456 – Battle of Placentia: Ricimer, supported by Majorian (comes domesticorum), defeats the Roman usurper Avitus near Piacenza (Northern Italy) .
1346 – Battle of Neville’s Cross: King David II of Scotland is captured by the English near Durham, and imprisoned in the Tower of London for eleven years.
1448 – Second Battle of Kosovo, where the mainly Hungarian army led by John Hunyadi is defeated by an Ottoman army led by Sultan Murad II.
1558 – Poczta Polska, the Polish postal service, is founded.
1604 – Kepler’s Supernova: German astronomer Johannes Kepler observes a supernova in the constellation Ophiuchus.
1610 – French king Louis XIII is crowned in Reims Cathedral.
1660 – Nine regicides, the men who signed the death warrant of Charles I, are hanged, drawn and quartered.
1777 – American Revolutionary War: British General John Burgoyne surrenders his army at Saratoga, New York.
1781 – American Revolutionary War: British General Charles, Earl Cornwallis surrenders at the Siege of Yorktown.
1800 – Britain takes control of the Dutch colony of Curaçao.
1861 – Nineteen people are killed in the Cullin-la-ringo massacre, the deadliest massacre of Europeans by aborigines in Australian history.
1888 – Thomas Edison files a patent for the Optical Phonograph (the first movie).
1905 – The October Manifesto issued by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia (October 30th in the Gregorian calendar).
1907 – Guglielmo Marconi’s company begins the first commercial transatlantic wireless service between Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada and Clifden, Ireland.
1912 – Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia declare war on the Ottoman Empire, joining Montenegro in the First Balkan War.
1917 – First British bombing of Germany in World War I.
1933 – Albert Einstein flees Nazi Germany and moves to the United States.
1940 – The body of Communist propagandist Willi Münzenberg found in South France, starting a never-resolved mystery.
1941 – World War II: a German submarine attacks an American ship for the first time in the war.
1941 – German troops execute the male population of the villages Kerdyllia in Serres, Greece.
1943 – The Burma Railway (Burma–Thailand Railway) is completed.
1943 – The Holocaust: Sobibór extermination camp is closed.
1945 – Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens becomes Prime Minister of Greece between the pull-out of the German occupation force in 1944 and the return of King Georgios II to Greece.
1956 – The first commercial nuclear power station is officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II in Sellafield,in Cumbria, England.
1970 – Montreal: Quebec Vice-Premier and Minister of Labour Pierre Laporte murdered by members of the FLQ terrorist group.
1973 – OPEC imposes an oil embargo against a number of Western countries, considered to have helped Israel in its war against Egypt and Syria.
1977 – German Autumn: Four days after it is hijacked, Lufthansa Flight 181 lands in Mogadishu, Somalia, where a team of German GSG 9 commandos later rescues all remaining hostages on board.
1979 – Mother Teresa is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
1989 – Peaceful Revolution: The East German Politburo votes to remove Erich Honecker from his role as General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.
1994 – Russian journalist Dmitry Kholodov is assassinated while investigating corruption in the armed forces.
2001 – Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Ze’evi becomes the first Israeli minister to be assassinated in a terrorist attack.