SUNDAY
In 1099, the armies of the First Crusade defeated the Saracens at the Battle of Ascalon, a historic Palestinian city on the Mediterranean coast, one month after they had captured Jerusalem.
In 1692, five women were hanged for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. Their trials had begun after a book by Cotton Mather, a Congressionalist pastor in Boston, stirred up the clergy and their parishioners following its publication in 1689. The hysteria in Salem was the basis for American playwright Arthur Miller's The Crucible. In 1693, the governor of Massachusetts ordered the release of all those held on witchcraft charges.
In 2011, a Polish judge found the frontman for the death metal band "Behemoth" innocent of offending religious feeling, ruling that his ripping up of a Bible during a show in 2007 was a form of artistic expression consistent with the style of his band.
