September 19 in History

Edward the Black Prince had around 8,000 men and was trying to retreat when the French king John II decided to charge instead of wait. The English longbowmen shredded the French cavalry, and when the fighting was done, John II himself was a prisoner — along with his teenage son Philip, who'd fought beside him. Edward treated the captured king to a banquet and served him personally. The ransom eventually set was 3 million gold écus — roughly the entire annual revenue of France. An army that had been retreating ended the day owning the King of France.

The Teutonic Order's State successfully repels the combined Polish-Lithuanian assault, ending the siege and preserving their control over Marienburg for another decade. This victory temporarily halts the expansion of the Polish-Lithuanian union in the region, allowing the Order to regroup its defenses before facing a decisive defeat at Grunwald two years later.

The British won the First Battle of Saratoga — also called Freeman's Farm — but General John Burgoyne's 600 casualties were losses he couldn't replace 300 miles from his supply base. General Horatio Gates pulled his men back inside fortified lines and refused to pursue, which infuriated Daniel Morgan and Benedict Arnold but preserved the Continental force. Burgoyne had taken the field but couldn't advance. Three weeks later came the second battle, and then his surrender — the surrender that brought France into the war. A British tactical win was the first step toward the total defeat that followed.

Mélanie Calvat was 14 and Maximin Giraud was 11, both illiterate shepherd children who barely knew each other, when they reported seeing a weeping woman in brilliant light on a mountaintop in the French Alps. The figure gave each child a separate secret message. Those secrets became the 'Secrets of La Salette' — officially delivered to Pope Pius IX in 1851 and never fully published. The apparition site drew pilgrims within months and a basilica within decades. Two children who couldn't read or write generated a theological controversy that occupied the Vatican for years.

The Battle of Iuka on September 19, 1862 should have been a trap. General Grant had positioned Rosecrans to block Confederate General Sterling Price's retreat while another Union force under Ord attacked from the north. But a freak atmospheric phenomenon — an "acoustic shadow" caused by the terrain — meant Ord's troops couldn't hear Rosecrans's guns just eight miles away, and never advanced. Price escaped. It was a Union tactical victory that accomplished half of what it should have, because physics intervened.

Philip Sheridan attacked at 2 a.m., routing Jubal Early's Confederate force with 37,000 Union soldiers against roughly 12,500 Confederates near Winchester. Early lost a third of his army. But in Washington, Abraham Lincoln read the dispatch and immediately understood something beyond the military result: he'd been trailing George McClellan in the polls, and Northern voters were exhausted by the war. Sheridan's victory — and his subsequent burning of the Shenandoah Valley — convinced the North the war could be won. Lincoln won re-election in November. A pre-dawn cavalry charge may have extended the United States.

Union troops under Philip Sheridan crush Confederate forces led by Jubal Early at the Battle of Cedar Creek, engaging over 50,000 soldiers in the Shenandoah Valley's largest clash. This decisive victory shatters Confederate hopes of disrupting Union supply lines and secures the valley for the North, effectively ending major Rebel operations there.

Italian troops besieged Rome after marching through the Papal States, breaching the walls at Porta Pia the following day and claiming the city for the unified Italian kingdom. Pope Pius IX declared himself a "prisoner of the Vatican" and refused to recognize the Italian state, beginning a standoff between church and government that lasted until the Lateran Treaty of 1929.

Paris in September 1870 had a population of about 2 million people and roughly 60 days of food. Prussian forces completed their encirclement on September 19, and the city's defenders tried everything — sorties, carrier pigeons, even balloons to get messages out. The siege lasted 132 days. By the end, Parisians were eating the animals from the zoo, including the elephants Castor and Pollux. France signed an armistice on January 28, 1871, ceding Alsace-Lorraine and paying five billion francs in reparations — terms that would echo into the next century.

Before Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid became mythology, they were two men robbing a bank in Winnemucca, Nevada in 1900, taking roughly $32,500 — about a million dollars today. They reportedly sent the bank a thank-you photograph afterward. Their partnership lasted only a few years before Pinkerton agents made the American West too small. They fled to South America. Whether they died in Bolivia in 1908 or slipped back into the U.S. under fake names is a question historians still haven't fully closed.

Tabora was German East Africa's largest inland town and a critical rail hub, and Belgian Congo's Force Publique — roughly 15,000 African soldiers led by Belgian officers — had marched hundreds of miles through equatorial terrain to take it. General Charles Tombeur had coordinated a two-pronged advance that outflanked the German defense. The fall of Tabora in September 1916 effectively ended German control of western German East Africa. It was one of the largest and least-discussed African campaigns of the war — fought almost entirely by African soldiers, commanded by Europeans, over land that belonged to neither.