54: Nero succeeds Claudius as the Emperor of the Roman Empire; Agrippina the Younger is thought to have murdered Claudius, her husband, with poisonous mushrooms to secure the succession for her son Nero 1307: French King Philip IV has Grand Master Jacques de Molay and the Knights Templar arrested and charged with idolatry and corruption […]
539 BC: Army of Cyrus the Great of Persia takes Babylon 1279: Nichiren, a Japanese Buddhist monk, founder of Nichiren Buddhism, inscribes the Dai-Gohonzon 1492: Christopher Columbus’s expedition makes landfall on a Caribbean island he names San Salvador (likely Watling Island, Bahamas); the explorer believes he has reached East Asia (OS 21 Oct) 1864: Brazilian […]
1138: Earthquake in Aleppo, Syria, kills an estimated 230,000 people 1634: Burchardi flood, known as the second “Grote Mandrenke,” kills about 15,000 people in North Friesland, Denmark, and Germany 1737: An earthquake is reported to have killed 300,000 people and destroyed half of Calcutta in India; now thought to have been an exaggerated account of […]
1780: The Great Hurricane of 1780 hits Barbados and goes on to kill 20,000 to 30,000 people in the Caribbean, making it the deadliest recorded hurricane in the Atlantic 1871: The Great Chicago Fire is finally extinguished after three days, leaving approximately 300 dead, 100,000 homeless, and causing $222 million in damage 1911: Chinese revolutionaries […]
768: Charlemagne and his brother Carloman I are both crowned King of the Franks 1000: Leif Erikson reaches “Vinland” (possibly L’Anse aux Meadows, Canada), reputedly becoming the first European to reach North America 1446: Korean Hangul alphabet is first published by King Sejong the Great 1941: US President Franklin D. Roosevelt approves an atomic program […]
1480: Great Stand on the Ugra River: Standoff between forces of Akhmat Khan, Khan of the Great Horde, and Ivan III, Grand Prince of all Rus, ends with a Tatar-Mongol retreat, leading to the disintegration of the Horde 1769: Captain James Cook lands in New Zealand for the first time near present-day Gisborne on the […]
1571: Battle of Lepanto: Holy League of Catholic states formed by Pope Pius V destroys an Ottoman fleet in a significant defeat off Western Greece 1737: A cyclone causes 40-foot waves that are believed to kill 300,000 in Calcutta, India 1763: George III of Great Britain issues the Proclamation of 1763, closing lands in North […]
1917: Third Battle of Ypres: Canadian troops recapture the high ground in the village of Passchendaele from the Germans in West Flanders, Belgium, during World War I; over 200,000 casualties occur on each side, and 24,000 German prisoners are taken 1948: Earthquake in Ashgabat kills 100,000 in Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic 1948: Paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey […]
1274: Around 1,000 soldiers of the Mongol army land on the Japanese island of Tsushima in the first attack of Kublai Khan’s Mongol invasion of Japan 1789: Women of Paris march to Versailles in the March on Versailles to confront Louis XVI about his refusal to promulgate the decrees on the abolition of feudalism, demand […]
1537: First printing in England of the complete English-language Bible, the “Matthew’s Bible,” with translations by William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale (an update of the earlier “Coverdale Bible”) [exact month/day unclear] [1] 1582: Last Julian calendar day in Spain, Portugal, and the Papal States; to sync to the Gregorian calendar 10 days are skipped, and […]
