January 18

474 – Seven-year-old Leo II succeeds his maternal grandfather Leo I as Byzantine emperor. He dies ten months later. 532 – Nika riots in Constantinople fail. 1126 – Emperor Huizong abdicates the Chinese throne in favour of his son Emperor Qinzong. 1486 – King Henry VII of England marries Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, uniting the House of Lancaster and the House of York. 1562 – Pope Pius IV reopens the Council of Trent for its third and final session. 1586 – The magnitude 7.9 Tenshō earthquake strikes Honshu, Japan, killing 8,000 people and triggering a tsunami. 1670 – Henry Morgan captures Panama. 1701 – Frederick I crowns himself King of Prussia in Königsberg. 1778 – James Cook is the first known European to discover the Hawaiian Islands, which he names the "Sandwich Islands". 1788 – The first elements of the First Fleet carrying 736 convicts from Great Britain to Australia arrive at Botany Bay. 1806 – Jan Willem Janssens surrenders the Dutch Cape Colony to the British. 1866 – Wesley College is established in Melbourne, Australia. 1871 – Wilhelm I of Germany is proclaimed Kaiser Wilhelm in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles (France) towards the end of the Franco-Prussian War. Wilhelm already had the title of German Emperor since the constitution of 1 January 1871, but he had hesitated to accept the title. 1886 – Modern field hockey is born with the formation of The Hockey Association in England. 1896 – An X-ray generating machine is exhibited for the first time by H. L. Smith. 1911 – Eugene B. Ely lands on the deck of the anchored in San Francisco Bay, the first time an aircraft landed on a ship. 1913 – First Balkan War: A Greek flotilla defeats the Ottoman Navy in the Naval Battle of Lemnos, securing the islands of the Northern Aegean Sea for Greece. 1915 – Japan issues the "Twenty-One Demands" to the Republic of China in a bid to increase its power in East Asia. 1919 – World War I: The Paris Peace Conference opens in Versailles, France. 1919 – Ignacy Jan Paderewski becomes Prime Minister of the newly independent Poland.