January 14 – Some important events on this day
1129 👉🏼 Formal approval of the Order of Templars at the Council of Troyes
1301 👉🏼 Andrew III of Hungary (1290-1301) dies at 50, ending the Arpad dynasty in Hungary
1343 👉🏼 Arnost of Pardubice becomes the first Archbishop of Prague (and the last bishop of Prague)
1514 👉🏼 Pope Leo X issues a papal bull against slavery.
1526 👉🏼 Charles V and Francis I sign the Treaty of Madrid, forcing Francis to give up claims to Burgundy, Italy and Flanders
1641 👉🏼 United East Indian Company conquers city of Malacca, 7,000 killed
1690 👉🏼 The musical instrument, the clarinet is invented in Nürnberg, Germany
1699 👉🏼 Massachusetts holds day of fasting for wrongly persecuting “witches”
1724 👉🏼 Spanish King Philip V abdicates throne
1761 👉🏼 Third Battle of Panipat: In one of the largest battles of the century, the mostly Muslim Afghani Durrani Empire defeats the mostly Hindu Maratha Empire in Northern India. An estimated 60,000–70,000 were killed in the fighting and about 40,000 Maratha prisoners massacred afterwards.
1784 👉🏼 US Revolutionary War ends with the US Congress of the Confederation ratifying the Treaty of Paris
1794 👉🏼 Dr Jessee Bennet of Edom, Virginia, performs 1st successful Cesarean section operation in the US on his wife
1900 👉🏼 Giacomo Puccini’s opera “Tosca” premieres in Rome
1943 👉🏼 World War II: Franklin D. Roosevelt travels from Miami to Morocco to meet with Winston Churchill, becoming the first American president to travel overseas by airplane.
Between January 14 and 23, the leaders of most of the Allied forces most significant members (excluding Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who had declined to attend on account of the ongoing Battle of Stalingrad) met in the Anfa Hotel in Casablanca, Morocco, the city made famous the year before in the 1942 film starring Humphrey Bogart (though this isn’t the reason they chose to meet there.)
The Allies held many major conferences during the war, including Yalta, Tehran, Malta and Potsdam. Casablanca, attended by Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the leaders of Free France represented by Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud discussed various topics of importance, including the invasion of Europe, logistical issues and the make-up of North Africa after the war.
Roosevelt lobbied for a cross-channel invasion but the decision was eventually made to instead invade Italy, deferring the Normandy landings for another year. The decision to invade France in 1944 was taken at the Trident Conference in Washington a few months later.
Perhaps the most famous aspect of the conference came with the decision that the Allies would fight until the Axis powers had been forced into an “unconditional surrender”, i.e. their total defeat.
1978 👉🏼 Sex Pistols’ final concert held in Winterland, San Francisco
2011 👉🏼 Tunisian president Ben Ali, flees to Saudi Arabia after popular protests known as the Jasmine Revolution