May 15 in History

Johann Sebastian Bach conducted the premiere of his cantata Ich bin ein guter Hirt (BWV 85) at Leipzig's Thomaskirche, a meditation on Jesus as the Good Shepherd composed for the second Sunday after Easter. The work showcases Bach's ability to blend theological depth with musical innovation, featuring an oboe obbligato that weaves through arias of unusual tenderness and structural precision.

Britain and Argentina ratified the Arana-Southern Treaty, ending a prolonged naval blockade of the Rio de la Plata and resolving territorial disputes that had strained relations for years. The agreement restored trade and normalized diplomacy, allowing Argentina to consolidate its sovereignty while Britain secured commercial access to South American markets.

U.S. Army cavalry under Nathaniel Lyon attacked a Pomo encampment on an island in Clear Lake, California, slaughtering an estimated 60 to 200 men, women, and children who had killed two abusive ranchers. The massacre went largely unreported for decades and exemplified the systematic violence against California's Indigenous peoples during the Gold Rush era.

The Roman people handed their biggest insult to the senate by letting a centurion dedicate a temple instead of a consul. Marcus Laetorius, a senior military officer with zero religious authority, walked up the steps of Mercury's new shrine between the Aventine and Palatine hills in 495 BCE and performed the sacred rites himself. The senate had ordered one thing. The popular assembly voted for another. And in a city where every religious ceremony reinforced the existing power structure, the people just weaponized a god of merchants against the aristocrats who claimed to speak for all the gods.

The twenty-one-year-old emperor was found hanging in his bedroom at Vienne, but nobody believed it was suicide. Valentinian II had just ordered his general Arbogast arrested for treason. The general refused. Three days later, the emperor was dead. Arbogast claimed he'd killed himself from shame. But the doors were guarded by Arbogast's men, and within weeks the general installed a puppet emperor named Eugenius. The Western Empire's last legitimate Theodosian ruler died alone, fifteen feet from soldiers who answered to someone else. Sometimes the uniform doesn't matter as much as who signs the orders.

The Lombard king married a Catholic princess from Bavaria, and she didn't even have to convert him—she converted his entire kingdom instead. Theodelinda brought more than a dowry when she wed Authari in 589. She brought legitimacy with Rome, something these Germanic warriors desperately needed if they wanted to hold northern Italy. When Authari died just a year later, the nobles let her choose the next king. She picked his successor, married him too, and spent decades steering the Lombards toward Catholicism. One wedding, three generations of influence. Strange how conquest works both ways.

He swam across the Euphrates to escape the assassins who'd already killed ninety of his relatives. Abd al-Rahman I had watched the Abbasid caliphate butcher his entire family in Damascus—his brothers drowned in front of him. So when he claimed Cordova in 756, he built something that couldn't be taken by surprise. Nearly three centuries the Umayyad dynasty lasted in Iberia, founded by a man who understood exactly how fragile power becomes when you turn your back. The survivor who never forgot what he'd survived.

The monastery burned to the ground, and Michael the Syrian decided to rebuild it himself. Not delegate it. Not commission it. Do it. As patriarch, he could've done anything else with his resources in 1194. But Michael chose Mor Bar Sauma, reconstructing it stone by stone until he could reconsecrate the monastery that same year. It became the beating heart of Syriac Orthodox Christianity for another century. Then it faded. Sometimes the buildings that matter most to one generation become footnotes in the next. Michael couldn't have known which his would be.

The Pope wanted rules for torture. Pope Innocent IV's 1252 bull *Ad extirpanda* didn't ban breaking heretics on the rack—it created a manual. No mutilation, no danger of death, no doing it twice. Once per suspect. And inquisitors who tortured couldn't hear confessions afterward, so they'd bring a second priest to keep their hands technically clean. The document turned violence into bureaucracy, complete with paperwork. For the next three centuries, people died within carefully documented legal limits. The Church didn't outlaw judicial torture until 1816.

The oldest surviving Danish history nearly vanished entirely. Saxo Grammaticus wrote his *Gesta Danorum* around 1200, but no medieval manuscript exists today—only fragments. When Christiern Pedersen found a complete copy in the early 1500s, he rushed it to Paris printer Jodocus Badius Ascensius. The 1514 Latin edition saved everything: the founding myths, the earliest Hamlet story, nine books of Danish kings. Without this single printing, Denmark's pre-Christian past would be guesswork. One book, published in the wrong country, preserved an entire nation's memory.