13. Januar

Tikal’s texts say that the stranger Siyaj K’ak’ “arrived” on this day, and that on the same day its king Chak Tok Ich’aak “entered the water”: died. El Perú records him passing eight days earlier, coming from the west. The next year Yax Nuun Ahiin, son of a lord called Spearthrower Owl, probably…

The Blue and Green chariot factions united against Justinian, crowned a rival emperor and burned half the centre. Procopius says Theodora talked her husband out of fleeing, and Belisarius’s troops trapped the crowd in the Hippodrome and killed some 30,000. Royalty is a good burial-shroud. —…

Monument 101 at Toniná marks this k’atun ending: the latest Long Count date known on a Classic Maya monument. After it the count of days from 3114 BCE falls silent in stone; later Maya kept time by the shorter round of k’atuns. Long Count 10.4.0.0.0 12 Ajaw 3 Wo

Hugh of Payns and a few knights had sworn around 1120 to guard the pilgrim roads, and lived in the al-Aqsa mosque, which the Franks called the Temple of Solomon. At Troyes a church council with Bernard of Clairvaux gave them a monastic rule for fighting men.

For the wedding of the young duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza and Isabella of Aragon, Leonardo staged Bernardo Bellincioni’s Festa del Paradiso in the Castello: a half-egg heaven lit by torches, with actors as the seven planets turning in their spheres.

The sixth session’s answer to Luther’s central doctrine: faith is the beginning of salvation, but grace works with human free will, and good works merit eternal life. Its 33 canons condemned “justification by faith alone” as Luther had taught it.

A comic opera, K. 196, for the Munich carnival. Wolfgang to his mother: the theatre was so full people were turned away, and after every aria “a terrific din of clapping and shouts of Viva Maestro”.

He came back from a trip to India with Kasturba and their sons to a white crowd angry at what he had said of Natal’s treatment of Indians while there. They pelted and kicked him in the street until Jane Alexander, the police superintendent’s wife, shielded him with her umbrella. He refused to…

Back in Copenhagen, Frisch lined uranium inside an ionisation chamber and saw the huge pulses the fragments should make. An American biologist, William Arnold, gave him the word for cells dividing: fission.

For peace in Delhi, where Muslims were being driven from their homes. The government released 550 million rupees it had held back from Pakistan, and on the sixth day community leaders signed a pledge to keep the peace. Hindu nationalists took the fast as appeasement of Pakistan.

Rukhsar Khatoon, an 18-month-old girl in Howrah district, West Bengal, was paralysed by wild poliovirus, the last case in a country that had more cases than any other as late as 2009. WHO’s South-East Asia region was certified polio-free in 2014.

One article, incitement of insurrection, over the breach of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 during the count of electoral votes. It passed 232–197 with ten Republican votes. The trial, the first of a former president, ended 57–43 for conviction, short of the 67 needed.