1821
Greek War of Independence
On the feast of the Annunciation, Bishop Germanos is said to have raised a banner at Kalavryta and blessed the rising. Within weeks Morea was in revolt; within months Ottoman atrocities and Greek massacres had horrified Europe. Byron would come, and die at Missolonghi, and a philhellene movement was born.
Brazil's Cry of Ipiranga
On a riverbank near São Paulo, Crown Prince Pedro tore the Portuguese cockade from his hat, drew his sword, and shouted "Independence or death!" Six weeks later he was crowned emperor of an independent Brazil. It was the gentlest of Latin American revolutions - a palace coup against the father, not the country.
Plan of Iguala
Agustin de Iturbide and the rebel Vicente Guerrero met, embraced, and issued a plan guaranteeing independence, Catholicism, and equality between Mexican-born Spaniards and criollos. Eleven years of war ended in compromise. By September, Mexico City was free. Iturbide would crown himself emperor within a year, and be shot within three.
Napoleon Dies on St. Helena
At fifty-one, in a damp farmhouse called Longwood, the former emperor died - of stomach cancer, his doctors said, of arsenic, said later toxicologists. His last word was 'Josephine.' His bones would return to Paris in 1840 to lie under the dome of Les Invalides, where they remain. The legend, carefully cultivated through his memoirs dictated in exile, proved more durable than the empire itself.
Peruvian Independence Declared
San Martin entered Lima, the old viceregal capital of Spanish South America, and declared Peru independent in its main square. The royalists retreated into the mountains; the real fighting would drag on for three more years. But the silver-rich heart of Spain's empire was out of Madrid's hands. Bolivar would arrive from the north to finish the war, and the two liberators met at Guayaquil to divide a continent.
Champollion Cracks Hieroglyphs
Bent over a copy of the Rosetta Stone, Jean-Francois Champollion realized that the cartouches contained phonetic signs, not just ideograms. Two years later he would publish the decipherment. Three thousand years of silence ended, and Egyptology became a science instead of a treasure hunt. His breakthrough rested on a command of Coptic, the last descendant of the ancient Egyptian language, which he had studied obsessively since boyhood.
Chios Massacre
After a small Greek rising on Chios, Ottoman troops landed and killed or enslaved most of the island's hundred thousand Greeks. Delacroix would paint the survivors in a haunted masterpiece. The atrocity shifted European opinion decisively in favor of Greek independence, and against the 'sick man of Europe.' Byron sailed for Greece partly because of Chios, and died there before the independence he championed was won.