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Before it was about roses and chocolate, February 14th marked a stranger event: the day Bolshevik Russia skipped thirteen days to join the modern calendar.

On 13 February 1258, Hulegu Khan ordered the sack of Baghdad. The caliph had called him young and ignorant. What followed was one of the most concentrated episodes of killing and destruction in human history.

On 12 February 1404, an Italian professor named Galeazzo di Santa Sofia opened a human body at a Vienna hospital, with wine poured and a fee charged at the door. It was the first anatomical dissection north of the Alps.

On 11 February 55 AD, Britannicus — the biological son of Emperor Claudius — collapsed at a dinner party and died. He was thirteen years old, one day short of manhood. The poisoning that killed him was not an aberration. It was how the Julio-Claudian dynasty did business.

On 10 February 1763, the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years' War. France traded a continent for a sugar island, Britain collected an empire, and the bills came due within a generation.

On 9 February 1822, Jean-Pierre Boyer rode into Santo Domingo with 12,000 soldiers and unified the entire island of Hispaniola under a single Black republic. The occupation lasted 22 years, abolished slavery, closed the oldest university in the Americas, and planted the resentments that would define Dominican identity ever after.

On 8 February 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded at Fotheringhay after the Babington Plot. Her death was lawful theatre, political necessity, and a dynastic tragedy all at once.

On 8 February 1904, Japan struck first at Port Arthur and shattered more than a fleet. Russia's defeat exposed the rot of Tsarism years before 1917 finished the job.

On 7 February 1906, Aisin-Gioro Puyi was born in Beijing. He became Emperor of China at two, lost the throne at six, spent his life as the plaything of forces vastly larger than himself, and died a gardener.

On 6 February 1952, a twenty-five-year-old princess in Kenya learned her father was dead. She reigned for seventy years — longer than any British monarch in history — and watched the empire she inherited dissolve beneath her.