1193 – Salāh al-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb died. Better known in the Western world as Saladin, he was the first Sultan of Egypt and Syria and the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty.
A Muslim of Kurdish origins, Saladin led Islamic opposition against the European Crusaders in the Levant. At the height of his power, his sultanate included Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, Hejaz, Yemen, and parts of North Africa.
Saladin died of a fever. In his possession at the time of his death were 1 piece of gold and 47 pieces of silver. He had given away his great wealth to his poor subjects leaving nothing to pay for his funeral. He was buried in a mausoleum in the garden outside the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria.
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1702 – Jack Sheppard born. Notorious English robber, burglar and thief of early 18th-century London. He was arrested and imprisoned five times in 1724 but escaped four times, making him a notorious public figure, and wildly popular with the poorer classes. Ultimately, he was caught, convicted, and hanged at Tyburn, ending his brief criminal career after less than two years.
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1878 – Peter D. Ouspensky born. Russian esotericist known for his expositions of the early work of the Greek-Armenian teacher of esoteric doctrine George Gurdjieff, whom he met in Moscow in 1915.
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1950 – Adam Rainer died. The only man in recorded human history to have been both a dwarf and a giant.
Born in Graz, Austria-Hungary in 1899, in 1917, at age 18, he was measured at 4 ft 0.25 in. – a typical defining characteristic of dwarfism is an adult height below 4 ft 10 in.
Then, probably as a result of a pituitary tumor, he had a dramatic growth spurt so that by 1931 he had reached a height of 7 ft 2 in.
As a result of his gigantism he became bedridden for the rest of his life. When he died in 1950 he had reached a height of7 ft 8 in.
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Alchemy & Accident 