1489 Ottoman Sultan Bajazet II agrees to pay Pope Innocent VIII 40,000 ducats a year to keep his brother Djem as a "guest"

1569 Battle of Jarnac: French Catholics defeat the Huguenots

1591 Battle of Tondibi: Moroccans defeat Sultan Askia Ishaq II of Songhai

1656 Jews are denied the right to build a synagogue in Nieuw Amsterdam

1792 Battle of Cape Noli: Anglo-Neapolitan and French fleets begin two-day clash

1814 Battle of Reims: Napoleon defeats the Russians

1815 The Congress of Vienna declares Napoleon an outlaw.

1836 The Battle of King's Defeat: Texians routed by a larger Mexican force

1865 The Confederacy authorizes enlistment of 300,000 slaves as soldiers

1884 Mahdists invest Khartoum, defended by George "Chinese" Gordon

1895 Spanish cruiser 'Reina Regente' sinks off Gibraltar, 402 die

1900 Boer War: British capture Bloemfontein

1904 Dedication of the statue of "Christ the Redeemer of the Andes", made from old cannon, to commemorate the peaceful delineation of the frontier between Chile and Argentina

1920 Berlin: The "Kapp Putsch" fails

1921 Mongolia declares independence from China

1933 Hitler makes Josef Goebbels Minister of Information

1942 Bismarck Archipelago: Japanese troops land on Buka, to build an airfield

1942 Julia Flikke, of the Nurse Corps, becomes the first woman colonel in the US Army

1943 Abortive assassination attempt against Hitler during a flight from Smolensk to Rastenburg

1943 The Arakan: Japanese 55th Div attacks the Indian 14th Div

1945 Queen Wilhelmina returns to the Netherlands after nearly five years of exile

1945 The Arakan: Indian 26th Div makes an amphibious "end run" to trap Japanese troops

1954 General Giap's Viet Minh attack Dien Bien Phu

1955 Accession of Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev as King of Nepal (1955-1972)

1957 Havana: Anti-Batista demonstration sparks bloody rioting1

963 Russians conduct two reconnaissance flights over Alaska

1979 New Jewel Movement overthrows the Gairy dictatorship in Grenada and imposes its own

1981 Bulgarian agent Mehemet Ali Agca attempts assassination of Pope John Paul II