May 5: On this day in world history …. briefly
Interesting historic snippets and facts taken from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London.
1291: Egypt’s Mamelukes overwhelmed the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land. Sultan Qalawun’s army battered the Crusader fortress-port of Acre into submission. Giant catapults lobbed bombs over walls, while engineers burrowed under them, and then blew them up with gunpowder. As Egyptian troops poured in, crusaders fled to the port, fighting for places in the few remaining boats to escape to Christian Cyprus. Most were captured. The sultan attacked Acre because Crusaders had broken a truce and slaughtered every Muslim in the town. He sent his captive 1 000 Christian knights, their foot soldiers, women and children to the slave market in Damascus.
1760: The first hanging takes place at Tyburn at the north-east edge of Hyde Park, London, when Earl Ferrers pays the penalty for murdering his valet.
1821: Napoleon Bonaparte dies in exile on the remote British island of St Helena at age 51. The military genius known as ‘The Little Corporal’, Emperor of France and conqueror of Europe, could not survive more than six years in such a restricted prison. “There is no more oil in the lamp.” he told his secretary Montholon, when he fell ill at the end of the previous year. He fell into a coma and died a few hours later on May 5. In France he was widely revered and his legend was underpinned by the memoirs he wrote in exile. His British captors had no hand in his death – though they did everything to make his life a misery, plaguing him with petty restrictions even during his illness. Napoleon had lost the three great loves of his life – France, power and his empress. He rejected her in 1810 because she had not given him a male heir. She died seven years before but the last word Napoleon spoke was “Josephine”.
1865: The first train robbery is carried out near North Bend, Ohio.
1920: Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco are arrested in New York City for possession of anarchist literature.
1949: Death of Count Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian poet and leading dramatist of the Symbolist movement, who wrote The Blue Bird.
1955: The post-war occupation of Germany officially ends as the Allied High Commissioners meet for the last time in Berlin and Germany regains sovereignty, with the country split into two parts, East and West.
1955: The World Bank warns that poverty is a greater threat to world peace than the Cold War.
1963: Britain’s first satellite is launched from Vandenburg air base, California.
1967: Scott McKenzie’s flower-power anthem ‘San Francisco’ (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair) enters the US singles charts.
1968: Paris was torn by violence as 30 000 students ripped up streets to make barricades. Student ‘commando squads’ clashed with riot police, answering the police teargas grenades with a hail of bricks and Molotov cocktails. Six hundred and fifty students were injured and 35 police members. The first demonstrations, six weeks prior, were anti-American, but student arrests prompted student leader ‘Danny the Red’ Cohn-Bendit to stage a mass sit-in at the university. Riot police had broken it up two days before, resulting in accusations of police brutality. The city of Paris awaited the mass demonstration planned at the Arc de Triomphe, which they feared would not remain peaceful and millions of dissatisfied workers were leaning towards support for the left-wing students.
1972: Legendary blind blues guitarist Reverend Gary Davis dies.
1980: Millions watch a live television broadcast of Britain’s Special Air Services commandos storming the Iranian Embassy in fashionable Knightsbridge to break a six-day terrorist siege. The gang was demanding the release of political prisoners in Iran. Commandos attacked without hesitation after the terrorists started shooting hostages. They killed four of the five gunmen and freed 19 surviving hostages. The Embassy building was gutted.
1988: Japanese television broadcasts the first transmission from the summit of Mount Everest.
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