23 maggio

Leading a sortie against the Burgundians besieging Compiègne, she was cut off when the town raised its drawbridge behind her retreating men, and was pulled from her horse. The Burgundians sold her to the English for 10,000 livres; Charles VII made no attempt to buy her back.

Excommunicated, tortured and condemned, Savonarola was hanged with two fellow friars in the Piazza della Signoria and their bodies burned. The ashes were thrown into the Arno so no one could keep a relic. A round plaque in the paving marks the spot.

The Eighty Years’ War, from the rebels’ first victory, at Heiligerlee, to Spain’s recognition of the Dutch Republic. It began as a revolt against Philip II’s taxes and heresy laws and ended with a Calvinist public church in the north and a Catholic south under Spain, roughly today’s Belgium.

Protestant nobles threw the Catholic regents Martinitz and Slavata and their secretary out of a window of the Bohemian Chancellery. All three survived a fall of some sixteen metres. Catholics credited angels; Protestant pamphlets, a dung heap.

From the Defenestration of Prague to the Peace of Westphalia, fought mostly in the German lands. Kepler’s printing of the Rudolphine Tables was held up by it, and the young Descartes served in its early campaigns.

A Bohemian revolt that drew in Denmark, Sweden, Spain and Catholic France, which fought on the Protestant side from 1635. Peter Wilson estimates that the Empire lost about 5 million people, some 20 per cent of its population, to fighting, hunger and disease.

The Methodist missionary Henry Bleby visited him in jail and recorded his words. Sharpe is one of Jamaica’s National Heroes, and the square where he died bears his name. I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery. — Samuel Sharpe, as Bleby recorded him

Italy had been allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary, but in the secret Treaty of London that April the Allies promised it Trentino, South Tyrol, Trieste and Dalmatia. It did not declare war on Germany until August 1916.

First the British whale-catcher Southern Sky from South Georgia, then the Uruguayan trawler Instituto de Pesca No. 1 from the Falklands, then the schooner Emma from Punta Arenas: each was turned back by pack ice short of Elephant Island, as the southern winter set in.