HISTORY & TIMELINE

17 October

A journey through
17 October in history

From a Scottish king captured outside Durham in 1346 to a freeway collapsing in the Bay Area in 1989, 17 October has a habit of turning on a single afternoon. This timeline follows the date across seven centuries.

Begin the Timeline ↓ ← Back to Explore This Day

THE MIDDLE AGES

Medieval History

Kingdoms, conflict, faith, power and the changing medieval world.

1346

The monument that marks the site of the battle of Neville’s Cross at Durham.Image: Boffy · CC BY-SA 3.0

world · Europe

A Scottish king is captured outside Durham

David II of Scotland invaded northern England in the autumn of 1346 as an ally of France, hoping to pull Edward III away from the siege of Calais. Edward had foreseen it and left a strong force in the northern shires. On 17 October the two armies met at Neville’s Cross, just west of Durham. The Scots were beaten, and David - wounded twice in the face by arrows - was taken prisoner. He spent eleven years in English captivity and was released in 1357 for a ransom of 100,000 merks, payable in nine annual instalments, a burden that shaped Scottish politics for a generation.

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Battle of Neville’s Cross ↗

III

A CHANGING WORLD

Early Modern Era

Exploration, political change, scientific development and expanding global connections.

1604

The remnant of the 1604 supernova, imaged by the Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra telescopes.Image: NASA/ESA/JHU/R.Sankrit & W.Blair · Public domain

science · Europe

Kepler starts watching a new star

A new star appeared in the constellation Ophiuchus in October 1604. Lodovico delle Colombe saw it in Italy on the 9th; Johannes Kepler, in Prague, began his own observations on 17 October and followed it for more than a year. At its brightest it outshone Jupiter and could be seen in daylight for weeks. It faded away in March 1606. Kepler published his measurements in 1606, which is why the star carries his name. It mattered because Aristotle had taught that the heavens beyond the Moon were unchanging, and this was the second new star in a generation, after Tycho Brahe’s of 1572. Astronomers now class it as SN 1604, a type Ia supernova - a white dwarf destroying itself - and it remains the most recent supernova seen with the naked eye in our own galaxy.

Source: NASA: 420 years ago, astronomer Johannes Kepler observes a supernova ↗

1662

The belfry at Dunkirk, in the port Charles II sold to France.Image: Welleschik · CC BY-SA 3.0

politics · Europe

Charles II sells Dunkirk

By a treaty dated 17 October 1662 - Old Style, the calendar England then kept, which was 27 October in France - Charles II sold Dunkirk to Louis XIV for a sum usually given as 40,000 pounds, or five million livres. Cromwell’s army had taken the port from Spain only four years earlier and it was regarded at home as a hard-won English foothold on the continent; it was also expensive to garrison, and the restored king was short of money and reluctant to go back to Parliament for more. The sale was deeply unpopular and was held against his chief minister, the Earl of Clarendon, for the rest of his career.

Source: The National Archives: treaty between Great Britain and France for the sale of Dunkirk, 1662 ↗

1777

General John Burgoyne, painted by Joshua Reynolds.Image: Joshua Reynolds · Public domain

world · Americas

A British army surrenders at Saratoga

General John Burgoyne had marched south from Canada in the summer of 1777 expecting to cut New England off from the rest of the rebellious colonies. By October he was outnumbered, surrounded and out of supplies on the west bank of the Hudson. On 17 October his army of about 6,000 men marched out of camp with the honours of war and stacked its weapons along the riverbank. The terms were set out in the Convention of Saratoga, negotiated with the American commander Horatio Gates: the British were to be shipped home on parole rather than held as prisoners, a promise Congress later declined to honour. The military consequence was significant; the diplomatic consequence was decisive. News of Saratoga reached Paris that winter, and in February 1778 France signed a treaty of alliance with the United States.

Source: National Park Service: Saratoga surrender site ↗

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The 1800s

Industry, empire, invention, reform and a century of enormous transformation.

1806

Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who declared Haiti independent in 1804.Image: Louis Rigaud · Public domain

politics · Americas

The founder of Haiti is killed at Pont Rouge

Jean-Jacques Dessalines had been born into slavery, fought his way up through the Haitian revolution and, on 1 January 1804, declared the independence of the first state in the world created by a successful revolt of enslaved people. He crowned himself Emperor Jacques I that September. On 17 October 1806 he was killed at Pont Rouge, just outside Port-au-Prince, on his way to put down a revolt. His rule had made enemies fast: a forced-labour system on the plantations that looked uncomfortably like the one it replaced, and a land policy that set him against the free mixed-race elite. After his death Alexandre Pétion and Henry Christophe divided the country between a southern republic and a northern kingdom. Haiti’s national anthem is named after him.

