October 28 in History

Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica near Black River with record-tying intensity, killing over 30 people and matching the destructive power of the 1935 Labor Day hurricane. The storm's devastating landfall underscored the growing threat of supercharged Atlantic hurricanes to Caribbean island nations.

The Praetorian Guard forced Emperor Nerva to adopt Trajan as his heir. Nerva was 66 and childless. The Guard had murdered his predecessor. They wanted a military man. Trajan was governing Upper Germany and had never been to Rome. Nerva died three months later. Trajan became emperor and ruled for 19 years, expanding the empire to its greatest extent. He never needed the Guard's approval again.

Visigothic forces sacked Braga, capital of the Suevi kingdom in northwest Iberia. They burned the city's churches to the ground. The Suevi had converted to Catholicism 80 years earlier. The Visigoths were Arian Christians who considered Catholics heretics. King Theodoric II was consolidating Visigothic control over Iberia. Braga's bishops fled. The city didn't recover for a generation.

Byzantine general Michael Bourtzes scaled Antioch's walls at night with a small force and seized two towers. The city had been in Arab hands for 340 years. Bourtzes held the towers for three days until reinforcements under Peter Phokas arrived with the main army. Antioch became Byzantine again. It had been one of Christianity's five patriarchal sees. Its loss to Arabs in 637 had been catastrophic. Recovery took three centuries.

Pope Nicholas II had died. Empress Agnes, ruling Germany as regent for her 11-year-old son Henry IV, pushed for Cadalus, the Bishop of Parma. Cardinals in Rome elected someone else. Now there were two popes. Cadalus called himself Honorius II. He marched on Rome with an army. The other pope barricaded himself in Castel Sant'Angelo. The schism lasted four years. Cadalus lost. But the precedent stuck: emperors didn't control papal elections anymore. The church had won.

Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi routed Emperor Lebna Dengel's forces at Amba Sel, extending Muslim control over southern Ethiopia and threatening the Christian highland kingdom's survival. The defeat forced the emperor into years of flight across his own territories and eventually drove him to seek Portuguese military assistance.

British General Howe had 13,000 troops. Washington had 14,500 but they were scattered. Howe attacked Chatterton Hill, the high ground overlooking White Plains. American militia held for two hours, then broke. British artillery pounded them from three sides. Washington retreated north. He'd lost the hill but saved his army. A month later, he'd cross the Delaware and win at Trenton. But at White Plains, he was still losing.

Eli Whitney applied for a cotton gin patent in 1793, six months after inventing it on a Georgia plantation. The machine could clean 50 pounds of cotton a day — one person had done ten pounds by hand. He thought it would make slavery obsolete. Instead, cotton production exploded 50-fold in a decade. Plantation owners bought more enslaved people to plant more cotton. Whitney's labor-saving device created the largest forced labor expansion in American history.