Assignment 7 - Victor Allison

Today is October 2, 2016. It's a Sunday, which means that not much happens.This morning I woke up at 12:30, ate breakfast, walked to Jackson's, ate pizza, blah blah. Not too eventful. But was this day a year ago this boring? What about ten years ago? A thousand, even? surely something, SOMETHING must have happened on October 2nd at some point in the history of mankind, and as it turns out, quite a lot of things happened. One of those things that I discovered happened on October 2nd happened in 1187, in the midst of the Crusades. In fact, after ample bloodshed, Jerusalem was captured by Sultan Saladin from the Christian Crusaders on 10/2/1187, exactly eight hundred and twenty-nine years ago today. This was not the end of the crusades, nor the beginning, but it was certainly a noteworthy event. It is accepted that the Crusades didn't achieve anything substantial other than death and turmoil, so the Muslim capture of Jerusalem was probably an event that I would consider a "bad thing," but it didn't necessarily influence my existence, or at least not directly. It did, however, mean that more lives would be lost, Christian and Muslim alike, and this conflict exists even today as a result of Islamic State's holy war, or modern-day crusade. So today wasn't so boring after all, and in a morbid way, was actually quite eventful 829 years ago.