01010829 This Day In History, August 29

1350: During the Hundred Years war, a Spanish fleet of 40 warships was defeated by the English at the Battle of Winchelsea.

1475: The Truce of Picquigny was signed, under which Edward IV of England agreed to withdraw his invading army from France in return for gold and a yearly pension.

1498: Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama prepared to leave Calicut (a city in southern India) and return to Portugal.

1526: The Battle of Mohacs in Hungary. Louis II of Hungary with an army of 24,000 was disastrously defeated by Suleiman I of Turkey (listen to our sermon The Ottoman Empire) with an army of 150,000. The king and nearly the entire Hungarian army were killed. Louis' defeat, which laid Hungary open to Ottoman/Turkish (the Ottomans were a ruling dynasty in Turkey) domination, was partly caused by the probably deliberate failure of John Zapolya to join Louis with his Transylvanian contingent. In 1687 Charles V of Lorraine routed the Turks on the same battlefield.

1756: Frederick II of Prussia (not to be confused with Russia; Prussia is in Germany - see also The Holy Roman Empire Of The German Nation) invaded Saxony, beginning the Seven Years War.

1786: Shays' Rebellion, an uprising of Massachusetts farmers, began in response to high debt and taxes. It was named after Daniel Shays, a veteran of the New England rebellion against England a decade earlier.

1825: Brazilian independence was recognized by Portugal.

1831: English scientist Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction.

1842: The Treaty of Nanking was signed between the British and Chinese, ending the first Opium War. The treaty confirmed the ceding of Hong Kong island to Britain.

1885: The first motorcycle was patented, built by Gottlied Daimler in Germany.

1910: The Japan-Korea Treaty of 1910 (also known as the Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty) began the era of Japanese dominion of Korea.

1949: The Soviet Union detonated their first atomic bomb. The news was made public on September 22 when the U.S., Britain and Canada announced that they all had detected it.

1960: Jordanian Prime Minister Hazza El-Majali and 10 others were assassinated in an explosion set off by a time-bomb.

1962: A U.S. U-2 spy plane photographed Soviet technicians installing a SAM (Surface to Air Missiles) launch pad in Cuba. An event prior to the Cuban missile crisis 6 weeks later.

1974: Canadian astronomer Dr. A. G. Willis was credited with the discovery of "the largest object in the universe," a cloud of energy stretching 105,582,528,000,000,000,000 miles from end to end. It is 1.8 billion light years away.

1982: The synthetic chemical element Meitnerium (Atomic Number 109) was first synthesized, at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany.

1991: The government of the Soviet Union suspended all political activity of the Soviet Communist Party that had ruled the country for over 70 years.

2003: Ayatollah Sayed Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, the Shia Muslim leader in Iraq, was assassinated by a bombing that also killed about 100 bystanders as they were leaving a mosque in Najaf.

2005: Hurricane Katrina devastated a wide area of the U.S. Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the Florida, killing more than 1,800 people and causing over $80 billion in damage.