1799: Francesco Antonio Lucifero, mayor of Crotone

On this date in 1799, the Jacobin mayor of the Calabrian city of Crotone was shot by counterrevolutionists with three comrades.

Francesco Antonio Lucifero hailed from a devilishly powerful family that had produced several prior mayors who weren’t left-wing radicals. Our Lucifero cleaved to the Parthenopean Republic, the Neapolitan revolutionary state that from the first days of 1799 displaced the Kingdom of Naples.

The Republic was short-lived, and so was Lucifero.

Southerly Crotone was one of the first targets of the Catholic and monarchist Sanfedismo militia led by Calabrian Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, which counterattacked the Republic with fury and alacrity. Ruffo overcame that city in March; Lucifero was condemned to death along with three other leading nobleman-revolutionaries Bartolo Villaroja and Giuseppe Suriano, and a Captain Giuseppe Ducarne — the leaders of the holdout republican resistance whom Ruffo besieged in Crotone’s fortress.

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1689: Gabriel Milan, Danish West Indies governor

Gabriel Milan, the governor of the Danish West Indies, was beheaded on Copenhagen’s Nytorv Square on this date in 1689.

Born to an emigre family of former Marranos that had resumed open Judaism, Milan (English Wikipedia entry | Danish) was a cavalryman turned merchantman married to the daughter of one of Europe’s most prominent Jewish scholars.

Well-connected in the court of Prince George of Denmark, Milan in 1684 was tapped to govern the struggling nascent sugar colony of the Danish West Indies — the islands of Saint Thomas, Saint John, and Saint Croix that have comprised the U.S. Virgin Islands since Denmark sold the money pits off in 1917.

There he proved to be a pettifogging despot who was noxious to the island’s planters and conspicuous about exploiting his office to fatten his own coffers. His incompetent predecessor, who was only supposed to be sent back to the mother country, Milan instead clapped in a dungeon. Even his brutal treatment of slaves — using impalement for an execution! — shocked peers accustomed to a different spectrum of cruelty.

“I wish for my part that your Excellency could have been here a single day and heard what thundering there has been in the commission, with howling, shouting, and screaming, one against the other,” the official reporter noted. “God be thanked it is over.”

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1979: Gen. Nader Jahanbani and eleven others

Wire report via the Baltimore Sun, March 14, 1979:

12 shot by firing squads in Iran

Tehran, Iran (AP) — Firing quads executed two generals, a legislator, the former head of the national news agency and eight other men yesterday, continuing the purge that has killed dozens of former supporters of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Eleven men were executed in Tehran and one in the holy city of Qom, 100 miles to the south, after secret trials without the aid of defense attorneys.

Since the shah’s government fell February 12, Islamic revolutionary courts are known to have ordered the execution of 57 persons, including 12 generals, for alleged political and sex crimes. The shah is in exile in Morocco.

Meanwhile, there were indications yesterday that the new government is having success in bringing the economy back to life. The National Iranian Oil Company announced that production in the country’s oilfields had reached 2.5 million barrels a day, up from 1.6 million barrels a day last week.

The company said all but 700,000 barrels a day was marked for foreign consumption. Before anti-shah strikes paralyzed the economy, Iran exported about 6 million barrels of oil a day.

The company said it will resume selling Iranian crude on a contract basis to American, European and Japanese companies April 1. In recent weeks, oil has been sold on a spot basis to the highest bidder. Spot prices are in the range of $20 a barrel, compared to the OPEC price of $13.55.

At Tehran University, 40,000 young Iranians rallied to condemn Mideast peace efforts by President Carter and Egyptian President Anwar el Sadat.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Council announced the 12 executions on radio.

Among those shot were Air Force Gen. Nader Jahan-Bani, former director of the National Iranian Sports Organization; Army Gen. Vali Mohammad Zandkarimi, former director of prisons, and Gholam Hussein Daneshi, a Muslim clergyman and former member of parliament who supported the shah.

Also executed were Mahmoud Jaafariian, former head of the official Pars news agency and former deputy director of the national radio and television service, and Parviz Nik-Khah, also a former deputy director of the radio-TV service. Both were former Communists who were sentenced to death by the shah in 1967, but who were pardoned and later went to the shah’s side.

Firing squads in Tehran also executed a corporal in the shah’s Imperial Guard and in Qom a former police officer was shot. Also executed were five members of the shah’s former secret police, SAVAK.

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1653: Felim O’Neill

Irish rebel Felim (or Phelim) O’Neill of Kinard was executed on this date in 1653.

“A well-bred gentleman, three years at court, as free and generous as could be desired, and very complaisant; stout in his person, but, not being bred anything of a soldier, wanted the main art, that is, policy in war and good conduct” by a contemporary assessment, O’Neill numbered among the leaders of the 1641 Irish Rebellion against English governance. He issued a noteworthy manifesto of the affair known as the Proclamation of Dungannon.

