Captured by Burgundian forces and sold to the English, Joan of Arc endured a politically motivated trial designed to discredit the French crown she had helped restore. Found guilty of heresy and cross-dressing, she was burned in the market square of Rouen. Twenty-five years later the Church annulled the verdict, and she was canonized a saint in 1920.
Columbus departed Spain on May 30, 1498, leading six ships toward the Caribbean in search of a passage to Asia and to reassert his authority over colonies he had established. The voyage would prove disastrous, marked by shipwreck, mutiny, and a year stranded in Jamaica, effectively ending his career as an explorer for the Spanish crown.
Surveyor 1 lifted off atop an Atlas-Centaur rocket on May 30, 1966, beginning a mission critical to the Apollo program's success. Its landing days later in the Ocean of Storms proved that a spacecraft could touch down gently on the Moon and survive, easing fears that lunar dust might swallow landers, and yielding thousands of images that helped NASA select Apollo landing sites.
Following multi-party elections held that April and May, Croatia's new Sabor (parliament) convened on May 30, 1990, with Franjo Tuđman's nationalist HDZ party in control. The session marked the effective end of one-party Communist rule in Croatia and set the stage for the declaration of independence a year later, a step that would help trigger the violent breakup of Yugoslavia.
Meeting in Amsterdam, heads of the fifteen EU member states finalized a treaty amending the Maastricht Treaty, strengthening common foreign and security policy, incorporating the Schengen Agreement into EU law, and expanding the powers of the European Parliament. Signed formally in October 1997, it took effect in 1999 and marked a significant step toward deeper European political integration.