After 38 grueling days navigating the treacherous strait at South America's southern tip, Magellan's three remaining ships emerged into open water so calm compared to the Atlantic that he christened it Mar Pacifico. The fleet had no idea the ocean spanned nearly a third of the globe, and the crossing would starve and kill many before landfall in the Philippines.

As the First Balkan War shattered Ottoman control over the region, Albanian delegates gathered in Vlorë and declared independence, raising a red flag with a black double-headed eagle. Ismail Qemali became the first prime minister of a fragile new state whose borders would be contested for years, but the declaration marked the birth of the modern Albanian nation after nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule.

As the Soviet Union entered its final weeks, Turkmenistan held a referendum in which voters overwhelmingly backed independence, formalized shortly after. The Central Asian republic, rich in natural gas but politically isolated, emerged as one of the most closed states in the post-Soviet world under longtime Communist Party boss Saparmurat Niyazov, who would rule for another 15 years as an increasingly eccentric autocrat.