This Week in History recalls memorable and decisive events and personalities of the past.

21st February 1808 – Without declaring war, Russian troops cross the Swedish border at Abborfors in eastern territory of Finland, thus beginning the Finnish War, in which Sweden will lose Finland to Russia.

The area that is now the country of Finland has been inhabited by Finno-Ugric peoples since possibly the Bronze Age (3200-600 B.C.). Of most of the history of Finland we know very little, only having small amounts of archaeological information to go on. Finland entered history more firmly when it began to trade and interact more often with its Scandanavian and Baltic neighbours.

During the Middle Ages the Swedes slowly began to conquer the various Pagan tribes who inhabited Finland and settle the region, which gradually came under the control of the Swedish crown and the Catholic church. The Finns themselves were either assimilated into Swedish language and culture or were pushed out of the elite until only peasants, lower clergy and local courts spoke Finnish. During the reformation the Finns converted to Protestantism along with the Swedes.

In the 18th century Finland became the site of battles between their Swedish overlords and the rising power of the Russian empire. Parts of Finland were occupied by Russian troops twice during the 18th century, once during the period known in Finland as the Greater Wrath (1714-1721) and again during the Russo-Swedish war of 1788-1790.

As the balance of forces moved in Russia’s favour, the Russian Tsars sought to make Finland a part of Russia.

In the early 19th century, Europe was caught in a titanic struggle between Napoleonic France and Britan. In 1807, after a series of victories against the powers of Europe, Napoleon sought to strangle British trade through a system of blockade, called the Continental System. Russia allied with Napoleon in 1807 and tried to force Sweden to stop supporting Britain and agree to the blockade and close the Baltic sea to all foreign ships. The Swedes refused.

Denmark and Russia colluded to break Swedish power and decided to attack Sweden together. On 21 February the Russian army crossed the border into Finland without declaring war. The surprise attack forced the Swedes to abandon their border defences and fall back in the face of the Russian invasion.

Initially the Russians overwhelmed the Swedish forces and pushed deep into Finland, but were thwarted by Finnish guerrilla fighters attacking their forces, and by a powerful Swedish counterattack which stopped the Russians at the Battle of Siikajoki.

Much of the fighting took place at sea, as the Swedish navy – backed by the British – fought the Russians for control of the Finnish coast. In July and August of 1808, the Russians received significant reinforcements and now went on the offensive again.

By 1809 the Russians had overrun most of Finland and, during the winter of 1808, the Russians had even marched across the frozen sea in the Gulf of Bothnia to invade Swede by land.

Angry at their king for the defeat, the Swedes overthrew King Gustav IV and replaced him with his uncle, Charles XIII. The new king sought peace terms.

While the Russians had won the war on land, with British help the Swedes had won the war at sea, and so when the sea ice melted in summer the Russians would be on the backfoot once again.

However, even with the stress of British and Swedish naval dominance, the Russians managed to defeat the Swedish army in Sweden proper.

The war was formally ended with the signing of the Treaty of Fredrikshamn in September 1809,  which ceded all of Finland to Russian control. The Russians would establish the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland under the rule of the Tsar, and would rule Finland until it declared independence during the Russian civil war in 1919.

23rd February 532 – Byzantine emperor Justinian I lays the foundation stone of a new Orthodox Christian basilica in Constantinople – the Hagia Sophia

The Hagia Sophia, or the ‘Church of Holy Wisdom’ in Constantinople (now Istanbul) is one of the greatest buildings in world history, and for almost 1 000 years was the largest cathedral on Earth. It is one of the first buildings in the world to have a fully pendentive dome (a curved triangle of vaulting formed by the intersection of a dome with its supporting arches). The church is widely considered the pinnacle of Eastern Roman (Byzantine) design philosophy and construction and was once described by a Slavic envoy as ‘the house of God on Earth’.

The contemporary historian Procopius, writing in the year 537, described it thus:

‘[The church] is distinguished by indescribable beauty, excelling both in its size, and in the harmony of its measures, having no part excessive and none deficient; being more magnificent than ordinary buildings, and much more elegant than those which are not of so just a proportion. The church is singularly full of light and sunshine; you would declare that the place is not lighted by the sun from without, but that the rays are produced within itself, such an abundance of light is poured into this church.’

