01011118 This Day In History, November 18

401: The Visigoths, led by King Alaric I, crossed the Alps and invaded northern Italy. The Visigoths (from the Latin meaning western Goths) and Ostrogoths (from the Latin meaning eastern Goths) were tribes of Germanic people who eventually overwhelmed and replaced the Roman Empire in Europe (see The Holy Roman Empire Of The German Nation).

1095: Pope Urban II opened the Council of Clermont. Summoned to plan the First Crusade (see Constantine's Crusades In History And Prophecy), it was attended by over 200 bishops of the Church of Rome (all of whom had earlier been equal in rank to the bishop of Rome; see The Struggle For The Papacy).

1105: Maginulfo was elected Antipope, as Sylvester IV (again, see The Struggle For The Papacy).

1302: Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed his "Unam Sanctam." It decreed that the Church of Rome was superior in authority to all national governments and that obedience to the pope was necessary for salvation.

1307: The famous incident in Switzerland when William Tell was forced to shoot an apple off his son's head with a crossbow or be executed along with his son.

1421: The Zuider Zee flooded 72 villages in the Netherlands, killing an estimated 10,000 people.

1477: William Caxton produced the first printed book in the English language, "The Dictes and Sayengis of the Phylosophers."

1493: Christopher Columbus first sighted the island now known as Puerto Rico. All of the four voyages of Columbus were limited to the islands of the Caribbean Sea (see also Thanksgiving In History and Prophecy).

1497: Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias became the first to round the Cape of Good Hope, thereby opening a sea route to India from Europe.

1755: The worst recorded earthquake on the Massachusetts Bay area struck Boston.

1883: Canada and U.S. adopted standard time. Standard Time was the invention of Sir Sanford Fleming, who came to Canada from Scotland and was Canada's foremost railway surveyor and construction engineer in the 19th century. The standard time system was adopted by the rest of the world in 1884 at an international conference in Washington.

1916: During the First World War (listen to our Sermon The European World Wars), General Douglas Haig of Britain called off the First Battle of The Somme after 5 months of futile battle, which included the first use of tanks in actual conflict. The allied advance of just 125 square miles cost 420,000 British, 195,000 French and 650,000 German casualties.

1936: Germany under Adolf Hitler (see Presidential Quotes On War, Terrorism, Religion) and Italy under Mussolini recognized General Francisco Franco's provisional government in Spain.

1941: Britain opened its second Western Desert offensive in Libya when the 8th Army advanced into Cyrenaica.

1961: U.S. President John F. Kennedy sent 18,000 "military advisors" to South Vietnam. The Vietnam War was actually a civil war between the people of Vietnam who had been divided into two countries by French colonial forces in the 1940s. When France was driven out by Vietnamese military forces, the U.S. replaced them and participated in the Vietnam civil war until the early 1970s. When the U.S. withdrew, Vietnam was re-united into the single nation that it had been for centuries before the French and U.S. occupations.

1966: The Roman Catholic Church ended its "meatless Friday" requirement.

1970: West Germany and Poland initialed a treaty recognizing the Oder-Neisse line as a common border and pledging each other to territorial integrity.

1978: U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan was shot and killed in Jonestown, Guyana by members of Jim Jones' "People's Temple." Ryan's murder was followed by the mass suicide of 912 member of the cult (see also Is Your Church A Cult?).

1991: British peace envoy Terry Waite and U.S. academic Thomas Sutherland were released after 5 years of captivity in Lebanon by the Islamic Jihad terrorist group.

1993: White and black leaders in South Africa approved the new constitution which gave blacks the right to vote and ended white minority rule.