TITLE: September 20: Seven Days That Changed History
Some dates in the calendar carry more freight than others. September 20 has hosted the opening of a siege that redrew the medieval world, the departure of the most audacious voyage ever attempted, the birth of modern Italy, a presidency nobody wanted, the founding of the world's greatest film festival, a diplomatic offer that might have rewritten the space race, and a tennis match watched by a tenth of humanity. Here are seven September 20ths worth remembering.
1. 1187 – Saladin Lays Siege to Jerusalem
After annihilating the Crusader army at the Horns of Hattin in July, Saladin spent the summer of 1187 picking off the coastal cities of the Kingdom of Jerusalem one by one. On September 20 his army arrived before the holy city itself. Inside were perhaps a few dozen knights and tens of thousands of refugees, under the improvised command of Balian of Ibelin — a nobleman who had entered the city under a safe-conduct to rescue his family and been begged by the terrified population to stay and lead them. The defense lasted twelve days. Saladin's sappers undermined a section of the northern wall, and Balian, knowing the city could not hold, went out to negotiate. His threat was extraordinary: if terms were refused, the defenders would destroy the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque and kill every Muslim prisoner before dying in the streets. Saladin agreed to ransom terms instead. What followed cemented Saladin's reputation across both civilizations. When Jerusalem fell to the First Crusade in 1099, the streets had run with blood. In 1187, the population walked out alive — many freed without payment when Saladin and his brother quietly covered the ransoms themselves. The loss of Jerusalem convulsed Europe and launched the Third Crusade, bringing Richard the Lionheart east and creating one of history's great rivalries.
2. 1519 – Magellan Sails to Circle the World
Five weather-beaten ships — Trinidad, San Antonio, Concepción, Victoria, and Santiago — cleared the sandbar at Sanlúcar de Barrameda on September 20, 1519, carrying about 270 men. Their commander, Ferdinand Magellan, was a Portuguese navigator sailing under a Spanish flag, which made him a traitor in Lisbon and a foreigner to his own officers. The mission was to reach the Spice Islands by sailing west, proving they lay in Spain's half of a world the Pope had divided in two. Nobody knew if a passage through the Americas existed. Magellan found one — a 350-mile maze of freezing channels near the continent's southern tip, now called the Strait of Magellan — and emerged into an ocean so deceptively calm he named it the Pacific. Then came ninety-eight days without fresh provisions, a crossing so much vaster than anyone had imagined that men ate leather stripped from the rigging and sawdust, and scurvy killed them by the score. Magellan never finished the voyage; he was killed in a needless skirmish on the island of Mactan in April 1521. The expedition limped on under Juan Sebastián Elcano, and on September 6, 1522 — nearly three years after leaving — a single ship, the Victoria, returned to Spain with 18 emaciated survivors. They had proved the world was one connected ocean and, in doing so, discovered they had lost a day from their meticulously kept logs: the first human beings to run into the consequences of a rotating Earth.
3. 1870 – The Breach of Porta Pia Completes Italian Unification
For over a millennium, central Italy had been ruled by the Pope as a temporal sovereign. By 1870 the Papal States had shrunk to Rome and its surroundings, preserved only by a French garrison stationed there by Napoleon III. When the Franco-Prussian War forced France to recall those troops, the last obstacle to Italian unity evaporated. On the morning of September 20, Italian artillery opened a breach in the ancient Aurelian Walls near the Porta Pia. Bersaglieri infantry poured through, and after about three hours of fighting — Pope Pius IX had ordered only a token resistance to register the act as a conquest rather than a surrender — Rome was taken. Fewer than 70 men died on both sides combined. A plebiscite held in October returned an overwhelming vote for annexation. The Risorgimento was complete; Rome became Italy's capital the following year. But Pius IX declared himself a "prisoner in the Vatican" and refused to recognize the Italian state, beginning a standoff that lasted until the Lateran Treaty of 1929 created Vatican City. Via XX Settembre — 20 September Street — still runs through Rome toward the gate, and in Italian cities everywhere the date is a street name, a quiet civic monument to the day the country finished becoming itself.
4. 1881 – Chester A. Arthur Takes the Oath at 2:15 A.M.
James Garfield had been shot on July 2, 1881, by a disappointed office-seeker named Charles Guiteau, and spent eleven agonizing weeks dying — mostly of infections introduced by doctors probing the wound with unwashed fingers. When word of his death reached New York late on September 19, Chester Alan Arthur was at his home on Lexington Avenue. In the early hours of September 20, a New York Supreme Court judge administered the presidential oath in Arthur's parlor. Few elevations have been greeted with such dismay. Arthur was a creature of the New York patronage machine, a man whose chief prior distinction was having been removed from the Custom House collectorship for exactly the kind of spoils-system practice that Garfield's assassin had come to embody. "Chet Arthur, President of the United States! Good God!" was a widely reported reaction. He confounded everyone. Arthur broke with his old patrons, prosecuted post office fraud, and in 1883 signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which established merit examinations for federal jobs and began dismantling the very spoils system that had made him. He also concealed a diagnosis of Bright's disease through most of his term and quietly declined to seriously pursue renomination. Mark Twain, no easy grader of politicians, wrote that it would be hard to better Arthur's administration.
