ON THIS DAY

FEBRUARY 12

1502 Isabella I issues an edict outlawing Islam in the Crown of Castile (part of what is today Spain), forcing virtually all her Muslim subjects to convert to Christianity. 1541 Santiago, Chile, is founded.

1554 A year after claiming the throne of England and holding it for just nine days, Lady Jane Gray, 16, is beheaded for “treason” during the reign of “Bloody Mary”.

1593 Japanese invasion of Korea: 3 000 Joseon defenders repel more than 30 000 Japanese in the Siege of Haengju.

1809 Author and naturalist Charles Darwin is born in Shrewsbury, England. He is best known for his work Origin of the Species, concerning the theory of evolution.

1924 Howard Carter examines the remains of boy king Tutankhamun when the lid of the sarcophagus is lifted for the first time in 3 300 years.

1942 The German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, together with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, escape from Brest to Germany in a dash up the English Channel.

1946 Operation Deadlight ends in the scuttling 121 of 154 captured U-boats.

1947 Christian Dior unveils a “New Look”, helping Paris regain its position as the capital of the fashion world.

1989 Student activists Portia Shabangu, Thabo Mohale and Derrick Mashobane are ambushed and shot in Swaziland by a Vlakplaas division under the command of Eugene de Kock.

1993 Two-year-old James Bulger is abducted in Liverpool by two 10-year-old boys, who torture and murder him.

1994 Four thieves break into the National Gallery of Norway and steal and ransom Edvard Munch’s iconic painting The Scream. Recovered, it sold for $120 million in 2010.

1999 US President Bill Clinton is acquitted by the Senate in his impeachment trial.

2001 The NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft becomes the first to land on an asteroid.

2002 The trial of Slobodan Milošević, the former president of Yugoslavia, begins at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. He dies four years later before its conclusion.

2019 Nasa data shows the world has got greener – 5% more leafier since the early 2000s, mostly due to tree planting in China and intensive farming in India.

2019 An extremely rare black female leopard, which has melanism – a condition in which the body produces an excess of pigment – is spotted for the first time in nearly 100 years in Kenya. | THE HISTORIAN