On 16 July 1945, at 5:29 a.m., Manhattan Project scientists exploded the first atomic bomb, a plutonium device called the Gadget, at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert; it released about 21 kilotons. Also on 16 July: the Battle of Montlhéry, 1465, and Las Navas de Tolosa, 1212.
Trinity: the first atomic explosion
Before dawn on Monday, 16 July 1945, Manhattan Project scientists exploded the world’s first atomic device, a plutonium implosion bomb nicknamed the Gadget, on top of a 100-foot steel tower at the Trinity site in New Mexico. The site lay in a remote corner of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, in the desert called the Jornada del Muerto, the “Journey of Death”, about 210 miles south of Los Alamos. The test director was the physicist Kenneth Bainbridge.1
The shot had been set for 4 a.m., but rain and a thunderstorm held it back, and it went off just before half past five. Los Alamos gives the moment as 5:29:45 a.m. and the National Park Service as 5:29 a.m. Mountain War Time, while the Department of Energy’s history says 5:30. The flash lit the sky and was seen as far as 160 miles away, and a mushroom cloud rose to about 38,000 feet. Where the tower had stood the blast left a crater about half a mile across, its sand fused into a green glass later called trinitite.2
The yield was about 21 kilotons, the force of 21,000 tons of TNT, more than most at Los Alamos had expected. Bainbridge called it “a foul and awesome display”. The test confirmed the new implosion design, the one used in the Fat Man bomb, and opened the way for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945.3
The princes against the king
In 1465 the great nobles of France had banded together against King Louis XI as the League of the Public Weal. Olivier de La Marche, who fought on the Burgundian side, writes that they did so “soubz umbre du bien publicque”, under color of the public good (our translation). Among them was Charles, Count of Charolais, son of Duke Philip of Burgundy and later known as Charles the Bold, whom Baumgartner, in his EBSCO article, calls the league’s leader. On Monday 15 July, Roye writes, the Burgundians took up quarters at Montlhéry; in Commynes’s account the count himself lay at Longjumeau, with his vanguard under the Count of Saint-Pol at Montlhéry.4
The journal of Jean de Roye, known as the Chronique scandaleuse, writes that the king, who was on this side of Orléans on his way to Paris, arrived on the morning of Tuesday, the 16th day of July, at Chastes below Montlhéry and attacked the Burgundians without waiting for his whole army. Roye's editor Bernard de Mandrot and Baumgartner both date the battle to that day, 16 July 1465. The English text of Commynes in Andrew Scoble's 1855 edition reads "the 27th of July", and Scoble's note corrects it to Tuesday 16 July, citing Roye's chronicle.5
Commynes writes that Louis meant not to fight but to throw himself into Paris, and Roye’s editor Mandrot likewise concludes that the king did not expect the Burgundians to bar his road to Paris. Commynes, who says the king told him this himself, writes that the royal vanguard was led by Pierre de Brézé, Grand Seneschal of Normandy, and quotes what Brézé confided to friends: “I will bring the armies so close together this day, that he must be a very experienced general who will part them without fighting”.6
The seneschal's charge
The royal army was drawn up behind a ditch, toward the castle of Montlhéry; Commynes adds a great hedge. On the Burgundian side, Commynes writes, the men-at-arms were first ordered to dismount and then nearly all mounted again, a loss of time in which the lightly armed Philippe de Lalaing was killed; the army was to halt twice on its long march so that the infantry could breathe, yet "all things were done as perfectly contrary, as if they designed to lose the battle on purpose", and the count advanced without giving his archers or foot soldiers any breath. The king's troops, he writes, came out at both ends of the hedge, and the Burgundian men-at-arms rode through the ranks of their own archers before these could shoot.7
Commynes writes that the Burgundian left wing was entirely broken, some of its men driven to their wagons and most of them to a forest nearly half a league away, while the count’s own wing, toward the castle, won without much opposition. La Marche, too, has the French fall on the Burgundian left, where some Burgundian captains fled the field.8
Part of the royal army then fled. Commynes writes that the Count of Maine fled with other men of rank and not fewer than 800 men-at-arms. Roye writes that toward nightfall the king's Scots guard took him into the castle of Montlhéry, that most of those who had not seen this believed him dead or captured and fled, and that Maine, the Admiral de Montauban and the lord of la Barde, with 700 to 800 lances, then withdrew and abandoned the king. Commynes sums up: "Never was there a greater rout on both sides; but (which is remarkable) the two princes themselves kept the field".9
"My lord, surrender yourself"
