Saint Mark, Evangelist
387 Saint Augustine (354–430) was baptized.
799 Pope Leo III (perhaps ca. 750-816) was attacked, his eyes stabbed and his tongue torn. He recovered and crowned Charlemagne emperor. He was pope from 795 to 816.
1214 Louis IX, king of France and saint, was born (d. 25 August 1270). Leader of the Seventh and Eighth Crusades (he died on the latter), he was known for his humility.
1265 Roger de Quincy, 2nd Earl of Winchester, a medieval English nobleman who probably joined his father on the Fifth Crusade in 1219, died (b. ca. 1195).
1502 Georg Major, Martin Luther’s friend, was born at Nürnberg (d. 28 November 1574).
1518 The German Augustinians, meeting in Heidelberg, relieved Martin Luther of his duties as district vicar due to his increasingly vocal campaign against indulgences.
1599 Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan lord protector of England, was born near Cambridge, Huntingdon, England (d. 3 September 1658).
1792 John Keble, English clergyman and hymnist, was born in Fairford, Gloucestershire (d. 29 March 1866).
1799 Ephraim Weston Clark, missionary to Hawaii and Micronesia, was born in Haverhill, New Hampshire (d. 16 July 1878).
1800 Israel Acrelius, provost of Swedish Lutheran churches in Delaware, died (b. 4 December 1714).
1800 William Cowper, English hymnist, died at East Dereham, England (b. 26 November 1731).
1825 Ernst Ottmar Clöter, one of Wilhelm Löhe’s missioners to America, was born in Baireuth, Bavaria (d. 17 March 1897).
1839 Samuel John Stone, Anglican clergyman and hymnist, was born in Whitmore, Staffordshire, England (d. 19 November 1900).
1847 The organizational meeting of the Missouri Synod began in Chicago with a worship service.
1879 Renowned English New Testament scholar J. B. Lightfoot (1828–1889) was consecrated Bishop of Durham, having left Cambridge and a life of scholarship to devote the remaining ten years of his life to church administration.
1887 Radio evangelist Charles Edward Fuller, known for his “Old Fashioned Revival Hour,” was born in Los Angeles (d. 18 March 1968).
1929 The Romanian Orthodox Episcopate of America was organized at a church congress that convened in Detroit. Previously the parishes in the U.S. were under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate in Bucharest, but the insurgence of Communism in Eastern Europe forced the new church’s separation from its parent body. Today the group is under the Orthodox Church in America.
1936 The Nigerian mission of the Lutheran Synodical Conference was opened by Henry Nau (1881–1956).
1937 George Linn Kieffer, National Lutheran Council statistician and reference librarian, died (b. 25 November 1883 near Millersburg, Pennsylvania).
2007 Boris Yeltsin’s (1931–2007) funeral was the first to be sanctioned by theRussian Orthodox Church for a head of state since the funeral of EmperorAlexander III (1845–1894) in 1894.