The attempted coup helped to launch the English Civil War,* whose local-to-Ireland theater was known as the Irish Confederate Wars — Irish Catholics versus Protestant English and Scottish colonists. Felim O’Neill passed these years as a parliamentarian of the rebel (to English eyes) Confederate Ireland whose destruction required the bloody intervention of Oliver Cromwell.

O’Neill officered troops in this conflict, to no stirring victories. Although far from Confederate Ireland’s most important player, he was significant enough to merit an exception to the 1652 Act for the Settlement of Ireland — which made him an outlaw with a price on his head. He was captured in February 1653 and tried for treason in Dublin, refusing the court’s blandishments to abate the horrible drawing-and-quartering sentence by shifting any blame for the rising to the lately beheaded King Charles I.

* Or for a somewhat broader periodization, the rebellion fit into the Britain-wide breakdown that delivered the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

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1938: Herman Hurmevaara, Finnish Social Democrat

Finnish parliamentarian Herman Hurmevaara was shot during Stalin’s purges on this date in 1938.

Hurmevaara (English Wikipedia entry | the more detailed Finnish) sat in parliament for the Social Democrats from 1917 to 1919, which was also the period when long-restive Finland broke away from Russia’s grasp while the latter was preoccupied with deposing its tsar.

This rupture brought Finland into a nasty Whites-versus-Reds civil war. The Whites won, and Hurmevaara ended up knocking about in exile in Sweden and (after expulsion in 1930) the USSR. There, he worked in publishing.

Shot as a spy in the capital of Russia’s Finland-adjacent Karelian Republic, he was among numerous emigre Finns destroyed during the late 1930s nadir of Stalinism. Hurmevaara was posthumously rehabilitated in the Khrushchev era.

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1946: Maliq Bushati, Lef Nosi, and Anton Harapi, of Balli Kombëtar

On this date in 1946,* communist Albania executed three former officials of its deposed wartime government.

Fascist Italy occupied Albania during World War II.

In a situation mirroring that of neighboring Yugoslavia, there were two resistance movements that sometimes maintained an uneasy truce and other times went straight at one another’s throats: the communist National Liberation Movement (LNC or LANC), and the nationalist National Front (“Balli Kombëtar”).

In 1943, when Mussolini’s government collapsed, Nazi Germany took over control of Albania. Wary of postwar domination by communists — and the likelihood that this party would not cede bordering “Greater Albania” regions like the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo — Balli Kombëtar cut a deal with Berlin to run a collaborationist government.

Our principals for this date were all prominent figures in that government: Maliq Bushati, the prime minister; Lef Nosi, a member of the High Regency Council, and Anton Harapi, a Franciscan friar who consented to be the Catholic community’s representative in the governing council.

Needless to say, Balli Kombëtar did not long benefit from German support, and succumbed to the partisan movement — both the domestic LNC, and the allied Yugoslavian partisans under Tito. Its adherents faced the fury of their conquerors.


From left: Maliq Bushati, Lef Nosi, and Anton Harapi.

Those who could, fled to the west to enroll as exile auxilia for the coming Cold War: the attempted 1949 Albanian Subversion was one of the CIA’s earliest regime change attempts — notable in that the covert operation was betrayed to Moscow by the Kremlin’s British intelligence mole Kim Philby, resulting in hundreds of deaths.

* The Internet brings some citations for February 20 instead of February 15; I have not been able to locate the source of the discrepancy. The British diplomatic communique reporting on the trial is my authoritative primary source here: “The trial took place, in eight sessions, in a squalid cinema in Tirana before a house packed by Party members who constantly interrupted and jeered, while three military judges on the stage kept hurling accusations and abuse at the defendants, jointly and severally. All three were held responsible for, among other things, Albania’s entire war losses … Defendant’s counsel was howled down as a ‘fascist’ and never succeeded in making himself heard … The three accused were shot two days afterwards, on 15 February.”

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1032: Hasanak the Vizier

On 28 Safar 423 — that’s 14 February 1032 — Hasanak the Vizier was executed by strangulation in Herat, in modern-day Afghanistan.

He was the powerful state minister for the final six years of the 31-year reign of Iranian Ghaznavid sultan Mahmud.*

When the latter died in 1030, a fight for the succession ensued between the old man’s designated heir Muhammad and Muhammad’s older twin brother Mas’ud. Hasanak backed Muhammad, who lost.

