8 luglio

On the word of a priest’s vision, the army fasted and walked barefoot around the walls to the Mount of Olives, while the defenders mocked them from the ramparts.

On 8 July 1401 the chapter resolved to replace the old mosque-cathedral. Later tradition has them say “let us build a church so great that those who see it will think us mad”; the minute itself asked for one “so good that there is no other its equal”. It is the largest Gothic cathedral by area.

Four ships and about 170 men. Scurvy and fighting killed more than half: only two ships and perhaps 55 men came home, but the pepper and cinnamon they carried paid for the voyage many times over.

“The end of the tent government”: fifteen years from Perry’s arrival to the fall of the shogunate, in which the treaties, assassinations and the rallying cry sonnō jōi, “revere the emperor, expel the barbarians”, broke two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule.

Commodore Matthew Perry anchored off Uraga with four ships, two of them steam frigates, and refused to go to Nagasaki. On 14 July he landed at Kurihama to hand over President Fillmore’s letter and said he would come back the next year for the answer. Japanese calendar: Kaei 6, 6th month, 3rd day

A mutiny of the Company’s sepoys became a rising across northern and central India. Both sides killed prisoners and civilians. The Company’s reprisals, from mass hangings to sepoys blown from cannon, were public and meant to terrify.

It began at a punishment parade at Meerut. Sepoys of the Bengal army mutinied over cartridges said to be greased with cow and pig fat, and peasants, landlords and deposed rulers across the north joined them. Both sides killed prisoners and civilians. British India called it the Mutiny; Indian…

Renfield has parted with some spiders and tamed a sparrow, and the spiders are diminishing because he feeds them to it. Seward’s idea about the method in his madness “is growing”.

Lvov resigned, and Kerensky, at 36, became minister-president while keeping the war ministry. He moved the government into the Winter Palace.

Down 89 per cent from the peak of 1929.

Wilson Smith, Christopher Andrewes and Patrick Laidlaw gave ferrets influenza using filtered washings from patients. The cause was a virus, not the bacterium blamed since the 1890s, which still carries the name Haemophilus influenzae.

Decrees of December 1917 made marriage a civil act and let either spouse divorce on request, without grounds, decades before any Western country. From the mid-1930s the state reversed course, and the Family Edict of 8 July 1944 made divorce a slow and costly court case again.

The first Grand Départ outside France. Brussels followed in 1958 and Cologne in 1965; since then the race has started as far off as Dublin, Copenhagen and Barcelona.

Andreas Brehme’s penalty won it five minutes from time. Argentina became the first team not to score in a final, and Pedro Monzón the first player sent off in one. Three months later West Germany ceased to exist.

The meanest World Cup: 2.21 goals a match, the lowest ever. It led to the back-pass rule in 1992. Roger Milla, 38, scored four goals for Cameroon and danced at the corner flag after each.

Customs officers stopped the Festina soigneur Willy Voet on his way to the start in Dublin and found EPO, growth hormone and testosterone in the car. The team was thrown out of the race, riders staged sit-down strikes, and police raids followed.

Planned for 90 Martian days, it drove for more than fourteen years and 45 km, a record off Earth. A planet-wide dust storm cut its power in June 2018, and NASA stopped calling it the next February. Its twin, Spirit, worked until 2010.

A crew of four, the smallest since 1983: Chris Ferguson, Doug Hurley, Sandra Magnus and Rex Walheim. Atlantis took a year of supplies to the space station in the Raffaello module.

A home semi-final. Germany were 5–0 up after 29 minutes, four of the goals in six minutes; Miroslav Klose’s was his 16th at World Cups, a new record. Brazil call it the Mineirazo.