A Daily Dose of History (29 Jul 2025) Today's historical events:

• The Praetorian Guard storm the palace and capture Pupienus and Balbinus. They are dragged through the streets of Rome and executed. On the same day, Gordian III, age 13, is proclaimed emperor, the sixth emperor of the year.
• Pakal ascends the throne of Palenque at the age of 12.
• Sack of Thessalonica: Saracen raiders under Leo of Tripoli sack Thessaloniki, the Byzantine Empire's second-largest city, after a short siege, and plunder it for a week.
• Battle of Firenzuola: Lombard forces under King Rudolph II and Adalbert I, margrave of Ivrea, defeat the dethroned Emperor Berengar I of Italy at Firenzuola (Tuscany).
• Byzantine-Bulgarian wars: Battle of Kleidion: Byzantine emperor Basil II inflicts a decisive defeat on the Bulgarian army, and his subsequent treatment of 15,000 prisoners reportedly causes Tsar Samuil of Bulgaria to die of a heart attack less than three months later, on October 6.
• Count Dirk III defeats an army sent by Emperor Henry II in the Battle of Vlaardingen.
• Ladejarl-Fairhair succession wars: Battle of Stiklestad: King Olaf II fights and dies trying to regain his Norwegian throne from the Danes.
• The Siege of Damascus ends in a decisive crusader defeat and leads to the disintegration of the Second Crusade.
• The widowed Mary, Queen of Scots marries Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, Duke of Albany, at Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh, Scotland.
• The infant James VI is crowned King of Scotland at Stirling.
• Anglo-Spanish War: Battle of Gravelines: English naval forces under the command of Lord Charles Howard and Sir Francis Drake defeat the Spanish Armada off the coast of Gravelines, France.
• War of the Grand Alliance: Battle of Landen: France wins a Pyrrhic victory over Allied forces in the Netherlands.
• Founding of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General's Corps: General George Washington appoints William Tudor as Judge Advocate of the Continental Army.
• French physicist Augustin Fresnel submits his prizewinning "Memoir on the Diffraction of Light", precisely accounting for the limited extent to which light spreads into shadows, and thereby demolishing the oldest objection to the wave theory of light.

Information from this episode are sourced from API Ninjas

Explanations from OpenAI ChatGPT API with proprietary prompts.

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