20. Oktober

Antioch’s walls ran over the mountain above the city and could not be closed off. Through the winter the besiegers starved more than the besieged, eating their horses while Bohemond looked for a traitor inside.

The pope ordered the movement suppressed, accusing its members of shedding Jewish blood under a show of piety. Bishops and princes enforced it, and the processions died away within months.

Bands of penitents, starting in Hungary and Austria in 1348, walked from town to town for thirty-three and a half days, one for each year of Christ’s life, whipping themselves twice a day in public. In several German towns their arrival set off attacks on Jews.

A British, French and Russian fleet sent to force an armistice in the Greek war destroyed the Ottoman and Egyptian fleet at anchor, the last great battle of sailing ships. Greece was independent by 1830.

Kennedy cut short a campaign trip in Chicago, his press secretary citing a cold. At a meeting in the White House that afternoon he chose a naval “quarantine”, a word picked because a blockade is an act of war, and kept the air strike in reserve.

Aditya Chopra’s romance of two diaspora Indians, with Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol, opened at Maratha Mandir and never left: it passed 1,000 consecutive weeks there in 2014, the longest run in Indian cinema.

Two orbiters, European and Japanese, stacked together for a journey of more than seven years to Mercury with six flybys of the planet on the way. Named for the man who planned Mariner 10’s route.