1098 After a seven-month siege the armies of the First Crusade captured Antioch (now in Turkey) from the Muslims. The original purpose of this crusade, proclaimed by Pope Urban II, was to relieve pressure by the Seljuk Turks on the Eastern Roman Empire and to secure safe access for pilgrims to Jerusalem.

1162 Thomas Becket (ca. 1118–1170) was consecrated as Archbishop of Canterbury.

1542 Johannes Trygophorus, reformer in Waldeck, died (b. ca. 1497). [German Wikipedia article]

1694 August Hermann Francke‘s (1663–1727) orphanage in Halle, Germany, opened.

1726 Philip William Otterbein, founder of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, was born in Dillenburg, Germany (d. 1813).

1764 Hans Adolph Brorson, Danish Lutheran bishop and hymnist, died (b. 20 June 1694).

1773 Johann Ludwig Konrad Allendorf, hymnist, died in Halle (b. 1693). [German Wikipedia article]

1796 Dyer Ball, medical missionary to Hong Kong, Singapore and Macau (1841), was born in West Boylston, Massachusetts (d. 27 March 1866).

1851 Azariah Smith, missionary to Armenia and Turkey, died (b. 16 February 1817).

1851 Theodore Baker, German musicologist and biographical scholar, was born (d. 13 October 1934).

1853 W. M. Flinders Petrie, Egyptologist, was born in Kent, England (d. 28 July 1942).

1853 Central College was chartered in Pella, Iowa, under Baptist auspices.

1879 Carl Friedrich Theodor Ruhland, first president of the Saxon Free Church (Freikirche), died (b. 26 April 1836).

1879 Frances Ridley Havergal, English devotional writer, hymnist and composer, died at Caswall Bay, near Swansea (b. 14 December 1836).

1886 Thirty-two young men, pages of the court of King Mwanga of Buganda, were burned to death at Namugongo for their refusal to renounce Christianity.

1894 William Alfred Passavant, leader in Lutheran social service work, died (b. 9 October 1821).

1905 James Hudson Taylor, China Inland Mission founder and missionary to China, died (b. 21 May 1832, Barnsley, Yorkshire, England).

1911 Arthur Tappan Pierson, mission authority, died after returning from a trip to the Orient (b. 6 March 1837).

1913 Michael Wolf Hamma, president of the General Synod, died (b. 25 December 1836).

1917 Ole T. Arneson, who translated many hymns from the Norwegian language into English, died (b. 4 May 1853).

1928 Andrew Schulze, following his ordination in his home congregation in Cincinnati, Ohio, was installed at Saint Philip Lutheran Church (Saint Louis). He was born in 1896 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and graduated from Concordia Theological Seminary (Springfield, Illinois) in 1924. He served Holy Trinity Lutheran Church there, an all-African-American congregation, from 1924 to 1928, prior to his ordination. His call in Saint Louis was to gather in the African American community. The newly founded parish became the first self-supporting congregation composed mostly of African American members. By 1944 two daughter congregations (Saint Michael and Holy Sacraments) were formed. Acutely aware of the problems of integrating the African American community into the church, Schulze served as president of the General Conference of Mission Workers and Mission Congregations of the Synodical Conference from 1930 until 1946. In 1938 he founded the Saint Louis Society for Better Race Relations (Lutheran). He was also active on the Saint Louis (City) Race Relations Commission. In 1941 he published My Neighbor of Another Color. He fought actively to allow African Americans into Missouri Synod schools. In September 1947 he was installed as missionary-at-large in Chicago under the Northern Illinois District to organize and work among the African American community on the South Side. In November 1949 Christ the King congregation, which he organized, dedicated its first building. He was instrumental in the founding of the Lutheran Human Relations Association of America in 1953. In June 1954 he accepted the position of executive secretary of that organization together with part-time teaching at Valparaiso University. In 1964 he became the director of research for the LHRAA.

1931 Francis A. O. Pieper, theologian and president of Concordia Seminary (Saint Louis) and fourth president of the Missouri Synod, died (b. 27 June 1852).

1936 H. R. Mackintosh (b. 1870), Church of Scotland theologian.

1963 Pope John XXIII, 260th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church and convener of the Second Vatican Council, died. Expected to be merely a “caretaker” pope when elected, he ushered in some of the Roman Catholic Church’s most far-reaching changes in its history. Born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli on 25 November 1881, he was elected to the papacy on 28 October 1958.

1972 Sally J. Priesand (b. 27 June 1946), became the first woman rabbi in the U.S. when she was ordained in Cincinnati, Ohio.

1980 Oliver R. Harms, seventh president of LCMS, died in Saint Louis, Missouri (b. 11 December 1901, Cole Camp, Missouri).

1980 Catholic and Eastern Orthodox representatives met officially for the first time since the Council of Florence-Ferrara in 1438/1439 had attempted to heal the Great East-West Schism of 1054.

1999 Heino O. Kadai, professor of historical theology at Concordia Theological Seminary (Springfield, Illinois, and Fort Wayne, Indiana) from 1960 to 1999, died (b. 20 August 1931, Tartu, Estonia).