ON THIS DAY MARCH 18
1190 Crusaders kill 57 Jews in Bury St Edmunds, England.
1241 First Mongol invasion of Poland: Mongols overwhelm Polish armies at Kraków in the Battle of Chmielnik and plunder the city.
1314 Jacques de Molay, the 23rd and final Grand Master of the Knights Templar, is burned at the stake.
1822 Dr James Barry (allegedly a woman, Miranda Stuart) is appointed by Lord Charles Somerset as medical inspector of the Cape Colony.
1827 Janet Soga (neé Burnside) is born in Hutchesontown, Glasgow, Scotland. She married Tito Yoga, the first Black man to be ordained to the Christian ministry, in February, 1857.
1834 Maria Koopmans-De Wet, linguist, art lover and cultural leader, is born in Cape Town.
1852 The Sand River Convention, recognising the independence of emigrant farmers north of the Vaal River, is ratified by the Volksraad of the Transvaal Republic. Representatives of the Boers and British government signed it two months previously.
1882 Marshall Morgan Earp, brother of Wyatt, is assassinated by outlaws while playing billiards in Tombstone, Arizona.
1922 In India, Mohandas Gandhi is sentenced to six years in prison for civil disobedience, of which he serves just two.
1937 Spanish Civil War: Spanish Republican forces defeat the Italians at the Battle of Guadalajara.
1946 Mahatma Gandhi sends a telegram to Field Marshal Smuts asking him to withdraw the Asiatic Bill.
1965 Cosmonaut Alexey Leonov, leaving his spacecraft Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes, becomes the first person to walk in space.
1967 The supertanker Torrey Canyon runs aground off Cornwall.
1969 Minister of Defence PW Botha attends the launching in France of the first of three Daphne-class submarines being built for the SA Navy.
2000 Aid arrives in Mozambique, where flooding leaves as many as 700 people dead and destroys the homes and jobs of another 2 million.
2007 Bob Woolmer, 58, Pakistani cricket coach and former South African coach, is found unconscious in his hotel room during the World Cup in the West Indies and later dies in hospital. After weeks of investigation, his body is returned to his family in South Africa.