18 maggio

A Byzantine embassy to Louis the Pious brought men who said their people were called Rhos and asked for safe passage home. Louis looked into it and found they were Swedes, and held them as possible spies. It is the first dated mention of the Rus’.

Bohemond kept the city for himself, breaking the oath he had sworn to Alexios to return former imperial lands. His Norman principality lasted 170 years, until Baybars took the city.

The Mamluks broke in at the Accursed Tower. The Templar master William of Beaujeu was killed and crowds fought for places on the ships. Abu’l-Fida, who fought there, dates it Friday 17 Jumada II 690, the day and month of the Frankish capture a century before; in the tabular calendar the Friday of…

Godfrey of Bouillon was chosen to rule but would not be called king where Christ had worn a crown of thorns. After Saladin took Jerusalem in 1187 the kingdom lived on along the coast, ruled from Acre for a century.

The Knights expelled from Rhodes held Birgu and Senglea against a huge Ottoman fleet for almost four months, under Grand Master Jean de Valette, until a Spanish relief force landed and the besiegers sailed away.

Two assaults failed, so Grant dug in. Civilians sheltered in caves dug into the bluffs, and the garrison ended on quarter rations and mule meat. 19,233 casualties (NPS).

Harker goes back to the room where the women came and finds the door “so forcibly driven against the jamb” that the wood has splintered, and fastened from the inside. He writes: “I fear it was no dream.”

Homer Plessy, a New Orleans shoemaker of mixed descent, had been arrested in 1892 for sitting in a whites-only railway car. The Supreme Court upheld the law by seven votes to one: “separate but equal”. In New Orleans the ruling helped push the city’s Creoles of colour, many of them…

Charles Howard-Bury led a party to find the mountain and a way up it. George Mallory and Guy Bullock did the climbing. Henry Morshead and Oliver Wheeler, with the Indian surveyors Lalbir Singh Thapa, Gujjar Singh and Turubaz Khan, mapped about 31,000 square kilometres that no outsider had surveyed.

Four assaults on the Gustav Line, whose hinge was the hill below the abbey St Benedict founded. Allied bombers destroyed the abbey on 15 February; the Germans then fortified its ruins. Polish troops of Anders’ II Corps raised their flag over the rubble on 18 May.

Assent this day. It banned bigamy for Hindus and made divorce available to all of them, on grounds set out in the Act. Divorce by mutual consent was added only in 1976.

Abbas Kiarostami’s film of a man driving the hills around Tehran, looking for someone to bury him, shared the prize with Shōhei Imamura’s The Eel. It was Iran’s first Palme d’Or, the peak of an Iranian New Wave that began with Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow in 1969.

Shares priced at $38 valued the company at about $104 billion, then the largest technology flotation ever. Zuckerberg rang the Nasdaq bell from Facebook’s own campus. Trading glitches and a falling price made it look like a flop for a year.