Events on September 14 48
Year 629
Emperor Heraclius enters Constantinople in triumph after his victory over the Persian Empire.
Year 786
"Night of the three Caliphs": Harun al-Rashid becomes the Abbasid caliph upon the death of his brother al-Hadi. Birth of Harun's son al-Ma'mun.
Year 919
Battle of Islandbridge: High King Niall Glúndub is killed while leading an Irish coalition against the Vikings of Uí Ímair, led by King Sitric Cáech.
Year 1723
Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena lays down the first stone of Fort Manoel in Malta.
Year 1752
The British Empire adopts the Gregorian calendar, skipping eleven days (the previous day was September 2).
Year 1763
Seneca warriors defeat British forces at the Battle of Devil's Hole during Pontiac's War.
Year 1812
Napoleonic Wars: The French Grande Armée enters Moscow. The Fire of Moscow begins as soon as Russian troops leave the city.
Year 1814
Battle of Baltimore: The poem Defence of Fort McHenry is written by Francis Scott Key. The poem is later used as the lyrics of The Star-Spangled Banner.
Year 1829
The Ottoman Empire signs the Treaty of Adrianople with Russia, thus ending the Russo-Turkish War.
Year 1846
Jang Bahadur and his brothers massacre about 40 members of the Nepalese palace court.
Year 1862
American Civil War: The Battle of South Mountain, part of the Maryland Campaign, is fought.
Year 1901
U.S. President William McKinley dies after an assassination attempt on September 6, and is succeeded by Vice President Theodore Roosevelt.
Year 1914
HMAS AE1, the Royal Australian Navy's first submarine, was lost at sea with all hands near East New Britain, Papua New Guinea.
Year 1936
Raoul Villain, who assassinated the French Socialist Jean Jaures, is himself killed by Spanish Republicans in Ibiza
Year 1939
World War II: The Estonian military boards the Polish submarine ORP Orzeł in Tallinn, sparking a diplomatic incident that the Soviet Union will later use to justify the annexation of Estonia.
Year 1940
Ip massacre: The Hungarian Army, supported by local Hungarians, kill 158 Romanian civilians in Ip, Sălaj, a village in Northern Transylvania, an act of ethnic cleansing.
Year 1943
World War II: The Wehrmacht starts a three-day retaliatory operation targeting several Greek villages in the region of Viannos, whose death toll would eventually exceed 500 persons.
Year 1944
World War II: Maastricht becomes the first Dutch city to be liberated by allied forces.
Year 1954
In a top secret nuclear test, a Soviet Tu-4 bomber drops a 40 kiloton atomic weapon just north of Totskoye village.
Year 1958
The first two German post-war rockets, designed by the German engineer Ernst Mohr, reach the upper atmosphere.
Year 1959
The Soviet probe Luna 2 crashes onto the Moon, becoming the first man-made object to reach it.
Year 1960
Congo Crisis: With CIA help, Mobutu Sese Seko seizes power in a military coup, suspending parliament and the constitution.
Year 1979
Afghan President Nur Muhammad Taraki is assassinated upon the order of Hafizullah Amin, who becomes the new president.
Year 1984
Joe Kittinger becomes the first person to fly a gas balloon alone across the Atlantic Ocean.
Year 1985
Penang Bridge, the longest bridge in Malaysia, connecting the island of Penang to the mainland, opens to traffic.
Year 1992
The Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina declares the breakaway Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia to be illegal.
Year 1997
Eighty-one killed as five bogies of the Ahmedabad-Howrah Express plunge into a river in Bilaspur district of Madhya Pradesh, India.
Year 1998
Telecommunications companies MCI Communications and WorldCom complete their $37 billion merger to form MCI WorldCom.
Year 2001
Historic National Prayer Service held at Washington National Cathedral for victims of the September 11 attacks. A similar service is held in Canada on Parliament Hill, the largest vigil ever held in the nation's capital.
Year 2007
Financial crisis of 2007-2008: The Northern Rock bank experiences the first bank run in the United Kingdom in 150 years.
Year 2015
The first observation of gravitational waves was made, announced by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations on 11 February 2016.