The Battle of the Defile was fought over three days in July 731 in and near the Takhtakaracha Pass (in modern Uzbekistan) between a large army of the Umayyad Caliphate and forces of the Türgesh Khaganate. The Türgesh had been besieging Samarkand; Samarkand's commander, Sawra ibn al-Hurr al-Abani, sent a request for relief to the newly appointed governor of Khurasan, Junayd ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Murri. Junayd's 28,000-strong army was attacked by the Türgesh in the pass, and although the Umayyad army managed to extricate itself and reach Samarkand, it suffered heavy casualties. Sawra's 12,000 men attacked the Türgesh from the rear in a relief effort and were almost annihilated. The battle halted and even reversed Muslim expansion into Central Asia for a decade. In addition, it increased Khurasani disaffection for the Umayyad regime, and drew away reinforcements from the metropolitan regions of the Caliphate, helping to bring about its downfall twenty years later.

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Defile

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1592:

Sigismund III Vasa, who was already King of Poland, succeeded his father John III as King of Sweden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigismund_III_Vasa

1796:

French Revolutionary Wars: French forces defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Arcole in a manoeuvre to cut the latter's line of retreat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Arcole

1968:

NBC controversially cut away from an American football game between the Oakland Raiders and New York Jets to broadcast Heidi, causing viewers in the Eastern United States to miss the game's dramatic ending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi_Game

2009:

Administrators at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit discovered that their servers had been hacked and thousands of emails and files on climate change had been stolen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

airs and graces: (derogatory) Behaviour adopted (originally) to demonstrate one's good upbringing; or (now) one's superiority; pretentious or snobbish behaviour. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/airs_and_graces

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

The Puritans had accused the Quakers of "troubling the world by preaching peace to it." They refused to pay church taxes; they refused to bear arms; they refused to swear allegiance to any government. (In so doing they were direct actionists, what we may call negative direct actionists.) So the Puritans, being political actionists, passed laws to keep them out, to deport, to fine, to imprison, to mutilate, and finally, to hang them. And the Quakers just kept on coming (which was positive direct action); and history records that after the hanging of four Quakers, and the flogging of Margaret Brewster at the cart's tail through the streets of Boston, "the Puritans gave up trying to silence the new missionaries"; that "Quaker persistence and Quaker non- resistance had won the day.   --Voltairine de Cleyre https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Voltairine_de_Cleyre