Mas’ud punished his foe by reviving an old charge that Mahmud had laughed out of court years prior — namely, that Hasanak in the course of his hajj pilgrimage had adhered to the rebel/schismatic sect of Qarmatians.**

The writer Abu’l-Fadl Bayhaqi chronicled those years in his History† and devoted an extended narration to the fallen vizier’s trial and punishment. Hasanak’s headless corpse — that bit had been sawed off to deliver as a trophy to a political enemy — reportedly decayed for seven years lashed to a public pillory.

* A Persianate empire ruled by Turkic mamluks that spanned from western Iran, across Afghanistan and Transoxiana (comprising what is now the former Soviet “stans” of central Asia).

** The cause of the suspicion lay in Hasanak’s having chosen to return from his pilgrimage via Fatimid Egypt; the Fatimids and the Qarmatians themselves were both strains of Isma’ilism, a branch of still-extant dissident currents within Shia Islam.

† Arabic speakers can peruse this chronicle at archive.org; if a translated version is available, I have not located it.

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1522: Didrik Slagheck

Danish scheming archbishop Didrik Slagheck was burned in Copenhagen on this date in 1522 — sacrificed to his sovereign’s convenience.

Slagheck rolled into Stockholm in 1517 in the train of the papal legate who had been vainly dispatched to calm tempers during the run-up to what became the Swedish War of Liberation.

That’s liberation from Denmark, the effective overlord via the Kalmar Union joining those two countries and Norway besides. In 1520, with ecclesiastical mediation a bust and Sweden restive, the Danish king Christian II invaded. Slagheck made his villainous historical reputation by opportunistically hitching on with the vengeful king, the same king who would execute him in the end.

Things went great for Slagheck at first: he helped queue up the enemies list for the victorious Christian’s demonstrative mass beheading, the Stockholm Massacre. And he got his 30 pieces of krona right away in the form of an archbishopric which had come open along with its former owner’s neck on the occasion of said massacre. Thereafter he commanded troops in the field during the rebellion of Gustav Vasa. By 1521 he’d been kicked upstairs,

promoted to the position of archbishop of Lund, then a Danish see, entering the cathedral at his installation on November 25th with great pageantry and to the sound of martial music. During the same autumn, however, a papal legation in Copenhagen had been investigating what had taken place in Stockholm after the coronation, and five days after his installation as archbishop Slagheck was summoned to give an account of the advice he had given and the manner in which he had acted. Christian II decided to abandon him in an attempt to clear his own reputation, and Slagheck was executed and burnt in Copenhagen on January 24th 1522. (Source)

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1957: József Dudás, Hungarian Revolution wild card

Hungarian politician József Dudás was hanged on this date in 1957, for participation in the previous year’s abortive Hungarian Revolution.

Although he’d been a Communist in his prewar youth, Dudás won election to the postwar government on the Independent Smallholders line. This agrarian opposition party was gradually pushed out of power and eventually suppressed over the course of the late 1940s; Dudás himself ended up getting arrested and detailed for a long visit to the feared Romanian Securitate.

He’d long since been repatriated as a non-political engineer when the Hungarian Revolution briefly cracked open the horizon of possibilities in the autumn of 1956.

Dudás immediately proved himself not so non-political — and a distinct thorn in the side of the Imre Nagy government. He advocated not only for Hungarian Independence (which was also the title of his newspaper) but also for a multiparty reformulation of the Hungarian state, which was a bit much for Nagy to process during the revolution’s two-week lease on life. Dudás’s penchant for off-script revolutionary improvisations, such as putting out feelers to Soviet commanders and also having his militia lynch agents of the temporarily disempowered secret police, made him an unwelcome wild card and Nagy had him arrested shortly before Soviet tanks re-established control.

The Soviets, of course, also had no use themselves for the peasants’ party deputy who’d been trying to subvert Nagy from the right.

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2007: Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, Saddam Hussein aides

Longtime Saddam Hussein aides Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Awad Hamed al-Bandar — who were co-defendants with the boss at his trial under U.S. occupation — were hanged before dawn on this date in 2007.

As top officials of the Ba’athist government both men’s hands were well-imbrued in blood: Awad Hamed al-Bandar had been a judge who issued death sentences to 143 people charged with complicity in a failed attempt on Saddam’s life during the Dujail Massacre; Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half-brother, had been his intelligence chief with all that entails. Al-Tikriti was also one of the authors of the terrifying 1979 Ba’ath Party purge in which the doomed were culled from the ranks of the party congress while video rolled and the un-culled were forced to execute them. He also achieved the dubious honor of a place in the U.S. invasion army’s playing card deck of most wanted Iraqis.*

They had initially been slated to hang on the same occasion as Saddam (December 30, 2006) but were briefly respited so that the dictator would have the spotlight to himself on his big day. It’s a good job they did that, because the al-Tikriti’s hanging was badly botched by an excessively long drop, and the noose tore his head clean off.

* We’re biased but we prefer Executed Today’s playing cards.

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