ON THIS DAY, MAY 29

1453 Ottoman armies under Sultan Mehmed II Fatih capture Constantinople after a 53-day siege, ending the Byzantine Empire.

1798 Between 300 and 500 United Irishmen are executed as rebels by the British Army in County Kildare, Ireland.

1864 Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico (the younger brother of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I) arrives in Mexico for the first time.

1878 Sandile, a Xhosa chief born in the

Ciskei, is killed in Denge Forest in a skirmish with the Fingos under Captain J Lonsdale.

1900 General Louis Botha visits Johannesburg two days before the invading British arrive and asks the city’s residents to not resist and not to destroy the gold mines.

1911 Sir William Gilbert, the surviving half of the composers Gilbert and Sullivan, is giving a swimming lesson to two women in a lake at his London home when one of them gets

into difficulties. He dives in to the rescue, but has a heart attack and is dead by the time he was pulled out of the water. It is said that, more than 100 years later, a Gilbert and Sullivan opera is performed somewhere in the world every night.

1953 Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay become the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

1979 Bishop Abel Muzorewa is sworn in as first

black prime minister of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.

1982 Aiming for the capital, Stanley, British forces defeat the Argentinians at the Battle of Goose Green during the Falklands War.

1985 Thirty-nine football fans die and hundreds are injured when a wall collapses at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels. The outcome of an inquiry later results in English clubs being banned from European competitions for five years; Liverpool for six years.

2005 France resoundingly rejects the European constitution.

2010 In an all-South African Super Rugby final at Soweto’s Orlando Stadium, the Bulls defend their title against the Stormers to win 25-17.

2018 Death toll in Puerto Rico 70 times higher than the official figure, probably 4 600 people died from Hurricane Maria, according to Harvard University study. The US figure was 64. | THE HISTORIAN