📅 Today in HistoryApril 26

Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) ascends Mont Ventoux.

The Pazzi family attack on Lorenzo de' Medici in order to displace the ruling Medici family kills his brother Giuliano during High Mass in Florence Cathedral.

Playwright William Shakespeare is baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England (date of birth is unknown).

The Virginia Company colonists make landfall at Cape Henry.

A massive earthquake devastates the Iranian city of Tabriz.

Sybil Ludington, aged 16, allegedly rode 40 miles (64 km) to alert American colonial forces to the approach of British regular forces

Battle of Beaumont during the Flanders Campaign of the War of the First Coalition.

Napoleon Bonaparte signs a general amnesty to allow all but about one thousand of the most notorious émigrés of the French Revolution to return to France.

Thousands of meteor fragments fall from the skies of L'Aigle, France; the event convinces European scientists that meteors exist.

First Barbary War: United States Marines captured Derne under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon.