📅 On This Day in Military History
3 events across history
The Germanic commander Odoacer, leading the Italian army's barbarian foederati, revolted when their demand for land was refused, killed the strongman Orestes, and deposed his teenage son, the puppet emperor Romulus Augustulus. Rather than name a new Western emperor, Odoacer sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople and ruled Italy as king, nominally under the Eastern emperor.
The quiet deposition of a boy who bore, with bitter irony, the names of both Rome's founder and its first emperor is the conventional end-date of the Western Roman Empire. No legions clashed; the office simply ceased. Italy passed to Germanic kings, and the institutions, peoples, and faith of the Roman West reorganized into the kingdoms of early medieval Europe.
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After nearly a decade of resistance across the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico and the Arizona Territory, Geronimo and his band of Chiricahua Apache — at times no more than 36 men, women, and children — surrendered to General Nelson Miles at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona. The pursuit had consumed 5,000 U.S. soldiers and 500 Mexican troops. Lieutenant Charles Gatewood's negotiations, aided by Apache scouts from Geronimo's own tribe, finally convinced the exhausted but undefeated warrior to surrender.
Geronimo's surrender effectively ended the Apache Wars and the last major armed resistance in the Southwest. He had never been defeated in battle. He and his followers, including Apache scouts who had helped capture him, were sent as prisoners of war to Florida, then Alabama, then Fort Sill, Oklahoma — never permitted to return to their Arizona homeland. Geronimo died a prisoner of war in 1909.
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A series of four bomb explosions destroyed apartment buildings in Moscow, Buynaksk, and Volgodonsk, killing nearly 300 sleeping civilians. The Russian government immediately blamed Chechen terrorists and used the attacks to build public support for a new military campaign. Suspicions remain that the FSB itself may have orchestrated the bombings — an FSB operative was caught placing a bomb in a Ryazan apartment building days later, an incident the FSB later claimed was a 'training exercise.' The bombings launched Putin to national prominence as a strongman who would restore Russian order.
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