ON THIS DAY

FEBRUARY 13

1258 Baghdad, a city of 1 million people, falls to the Mongols.

1633 Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei arrives in Rome for trial before the Inquisition for saying the Earth is not the centre of the universe.

1713 Smallpox breaks out at the Cape and wreaks havoc. Hardest hit are the Khoisan. 1779 An edict in the Cape Colony forbids any white person from settling beyond the Gamtoos River.

1850 A 463-ton British ship, Childe Herold, carrying more than 1 300 pieces of ivory, is wrecked off Dassen Island.

1880 Work begins on the covering of the Senne, burying Brussels’s primary river and creating the modern central boulevards.

1917 Dutch exotic dancer Mata Hari is arrested in Paris for being a German spy.

1937 The Prince Valiant comic strip, known for historical detail, first appears.

1941 The 12th African Division, led by the

1st SA Infantry Brigade, captures Kismayu, Somaliland.

1942 Hitler’s Operation Sealion, the invasion of England, is called off.

1945 Allied planes bomb Dresden, Germany; a firestorm results and more than 22 000 die. 1981 Sewer explosions destroy more than 3km of streets in Louisville, Kentucky.

1982 About 15 000 people attend Neil Aggett’s funeral in Johannesburg.

1984 Notorious bank robber André Stander is killed struggling for control of a policeman’s firearm in the US. As a bored policeman, he would sometimes rob a bank on his lunch break, only to return later as the investigating officer.

2000 The last original Peanuts comic strip appears, one day after creator Charles M Schulz dies.

2008 Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd makes a historic apology to the Indigenous Australians and the Stolen Generations.

2018 President Jacob Zuma is told to step down.

2019 Australia’s Flinders River swells to 60km wide, creating its own weather system, after intense flooding in Queensland. | THE HISTORIAN