26 juillet

After sacking the Bulgar capital Pliska, Nikephoros I was trapped in a mountain pass and killed with much of his army. Khan Krum had his skull lined with silver and drank from it: the first emperor killed in battle since Valens in 378.

The English stormed the bridge into the town the day they arrived and sacked it for days. Townspeople who fought from the houses were killed in the streets; the Constable of France, the Count of Eu, surrendered and was held for ransom. Contemporary accounts put the town’s dead at about 2,500.

The contract, signed for Charles V by Empress Isabella, that let Pizarro conquer a land he had only glimpsed. It made him governor of “Peru” for 200 leagues down the coast. His partner Diego de Almagro got far less, a grudge that would end in civil war.

Accused of plotting a rising, he was condemned to burning, and was garrotted instead after he accepted baptism. The date is disputed: Hemming argues for 26 July 1533 from the eyewitness evidence; other accounts give 29 August.

Sixty-six years of astronomy by the naked eye. Copernicus’s system found readers among mathematicians but few converts: by one count there were only about ten Copernicans in Europe in 1600.

Thomas Harriot, mathematician to the Earl of Northumberland, looked at a crescent Moon through a six-power “perspective trunke” and sketched a ragged terminator and a few dark patches: the oldest known drawing of anything seen through a telescope. England kept the Julian calendar, so his 26 July…

At Syon House, with a six-power “perspective trunke”, Harriot made the first known drawing of the Moon through a telescope, four months before Galileo. He never published it. In Venice it was already 5 August.

Mr. Hawkins has sent Mina a line from Jonathan dated from Castle Dracula, saying he is starting for home: “That is not like Jonathan”, she writes. Lucy has taken up sleepwalking again, and Mina is to lock their bedroom door each night.

A civil wedding at the town hall, with no religious service and no rings. She wore a dark blue suit she could wear in the laboratory afterwards. A relative’s wedding money bought two bicycles, and they spent the summer riding the country roads of the Île-de-France.

Stevens stopped the digging until the workers had housing, food and clean water, backed Gorgas, and treated the canal as a railway problem: the spoil could only go as fast as trains could carry it away. He argued Roosevelt and Congress into a lock canal.

“We said good-bye to the sun on May 1.” Before noon on 26 July the top of the sun showed by refraction for one minute. In between, the men held concerts and an “Antarctic Derby” for the dog teams, and listened to the floes grinding against the hull.

The United States, Britain and China called on Japan to surrender unconditionally: “The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.” It said nothing about the Emperor. Japan’s prime minister told the press he would ignore it.

The favourite, beaten out of the medals as Josy Barthel won for Luxembourg. Bannister, a medical student, nearly gave up running; instead he chose one more target: the first four-minute mile.

After Helsinki three men made four minutes a public target: Roger Bannister in Britain, John Landy in Australia and Wes Santee in the United States. Landy ran 4:02 six times and could not find the last two seconds.

The UN’s first world conference on women, in Mexico City for International Women’s Year, launched the Decade for Women, 1976 to 1985. The second met in Copenhagen in 1980; the third, in Nairobi in July 1985, set strategies for the year 2000.

Commanded by Eileen Collins. Cameras caught a large piece of foam coming off the tank again, and NASA grounded the fleet for another year. In orbit Stephen Robinson pulled two protruding gap fillers from the belly by hand, the first repair of an orbiter’s underside in space.

Twenty-nine months without a shuttle flight. The station’s crew fell to two and came and went by Soyuz.

A hailstorm and a mudslide blocked the road below the Iseran, and the stage was stopped with times taken at the summit. Egan Bernal took yellow and became the first Colombian winner.

Meta reported 3.03 billion monthly users of Facebook, about a third of everyone alive.

A hundred years after Paris 1924, the Games came back to the city of Coubertin. For the first time the athletes’ places were split exactly half and half between women and men.

The first opening ceremony held outside a stadium. The teams sailed six kilometres downstream on 85 boats in the rain, to the Trocadéro opposite the Eiffel Tower.

The third start in Spain, and the first to open with a team time trial since 1971. Two finishes on Alpe d’Huez; a heatwave shortened two stages.

He won by 6 minutes 26 seconds from Remco Evenepoel, with Isaac del Toro third, and joined Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault and Induráin as a five-time winner.