ON THIS DAY NOVEMBER 18

326 Built over the site of the Circus of Nero, the old St Peter’s Basilica in Rome is consecrated. It was also built over the tomb of St Peter, first bishop of Rome and chief among Jesus’s disciples.

1095 Pope Urban II appeals for a crusade to overthrow the Turks who control Palestine. 1307 According to Swiss lore, William Tell refuses to bow to a tyrant and is forced to shoot an apple off his son’s head with a bow and arrow.

1421 A seawall at the Zuiderzee dike in the Netherlands breaks, killing 10 000 people. 1477 William Caxton prints the first book in the English language, The Dictes and Sayengis of the Phylosophers.

1497 Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama reaches the Cape of Good Hope.

1626 St Peter’s Basilica, the world’s largest, is consecrated, replacing the old St Peter’s. 1836 British author Sir William Gilbert is born in London. He wrote the verses for the muchloved Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas which poked fun at the British establishment.

1902 A Brooklyn toymaker names the teddy bear after US President Teddy Roosevelt. 1904 Gold is discovered in Rhodesia, 320km south of Salisbury (now Harare).

1916 In France, General Douglas Haig calls off the first Battle of the Somme, which started on July 1. The Allies’ 200km advance cost almost a million lives.

1992 Ten MK members are killed when the pin is pulled out of a grenade at a party in Sebokeng.

1993 21 political parties approve a new Constitution for South Africa, expanding voting rights and ending white minority rule of more than 300 years.

2015 French police raid a terrorist cell in Saint Denis, killing 2, including the leader of the Paris terror attacks.

2015 Two female suicide bombers blow themselves up in Kano, Nigeria, killing 15 people and injuring over 100.

2018 An American missionary is killed on the forbidden North Sentinel Island, in the Bay of Bengal, by one of the world’s most fiercely independent and isolated tribes. | THE HISTORIAN