December 31 in History

The boy emperor Tran Thai Tong took the Vietnamese throne through marriage to the last Ly monarch, ending 216 years of Ly Dynasty rule. The new Tran Dynasty would prove itself in the most dramatic fashion possible, repelling three Mongol invasions that Kublai Khan launched against Vietnam within the century.

Belisarius took Syracuse without a siege. The Ostrogothic garrison saw his fleet, counted the soldiers, and simply surrendered the keys. He'd conquered the entire island in one campaigning season — grain shipments to Constantinople resumed within weeks. But this was also his last day as consul, Rome's most prestigious office. He spent it accepting a fortress, not attending ceremonies in silk robes. The emperor Justinian had given him an army and one year of glory. Belisarius chose to spend both on Sicily's wheat fields, knowing they fed the capital better than any parade. He sailed for Africa next, already planning how to take Carthage with even fewer men.

Vikings crash into Berkshire's forces at Englefield, only to stumble back toward Reading after Æthelwulf's men slaughter many Danes. This sharp defeat buys Wessex crucial breathing room against the Great Heathen Army's advance.

The Muslim defenders had held out for three months behind Palma's walls. When they finally opened the gates on December 31, James I rode in with 16,000 men — nearly twice the entire population of the city they'd just conquered. He was 21 years old. The king immediately converted the main mosque into a cathedral, didn't wait for papal blessing, and started parceling out land to Catalan nobles who'd bankrolled his fleet. Within a decade, Arabic disappeared from official records. The conquest worked because James promised his barons one thing: free real estate. Majorca's Muslims got a choice: convert, become serfs, or leave. Most left.

Twenty-one scientists squeezed into the belly of a concrete dinosaur and ate turtle soup. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins built the Iguanodon for Crystal Palace Park — 33 feet long, big enough to host dinner inside its ribcage. Richard Owen, who'd coined "dinosaur" just eleven years earlier, sat at the head. They toasted extinct monsters while sitting in one. The sculptures still stand in south London, and they're catastrophically wrong: Iguanodon walked on two legs, not four, and that spike Hawkins mounted on its nose? Actually a thumb claw. But on New Year's Eve 1853, nobody knew that yet. They just knew they were dining in deep time.

Confederate forces under Braxton Bragg launch a surprise assault on Union troops led by William S. Rosecrans near Murfreesboro, igniting three days of brutal fighting. This engagement ends in a strategic Union victory that secures control of central Tennessee and prevents Confederate expansion into Kentucky.

Virginia didn't split itself. Lincoln did it — in the middle of a war, to a Confederate state still fighting him. The western counties had voted to secede from Virginia after Virginia seceded from the Union, creating a legal pretzel that still gets argued in law schools. Congress said yes in December 1862, but West Virginia wouldn't actually join until June 1863. The timing mattered: every new loyal state meant more senators, more soldiers, more legitimacy for a government half the country said didn't exist. Richmond lost a third of its territory and most of its salt, its coal, and its Appalachian supply routes. West Virginia remains the only state formed by splitting another during wartime.

Karl Benz was 34, broke, and hiding from creditors when he built an engine that actually worked. His two-stroke gas design ran on New Year's Eve 1879 in a tiny Mannheim workshop — the patent came through that same year. It wasn't the first internal combustion engine. It was just the first one reliable enough to power something real. Eight years later, he'd bolt a version of it to three wheels and call it a motorwagen. But that night in 1879, all he had was a machine that kept running when every other inventor's quit, and a German patent office stamp that said someone finally believed him.

The New York Times just moved into its new tower at Broadway and 42nd Street—still called Longacre Square, named for the horse exchange that used to operate there. Owner Adolph Ochs wanted attention. He got fireworks, a street festival, and 200,000 people crammed into what had been a sleepy intersection. The city renamed the square after his newspaper three weeks later. But the fireworks terrified nearby buildings, so in 1907 Ochs switched to a lit ball drop instead. That ball—now LED and weighing 11,875 pounds—has fallen 116 times since, missing only two years during World War II blackouts.