1822
The Turks slaughtered some twenty-five thousand Greeks on the island of Scio (Chios), and sold the surviving women and children into slavery. Constantine Kanaris, unaided, burned the flag-ship of the Turkish fleet. A Turkish army under Dramalis invaded the Grecian mainland, and reached Corinth, but gained no decisive success. Other nations, in response to popular sympathy for the Greeks, intervened to put an end to the war. Spain disturbed by civil war; King Ferdinand VII imprisoned in his own palace. Spanish efforts to reconquer the revolted colonies in South America ended disastrously in the battle of Ayacucho, in which General Sucre, a lieutenant of the great liberator Bolivar, decisively defeated the Spaniards. Brazil became independent of Portugal by a peaceful revolution, which set Dom Pedro, son of the Portuguese king, upon the Brazilian throne with the title of emperor. General Iturbide proclaimed himself Emperor of Mexico.
Percussion-caps invented. Cabs introduced in London, and their use immediately spread. Aleppo, Syria, destroyed by an earthquake; twenty thousand people killed. Percy Bysshe Shelley, English poet; Sir William Herschel, astronomer; and Antonio Canova, Italian sculptor, died. Viscount Castlereagh, British statesman, committed suicide.
RULERS—The same as in the previous year.