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1095
Pope Urban II opens the Council of Clermont where ambassadors from the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus, asking help against the Muslims, were warmly received.
1177
Saladin leaves Egypt in the hope of quickly capturing Jerusalem from the Crusaders. A small force of Knights Templar are kept pinned down so that the main army can continue northward.
1302
Pope Boniface VIII published the bull "Unam Sanctam," decreeing that spiritual power was primary to temporal power and that submission to the pope was necessary to achieve salvation.
1626
St. Peter's Basilica was consecrated by Pope Urban VIII. At 619 feet long, St. Peter's is still the largest church in Christendom.
1962
Physicist Niels Bohr was born.
1963
The Ba'ath government of Iraq, which came to power in February of this year by assassinating Iraqi Premier Kassim, was itself overthrown by its own president, Abd-al-Salam Muhammad Arif, and a group of military officers. Arif created a new non-Ba'thist, pro-Nasserist government.
1966
This was the last Friday on which American Roman Catholics were required to abstain from eating meat. The change was due to a decree made by Pope Paul VI earlier the same year.
1978
In Jonestown, a compound located in Guyana, the self-professed messiah Reverend Jim Jones called upon his followers to drink a cyanide-laced punch "or be destroyed from the outside." The death toll was 913, many of which probably didn't go voluntarily - this is what came to be known as the Jonestown Massacre.
1995
After being involved in a traffic accident, Lisa McPherson takes off her all clothes and tells a paramedic: "I need help. I need to talk to someone" and that she's been doing "wrong things she didn't know were wrong." She is taken to the nearby Morton Plant Hospital for psychiatric evaluation, but a group of her follow Scientologists intervene and convince her to sign herself out against a doctor's advice. Psychiatry is considered evil by the Church of Scientology and McPherson is taken to Scientology's Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida. McPherson would later die under mysterious circumstances while in the care of the Church of Scientology, resulting in a seven-year long civil lawsuit that was finally settled out of court before the trial could begin in 2004.
2002
U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson of Montgomery, Alabama, ordered the removal of Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monument, finding that it violated the constitution's ban on government establishment of religion. Thompson wrote in his decision that "the Ten Commandments monument, viewed alone or in the context of its history, placement, and location, has the primary effect of endorsing religion."
2003
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled 4-3 that government attorneys "failed to identify any constitutionally adequate reason" to deny gay and lesbian couples the right to marry. The court gave the Massachusetts Legislature six months to rewrite the state's marriage laws in order to fix this. This ruling was hailed by many liberals but denounced by conservatives, especially religious conservatives, who began to work for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution defining marriage as being between "one man and one woman."
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