29. Oktober

Seventeen days later Cyrus himself arrived and green twigs were spread before him. In the clay cylinder he had written soon after, he presents himself as Marduk’s choice, sent to save Babylon from its own impious king. Mesopotamia would not be ruled from within again for centuries.

Days after his election at Ferrara, Pope Gregory VIII told Latin Christendom of Hattin and blamed its sins, calling for a new crusade with the same remission of penance as before.

Henry left Harfleur with a sick, shrunken army to march to Calais in eight days. Finding Blanchetaque guarded, he had to follow the Somme upstream for a week before crossing at Voyennes and Béthencourt, and the French army was waiting across his road at Agincourt.

The townspeople rose and let the French in; the Duke of Somerset held out in the castle a few days, then gave it up with Talbot as a hostage for the terms. Charles VII made his entry on 10 November.

A Portuguese army from Angola defeated Kongo, and King António I was killed and beheaded. Kongo split into rival factions for half a century, and its civil wars sent thousands into slavery.

Prague’s reward for loving Figaro: a new opera with Da Ponte, K. 527, conducted by Mozart. By the usual story he wrote the overture the night before the premiere, a tale that may have grown in the telling.

Prague had loved The Marriage of Figaro, so its theatre commissioned a new opera from Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte. Mozart conducted. By the usual account he finished the overture the night before the premiere, a story that may have grown in the telling.

In the train from Varna to Galatz the hypnotic trance comes harder: Van Helsing “had to ask her questions” and, at sunset, Mina “yielded to the hypnotic influence even less readily”. Seward fears her power to read the Count’s sensations may die just when it is needed.

The German-crewed battlecruiser Goeben, now flying the Ottoman flag, led a raid on Russia’s Black Sea ports. Russia declared war on 2 November and Britain and France on 5 November, opening four new fronts in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Sinai and at the Dardanelles.

It began when the Ottoman fleet, led by two German warships, shelled Russian Black Sea ports. The empire fought in the Caucasus, Sinai, Mesopotamia and at Gallipoli, and won more battles than the Allies expected.

The Assembly declared a republic and elected Mustafa Kemal its first president. Ankara was already the capital.

Some 16.4 million shares traded, and the Dow fell 12 per cent to 230.07. Monday had already taken 13 per cent.

A lecture to a crowd so large that chairs broke and people fainted. Sartre’s slogan: existence precedes essence. There is no human nature given in advance; we are what we make of ourselves, and responsible for it.

Israel, Britain and France attacked Egypt to take back the canal Nasser had nationalised. Moscow threatened rockets, but it was Eisenhower, refusing to prop up the falling pound, who forced his allies to stop. The crisis also drew the world’s eyes away from Budapest.

ARPANET first messageARPANET

Charley Kline at UCLA tried to log in to a computer at SRI, 500 km north. He typed “L” and “O”; the SRI machine crashed on the “G”. So the first message ever sent over the network was “LO”. About an hour later the full login went through.

ARPANET’s first message: “LO”ARPANET

Student Charley Kline at UCLA began typing LOGIN to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute. After two letters, the system crashed. An hour later it worked.

Thirty-six years after he became the first American to orbit the Earth, Glenn flew on Discovery’s STS-95 at 77, the oldest person yet to go to space, as a subject in studies of ageing.

Under Archbishop Desmond Tutu it heard the victims of gross human-rights violations since 1960, and offered amnesty for full disclosure of politically motivated crimes. Its report, handed to Mandela in October 1998, found the state responsible for most of the violations, and the ANC for violations…