What happened on 19 October?

17 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 202 BCE Battle of Zama Scipio Africanus defeats Hannibal.
2. 1469 Marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella The union of Aragon and Castile's heirs creates the Catholic Monarchs and the foundation of unified Spain.
3. 1812 French retreat from Moscow Of ~600,000 troops that crossed the Niemen, fewer than 40,000 returned.
4. 1847 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë's novel of governess Jane and the mysterious Mr Rochester.
5. 1914 First Battle of Ypres Fought at the end of the Race to the Sea; trench warfare locks in on the Western Front.
6. 1987 Black Monday Stock markets crash worldwide; the Dow loses 22.6%, its largest one-day percentage fall in history.
7. 1216 Death of King John With half his kingdom held by the French prince Louis and his baggage train — crown jewels included, by legend — lost in the Wash, John dies of dysentery at Newark, unmourned. His
8. 1854 Liszt's Faust Symphony Liszt's three-movement orchestral work after Goethe - high point of programme music.
9. 1964 Prediction of the Higgs mechanism (Englert-Higgs) Three theoretical papers in 1964 predict the field that gives particles mass.
10. 1866 Venetia joins Italy Italy's own campaign against Austria goes badly on land and sea — but its alliance with victorious Prussia wins the prize anyway, and after a plebiscite Venice and its hinterland j
11. 1935 Arrival at Yan'an Mao's First Front Army reaches Wuqi in northern Shaanxi, ending the Long March; nearby Yan'an, taken in January 1937, becomes the Communist base and cradle of Mao's leadership.
12. 1901 Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 Its trio tune earns an unprecedented double encore in London and, set to words as 'Land of Hope and Glory', becomes Britain's unofficial second anthem.
13. 1922 Carlton Club meeting Conservative MPs vote to leave the coalition; Lloyd George resigns that afternoon and never holds office again — and backbenchers found the 1922 Committee.
14. 1922 Ravel's orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition Commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, Ravel dresses Mussorgsky's piano suite in brilliant orchestral colour — the version, from the trumpet Promenade to the Great Gate of Kiev, the w
15. 1954 Britain agrees to leave the Suez Canal Zone After seventy years of garrison, Britain signs an agreement with Nasser's Egypt to withdraw its 80,000 troops from the canal within twenty months — the largest British base in the
16. 1330 Edward III seizes power at Nottingham Castle The seventeen-year-old king's friends slip into Nottingham Castle by a secret passage and arrest Roger Mortimer, his mother's lover and the real ruler of England; Mortimer is hange
17. 1963 Alec Douglas-Home's premiership An earl becomes prime minister, then renounces his peerage to sit in the Commons, governing for a year, the last chosen by the party's customary processes.