The count chased the fugitives, Commynes writes, half a league beyond Montlhéry, and turned back only when the lord of Contay warned him that the French had rallied. Near the castle some fifteen or sixteen men-at-arms fell on him, killing Philippe d'Oignies, who carried his guidon. The count took a sword wound in the neck, on the left side by La Marche’s account, because his beaver, loosely fastened that morning, had dropped from his head; Commynes adds: "I myself saw it fall". The Frenchmen laid hands on him, crying: "My lord, surrender yourself; we know you well; do not obstinately throw away your life"; La Marche, too, writes that they called on him to surrender. A servant of the count rode between them and the attackers drew off; Commynes calls him Jean Cadet, La Marche Robert Cottereau, the son of the count’s physician. Roye writes that the count was taken prisoner twice, by Geoffroy de Saint-Belin and Gilbert de Grassay, and rescued.10
Night found the Burgundians, in Commynes's account, behind a ring of wagons, many of them wounded and afraid of a sortie from Paris. Before the count could sit down to eat, four or five dead bodies had to be moved, and one of the naked men they took for dead called out for a drink and proved to be Pierre Savarot, an archer of the count's guard, who was dressed and cured.11
Counting the dead
Commynes reports that the prisoner brought to the count before the battle put the king's force at about 2,200 men-at-arms, besides the arrière-ban of Dauphiné and forty or fifty gentlemen of Savoy, and he writes that the Burgundian army was the larger. La Marche writes that the Burgundian army took the field with more than ten thousand horses, not counting pack animals and artillery, and that the king had 1,900 lances of the ordonnance companies.12
Commynes counts at least 2,000 men slain on both sides; the Burgundians, he writes, lost more foot soldiers and the king more horsemen. Roye writes that after the fighting 3,600 men were found dead on the field: "Dieu en ait les ames !" ("God have their souls!", our translation). Roye adds that the Burgundians had many more dead and prisoners than the king; in a note to that sentence Mandrot writes that the dead were stripped at once, so that it was impossible to know which side had lost more. Both writers name Brézé, Geoffroy de Saint-Belin and Floquet among the king's dead, and Commynes names Philippe de Lalaing on the Burgundian side.13
A field held, a war unsettled
As darkness fell Louis withdrew to Corbeil, while the Burgundians remained on the field. Roye writes that the king reached Paris late on Thursday 18 July. La Marche, who was knighted on the Burgundian side that day, writes that the count won the day and held the field.14
Baumgartner calls the battle indecisive in his EBSCO article and writes that the fighting ability of the 500 Swiss infantrymen in the royal army, the first to serve in it, caught the attention of French commanders. In his entry for the encyclopedia Europe, 1450 to 1789, he writes instead that Charles and his allies were victorious, but that little came of it after they failed against Paris. In the EBSCO article the nobles, "bloodied but unbowed", pushed on to Paris, put it under siege on 28 August and, unable to take it before the end of the campaigning season, accepted the Treaty of Conflans in late October.15
The next day, Commynes writes, the count kept the field all day, "imputing the whole glory of this action to himself"; after that he was governed by no counsel but his own and spent the rest of his life in wars, in which he died.16
Also on this day
Battle of Montlhéry
16 July 1465 · 561 years ago
South of Paris, the royal army of Louis XI fought Burgundian troops under Charles the Bold, then Count of Charolais and a leader of the rebel nobles' League of the Public Weal. Neither side won a clear victory, so the clash settled nothing in the conflict.
Battle of Peta
16 July 1822 · 204 years ago
Near Peta in Epirus, Greek insurgents under Alexandros Mavrokordatos, joined by foreign philhellene volunteers, faced Omer Vrioni's Ottoman army in the Greek War of Independence. The Greeks lost, the philhellenes suffered heavily, and Mavrokordatos's standing was hurt.
1212: at Las Navas de Tolosa, Alfonso VIII of Castile, Peter II of Aragon and Sancho VII of Navarre defeated the Almohad caliph Muhammad al-Nasir, who fled, and the Christians took his camp. Julia Pavón and María Calonge of the University of Navarra date it to Monday 16 July, as does the translation of al-Marrakushi's history, written in 1224. In his report to Pope Innocent III, Alfonso claimed that only some twenty or thirty Christians fell. Our article on the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa tells the whole story.17
1779: shortly after midnight on 16 July, Anthony Wayne's light infantry stormed the British post at Stony Point on the Hudson, under orders to attack with fixed bayonets and unloaded muskets, and took it, with its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Johnson. New York State Parks says it took about twenty-five minutes and nearly five hundred prisoners; Mark Maloy, writing for the American Battlefield Trust, counts 15 Americans killed and 83 wounded against 20 British killed, 74 wounded and 472 captured.18
