April 26

• April 26, 1478
  Conspirators of a noble Tuscan family, Pazzi, attack Lorenzo de'Medici but kill Giuliano de'Medici, Medeheerser of Florence
• April 26, 1677
  Emperor Leopold I forms University of Innsbruck
• April 26, 1717
  Pirate Black Samuel Bellamy dies along with 143 others when their ship, the Whydah, sank off of Wellfleet, Cape Cod
• April 26, 1721
  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador to Ottoman Constantinople, returns to England where she learned of a procedure to inoculate against smallpox and begins a campaign to have the procedure
• April 26, 1803
  A large shower of several thousand stony meteorites occurs near town of L'Aigle in Northern France, which convinces scientists that meteors are of extraterrestrial origin
• April 26, 1828
  Russia declares war on Turkey to support Greece's independence
• April 26, 1865
  John Wilkes Booth, an actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, is tracked to a Virginia farm near Bowling Green, and shot in the neck by federal troops when he tried to escape from a burning barn
• April 26, 1915
  Italy secretly signs Pact of London with Britain, France and Russia and gains the alliance against its former allies, including Germany
• April 26, 1937
  German Luftwaffe destroys Basque town of Guernica in Spain, which becomes one of the first aerial bombings by Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe
• April 26, 1945
  Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, leader of France's Vichy collaborationist regime during World War II, is arrested for treason
• April 26, 1954
  Akira Kurosawa's film Seven Samurai is released
• April 26, 1964
  Tanganyika and Zanzibar unite to form Tanzania
• April 26, 1986
  In Ukraine, one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear plant explodes due to pressurized steam in the cooling system during a maintenance test, releasing into the air 9 tons of radioactive material
• April 26, 1989
  Daulatpur–Saturia tornado in the Manikganj District, Bangladesh, becomes the deadliest tornado in history