1 marzo

On his way home from Worms, Luther was “kidnapped” by men of his protector, Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony. He grew a beard, lived as “Junker Jörg”, and translated the New Testament from Greek into German in about eleven weeks.

Eight civil wars in 36 years, from the day the Duke of Guise’s men killed about fifty Huguenots at worship in a barn at Vassy to the Edict of Nantes. Noble factions, the crown and foreign money fought alongside the two faiths.

A Spanish treasure ship bound for Panama, overhauled off Ecuador. She was carrying some 26 tons of silver and it took days to move it all across.

Rebuked by the bishop of Puebla, writing as a nun, “Sor Filotea”, for meddling in theology, the Hieronymite nun of Mexico City answered with a defence of women’s right to learn and her own history of study. Within a few years she had given up her library; she died in 1695.

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s daily essay sheet. By its tenth number Addison claimed 3,000 copies a day and twenty readers for each, and set out its aim: to bring “Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in…

Dated 1 March 1738 in English style, where the year began on 25 March: 1739 by ours. The colony recognised the Maroons’ freedom and 1,500 acres of land; in return they were to hand back future runaways and fight for the colony. The terms divided Maroons from the enslaved for a century.

The first abolition law passed by a legislature freed no one at once: children born to enslaved mothers from then on would be free, but only at twenty-eight. Other northern states followed; the southern ones did not.

Lamé told the Academy he had it: factor xⁿ + yⁿ using complex roots of 1, then argue as with ordinary whole numbers. Joseph Liouville rose at once to ask whether these new numbers factor uniquely into primes, as whole numbers do. Augustin Cauchy joined the race. On 24 May Liouville read out a…

Every whole number above 2 is a multiple of 4 or of an odd prime, so it is enough to prove the theorem for n = 4 and for every odd prime. For nearly a century mathematicians did it prime by prime, each proof harder than the last.

John Newlands ordered the elements by atomic weight and saw that every eighth one echoed the first, like octaves on a keyboard. At the Chemical Society, George Carey Foster asked whether he had tried listing them alphabetically, and the Society declined to print the paper. The Royal Society gave…

Henri Becquerel found that uranium salts fog a photographic plate in the dark. Radioactivity gave chemists a new detector: an element could be tracked by its radiation long before there was enough of it to see. It found polonium, radium, radon and protactinium, and ended with francium, the last…

The Soviet told the garrison to elect committees, to keep its weapons out of officers’ hands and to obey the Duma’s orders only when the Soviet agreed. Meant for Petrograd, it spread to the whole army.

Trying to reach his family at Tsarskoye Selo, Nicholas found the line blocked and turned for Pskov, headquarters of the Northern Front under General Ruzsky. He arrived in the evening, a tsar without a capital.

A personal computer years before the phrase caught on: a bitmapped screen, a mouse, windows and icons, and Ethernet to reach laser printers and other Altos. Xerox never sold it. In December 1979 Steve Jobs saw it demonstrated, and Apple's Lisa and Macintosh followed.

The first colour pictures and the first sound recorded on another planet. Designed to last 32 minutes on the surface, it lasted 127, and drilled a rock sample for its X-ray spectrometer.