13. August

Henry V came to conquer, not to raid: he took Normandy town by town and was made heir to France at Troyes. His death at 35 left a baby king, and after Orléans, Arras and the French artillery trains of the 1440s the conquest was undone in four years.

CuauhtémocTenochtitlan

“Descending Eagle”, Moctezuma’s young cousin, the last independent ruler of Tenochtitlan. He refused every offer of terms through the siege, and was taken trying to escape across the lake.

After a 75-day siege, with the city's water cut and its causeways taken, the last emperor, Cuauhtémoc, was captured in a canoe on the lake. Mexico City was built on the ruins.

The last defenders held out in Tlatelolco. Cuauhtémoc was captured on the lake, on the day 1 Serpent of the year 3 House. A Nahua lament written in Tlatelolco a generation later remembers it: Broken spears lie in the roads; we have torn our hair in our grief. — from the Annals of Tlatelolco,…

The siege of TenochtitlanTenochtitlan

The besiegers cut the aqueduct from Chapultepec and closed the causeways. Fewer than a thousand Spaniards fought beside armies of Tlaxcala, Texcoco, Huexotzinco and Chalco, and the city was taken block by block, its buildings pulled down to fill the canals.

Back to Milan for a royal wedding: the Empress’s son Archduke Ferdinand was marrying Maria Beatrice d’Este, and Wolfgang had a festive serenata to write. Leopold hoped the Archduke would take his son into service.

Pitt set up a Board of Control of ministers over the directors’ political decisions, while the Company kept its trade and its patronage. This “dual control” lasted until 1858. The same summer the Commutation Act slashed the duty on tea, which killed the smuggling trade and sent legal sales soaring.

Widowed young, she governed the Holkar lands from Maheshwar for 28 years, heard petitions in person and rebuilt temples across India, the Kashi Vishwanath in Benares among them.

About sixty mounted warriors came at full speed, expecting raiders. The Lemhi Shoshone had been driven into the mountains by Blackfeet and Hidatsa who had British guns, and they were hungry. Their chief, Cameahwait, embraced Lewis and suspected a trap all the same. if we had guns, we could then…

Wagner’s own theatre, built for his works alone, opened with the first complete Ring of the Nibelung: four evenings, given three times. The orchestra played unseen in a covered pit. Kaiser Wilhelm I, Liszt, Bruckner, Grieg and Tchaikovsky, writing for a Moscow paper, came; the festival ended deep…

Lucy sits up in bed, asleep, pointing at the window, and Mina sees through it “a great bat” flit in circles in the brilliant moonlight and away towards the abbey.

Chiang Kai-shek chose to fight in Shanghai, in view of the foreign concessions, and threw in his best German-trained divisions. They held for three months and were shattered: the core of China’s modern army was lost in the first autumn of the war.

The Manhattan Engineer District, named for its first office on Broadway, was put under General Leslie Groves in September 1942. It employed some 130,000 people at its peak and cost about $2 billion by 1945. It ran until 1947; the band stops at Nagasaki.

Decreed this day, five months after independence, by Habib Bourguiba’s government; in force from 1 January 1957. It abolished polygamy, replaced a husband’s repudiation with divorce in court open to either spouse, and required the bride’s consent. 13 August is Women’s Day in Tunisia.

A PV544 with Nils Bohlin’s belt, across the chest and the lap and buckled with one hand, went to a dealer in Kristianstad. Volvo let every carmaker use the patent free, and it is reckoned to have saved more than a million lives.

The Berlin WallBerlin Wall

About 155 kilometres of concrete, wire and death strip closed West Berlin off from East Germany, which called it the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart.” At least 140 people were killed at the Wall, by the count of Berlin’s Wall Memorial and the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam.

The border is sealedBerlin Wall

After midnight on a Sunday, East German police and soldiers strung barbed wire along the sector border and tore up the streets. Some 2.7 million people had fled west since 1949; the Wall was built to stop them. The concrete came days later.

The Games went home. The shot put was held at ancient Olympia, and the marathon followed the 1896 course from Marathon to the Panathenaic Stadium.