this day in history

On 28 April 1945, Benito Mussolini was shot at a roadside near Lake Como and hung upside down from a petrol station in Milan. The man who invented fascism ended as a public spectacle in a piazza he had helped make notorious.

On 27th April 711, a Berber commander called Tariq ibn Ziyad landed at the rock that now bears his name. What followed was the destruction of the Visigothic Kingdom within months — and the beginning of 781 years of Muslim rule in Iberia.

On 26 April 1564, William Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon. His birth date is unknown. For some people, this uncertainty is enough to convince them that a glover's son could not possibly have written Hamlet.

On 25 April 404 BC, Athens surrendered to Sparta, ending the Peloponnesian War. Twenty-seven years of plague, naval catastrophe, and Persian gold had turned Greece's golden age into rubble — and left a warning nobody has quite managed to heed.

On 24 April 1479 BC, Thutmose III became Pharaoh of Egypt. For the next 22 years, his stepmother Hatshepsut ran the kingdom. When he finally ruled alone, he built the largest empire in Egyptian history — then spent years trying to erase her from it.

On 23 April 1521, royalist forces crushed the Comuneros on a muddy field at Villalar. The revolt had almost ended the Spanish reign of Charles V before it properly began - a teenage Habsburg who spoke no Castilian, travelled with a Flemish court, and treated Spain as a bank to finance his Imperial ambitions elsewhere.

On 22 April 1500, Pedro Álvares Cabral sighted a mountain on the Brazilian coast and claimed it for Portugal. The territory had already been assigned to his king six years earlier, by a line drawn through an ocean that no one could accurately locate.

On 21 April 753 BC, according to tradition, Romulus founded Rome. The date is a fiction a Roman scholar calculated seven centuries later. The city it commemorates outlived every peer it ever had, and most of its successors.

On 20 April 1653, Oliver Cromwell walked into the Commons with a file of musketeers, pointed at the Speaker's mace, called it 'a bauble,' and dissolved the Rump Parliament. He had no constitution to replace it with. Seven years later, the same Rump voted to bring back the king.

On 19 April 1529, the Diet of Speyer voted to ban Lutheranism and reinstate the Edict of Worms. Six princes and fourteen cities filed a legal protest. That document coined the word 'Protestant.' Ten years later to the day, Charles V made peace with them. He never managed more than that.