6. Oktober

The migrating Cimbri and Teutones destroyed two Roman armies whose commanders would not work together. Ancient writers put the dead at 80,000 soldiers, the worst defeat since Cannae; in the panic Gaius Marius was elected consul five years running.

Exiled by the Albizzi in 1433, Cosimo came back a year later and ran the republic for thirty years without holding any permanent office: the Medici bank, loans and friends in the councils did it for him. His tomb calls him Pater Patriae, father of his country.

Betrayed in Antwerp and held for sixteen months in Vilvoorde castle, Tyndale was strangled and his body burned; 6 October is the traditional date. Foxe gives his last words as “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes”. Much of his wording survives in the King James Bible.

Jacopo Peri’s setting of Ottavio Rinuccini’s play was part of the festivities for the proxy wedding of Maria de’ Medici to Henri IV of France. It is the oldest opera whose music survives; Peri’s Dafne of 1598 is lost. Peri sang Orfeo himself.

Thousands of Paris market women marched twenty kilometres in the rain to demand bread, and the National Guard followed. Next day the royal family was taken back to Paris, hailed as “the baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s boy”. They never lived at Versailles again.

Staying in the village of Heiligenstadt on his doctor’s advice, Beethoven, 31, wrote to his brothers about the deafness he had hidden for years, and admitted that only his art had kept him from ending his life. The letter was never sent; it was found among his papers after his death.

Passing current from a large voltaic battery through moist caustic potash, Humphry Davy saw globules of metal burst through the crust and catch fire. His cousin Edmund recalled that he “danced about the room in ecstatic delight”. Sodium followed days later, from caustic soda: two metals no…

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway offered £500 for the best locomotive, to be run up and down a level stretch of the new line. Five machines entered, one of them a horse on a treadmill. Thousands came to watch.

At dawn Mina tells Van Helsing, “I must go with you on your journey”, because she knows that when the Count wills it she must come to him: “I am safer with you, and you shall be safer, too.” Jonathan makes his will, leaving her everything.

Invaded from the north by Germany and Austria-Hungary and from the east by Bulgaria, the Serbian army, the old king and thousands of civilians retreated over the Albanian mountains in winter. Allied ships carried the survivors to Corfu, where the army was rebuilt.

Mostly a silent film with title cards, but its songs and a few ad-libbed lines were synchronised on Vitaphone discs. Al Jolson, performing in blackface, says “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” Sam Warner, who had pushed the studio into sound, died the day before the…

A European craft on an American launch, flung by Jupiter out of the plane of the planets to become the first to fly over the Sun’s poles. It worked for more than 18 years, nearly four times its design life.

Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz found a planet half Jupiter’s mass circling 51 Pegasi every 4.2 days, a “hot Jupiter” that planet-formation models had not expected. More than 6,000 exoplanets have been confirmed since.

Jeffery Taubenberger’s team published the last three gene sequences of the 1918 virus, worked out from preserved wartime tissue samples and from a body buried in the Alaskan permafrost. The work took ten years and showed the virus was of avian origin.

Henry Waxman’s committee put Lehman’s chief executive’s pay since 2000 at about 480 million dollars. Fuld disputed the sum, said he took full responsibility, and blamed short sellers and the loss of confidence.

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier shared half the prize in physiology or medicine; the other half went to Harald zur Hausen for the virus that causes cervical cancer. Robert Gallo was not included.

Prime Minister Geir Haarde went on television to say the state could not save its banks. Within three days Landsbanki, Glitnir and Kaupthing, with debts many times Iceland’s GDP, had all failed.

Prime Minister Geir Haarde told the nation on television that the state could not save its banks, whose balance sheets were about ten times Iceland’s annual output, and closed with Guð blessi Ísland. Parliament passed an emergency act that night.