11 mars

Leo V revived the ban after a run of defeats by the Bulgars, reasoning that the iconoclast emperors had won their wars. It was milder and ended with a woman, as the first had.

The regent Theodora, widow of the last iconoclast emperor, restored the icons with a procession to Hagia Sophia on the first Sunday of Lent. The Orthodox Church still celebrates that Sunday as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

It began with stocking frames smashed at Arnold, near Nottingham, and spread to the Yorkshire croppers and the Lancashire weavers. Letters were signed by “General Ludd”. The government sent about 12,000 soldiers into the disturbed counties.

Felix Mendelssohn, 20, conducted Bach’s Passion for the first time since Bach’s death, shortened, with the large choir of the Sing-Akademie. The performance was repeated on Bach’s birthday ten days later and set off the nineteenth century’s Bach revival.

General Maude’s rebuilt army, most of it Indian, took the city less than a year after Kut. His proclamation told its people: “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors, but as liberators.”

The act let the president lend or lease war supplies to any country whose defence he judged vital to the United States. Britain, the Soviet Union and China received some $50 billion of aircraft, trucks, food and fuel by the end of the war.

The day after Konstantin Chernenko died, the Politburo chose Mikhail Gorbachev, at 54 its youngest member. His perestroika and glasnost were meant to save the Soviet system; they unravelled it.

Its president, Lucas Mangope, refused to take part in the election. His civil servants struck and his police mutinied; armed white right-wingers who came to defend him were driven out, and three were shot dead in front of the cameras. The next day Mangope was removed, and the armed right’s hopes…

“We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the press. Cases outside China had risen thirteenfold in two weeks.