March 28 in History

The Praetorian Guards literally auctioned the Roman Empire to the highest bidder. After murdering Emperor Pertinax in March 193 CE, they stood on their camp walls and invited wealthy senators to shout out bids. Didius Julianus offered 25,000 sesterces per guard—roughly five years' salary each. He won. The guards opened the gates, proclaimed him emperor, and collected their payment. Sixty-six days later, rival general Septimius Severus marched into Rome, executed Julianus, and disbanded the Praetorian Guard entirely. The empire's most elite military unit had sold the one thing they were sworn to protect, and it cost them everything.

Seven thousand German pilgrims, starving and dying of thirst after three days of Bedouin raids near Caesarea, watched a Muslim army approach across the desert. They braced for death. Instead, the Fatimid governor of Ramla, Mu'tamin al-Khilafa, attacked the bandits and escorted the Christians safely to Jerusalem. He even waived the customary gate fee. This act of protection should've been remembered as proof that Muslim authorities welcomed Christian pilgrims. But when these same Germans returned home with horror stories about the journey's dangers, their accounts helped fuel the very crusading fever that would turn Jerusalem into a battlefield thirty years later. The rescue that saved them inspired the invasion that destroyed the peace.

De Valette was 72 years old when he laid Valletta's foundation stone, still recovering from wounds he'd personally sustained defending Malta against 40,000 Ottoman troops just months earlier. The elderly warrior had fought sword-in-hand on the ramparts during the Great Siege, refusing to retreat. He designed his new capital city as a fortress—every street a firing line, every corner a defensive position. The grid layout wasn't aesthetic; it was tactical genius that let crossfire cover every approach. Five months after breaking ground, de Valette died, never seeing his city completed. Malta built the world's first planned Baroque city not as a monument to victory, but as preparation for the next invasion.

The last duke didn't even live in his own duchy. Peter von Biron spent his final years in his German estates while Catherine the Great's armies marched into Courland—a Baltic territory that had been semi-independent for 240 years. When Russia formally annexed it in 1795, the duchies of Courland and Semigallia vanished from maps without a single battle. The 500,000 people who lived there woke up Russian subjects overnight. This wasn't conquest—it was paperwork. Three empires had just carved up Poland-Lithuania like a feast, and Courland was the side dish nobody remembered ordering.

The furthest battle of the War of 1812 happened 5,000 miles from American shores, in neutral Chilean waters. Captain David Porter had sailed the USS Essex around Cape Horn to terrorize British whalers in the Pacific—he'd captured twelve vessels and cost Britain millions. But on March 28, 1814, two British warships cornered him in Valparaíso's harbor. Porter tried to make a run for it. His ship was shredded. Fifty-eight Americans died, many drowning while trying to swim to shore as Chilean crowds watched from the beach. The battle that ended America's only Pacific campaign of the war became a spectator sport for a country that wasn't even fighting.

The Senate had never censured a sitting president before, and Jackson was furious. When he defunded the Second Bank by pulling federal deposits in September 1833, Henry Clay gathered enough votes to formally condemn him on March 28, 1834. Jackson fired back with a blistering protest message, calling the censure unconstitutional—which the Senate refused to even enter into their records. He spent his final three years in office fighting to expunge that black mark. His allies finally succeeded in 1837, physically drawing black lines through the censure in the Senate journal. The president who expanded executive power beyond anything the Founders imagined couldn't stand one paragraph of criticism in a ledger book.

The Confederates won the battle but lost the war in New Mexico — because a Union spy destroyed their entire supply train while the fighting raged miles away. Major John Chivington led 400 soldiers on a forced march through canyon trails on March 28, 1862, bypassing the main battle at Glorieta Pass entirely. They torched 80 wagons, bayoneted 500 horses and mules, and burned every supply the Texan invaders owned. The Confederate commander, Henry Sibley, technically held the battlefield that day but couldn't feed his men. Within weeks, his starving army retreated 1,000 miles back to Texas, abandoning dreams of capturing Colorado's gold mines and California's ports. Sometimes the real battle happens where no one's looking.