On 29 May 1453 the army of Sultan Mehmed II stormed Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, after a siege begun in early April. The last emperor, Constantine XI, died that day, though the sources tell his death in different ways. On the same date in 1780, Tarleton's British Legion overran Buford's Virginians at the Waxhaws in South Carolina.
The Fall of Constantinople, 1453: the end of Byzantium
29 May 1453 (fall of the city) · 573 years ago
By 1453 the Byzantine Empire, the Greek-speaking eastern half of the old Roman Empire, had shrunk to little more than the city of Constantinople itself. Around it the Ottoman Empire had spread across the Balkans and Anatolia.
Read the full story of The Fall of Constantinople, 1453: the end of Byzantium ›Battle of Rajgród, 1831: Giełgud opens the road to Lithuania
29 May 1831 · 195 years ago
During the November Uprising, Antoni Giełgud's Polish corps, marching on Lithuania, clashed at Rajgród with Russian troops that had fallen back there from Łomża. The Russians were driven off, opening the road to Lithuania, where a partisan movement was active.
Read the full story of Battle of Rajgród, 1831: Giełgud opens the road to Lithuania ›Also on this day
1780: at the Waxhaws, near the line between North and South Carolina, Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton's British Legion caught Colonel Abraham Buford's Virginians, who were retreating toward North Carolina. Buford rejected Tarleton's summons to surrender, answering that he would "defend myself to the last extremity". Tarleton writes that his horse was brought down and that a report that they had lost their commander stirred his men to "a vindictive asperity not easily restrained"; the American Battlefield Trust concludes that he lost control of his men, and that Americans were killed while trying to surrender. In a letter on Buford's defeat, Dr. Robert Brownfield wrote that "not a man was spared". Sir Henry Clinton's dispatch reports 172 killed; Lossing and the Trust count 113 killed, 150 wounded and 53 captured.1