And

‘No one ever became weary of this spectacle, but those who are in the church delight in what they see, and, when they leave, magnify it in their talk. Moreover, it is impossible accurately to describe the gold, and silver, and gems, presented by the Emperor Justinian, but by the description of one part, I leave the rest to be inferred. That part of the church which is especially sacred, and where the priests alone are allowed to enter, which is called the Sanctuary, contains forty thousand pounds’ weight of silver.’

The massive church was built on the site of an older church which was burned down during the Nika riots against the emperor Justinian. After the suppression of the riots, Justinian sought to rebuild the city which had been heavily damaged by the riots, and on 23 February 532 laid the foundation stone of one of his reign’s most enduring legacies.

The church would remain an Eastern Orthodox church until the capture of Constantinople by Catholic crusaders in 1204 and the establishment of the Latin Empire. It would return to being an Eastern Orthodox church in 1261 when the Eastern Roman Empire was restored. The church would switch back and forth between Catholic and Eastern Orthodox as the Emperors of the collapsing Eastern Roman empire sought to reconcile with the Pope to secure western allies against the Turks.

In 1453 the Ottoman Turks under Mehmed the Conqueror finally conquered the city and on the day of their conquest converted the Hagia Sophia into a mosque. All Christian symbols were removed from the church and the icons which covered the walls were plastered over. The Ottomans would also erect four minarets around the building to further solidify its status as a mosque.

The Ottomans would go on to construct the nearby Sultan Ahmed Mosque (The Blue Mosque) in a similar design in 1616, and tourists today often confuse the two buildings.

The Hagia Sohpia would remain a mosque until 1931 when the new secular Turkish Republic converted the building from a mosque into a museum.

Since then it has remained as one of Turkey’s most visited tourist attractions. Some of the ancient Christan icons were uncovered and the museum showed off features of the building from when it was a church and a mosque.

 In July 2020, the Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared that the museum would be reclassified as once again as a mosque. The Christan symbols on the walls were this time covered with drapes rather than plastered over. The building is today a working mosque, open to visitors in the same way as churches such as St Paul’s in Rome, Notre-Dame in Paris and Canterbury Cathedral in England.

On 22 July 2020, in the opening sermon of the re-established mosque, the cleric declared the following: ‘Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror dedicated this magnificent construction to believers to remain a mosque until the Day of Resurrection.’

25th February 1870 – Hiram Rhodes Revels, a Republican from Mississippi, is sworn in in the United States Senate, becoming the first African American ever to sit in Congress

Born in North Carolina in 1827 to a family of free black Americans, who had been free since before the American revolution, Hiram Rhodes Revels would go on to become a chaplain in the Union Army, the first president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College and the first black person to sit in the US Congress.

Originally trained as a barber, Revels would eventually follow in his father’s footsteps and become ordained as a minister in 1845 – but in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, unlike his father who was a Baptist. For the next ten years he travelled around the American Midwest preaching and giving religious instruction.

Between 1855 and 1857 Revels studied religion at Knox College in Illinois. He became a minister in Baltimore and the principal of a black high school.

When the Southern States seceded and the American civil war broke out, Revels joined the conflict by recruiting two black regiments to fight on the side of the Union. He served as the chaplain of the regiments.

After the war in 1866, during the period of reconstruction in the Southern States, Revels settled down in the Southern state of Mississippi with his wife and five daughters and served the Methodist church there.

In 1870, the Mississippi state Senate (who chose senators until 1913) elected by a vote of 81 to 15 to have Revels finish the term of one of the state’s two senate seats which had been left empty by the resignation of their former holders to join the Confederacy.

When he arrived in Washinton, Democrats from the Southern States refused to seat him in Senate.

They claimed that because of the 1857 Dred Scott Decision by the US Supreme Court – which ruled that people of African ancestry were not and could not be citizens – no black man had been a citizen until the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 and therefore Revels could not be a Senator, since, to hold a Senate seat, one must have been a US citizen for nine years prior.

Revels’ party argued that the civil war had made pre-war citizenship laws invalid, that Revels was partly of European heritage and thus Dred Scott did not apply to him anyway.

Republican Senator Charles Sumner would later say:

‘All men are created equal, says the great Declaration, and now a great act attests this verity. Today we make the Declaration a reality. … The Declaration was only half established by Independence. The greatest duty remained behind. In assuring the equal rights of all we complete the work.”

On 25 February 1870, Revels was sworn in as a Senator by a vote of 48 to 8.

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