On August 21, 1915, the Turkish governor of Syria had 11 Arab nationalists publicly hanged in Beirut for seditious contacts with the French.

A larger and more famous batch would follow these the next year, like today’s victims the fruit of the French consul‘s leaving an incriminating list of potential allies in its embassy when it bugged out.

According to Charles Winslow,

[i]n all, fifty-eight individuals were tried and sentenced to death; forty-five of these were either out of the country or avoided arrest; two were given reprieves; and the other eleven, ten Muslims and one Christian, were disgracefully hanged. This public display of terror was only a prelude to additional steps taken as part of the wartime policy of repression…

Lightly defended, Jemal argued that he had no means other than those of terror to hold the area. He claimed that the executions had, in fact, forestalled a rising in Syria. Others, however … see Jemal’s actions in Syria as turning the tide against Istanbul, “causing the Arab Muslims in the area to make up their minds once and for all to break away from the Turkish Empire.” Jemal had perpetrated a “Remember-the-Alamo” for the Lebanese. Throughout the country, the story of his perfidy was passed from person to person and from village to village … One can hardly measure the significance of these hangings in stimulating people to abandon their Ottoman attachment.

By the next year, Arabs had risen in revolt, in alliance — as Pasha had feared — with the Triple Entente.

On this day..

• 1497: Lorenzo Tornabuoni, Florentine nobleman
• 1647: Thomas Boulle and the remains of Mathurin Picard, for the Louviers possession
• 1650: Four condemned and one reprieved on appeal from the Wiltshire Assizes
• 1789: Francois Bordier, Harlequin
• 2016: 36 for ISIS's Camp Speicher massacre
• 1811: Barbara Zdunk, the last witch (sort of)
• 1851: John McCaffary, the last hanged by Wisconsin
• 509 B.C.E.: The Sons of Brutus
• 1887: Israel Lipski
• 2010: Four in Equatorial Guinea
• 1938: Margarita Arsenieva, the explorer's widow
• 2007: Frank Duane Welch, a cold case CSI caught