1602: United Dutch East Indian Company (VOC) forms granted a monopoly in all Dutch sea-borne trade with Asia 1800: Alessandro Volta reports his discovery of the electric battery in a letter to Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society of London 1815: Napoléon Bonaparte enters Paris after his escape from Elba, begins 100-day rule 1854: […]
1279: Mongolian victory at the naval Battle of Yamen ends the Song Dynasty in China 1644: Two hundred members of the Peking imperial family and court commit suicide out of loyalty to the last Ming Emperor, Chongzhen 1863: Confederate cruiser SS Georgiana is destroyed on her maiden voyage with a cargo of munitions and medicines […]
1123: First Council of the Lateran (9th ecumenical council) opens in Rome, agreements of the Concordat of Worms are ratified 1314: Jacques de Molay, the 23rd and last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, is burned at the stake by King Philip IV of France 1325: According to legend, Tenochtitlan is founded on this date […]
432: Saint Patrick, aged about 16 is captured by Irish pirates from his home in Great Britain and taken as a slave to Ireland (traditional date) 1861: Italy is unified into a single kingdom under Victor Emmanuel II following the campaigns led by Giuseppe Garibaldi 1905: Albert Einstein finishes his scientific paper detailing his Quantum […]
597 BC: Babylonians capture Jerusalem, replace Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king 1521: Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan reaches the Philippines, landing on Homonhon Island after crossing the Pacific Ocean 1660: English Long Parliament disbands 1792: King Gustav III of Sweden is shot by Count Jacob Johan Anckarström at a masked ball at the opera and dies […]
44 BC: Julius Caesar is stabbed to death by Brutus, Cassius and several other Roman senators on the Ides of March in Rome 221: Liu Bei, a Chinese warlord and member of the Han royal house, declares himself Emperor of Shu-Han, claiming legitimate succession to the Han Dynasty 1493: Christopher Columbus returns to Spain after […]
1590: Battle of Ivry: French King Henry IV defeats the Catholic League during the French Wars of Religion 1794: Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin, revolutionizing the cotton industry in the southern US states [1] 1900: Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries rediscovers Gregor Mendel’s laws of heredity and genetics 1900: US currency goes on the […]
624: Battle of Badr: Muhammad’s Muslim forces win a significant victory over the Meccan army 1781: William Herschel sees what he thinks is a “comet” but actually discovers the planet Uranus 1877: American Chester Greenwood patents earmuffs after inventing them at age 15 1884: Siege of Khartoum, Sudan, begins by Mahdist forces and lasts ten […]
538: Witiges, King of the Ostrogoths, ends his siege of Rome and retreats to Ravenna, leaving the city in the hands of the victorious Byzantine general Belisarius 1455: First record of Johannes Gutenberg’s Bible, a letter dated this day by Enea Silvio Piccolomini refers to the Bible printed a year earlier 1918: Fearing foreign invasion, […]
843: Icon veneration officially re-instated in Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople 1502: Founder of the Safavid dynasty, Ismail I, is crowned Shah of Persia (rules till 1524) 1966: Military coup led by Indonesian General Suharto breaks out 1985: Mikhail Gorbachev replaces Konstantin Chernenko as Soviet leader 2011: 9.0 magnitude earthquake strikes 130 km (80 miles) […]
