9 de junio

Nero’s suicide ended his line. Galba, Otho and Vitellius rose and fell within a year before Vespasian won. Tacitus drew the lesson: an emperor could be made elsewhere than at Rome.

Suger’s first campaign: a twin-towered front with three portals, the one of the first rose windows in a church façade, and a vaulted narthex whose chapels were dedicated that day. Its gilded bronze doors carried verses he wrote himself.

A crowd of Jacques and Parisians attacked the fortified market of Meaux, where the Dauphin’s wife and hundreds of noblewomen had taken refuge. Gaston Fébus, Count of Foix, and the Captal de Buch, on their way home from crusading in Prussia, cut them down on the bridge, and the town was burned.

The Florentine physician and astronomer Paolo Toscanelli measured the comet’s place among the stars night after night in June and July 1456, the first careful track of it. Centuries later his notes helped astronomers work out that return’s orbit.

On Whitsunday, by law, every parish in England began to worship in English from Thomas Cranmer’s new prayer book. In Devon and Cornwall it set off the Prayer Book Rebellion: Cornish rebels complained that English was a language many of them did not understand.

A novel about raising a child, with a chapter, the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar”, that did without revelation. The Parlement of Paris condemned the book and ordered Rousseau’s arrest; he left Paris that day. Geneva burned both Émile and the Social Contract ten days later.

Leopold Mozart took his children Nannerl and Wolfgang, then seven, on three and a half years of concerts at courts and in public halls. In Frankfurt the fourteen-year-old Goethe heard Wolfgang play; in London the boy met Johann Christian Bach and wrote his first symphonies.

Leopold took leave from court and put the family on the road for three and a half years: through southern Germany and the Rhineland to Paris, on to London for fifteen months, back through the Low Countries, Paris again and Switzerland. The children, eleven and seven at the start, played at courts…

Robert Millikan spent a decade trying to disprove its equation for the photoelectric effect. His measurements of 1916 confirmed it, and he still called the light quanta behind it a “bold, not to say reckless” hypothesis. This law, not relativity, is what the Nobel Prize would name.

Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm, with two Americans as navigator and radio operator, flew a Fokker trimotor from Oakland to Brisbane by Hawaii and Fiji. The leg from Kauai to Suva, more than 5,000 kilometres of open ocean, took about 34 hours.

Thirteen months.

France’s second mile record, thirty-four years after Ladoumègue’s. Jazy had taken the Olympic 1500 metres silver behind Elliott in Rome.

Three years and a half, with a second record inside it.

Germans remember it as the Sommermärchen, the summer fairy tale, when the country flew its flag without embarrassment. Ronaldo’s 15th World Cup goal broke Gerd Müller’s record.