01010804 This Day In History, August 4

70: Roman forces continued their siege of Jerusalem that resulted in the destruction of the city and the Temple (see What Did Jesus Christ Say About Those Stones? and A History Of Jerusalem: The Temple Of The LORD; also The Temple Vessel Prophecies Today).

367: Roman Emperor Valentinian I declared his eight year old son Gratian as co-emperor (see The Politics Of Rome and A History Of Jerusalem: Pompey And The Caesars).

1060: Henry I of France died and was succeeded by Philip I.

1265: King Henry III put down a revolt of English barons lead by Simon de Montfort.

1521: Pope Urban VII was born as Giambattista Castagna. He was elected Pope in September 1590, but died of malaria before his coronation.

1578: A crusade against the Moors of Morocco was routed at the Battle of Alcazar-el-Kebir (see also Constantine's Crusades In History And Prophecy).

1586: A plot to kill Queen Elizabeth I was discovered. Anthony Babington, supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots, planned to kill Elizabeth and her ministers and assume power with the aid of English Roman Catholics and Spanish soldiers. Babington and others were executed for high treason.

1704: During the War of the Spanish Succession, a joint Anglo-Dutch force attacked and captured Gibraltar.

1914: Germany invaded Belgium, causing Britain to declare war on Germany. By midnight of that day, 5 empires had entered the First World War: the Austro-Hungarian empire against Serbia; the German empire against France, Britain and Russia; the Russian empire against Germany and Austria-Hungary; the British and French empires against Germany. Many believed that the war would be "over by Christmas" (listen also to our Sermon The European World Wars).

1916: Denmark agreed to cede the Danish West Indies, including the Virgin Islands, to the United States for $25 million. The deal took effect the following March 31.

1927: The Peace Bridge between Canada and the U.S. was opened.

1944: After two years hiding in an Amsterdam back room, Anne Frank, her sister, her parents and four other Jews were discovered by the Gestapo (a German abbreviation for "The State Police"). The diary she kept was found after the war, published in over 30 languages and turned into a play and film.

1944: Royal Air Force pilot T. D. Dean became the first pilot to destroy a German V-1 "buzz bomb" (similar to a modern-day cruise missile) when he tipped the pilotless craft's wing, sending it off course.

1954: Britain's first supersonic fighter plane, the English Electric Lightning P-1, made its maiden flight.

1964: The U.S. warship Maddox reportedly clashed with North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf Of Tonkin, in North Vietnamese waters off the coast of North Vietnam, resulting in President Johnson ordering the first bombing of North Vietnam in the Vietnam civil war (Vietnam had been divided into north and south by colonial France in the 1950s). Later historians and investigators questioned whether the incident, and a similar reported incident later (called by some the "ghost" attack because there may have been no North Vietnamese coastal defense ships at all present the second time) actually happened, or whether it was merely a false or provoked excuse to begin bombing North Vietnam.

1997: The world's oldest person, Jeanne Calment, died aged 122 years and 164 days in Arles, France.