OCTOBER 16
1384 Despite being a girl, Jadwiga, 10, is crowned King of Poland and goes on to become an exceptional ruler.
1793 Queen Marie Antoinette, French queen and widow of King Louis XVI, is guillotined. 1815 Cape-dutch settler Cornelis Bezuidenhout is shot dead by Khoi soldiers, commanded by a white lieutenant, when he resists arrest for maltreatment of a servant at Baviaans River.
1836 The Voortrekkers and Ndebele clash at the Battle of Vegkop, near Heilbron.
1840 Two Voortrekker states, east and west of the Drakensberg, form the Republic of Natalia. 1853 The Ottomans, supported by Britain and France, declare war on the Russian Empire. The conflict will go down in history as the Crimean War (1853-1856).
1905 The Partition of Bengal begins.
1916 TE Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) arrives in Cairo with a British fact-finding mission charged with finding ways to support the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. 1934 Chinese Communists begin the Long March; it ends a year and four days later.
1939 No. 603 Squadron RAF intercepts the first Luftwaffe raid on Britain, marking the end of the so-called ‘Phoney War’.
1939 Charlotte Maxeke, the ‘Mother of
Black Freedom’ and the founder of the Bantu Women’s League, dies in Johannesburg.
1943 After an anti-semitic riot, Rome’s
Jewish quarter is surrounded by Nazis and the inhabitants shipped off to Auschwitz.
1975 The last person infected with naturally occurring smallpox is reported in Bangladesh. 1978 Pole Karol Wojtyla is elected John Paul II, the first non-italian pontiff since 1523.
1984 Desmond Tutu wins Nobel Peace Prize. 1997 James Michener (90), the author of epic historical fiction, such as The Covenant, which is about the Voortrekkers, dies.
2001 The US Coast Guard lifts a ban on LNG tankers in Boston Harbour in the wake of 9/11. 2017 Creating an eerie red sun and yellow sky from Sahara dust, Hurricane Ophelia leaves 360 000 Irish homes without power.
2020 French teacher Samuel Paty is beheaded by an 18 year-old Islamist militant in Paris. | THE HISTORIAN