Days after defeating his rival Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge—a victory he attributed to a vision of the Christian cross—Constantine made his ceremonial entry into Rome in early November 312 AD. He pointedly bypassed the traditional sacrifice to Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, a small but telling signal of the religious revolution his reign would set in motion across the Roman world.
After sixteen years of intermittent war that drained Venetian coffers and cost the Republic key Aegean and Albanian strongholds, Venice's ambassador signed terms with Sultan Mehmed II's court. The treaty forced Venice to surrender Scutari and pay 10,000 ducats annually to retain trading privileges in the Black Sea, marking a decisive shift of Mediterranean power toward Constantinople.
Marching in from the causeway across Lake Texcoco with roughly 400 soldiers and thousands of indigenous allies, Cortés was received with wary ceremony by Moctezuma II in the heart of the Aztec capital, one of the largest cities in the world at the time. The meeting, cloaked in gifts and diplomatic caution on both sides, set in motion the events that within two years would destroy the Aztec Empire.
Lincoln carried every free state but not a single Southern one, winning the Electoral College decisively while capturing less than 40 percent of the national popular vote in a four-way race. Southern political leaders, who had warned for months that a Republican victory meant disunion, began organizing secession conventions within weeks. South Carolina would leave the Union before year's end.
On the night of November 6-7 (October 24-25 in Russia's old Julian calendar), Bolshevik Red Guards and sailors from the cruiser Aurora moved to seize key points across Petrograd, culminating in the storming of the Winter Palace and the arrest of the Provisional Government's ministers. Lenin declared Soviet power established, launching a Communist regime that would rule Russia for seven decades and reshape twentieth-century geopolitics.
Amid mass demonstrations that had swelled to hundreds of thousands of citizens demanding freedom of movement and political change, East Germany's Communist government unveiled draft travel regulations meant to ease—but not eliminate—restrictions on leaving the country. Protesters rejected the proposal as inadequate, and the pressure it failed to relieve would burst three days later when the Berlin Wall itself opened.