| 23 February 1464 | China, Ming Empire [political events] | Hsien-Tung succeeds as the Ch'eng-Hua emperor following the death of his father Ying-tsung, and immediately orders military reforms, creating 120,000 elite capital troops and introducing military examinations. |
| 23 February 1574 | France [French Wars of Religion (1562–80)] | The Fifth War of Religion breaks out in France; Henri de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, governor of Picardy, renounces his Catholicism and flees to Alsace to raise a German Protestant army. |
| 23 February 1619 | United Netherlands [Protestantism] | The Synod of Dort, held in Dordrecht, the United Netherlands, ends. The meeting of Dutch Reformed Church ministers has condemned the ‘liberal’ Calvinist Remonstrants and adopted the strict Five Points of Calvinism. |
| 23 February 1633 | England [births and deaths] | Samuel Pepys, English diarist known for his Diary, which provides a look at upper class life in England during the 1660s, born in London, England (–1703). |
| 23 February 1660 | Sweden [administration] | A regency is established in Sweden when, after the death of his father Charles X, the four-year-old Charles XI becomes king. |
| 23 February 1685 | Germany, England [births and deaths] | George Frideric Handel, German-born English baroque composer, whose best-known works include the oratorio Messiah (1741), born in Halle, Germany (–1759). |
| 23 February 1821 | England, Rome [births and deaths] | John Keats, English Romantic lyric poet, dies in Rome, Italy (26). |
| 23 February 1868 | USA [births and deaths] | W E B Du Bois, US sociologist, writer, and black leader, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (–1963). |
| 23 February 1931 | [births and deaths] | Nellie Melba, Australian soprano, dies in Sydney, Australia (72). |
| 23 February 1950 | UK [television] | For the first time, British election returns are televised. |
| 23 February 1970 | Guyana [decolonization] | Guyana becomes a republic within the British Commonwealth. |
| 23 February–16 March 1979 | North Yemen, South Yemen [political events] | North and South Yemen wage war; the former is supported by the USSR, the latter by the West. |
| 23 February 1981 | Spain [law and government] | Two hundred Civil Guards storm the Spanish parliament and hold members at gunpoint in an attempted coup. The Guards surrender after King Juan Carlos denounces the coup on February 24. |
| 23 February 1987 | USA [births and deaths] | Andy Warhol, US artist and film-maker, a leading exponent of Pop Art in the 1960s, dies in New York City (59). |
| 23 February 1987 | world [astronomy] | Astronomers around the world observe a spectacular supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the galaxy closest to ours, when a star (SN1987A) suddenly becomes a thousand times brighter than our own Sun. It is the first supernova visible to the naked eye since 1604. |
| 23 February 1998 | Iraq [political events] | Iraqi prime minister Tariq Aziz and Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, sign a breakthrough peacekeeping deal to avert war and permit UN weapons inspectors to continue their work. |