5. 1946 – The First Cannes Film Festival Opens
The festival had been planned for September 1939 as France's democratic riposte to the Venice Biennale, where Mussolini's government had rigged the previous year's top prize. The opening gala screened one film — The Hunchback of Notre Dame — and then Germany invaded Poland and everyone went home. Cannes waited seven years. It finally opened on September 20, 1946, in a converted casino, with entries from 21 nations and a jury that awarded a nearly comical abundance of prizes: eleven films shared the top honor, a diplomatic gesture toward a world that had just finished tearing itself apart. Technical mishaps abounded — reels were shown out of order, and at one screening the projectionist ran the wrong film entirely. From that improvised beginning grew the most consequential film festival in the world: the launchpad for the French New Wave, the venue where Tarantino, Coppola, Kurosawa, and countless others were made or crowned, and the place where the global art-film economy does its business each spring. That it began as an explicitly anti-fascist project — art as an argument that culture belongs to free societies — is worth remembering every time the red carpet rolls out.
6. 1963 – Kennedy Asks the Soviets to Go to the Moon With Us
Standing before the UN General Assembly on September 20, 1963, John F. Kennedy made a proposal that still startles people who encounter it for the first time. Two years after committing the United States to landing a man on the Moon before the decade was out, he suggested doing it jointly with the Soviet Union: "Why, therefore, should man's first flight to the Moon be a matter of national competition?... Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries — indeed of all the world — cannot work together in the conquest of space." The offer was not a whim. Kennedy had floated the idea privately to Khrushchev at the Vienna summit in 1961 and raised it again after the Cuban Missile Crisis concentrated both leaders' minds on the cost of confrontation. The Apollo program was proving staggeringly expensive, Congress was restless, and a joint mission would have turned the space race's enormous budget into a shared scientific enterprise. Khrushchev's public response was cool, and Kennedy was assassinated two months later. Lyndon Johnson recast Apollo as a memorial to him, and the race resumed in earnest — leading to Neil Armstrong's footprint in July 1969, and to a plaque reading "we came in peace for all mankind." Cooperation eventually arrived anyway, via Apollo-Soyuz in 1975 and the International Space Station, but the counterfactual endures: a Moon landing under two flags, twenty years early.
7. 1973 – Billie Jean King Beats Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes
Bobby Riggs was 55, a Wimbledon champion three decades past his prime, and a self-appointed showman for the proposition that the women's game was so inferior that an old man could beat its best. He had already routed Margaret Court on Mother's Day in a rout dubbed the "Mother's Day Massacre." Billie Jean King, 29 and the world's best female player, had refused the match twice. After Court's loss, she accepted. The spectacle was pure 1973: King carried into the Houston Astrodome on a gold litter borne by muscular men, Riggs wheeled in on a rickshaw pulled by models, a live audience of over 30,000 — still a record for a tennis match — and an estimated 90 million viewers worldwide. Then the tennis started, and it wasn't close. King attacked Riggs's weak backhand, ran him corner to corner, and won in straight sets, 6–4, 6–3, 6–3. The stakes were larger than the scoreboard. King had already forced the issue of prize money — she'd threatened to boycott the 1973 US Open, which became the first major to pay men and women equally — and had co-founded the Women's Tennis Association just months earlier. A loss would have handed ammunition to everyone arguing that women's sport was unserious. Instead, the most-watched tennis match in history became a public referendum that the women's side won on live television, and King spent the next fifty years as one of the most consequential athlete-activists of the modern era.
Why These Days Still Matter
Look at these seven dates together and a pattern surfaces: almost none of the people involved knew they were making history. Magellan's crew thought they were going shopping for cloves. Chester Arthur thought his career was over, not beginning. A projectionist in Cannes was fumbling reels while inventing the center of world cinema. Billie Jean King was playing an exhibition match against a 55-year-old hustler. History rarely announces itself. It arrives as a decision made under pressure — Saladin choosing mercy, Balian choosing to stay, Kennedy choosing to offer his rival a hand — and only later hardens into something inevitable-looking. The calendar is a useful trick for noticing this. Every day of the year is the anniversary of someone's ordinary Tuesday that turned out to matter enormously, which means the reverse is true too: some ordinary day you're living through right now is one that people will look back on. That's the real connection across eight centuries of September 20ths. Not that great events cluster on particular dates — they don't, that's an artifact of how we count — but that the people in them were as uncertain about what they were doing as we are about what we're doing. They acted anyway.