6 juillet

A king in full regalia, with an ancestor looking down on him from above. The Long Count on its back is the earliest known on a monument in the Maya lowlands, and marks the start of the Classic period by convention. Long Count 8.12.14.8.15 13 Men 3 Sip

Henry III pulled down Edward the Confessor’s church to build a French-style one around a new shrine for him, under his master mason Henry of Reyns. It cost about £45,000. At the consecration on 13 October 1269 the Confessor’s body was moved to the shrine, where it still lies.

The fleet sailed again for Calicut by the usual ports, building a base at Malacca on the way. On this voyage the fleet first fought a king rather than a pirate, in Ceylon on the way home.

With the Byzantine emperor John VIII in the city, the decree of union was read in the cathedral in Latin and Greek. It collapsed within years at home in Constantinople, but Greek scholars stayed, and Gemistus Plethon’s lectures on Plato made a mark on Cosimo.

John VIII and his bishops accepted union with Rome in exchange for help; the decree Laetentur caeli was read in the cathedral in Latin and Greek. At home, most clergy and people rejected it.

An Italian league under Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua tried to trap Charles VIII’s army on its way home. Charles got through and both sides claimed victory. Gonzaga had Mantegna paint the Madonna della Vittoria to prove his.

Afonso I (Nzinga a Mbemba), a Christian king who traded with Portugal, wrote to João III that Portuguese merchants were seizing free people, nobles and his own kinsmen among them, and asked for the trade to be stopped. When it wasn’t, he set up a royal board to check that every captive sold had…

Galileo, 69 and ill, arrived in February and lodged at the Tuscan embassy in the Villa Medici, except for some three weeks held at the Holy Office during questioning.

Joseph Meister, nine, from Alsace, had been bitten by a rabid dog two days before. Pasteur, who was not a doctor, had physicians give him 13 injections over eleven days, made from the dried spinal cords of rabbits that had died of rabies. The boy never developed the disease, and later worked as a…

The captain’s log, written up on 18 July “things so strange happening”, begins with the loading: silver sand and boxes of earth. The Demeter sails at noon with a crew of five hands, two mates, a cook and the captain.

The Russian schooner Demeter sails from Varna on 6 July with silver sand and fifty boxes of earth, and is driven into Whitby in the storm that the Dailygraph dates 8 August. The captain’s log is the only record of the voyage.

Arab tribesmen with Lawrence and Auda abu Tayi crossed the desert and took the port from the landward side, where its guns did not point. It became the base for the revolt’s advance north.

Kerensky toured the front to rouse the troops, and the offensive in Galicia gained ground for a few days. Then units began voting against attacking, and a German counterstroke on 6 July turned it into a rout.

The ballerina’s art nouveau house had been the Bolshevik headquarters since March, and Lenin had spoken from its balcony. Government troops took it without a fight; Pravda’s offices had been wrecked the day before.

The Quarrymen played the St Peter’s Church garden fête. Between sets, a mutual friend, Ivan Vaughan, introduced 16-year-old Lennon to 15-year-old McCartney, who borrowed a guitar and played Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock”, knowing all the words. Within weeks Lennon asked him to join.

Lennon’s skiffle group, named after his school, Quarry Bank. Over three years it shed its schoolfriends and its washboard, took in McCartney, Harrison and the art student Stuart Sutcliffe, and tried out names — Johnny and the Moondogs, the Silver Beetles — before settling on the Beatles in the…

Richard Lester’s black-and-white comedy, made cheaply and fast as a cash-in, turned out to be one of the best-reviewed films of the year. Princess Margaret came; 12,000 fans blocked Piccadilly Circus.

János Kádár, who had ruled Hungary from 1956 until 1988, died on the morning the Supreme Court quashed Nagy’s death sentence. The man Kádár had sent to the gallows was rehabilitated within hours of his death.

Niantic’s phone game sent players out into real streets and parks to catch Pokémon on a map, and was downloaded 500 million times in about two months.