421 – Venice is founded at twelve o'clock noon, according to legend.
708 – Pope Constantine succeeds Pope Sisinnius as the 88th pope.
717 – Theodosius III resigns the throne to the Byzantine Empire to enter the clergy.
1199 – Richard I is wounded by a crossbow bolt while fighting France, leading to his death on April 6.
1306 – Robert the Bruce becomes king of Scotland.
1409 – The Council of Pisa opens.
1555 – The city of Valencia is founded in present-day Venezuela.
1584 – Sir Walter Raleigh is granted a patent to colonize Virginia.
1634 – The first settlers arrive in Maryland.
1655 – Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is discovered by Christiaan Huygens.
1802 – The Treaty of Amiens is signed as a "Definitive Treaty of Peace" between France and the United Kingdom.
1807 – The Slave Trade Act becomes law, abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire.
1807 – The Swansea and Mumbles Railway, then known as the Oystermouth Railway, becomes the first passenger-carrying railway in the world.
1811 – Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from the University of Oxford for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism.
1821 – (Julian calendar) Traditional date of the start of the Greek War of Independence. The war had actually begun on 23 February 1821. The date was chosen in the early years of the Greek state so that it falls on the day of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, strengthening the ties between the Greek Orthodox Church and the newly founded state.
1865 – American Civil War: In Virginia, Confederate forces temporarily capture Fort Stedman from the Union.
1894 – Coxey's Army, the first significant American protest march, departs Massillon, Ohio for Washington, D.C.
1911 – In New York City, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire kills 146 garment workers.
1914 – Aris is founded in Thessaloniki.
1917 – The Georgian Orthodox Church restores its autocephaly abolished by Imperial Russia in 1811.
1918 – The Belarusian People's Republic is established.
1924 – On the anniversary of Greek Independence, Alexandros Papanastasiou proclaims the Second Hellenic Republic.
1931 – The Scottsboro Boys are arrested in Alabama and charged with rape.
1941 – The Kingdom of Yugoslavia joins the Axis powers with the signing of the Tripartite Pact.
1947 – An explosion in a coal mine in Centralia, Illinois kills 111.
1948 – The first successful tornado forecast predicts that a tornado will strike Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma.
1949 – The extensive deportation campaign known as March deportation is conducted in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to force collectivisation by way of terror. The Soviet authorities deport more than 92,000 people from the Baltics to remote areas of the Soviet Union.
1957 – United States Customs seizes copies of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" on obscenity grounds.
1957 – The European Economic Community is established with West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg as the first members.
1958 – Canada's Avro Arrow makes its first flight.
1965 – Civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King Jr. successfully complete their 4-day 50-mile march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama.
1969 – During their honeymoon, John Lennon and Yoko Ono hold their first Bed-In for Peace at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel (until March 31).
1971 – Bangladesh Liberation War: Beginning of Operation Searchlight by the Pakistan Armed Forces against East Pakistani civilians.
1971 – The Army of the Republic of Vietnam abandon an attempt to cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos.
1975 – Faisal of Saudi Arabia is shot and killed by a mentally ill nephew.
1979 – The first fully functional Space Shuttle orbiter, Columbia, is delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center to be prepared for its first launch.
1988 – The Candle demonstration in Bratislava is the first mass demonstration of the 1980s against the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.
1990 – The Happy Land fire was an arson fire that kills 87 people trapped inside an illegal nightclub in The Bronx, New York City.
1992 – The Pakistan national cricket team wins the 1992 Cricket World Cup at Melbourne Cricket Ground.
1992 – Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev returns to Earth after a 10-month stay aboard the Mir space station.
1993 – Warrington bomb victim Tim Parry dies five days after an IRA bomb detonated on 20 March 1993 in the second of the Warrington bomb attacks.
1995 – WikiWikiWeb, the world's first wiki, and part of the Portland Pattern Repository, is made public by Ward Cunningham.
1996 – An 81-day-long standoff between the anti-government group Montana Freemen and law enforcement near Jordan, Montana, begins.
1996 – The European Union's Veterinarian Committee bans the export of British beef and its by-products as a result of mad cow disease (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy).
2006 – Capitol Hill massacre: A gunman kills six people before taking his own life at a party in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood.
2006 – Protesters demanding a new election in Belarus, following the rigged Belarusian presidential election, 2006, clash with riot police. Opposition leader Aleksander Kozulin is among several protesters arrested.
