April 8

• April 8, 217
  Roman emperor Caracalla is murdered by army officer after stopping to urinate during a travel to temple near Carrhae; Macrinus becomes the 24th Emperor of the Roman Empire
• April 8, 451
  Attila's Huns plunder city of Metz and continue moving south along the Moselle River
• April 8, 1195
  Alexios III Angelos drives out brother Isaac II Angelos as Byzantine emperor
• April 8, 1341
  Francesco Petrarch, Italian scholar and poet, is crowned poet laureate on the Capitol in Rome
• April 8, 1364
  King Jean II the Good of France dies in prison at the Savoy Palace, London and is given lavish funeral, thus his son Charles V begins his rule of France
• April 8, 1492
  Lorenzo de' Medici, ruler of Florence, dies
• April 8, 1820
  The Venus de Milo is discovered on the Aegean island of Melos by a peasant Yorgos Kentrotas
• April 8, 1898
  British General Horatio Kitchener with Anglo-Egyptian forces defeats 15,000 Sudanese Abdallahi ibn Muhammad, the leader of the dervishes in Sudan, at the Battle of Atbara, the turning point in the conquest of Sudan by a British and Egyptian coalition
• April 8, 1902
  Dmitry Sipyagin, Russian minister of interior and headed Secret Service, is assassinated in the Mariinsky Palace by Socialist-Revolutionary Stepan Balmashov
• April 8, 1904
  Great Britain and France sign Cordial Entente concerning colonial matter, marking the start of the alliance against Germany that fought the First World War
• April 8, 1911
  Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, a Dutch physicist, finds that at 4.2 K the resistance in a solid mercury wire immersed in liquid helium suddenly vanish, thus discovers superconductivity
• April 8, 1912
  Frederick Gowland Hopkins, an English biochemist, after series of animal feeding experiments, suggests the existence in normal diets of tiny quantities of substances that are essential for animal growth and survival, later called vitamins
• April 8, 1913
  Opening of China's first parliament takes place in Beijing
• April 8, 1946
  The assembly of the League of Nations meets for last time, voting that "from this day the League of Nations shall cease to exist"
• April 8, 1962
  Evian Accords, comprise a treaty signed by France and the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, which sought Algeria's independence from France, is accepted by referendum in France
• April 8, 1973
  Pablo Picasso, a Spanish painter, sculptor, dies
• April 8, 1994
  Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana, is found dead in Seattle, Washington, where he committed a suicide by gunshot