April 4, 636: Isidore, spanish scholar and archbishop of Seville dies. His most extensive and famous work was his Etymologiae (Etymologies), an extensive encyclopedia of early medieval knowledge that, unlike other such works, used liberal arts and secular learning as the foundation of Christian education. (Isidore did remark, however, that it would be better to be without the knowledge of heretics than to be misled by their comments.)

April 4, 1541: Spanish ascetic and theologian Ignatius of Loyola is elected the first General of the Jesuit Order (or the Society of Jesus), which he had founded the previous year.

April 4, 1687: James II issues a Declaration of Indulgence allowing full liberty of worship in England. The government allowed Nonconformists to meet (though justices of the peace had to be notified), forgave penalties for ecclesiastical offenses and no longer required oaths of supremacy and allegiance for those in royal service. Thus the declaration severely threatened Anglican control of church and state.

April 4, 1968: Civil rights leader and Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

April 5, 1524: Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli marries Anna Reinhart for the second time-this time in public. In 1522, Zwingli (and 10 other priests) appealed to the bishop of Constance for permission to marry. When the bishop refused the petition, Zwingli married secretly and, later that year, resigned from the priesthood.

April 5, 1649: John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, dies. Profoundly religious, Winthrop, who left England because of its persecution of Puritans, believed New England to be "a city upon a hill" for the world to see and emulate.

April 5, 1811: Robert Raikes, founder of English Sunday schools in 1780, dies. Raikes built his Sunday schools not for respectable and well-mannered children of believers, but for (in one woman's description) "multitudes of wretches who, released on that day from employment, spend their day in noise and riot." In 4 years, 250,000 students were attending the schools, by Raikes's death, 500,000, and by 1831, 1.25 million.

April 6, 1249: Muslims take King Louis IX of France prisoner during the seventh crusade, which was supposed to overcome the Muslim political center in Egypt. After showing bravery in the face of torture, he was allowed to buy his freedom for a huge sum in gold-and the city of Damietta.

April 6, 1932: Eric Liddell, the Olympic athlete featured in the film Chariots of Fire, makes his evangelistic debut by sharing his testimony to a group of men in Armadale, Scotland. Liddell later returned to the mission field in China, where he was born, and ministered in an internment camp following the Japanese invasion. He died in 1945 from a massive brain tumor.

April 7, 1199: England's King Richard I, the "Lionhearted," dies at age 41. Richard, as one of the three leaders of the Third Crusade, negotiated Christian access to Jerusalem.

April 7, 1498: Franciscan friars arrange an "ordeal by fire" in Florence to settle the dispute between reforming preacher Jerome Savonarola and Pope Alexander VI. Alexander had excommunicated Savonarola for preaching against papal corruption; Savonarola responded by calling for the pope to step down. If Savonarola's friend Fra Domenico could walk safely between two walls of fire, God was supposedly on the Florentine city-manager's side. But Savonarola never sent Domenico out. The crowd rioted, Savonarola's power crumbled, and he was soon arrested, tortured, and executed.