Today in History: October 26

Commemorated in the Christian church on October 26 is St. Rusticus, a 5th century Gallic bishop who was born at Marseille or Narbonnaise. His father, Bonosus, was also a bishop. Rusticus won his spurs as a preacher in Rome and then as a monk at Lerins. Ordained a bishop of Narbonne in 427 AD, he later asked permission of Pope St. Leo I to resign, citing growing dissension in his flock and the growth of the heresy of Arianism. Dissuaded by the pontiff, Rusticus instead attended the synod at Arles that approved St. Leo’s Epistola Dogmatic denouncing Nestorianism. He died in 461 AD.

Born on October 26 in 1685 was Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti. He wrote 555 sonatas for the harpsichord and was a fixture at the royal courts of Spain and Portugal. On October 26, 1919 Mohammed Reza Pahlavi – the future Shah of Iran – was born. On his birthday in 1967, Pahlavi was crowned Shah of his country with lavish ceremony.

This date also has significant martial significance. In 1914, the British battleship HMS Audacious hit a mine in the North Sea. In 1940, the Empress of Britain was torpedoed by a Nazi U-boat. In 1942, the USS Hornet was damaged in the Santa Cruz Islands and the USS President Coolidge hit a Japanese mine in the South Pacific. The US Navy returned the favor in 1944 when it soundly drubbed the Japanese fleet off the Philippines. And it was on this date in 1947 that the British army finally withdrew from Iraq. It was during the British Mandate in Mesopotamia to claim the oil prize that Winston Churchill briefly considered the use of chemical weapons against the Iraqi insurgency that under the British had managed to unite the otherwise warring Sunni and Shiite Muslim factions.