February 10

The Siege of Baghdad ends as the last Abbasid caliph surrenders to Mongol forces led by Hulegu Khan, a devastating blow to the Islamic world.

The fall of Baghdad, then a leading center of Islamic scholarship and the Abbasid capital for five centuries, brought catastrophic destruction, including the burning of its famed libraries and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of residents. Historians often cite the sack as marking the symbolic end of the Islamic Golden Age.

Vasco da Gama sets sail from Lisbon on his second voyage to India, this time commanding a heavily armed fleet to assert Portuguese dominance over the spice trade.

Da Gama's second voyage was far more heavily armed than his first, reflecting Portugal's determination to seize control of the lucrative spice trade by force if necessary. His fleet attacked rival Arab and Indian trading vessels along the route, establishing Portuguese naval dominance in the Indian Ocean for decades.

The Treaty of Paris ends the French and Indian War, with France ceding Quebec and its North American territories to Great Britain.

The treaty ended the North American theater of the broader Seven Years' War, dramatically reshaping colonial power by removing France as a major territorial power in North America. Britain's massive new territorial gains, combined with war debts, contributed directly to the taxation disputes that sparked the American Revolution just over a decade later.

Queen Victoria marries her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, beginning a famously devoted royal partnership.

Victoria and Albert's marriage, which she famously proposed herself given her status as reigning queen, became a model of domestic royal partnership that shaped Victorian-era ideals of marriage and family. Albert's influence on British politics and culture, and Victoria's prolonged mourning after his 1861 death, left a lasting mark on the era.

Nationalist forces complete their conquest of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, sealing the border with France.

Franco's Nationalist forces completed their conquest of the Catalonia region after a grueling campaign that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing across the border into France. The fall of Catalonia effectively decided the outcome of the Spanish Civil War, which ended in Nationalist victory weeks later.

The Paris Peace Treaties are signed, formally settling peace terms between the Allies and several defeated Axis-aligned nations after World War II.

The Paris treaties formally settled reparations, border adjustments, and other postwar terms with Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland, distinct from the earlier agreements governing Germany and Japan. They helped stabilize Europe's political map in the early Cold War period.

Captured American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers is exchanged for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in a Cold War prisoner swap on Berlin's Glienicke Bridge.

The exchange of Powers, whose U-2 spy plane had been shot down over Soviet territory in 1960, for Abel, a longtime KGB operative caught in New York, took place on a bridge connecting East and West Berlin, cementing the location's enduring reputation as a symbol of Cold War espionage exchanges.

The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, clarifying presidential succession and procedures for presidential disability.

Prompted partly by the assassination of President Kennedy and lingering questions about presidential incapacity, the amendment established clear procedures for filling a vice-presidential vacancy and for temporarily transferring presidential power during a president's incapacitation.

IBM's Deep Blue computer defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a single game, the first time a computer beat a reigning champion under standard time controls.

Deep Blue's win came in the second of a six-game rematch series against Kasparov, who had defeated an earlier version of the machine the previous year. Kasparov ultimately lost the full match, a result many considered a landmark moment in the development of artificial intelligence's capabilities relative to elite human cognition.

A catastrophic winter storm triggers the Texas power crisis, causing widespread blackouts and hundreds of deaths amid a failure of the state's isolated electrical grid.

A severe winter storm overwhelmed Texas's independent power grid, which was not required to meet the same weatherization standards as other U.S. regional grids, leaving millions without electricity or heat during freezing temperatures. The crisis exposed serious vulnerabilities in the state's energy infrastructure and regulatory oversight.