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Jean-Jacques Dessalines ↗

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The 1900s

War and peace, technological leaps, social change, politics, sport and popular culture.

1931

Al Capone, photographed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.Image: Chicago Bureau (Federal Bureau of Investigation) - Wide World Photos. · Public domain

politics · Americas

They got Capone on his tax return

After nearly nine hours a federal jury in Chicago found Al Capone guilty on 17 October 1931 - three felony counts and two misdemeanours, all of them for failing to pay or file income tax between 1925 and 1929. He was 32 and had run the city’s biggest criminal organisation for years without being convicted of anything that mattered. The strategy belonged to the Treasury: prove what he had spent, since nobody could prove what he had earned. The evidence included his own lawyer’s offer to settle the tax bill, which amounted to an admission of income. He was sentenced in November to eleven years, fined 50,000 dollars and sent eventually to Alcatraz. He was released in 1939, his health destroyed by untreated syphilis, and died in Florida in 1947.

Source: National Archives (US): Al Capone’s guilty verdict ↗

1961

A memorial plaque in Paris to the Algerians killed on 17 October 1961.Image: FSouici · CC BY-SA 4.0

politics · Europe

A massacre in Paris, and a press blackout

On 17 October 1961 tens of thousands of Algerians walked into central Paris to protest peacefully against a curfew imposed on them alone. The demonstration had been banned. The police, under the prefect Maurice Papon, broke it up with extreme violence: around 12,000 people were arrested and held in sports stadiums, and an unknown number - several dozen at least - were killed, some beaten and thrown into the Seine. The French government imposed a press blackout and the event vanished from official memory for decades. Papon, who had also organised deportations of Jews from Bordeaux under Vichy, was convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity in 1998 for that earlier record. France did not formally acknowledge the massacre until 2012, and a president attended a commemoration for the first time in 2021.

Source: Présidence de la République française: commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of 17 October 1961 ↗

1973

Petrol ration coupons printed in the United States during the 1973-74 oil crisis.Image: Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine · Public domain

world · Asia

The day oil became a weapon

Eleven days into the Yom Kippur War, on 17 October 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries met in Kuwait and agreed to cut oil production immediately by five per cent, and by a further five per cent every month until Israel withdrew from the territories it had occupied in 1967. Deliveries to ‘friendly’ countries would continue; states that armed Israel were threatened with a total embargo. An embargo on the United States and the Netherlands followed within days. The price of crude roughly quadrupled within months. Western economies that had grown up on cheap energy met queues at petrol pumps, speed limits, three-day weeks and a decade of inflation, and governments began, for the first time, to think seriously about where their energy came from. The embargo was lifted in March 1974.

Source: US Department of State, Office of the Historian: oil embargo, 1973-1974 ↗

1979

Mother Teresa, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.Image: Kingkongphoto & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0

culture · Asia

A Nobel Peace Prize for the nun of Calcutta

On 17 October 1979 the Norwegian Nobel Committee named Mother Teresa as that year’s Peace Prize laureate, for her work bringing help to suffering humanity. Born in Skopje to Albanian parents, she had gone to India as a teacher in 1929 and in 1950 founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, an order that grew to thousands of sisters working with the dying, with orphans and with people with leprosy across more than a hundred countries. She asked that the prize banquet be cancelled and the money given to the poor. She died in 1997 and was canonised in 2016.

Source: The Nobel Prize: the Nobel Peace Prize 1979 ↗

1989

The collapsed Cypress Street viaduct in Oakland, photographed by the US Geological Survey.Image: H.G. Wilshire, U.S. Geological Survey · Public domain

world · Americas

The World Series earthquake

At four minutes past five on the afternoon of 17 October 1989 a magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay area, its epicentre near Loma Prieta peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It killed 63 people, injured nearly 3,800 and did around six billion dollars of damage. Most of the deaths came when the double-deck Cypress Street viaduct in Oakland pancaked; a span of the Bay Bridge also fell. Because the third game of the World Series between the two Bay Area teams was about to start, the shaking happened live on national television, and a great many people watched a major earthquake as it occurred.

Source: United States Geological Survey: M 6.9 October 17, 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake ↗

RESEARCH

Sources & Further Reading

Selected authoritative references supporting the events on this page.

WHY THESE MOMENTS?

Significance before volume

This page is not the longest possible list of events. It is a chronological journey through 17 October, where each entry is chosen for historical significance, human interest and reliability.

Facts are checked against authoritative museums, archives, universities and reference works. Where sources disagree, the page says so.

EXPLORED THE DEEPER STORY?

Return to the highlights of 17 October

Discover the lighter side of the date with famous birthdays, culture, firsts and lives remembered.

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