonerate Jean Calas of murdering his son. Calas had been tortured and executed in 1762 on the charge, though his son may have actually died by suicide.

François-Marie Arouet, known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher (philosophe), satirist, and historian. Famous for his wit and his criticism of Christianity and of slavery, Voltaire was an advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state.

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09/03/1701

Safavid troops retreat from Basra, ending a three-year occupation.

The Guarded Domains of Iran, commonly called Safavid Iran, Safavid Persia or the Safavid Empire, was one of the largest and longest-lasting Iranian empires. It was ruled by the Safavid dynasty from 1501 to 1736, albeit others place the end on the year 1722, when Isfahan fell to the Afghans. It is often considered the beginning of modern Iranian history, as well as one of the gunpowder empires.

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09/03/1500

The fleet of Pedro Álvares Cabral leaves Lisbon for the Indies. The fleet will discover Brazil which lies within boundaries granted to Portugal in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.

Pedro Álvares Cabral was a Portuguese nobleman, military commander, navigator and explorer regarded as the European discoverer of Brazil. He was the first human in history to ever be on four continents, uniting all of them in his famous voyage of 1500, where he also conducted the first substantial exploration of the northeast coast of South America and claimed it for Portugal. While details of Cabral's early life remain unclear, it is known that he came from a minor noble family and received a good education. He was appointed to head an expedition to India in 1500, following Vasco da Gama's newly opened route around Africa. The undertaking had the aim of returning with valuable spices and of establishing trade relations in India—bypassing the monopoly on the spice trade then in the hands of Arab, Turkish and Italian merchants. Although the previous expedition of Vasco da Gama to India, on its sea route, had recorded signs of land west of the southern Atlantic Ocean, Cabral led the first known expedition to have touched four continents: Europe, Africa, South America, and Asia.

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09/03/1230

Bulgarian Tsar Ivan Asen II defeats Theodore of Epirus in the Battle of Klokotnitsa.

Bulgaria, officially the Republic of Bulgaria, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern portion of the Balkans directly south of the Danube river and west of the Black Sea. Bulgaria is bordered by Greece and Turkey to the south, Serbia and North Macedonia to the west, and Romania across the Danube river to the north. It covers a territory of 110,994 square kilometres (42,855 sq mi) and is the tenth largest within the European Union and the sixteenth-largest country in Europe by area. Sofia is the nation's capital and largest city; other major cities include Plovdiv, Varna, and Burgas.

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09/03/1226

Khwarazmian sultan Jalal ad-Din conquers the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.

The Anushtegin dynasty or Anushteginids, also known as the Khwarazmian dynasty was a Sunni Muslim dynasty of Turkic mamluk origin from the Bekdili clan of the Oghuz Turks. The Anushteginid dynasty ruled the Khwarazmian Empire, consisting in large parts of present-day Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iran in the approximate period of 1077 to 1231, first as vassals of the Seljuks and the Qara Khitai, and later as independent rulers, up until the Mongol conquest of the Khwarazmian Empire in the 13th century.

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09/03/1044

The people of Constantinople riot against emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, whose preference of his mistress Maria Skleraina over empress Zoe Porphyrogenita is seen as an insult.

Constantinople was a historical city located on the Bosporus, which served as the capital of the Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman empires between its consecration in 330 and the formal abolition of the Ottoman sultanate in 1922. Constantinople was founded in 324, initially as New Rome, during the reign of Constantine the Great on the site of the existing settlement of Byzantium and in 330 became the capital of the Roman Empire. Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the late 5th century, Constantinople remained the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Latin Empire (1204–1261), and the Ottoman Empire (1453–1922). In the aftermath of the Turkish War of Independence, the Turkish capital moved to Ankara. The city was officially renamed Istanbul on 28 March 1930. As of December 2025, it is the most populous city in Europe, with a population of more than 16 million residents, straddling the Bosporus Strait and lying in both Europe and Asia, and is the financial beneficiary of Turkey.

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09/03/1009

First known mention of Lithuania, in the annals of the monastery of Quedlinburg.

Lithuania, officially the Republic of Lithuania, is a country in the Baltic region of Europe. It is one of three Baltic states and lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, bordered by Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, Poland to the south, and the Russian semi-exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast to the southwest, with a maritime border with Sweden to the west. Lithuania covers an area of 65,300 km2 (25,200 sq mi), and has a population of 2.9 million. Its capital and largest city is Vilnius; other major cities include Kaunas, Klaipėda, Šiauliai and Panevėžys. Lithuanians are the titular nation, belong to the ethnolinguistic group of Balts, and speak Lithuanian.

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01/01/1970

Liu Che, posthumously known as Emperor Wu of Han, assumes the throne over the Han dynasty of China.

A posthumous name is an honorary name given mainly to revered dead people in East Asian culture. It is predominantly used in Asian countries such as China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Timor-Leste and Thailand. Reflecting on the person's accomplishments or reputation, the title is assigned after death and essentially replaces the name used during life. Although most posthumous names are given to royalty, some posthumous names are given to honor significant people without hereditary titles, such as courtiers or military generals.

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