8 septembre

Told for certain that William meant to come, Harold gathered a larger fleet and army than any king before him and kept them on the south coast all summer. On the Nativity of St Mary, 8 September, the provisions ran out and he sent the men home. Many of the ships sent round to London were lost on…

Called by Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council, it struck at Egypt, the Ayyubids’ source of wealth. The legate Pelagius refused al-Kamil’s offer of Jerusalem in exchange for Damietta, and marched on Cairo into the Nile flood.

Joan led an attack on the Porte Saint-Honoré and was shot through the thigh by a crossbow bolt as she tested the depth of the moat. Charles called the army off the next day and disbanded it soon after.

Moving the statue the few hundred metres from the cathedral took four days in May, Landucci wrote, and stones were thrown at it by night. It replaced Donatello’s Judith at the palace door, a republic’s guard, and stood there until 1873.

Snow mapped the Soho deaths around one public well and persuaded the parish Board of Guardians on 7 September to take off its handle, which was done the next day. The outbreak was already fading, as Snow said himself. The curate Henry Whitehead later traced the source to a cesspool at 40 Broad…

Seward sits up all night with Lucy. She is afraid to sleep, for sleep “was to you a presage of horror”, and he promises to wake her if he sees any bad dream. She sleeps through the night with a smile, and in the morning he wires Van Helsing and Arthur of the success.

Afraid that Scott’s motor sledges would beat him, Amundsen started with eight men and 90 dogs while it was still late winter. The thermometer fell to about −55 °C; they dumped their loads at 80° and raced home strung out, the last pair eight hours behind the first. Next morning Hjalmar Johansen…

For 872 days the city was cut off except across Lake Ladoga, by boat in summer and by the “Road of Life” over the ice in winter. Estimates of the civilians who died, most of hunger and cold, run from the Soviet figure of 632,000 given at Nuremberg to around a million.

Signed secretly at Cassibile in Sicily on 3 September and announced five days later. Germany was ready: it disarmed the Italian army, occupied the north and centre, and in September rescued Mussolini to head a puppet state.

The freighter Omsk docked with the first R-12 medium-range missiles, about 20 metres long; a second shipment followed on 16 September. They were unloaded at night and moved inland on trailers so long that they had to back and fill to turn through village streets.

NASA’s first asteroid sampler. At Bennu its sampling arm sank into loose rubble that offered almost no resistance. Renamed OSIRIS-APEX, it is on its way to the asteroid Apophis.

Alfonso Cuarón’s black-and-white memory of his Mexico City childhood, told through its Mixtec housekeeper, was a Netflix film: the first streaming release to take the top prize at one of the big festivals. Cannes had turned it away by requiring a French cinema release.