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On 18th June 656, Ali ibn Abi Talib finally became caliph - the post he had arguably been born for, after watching three others take it before him. He inherited a throne built on his predecessor's corpse. The First Fitna followed within months.
On 17 June 1462, Vlad the Impaler led his cavalry into the sleeping camp of Mehmed II and nearly killed him. The real Dracula — the man who impaled 20,000 Turks outside his own capital — was considerably more dangerous than the fictional one.
On 16 June 632, an eight-year-old boy was crowned Shah of Persia at the sacred temple of Anahita. He was the last Sasanian King of Kings. The empire he inherited had already been hollowed out by civil war, plague, and twenty years of war with Byzantium - and within weeks, Muhammad would die in Arabia.
On 15 June 1215, King John applied his seal to Magna Carta at Runnymede, ending a baronial revolt. Within three months he had appealed to the Pope to annul it, the Pope obliged, and England was at war again. The document that supposedly founded Western liberty lasted as a peace treaty for less than a season.
On 14 June 1822, Charles Babbage told the Royal Astronomical Society he could build a machine to calculate mathematical tables without human error. He was right about the problem and right about the solution. He never finished building it.
On 13 June 1944, Germany launched eleven V-1 flying bombs at England. Four arrived. Six people died. Over the next eleven months, roughly 10,000 more followed - and the world's first cruise missile campaign killed more than 6,000 Britons and pushed 1.5 million out of London.
On 12 June 1817, Karl von Drais pushed a two-wheeled wooden contraption from Mannheim to Schwetzingen and back in under an hour. No pedals. No engine. Just a baron with a plank, two wheels, and a good road.
On 11 June 980, Vladimir - the illegitimate son of a housekeeper - had his brother murdered under a flag of truce and was proclaimed knyaz of all Kievan Rus'. He united a realm stretching from Ukraine to the Baltic, and a thousand years later two warring capitals still claim him.
On 10 June 1782, Chao Phraya Chakri was crowned on the east bank of the Chao Phraya River and took the name Rama I. What he built there — Bangkok, a dynasty, a legal code, a purified scripture — replaced everything Burma had burned fifteen years earlier.
On 9 June AD 68, Nero drove a dagger into his own throat in a freedman's villa outside Rome. He was the last of the Julio-Claudians, and his death opened the first succession crisis in imperial history - the Year of the Four Emperors.