10. November

Murad II came back from retirement to meet a crusade that had broken a ten-year truce. King Władysław III of Poland and Hungary was killed charging the sultan’s guard. His body was never found; the Ottoman chroniclers say his head was sent to Bursa.

Mary I restored Catholicism and the heresy laws. From the burning of John Rogers at Smithfield to the last five at Canterbury a week before her death, Eamon Duffy counts 284 people burned, 56 of them women, and around thirty more who died in prison. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs kept their memory alive…

Bijapur sent Afzal Khan to crush the Maratha rebel. They met for talks below Pratapgad, and Shivaji, wearing armour and steel “tiger claws” on his hand, killed him; his men then routed the Bijapur army.

On 20 Brumaire of Year II an actress played Liberty on an artificial mountain in the choir. That year the twenty-eight kings of Judah on the façade were pulled down and beheaded, taken for kings of France; twenty-one of the heads turned up in 1977 under a bank courtyard.

Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach put their fast-running petrol engine into a wooden frame on two wheels with outriggers, and Daimler’s son Paul rode it about three kilometres from Cannstatt to Untertürkheim. It counts as the first motorcycle; their first four-wheeler, a horse carriage with an…

The Third Battle of Ypres. Haig aimed for the Belgian coast; the heaviest rain in years turned the shelled fields into a swamp in which men and horses drowned. Canadians took the ruins of Passchendaele village in November. Each side lost roughly a quarter of a million men, though the figures are…

Some 240 Red fighters of the Moscow battle were laid in two mass graves on Red Square, the start of the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. The cadets were buried separately, with a church service.

The first great international tournament in the Soviet Union, run by the state as a showcase. Efim Bogoljubov won ahead of Lasker and Capablanca, and Vsevolod Pudovkin filmed the comedy Chess Fever around it, with Capablanca playing himself.

A student march in Budapest turned into a revolution: the giant statue of Stalin was pulled down, Imre Nagy became prime minister and, on 1 November, announced that Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact. About 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet soldiers were killed, and some 200,000 Hungarians fled…

Bulgaria’s change began inside the party, not on the street, and the street followed. The band stops at the year’s end; the Round Table and the end of the party’s leading role came in January 1990.

The day after the Wall opened, a party plenum retired Todor Zhivkov, leader since 1954 and the bloc’s longest-serving. Foreign Minister Petar Mladenov, who had organised the move with Moscow’s blessing, replaced him.

For a reported $800 million to $1 billion: the price of an audience of Western teenagers ready-made for TikTok.

China’s full-ocean-depth submersible took three people to the Challenger Deep and sent up the first live video from the bottom of the trench.

Ninth console generationXbox Series X and S

Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and S and Sony’s PlayStation 5 launched two days apart in a pandemic and a chip shortage, and were hard to buy for much of their first two years. The Nintendo Switch 2 joined them in 2025.