19 de mayo

With the choir complete, the papal legate Henri de Château-Marçay and Bishop Maurice consecrated the high altar, a date the chronicler Robert of Torigni records. Services moved east while the nave went up behind them, the usual order on a Gothic site.

A panel almost seven metres tall over the high altar of the Franciscan church. The diarist Marino Sanudo noted the unveiling. The friars are said to have doubted it, and Titian, about thirty, became the painter of Venice.

Formed in spring 1594 under Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the queen’s cousin and Lord Chamberlain. Shakespeare was a sharer as well as its playwright, with Richard Burbage as leading actor and Will Kemp as clown. When Carey died in 1596 his son George took the company, and the title of Lord…

Tsarevich Nicholas turned the first earth at Vladivostok. Crews worked from both ends and in sections between. By 1903 trains ran from Moscow to the Pacific, though by a short cut through Manchuria. The route lay wholly in Russia only when the Amur bridge at Khabarovsk opened in 1916. Moscow to…

The Count has Harker write three letters, saying his work is nearly done, that he is starting home, and that he has reached Bistritz, dated 12, 19 and 29 June, and promises to hold the later ones at Bistritz until their date. “I know now the span of my life,” Harker writes.

Marsden, a 20-year-old undergraduate, found that about one alpha particle in 8,000 striking a metal foil came back off it. Rutherford later said it was “almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.” The date is the paper’s receipt by…

Sergei Diaghilev’s company opened its first Paris season at the Théâtre du Châtelet and toured for twenty years without a home theatre. It commissioned Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, Prokofiev, Satie and Poulenc, with designs by Picasso and Matisse. It ended with Diaghilev’s death in Venice.

Spectra had found cyanogen gas in comet tails, and newspapers spread the fear that it would poison the air. Hucksters sold “comet pills” and gas masks. Nothing happened: the tail was far too thin to notice.

Shackleton, Worsley and Crean left McNish, McCarthy and Vincent under the boat and set out by moonlight with a 50-foot rope, an adze, a Primus and three days’ food, with screws from the boat driven into their boot soles for grip. Shackleton later wrote that it often seemed to him “that we were…

On a ridge at about 4,500 feet, with fog climbing behind them and night coming, Shackleton said, “Come on, boys.” They sat on the coiled rope and slid into the dark, dropping at least 900 feet in two or three minutes, and stopped safely in a snowbank.

South African forces struck at what they said were ANC bases in Lusaka, Harare and Gaborone, while a Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group was in South Africa trying to broker talks. The group abandoned its mission and reported that sanctions were the only way left.

CD Projekt began in 1994 when Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński started importing and translating games into Polish in a country where most were pirated. Its studio’s third game from Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels sold over 50 million copies.