The Islamic calendar, adopted formally under Caliph Umar around 638 CE, was set to begin its count from the year of the Hijra, Muhammad's migration from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE. This lunar calendar, roughly eleven days shorter than the solar year, governs Islamic religious observance worldwide, including Ramadan and the Hajj pilgrimage, and its epoch date is conventionally reckoned to July 16, 622 in the proleptic Julian calendar.
Exhausted and dying of thirst after a forced march across arid hills, the crusader army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem was surrounded and annihilated by Saladin's forces near the twin hills known as the Horns of Hattin. King Guy of Lusignan was captured along with the relic believed to be the True Cross, and most of the Knights Templar and Hospitaller taken prisoner were executed. The defeat left Jerusalem defenseless; Saladin recaptured the Holy City that October.
Venetian and French crusader forces, diverted from their original goal of Jerusalem, scaled the sea walls of Constantinople using ships' ladders and captured towers along the Golden Horn. Emperor Alexios III Angelos fled the city in the night, abandoning his throne, and the crusaders restored the deposed Isaac II Angelos and his son Alexios IV to power. The episode was a prelude to the catastrophic sack of the city the following year.
Fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous reported her eighteenth and final vision of the Virgin Mary at a rocky grotto beside the Gave de Pau river in Lourdes, France. Her earlier visions, beginning that February, had already drawn thousands of curious villagers and skeptical officials to the site. The Catholic Church later authenticated the apparitions, and Lourdes became one of the world's most visited pilgrimage destinations, drawing millions annually who seek healing at its spring.
At 5:29 a.m. in the Jornada del Muerto desert, physicists watched a plutonium device unleash a fireball brighter than the sun, vaporizing the steel tower that held it and fusing the desert sand into a glassy green mineral later named trinitite. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project's scientific team, later said the test brought to mind a line from the Bhagavad Gita: 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' Three weeks later, the bomb's descendants fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On what Walt Disney's staff privately called 'Black Sunday,' roughly 28,000 people, nearly double the expected number due to widespread counterfeit tickets, flooded into the still-unfinished Anaheim theme park. Freshly poured asphalt melted in 100-degree heat and trapped women's high heels, a gas leak forced Fantasyland to close, and food and drink ran out entirely at some stands. Televised live to 90 million viewers, the bungled event nonetheless became legendary Disney lore.
At 9:32 a.m. Eastern time, the 363-foot Saturn V rocket roared off Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center, carrying the three astronauts of Apollo 11 on humanity's first crewed mission to land on the moon. An estimated one million spectators watched from the beaches and highways of central Florida, while hundreds of millions more followed on television worldwide. Four days later, Armstrong and Aldrin would walk on the lunar surface.
Ted Turner's Cable News Network began broadcasting from a former antebellum mansion turned studio in Atlanta, promising to stay on air 'until the world ends.' Skeptics mocked the venture as 'Chicken Noodle News,' doubting anyone would watch news all day. Within a decade CNN's live coverage of events like the Gulf War made it an indispensable global institution and reshaped how the world consumed breaking news.