8 avril

The Hospitallers’ great castle had never been taken by storm. After Baybars’s miners broke into the outer ward, the garrison surrendered the inner castle and was allowed to leave for Tripoli.

Three days earlier, the diarist Luca Landucci wrote, lightning struck the lantern of the cathedral and brought marble crashing down, and people took it as an omen. Savonarola came to Lorenzo’s deathbed; what passed between them is legend.

In its fourth session the council listed the books of scripture, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and 1–2 Maccabees among them, under anathema. It was the first time the whole Catholic Church defined the canon as dogma, and it named the Vulgate authentic.

In its fourth session the council fixed the canon of the Bible, books the Protestants called Apocrypha included, declared the Latin Vulgate the authentic text, and set the Church’s unwritten traditions beside Scripture against the Protestant “Scripture alone”.

A trip north in the carriage of his pupil and fellow Mason Prince Karl Lichnowsky, by Prague, Dresden and Leipzig to Potsdam and Berlin. The King of Prussia, a cellist, is said to have ordered string quartets; the journey paid little.

Under the Unlawful Organisations Act both movements were outlawed. For thirty years they worked underground and in exile, the ANC’s external mission led by Oliver Tambo, for much of the time from Lusaka. Membership, or even quoting a banned person, was a crime.

Some 6,000 Marines and South Vietnamese Rangers were surrounded on a plateau near the Laotian border. Westmoreland expected a second Dien Bien Phu and answered with B-52 strikes around the clock. Relieved in April, the base was razed and abandoned in July.