26 de agosto

He died at 80 and was buried in a jade mosaic mask, under a carved lid 3.8 metres long, deep inside the pyramid he had begun as his tomb. In 1948 Alberto Ruz Lhuillier lifted a floor slab in the temple on top and found a stairway packed with rubble; it took four seasons to clear, and he reached…

Romanos IV Diogenes was deserted by part of his army and captured by the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan, who released him on terms. Byzantine civil war, not the battle itself, let the Turks settle Anatolia in the years after.

Sultan Alp Arslan’s army broke the field army of Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes in eastern Anatolia and took the emperor prisoner. Turkish bands spread across Anatolia in the civil wars that followed, and within ten years they held Nicaea, a hundred kilometres from Constantinople.

Edward fought on foot on a slope, archers on the wings. The Genoese crossbowmen were shot down, and wave after wave of French horsemen charged uphill into the arrows until dark. Ayton and Preston put the English at about 14,000; the French were larger, perhaps 20,000 to 30,000, though no muster…

Peter Apian, professor of mathematics at Ingolstadt, noticed that the comet’s tail always pointed away from the Sun, and drew it so in his Practica for 1532. Girolamo Fracastoro in Verona saw the same that year.

Sent downriver for food, Francisco de Orellana could not get back upstream and went on to the Atlantic, the first European to travel the river. His chronicler told of women warriors, and the river took the name of the Amazons. He also saw crowded towns that later travellers could not find;…

Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good. — Article 1 Seventeen articles, still part of the French constitution today.

“Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” The National Assembly adopted seventeen articles, drafted with Lafayette, who had consulted Jefferson. It took Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau from the page into law.

Fifty-three captives, taken illegally from Mendeland to Havana, rose on the schooner carrying them along the coast of Cuba. Led by Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinqué), they killed the captain and the cook and ordered the two Spanish owners to sail for Africa; the owners steered north by night. After two…

Krakatau had last erupted in 1680–81. From May 1883 it erupted on and off all summer, and to the people of Batavia, used to earthquakes and volcanoes, it soon became what the Royal Society’s report called “a nine-days’ wonder”.

At about 1 pm on Sunday 26 August the explosions became almost continuous. By 2 pm a black cloud stood about 27 kilometres over the island, and by 5 pm the explosions could be heard all over Java.

Some 22 hours of near-continuous explosions, peaking on the morning of 27 August, left two-thirds of the island gone and the sea 200 to 300 metres deep where Perboewatan and Danan had stood. About 20 cubic kilometres of ash and pumice were thrown out, which puts the eruption at 6 on the Volcanic…

The British ship Charles Bal reached a point about 10 miles due south of the island, where warm pumice rained on her deck. Through the night Captain Watson beat about east of the volcano and saw “chains of fire, appearing to ascend” between it and the sky, and “a continual roll of balls of white…

At about 06:30 a wave over 10 metres high swept away nearly the whole of low-lying Anjer, the port on the Java shore; a second, an hour later, finished it. At the same time the lower town of Teluk Betung was overwhelmed.

The steamer Gouverneur-Generaal Loudon, Commandant T. H. Lindeman, had anchored out in the bay off Teluk Betung. She met the early-morning waves head on and rode over them, while the government steamer Berouw, moored at the pier, was not so lucky. Suddenly we saw a gigantic wave of prodigious…

At 05:30 local time came the first of four great explosions, at Perboewatan. Its sea wave ran north towards Teluk Betung, at the head of Lampung Bay on Sumatra.

The second explosion, at 06:44, came from Danan, the middle peak. Its waves ran both east and west along the Strait.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff encircled Samsonov’s Second Army in East Prussia and took about 92,000 prisoners. Samsonov shot himself. The Germans named the battle after a village nearby to avenge the Teutonic Knights’ defeat there in 1410.

The first Allied conquest of the war. British and French colonial troops took the small German colony in under three weeks; its prize was the radio station at Kamina, which linked Berlin to Germany’s colonies and ships, and which the Germans blew up before they gave in.

A muddle of go-betweens turned into a march on the capital. Kornilov sent cavalry towards Petrograd; railwaymen and agitators stopped them without a battle. Kerensky had to arm the Red Guards and free the Bolsheviks to defend himself. Whether Kornilov planned a coup is still argued.

Satyajit Ray, an advertising art director, shot it at weekends over nearly three years with a crew who had never made a film, pawning his wife’s jewellery when the money ran out. The West Bengal government paid to finish it. At Cannes in 1956 it won a prize for “Best Human Document”, and Indian…

King moved his family into a slum flat in North Lawndale to take the movement north, against segregated housing. It ended with a Summit Agreement on open housing that the city did little to honour.

West Germany’s “cheerful Games”, meant to show a different country from 1936, with light security on purpose. Mark Spitz won seven swimming golds, each in a world record, and Olga Korbut’s gymnastics made her a star.

Seven days later, Ovett took it back by 0.13 seconds.

Just after closest approach its camera platform jammed, and some of the best pictures were lost. Engineers freed it in time for Uranus.