July 17

Events

• 1203 - Fourth Crusade captures Constantinople by assault; the Byzantine emperor Alexius III Angelus flees from his capital into exile.
• 1453 - Hundred Years' War: Battle of Castillon - The French under Jean Bureau utterly defeat the English under the Earl of Shrewsbury, who is killed in the battle in Gascony
• 1762 - Catherine II becomes tzar of Russia upon the accidental murder of Peter III of Russia.
• 1791 - Members of the French National guard under the command of General Lafayette open fire on a crowd of radical Jacobins at the Champ de Mars, Paris, during the French Revolution, killing as many as 50 people.
• 1815 - Napoleonic Wars: In France, Napoleon surrenders at Rochefort, Charente-Maritime to British forces.
• 1918 - By order of the Bolshevik Party and carried out by Cheka, Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, his immediate family, and retainers were murdered at the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, Russia.
• 1936 - Spanish Civil War: An Armed Forces rebellion against the recently-elected leftist Popular Front government of Spain starts the Spanish civil war.
• 1945 - World War II: Potsdam Conference - At Potsdam, President Harry S. Truman, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the three main Allied leaders, begin their final summit of the war. The meeting will end on August 2.
• 1975 - Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: An American Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft dock with each other in orbit marking the first such link-up between spacecraft from the two nations.
• 1976 - History of East Timor: East Timor was annexed, and became the 27th province of Indonesia.
• 2014 - Chikungunya is first acquired from within the USA brought by mass immigration.

Births

• 1744 - Elbridge Gerry, 5th Vice President of the United States (d. 1814)
• 1926 - Willis Carto, American nationalist publisher (d. 2015)
• 1939 - Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran
• 1954 - Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany

Deaths

• 1790 - Adam Smith, Scottish economist and philosopher (b. 1723)
• 1918 - Family of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia (b. 1868)
• 1937 - Nicolae Paulescu, Romanian physiologist and discoverer of insulin (b. 1869)
• 2001 - Katharine Graham, American publisher (b. 1917)
• 2005 - Edward Heath, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1916)