13. April

On the night of Palm Sunday, 13 April 1348, a crowd broke into the Jewish quarter, looted the houses and killed about forty people: the first of a wave of attacks on Jews in Provence that spring.

After failing to take Reims, where he meant to be crowned, and Paris, Edward’s army was caught near Chartres on Easter Monday by a storm of hail, lightning and freezing rain that killed men and horses in the open. Chroniclers made it the moment Edward chose to make peace.

Parisians rose against the English garrison and let the Constable Richemont’s troops in. The English shut themselves in the Bastille and were let go by the river while the crowd jeered “À la queue!”, “to the tail!”, an old taunt that Englishmen had tails.

Henry IV granted the Huguenots freedom of conscience, public worship in named places, equal access to office and garrisoned towns of their own. It was a truce, not toleration as a principle: Louis XIV revoked it in 1685.

Eight civil wars in 36 years, from the day the Duke of Guise’s men killed about fifty Huguenots at worship in a barn at Vassy to the Edict of Nantes. Noble factions, the crown and foreign money fought alongside the two faiths.

A charity performance in the new Musick Hall in Fishamble Street, for prisoners held for debt and two hospitals. To fit 700 people in, the stewards asked ladies to come without hoops in their skirts and gentlemen without their swords. Ireland, like England, was still on the Julian calendar: the…

Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer marched troops into the Jallianwala Bagh, a walled garden crowded for the Baisakhi festival, and without warning had them fire some 1,650 rounds for about ten minutes. The official Hunter Committee counted 379 dead; the Congress inquiry, whose report Gandhi helped…

Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer marched troops into a walled garden in Amritsar crowded for Baisakhi and, without warning, had them fire about 1,650 rounds. The official Hunter Committee counted 379 dead; the Indian National Congress’s inquiry put it at about 1,000.

The Army asked Yoshio Nishina’s laboratory at Riken to study a uranium bomb. His team built a thermal-diffusion column to enrich uranium, with little uranium to feed it. An American air raid on 13 April 1945 burned the column; the Navy’s separate F-Go effort at Kyoto never got further.

Manfred Weissleder’s new club, the biggest on the Große Freiheit, opened with a seven-week booking for the Beatles. Tapes made on a home recorder at their last stint there, in December, came out in 1977 as Live! at the Star-Club.

A planned 3.5-second burn of the service module engine left the trajectory that would have swung the ship around the Moon and back to Earth by itself, for a better approach to Fra Mauro. Thirty-one hours later that path had to be won back.

In 1991 she had been convicted of kidnapping in the case of Stompie Seipei, a fourteen-year-old activist killed by members of her bodyguard; on appeal her sentence was reduced to a fine. At a press conference Mandela announced the separation, saying he parted from her with no recriminations. They…