The Orthodox emperor Paul I became Grand Master of the Catholic Knights of Malta: in 1798, after Napoleon seized their island, the knights in Saint Petersburg elected the Russian tsar head of the order.

1798

◍ Show on the globe

The event

• Paul I's Indian March1801 · Orenburg and the Kazakh steppe. In January 1801 Paul I ordered Ataman Orlov's Don Cossacks to march via Bukhara and Khiva to the Indus and strike British India. Some 20,000 Cossacks rode into the steppe; Paul's orders admitted his maps went only as far as Khiva and the rest was their affair. News of his murder in March turned them back.

18th century

More amazing facts

• 1795 In 1795 cavalry captured a navy.
• 1796 · 1980 It took 184 years to get from the first vaccination to a world without smallpox.
• 1796 The word 'vaccine' comes from the Latin vacca, cow. Jenner took material from milkmaid Sarah Nelmes, who caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom.
• 1796 · 1867 Catherine the Great did not sell Alaska: she died 71 years before the deal.
• 1800 In Siberia, Mongolia and Tibet bricks of pressed tea served as money.
• 1800 · 1844 As early as 1800 Humphry Davy wrote that laughing gas might be useful in surgery.

All amazing facts (1058) →