Ibn Battuta leaves Tangiers, setting out for Mecca (1325), and Martin Luther marries Katharina von Bora (1525). Born on this day: James Clerk Maxwell, Ban Ki-Moon and William Butler Yeats. Died: Charles Édouard Guillaume, Miyamoto Musashi and St. Anthony of Padua.
28 events, 68 births and 51 deaths on this date.
He set out from Tangiers for Mecca, a journey that stretched into decades of wandering across Africa and Asia. Later he dictated an account of it, The Rihla, and he is often counted the most-travelled explorer of the pre-modern world.
Ideophagous · CC BY-SA 4.0Luther's wedding to a former nun broke with centuries of Catholic practice requiring priests to stay celibate. It set a precedent that married clergy became a normal feature of Protestant churches.
Rhode Island's assembly voted to outlaw bringing enslaved people into the colony, the earliest of the mainland British colonies to do so. It was an early legal step against the slave trade, passed two years before the colonies declared independence.
James Earl Ray, who had been convicted of Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder, was caught three days after breaking out of prison. His escape had briefly made him a fugitive again.
Braddock, a battered former steelworker and rank outsider, climbed into the ring against the favourite Max Baer and won the world heavyweight crown on points. Few expected the result, and it gave Depression-era America a fighter who had refused to give up.
Canada split the Yukon off from the Northwest Territories, creating a separate territory to govern the gold-rush region. Dawson City was named its capital, a choice that reflected the boom town's population at the time.
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Scottish physicist whose equations showed that electricity, magnetism and light are one phenomenon, travelling as waves. His work also predicted radio waves, decades before anyone built a radio.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
South Korean diplomat who led the United Nations from 2007 to 2016, focusing on climate change and the Darfur conflict. He is still alive and continues to work on global issues.
World Economic Forum · CC BY-SA 2.0
Irish poet and playwright who helped found the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. He was remembered for poems rooted in Irish legend and for shaping the Irish Literary Revival.
George Charles Beresford · Public domain
Swiss physicist who died on this day in 1938. He won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering odd behaviour in nickel steel alloys, findings that made precision measurements far more reliable.
Auguste Léon · Public domain
Famed for fighting with a sword in each hand, Miyamoto Musashi was a Japanese swordsman who claimed never to lose a duel. In his final years he wrote The Book of Five Rings, a work on strategy and combat.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
Portuguese friar and preacher, famed for his eloquent sermons across Italy and France and his deep learning in scripture. Canonised within a year of his death, he is now one of the Church's Doctors and the patron saint of lost things.
Didier Descouens · Public domain
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