29 maggio

The Yongle Emperor died on his last Mongol campaign. His son Zhu Gaochi, guided by Confucian ministers who hated waste and distrusted eunuchs, reigned less than a year.

Mehmed II took the city on 20 Jumada al-Ula 857 in the Hijri calendar. Textbooks long said the Ottomans then closed the spice routes and drove Europe to sea, but Portugal had been sailing south for decades, and spices kept reaching Venice through Egypt.

From the conquest of Constantinople to the death of Süleyman: the empire of the kanun law codes, the timar land grants and the devşirme levy of Christian boys, and of conquests that reached from Hungary to Yemen within a century.

The final assault came before dawn. When the Janissaries got in near the Gate of St Romanus, Constantine XI threw off his regalia and charged into the fighting; his body was never identified. Mehmed rode to Hagia Sophia that afternoon and made it a mosque.

A small emirate on the Byzantine frontier grew, by conquest, marriage and the service of Christian lords, into a state that held most of the Balkans and western Anatolia before it held the city in the middle of them.

The one international synod of the Reformed churches, with delegates from England, Scotland, Switzerland and Germany, condemned the Remonstrants, who taught that grace could be resisted. Its canons defined strict Calvinism. Days before it closed, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the Remonstrants’…

From Charles I raising his standard at Nottingham to Charles II riding into London. At Oxford, John Wilkins gathered the experimenters who would found the Royal Society: Boyle, Wren, Hooke.

The Constitution needed nine state conventions, and the fight between Federalists and Anti-Federalists was the first national political campaign. The Anti-Federalists lost, but won a bill of rights.

The only state that never sent a delegate to Philadelphia joined by 34 votes to 32, more than a year after Washington took office, under threat of being taxed as a foreign country.

Selim founded a European-drilled infantry, the Nizam-ı Cedid, paid for by new taxes, and opened permanent embassies in European capitals. The Janissaries deposed him in 1807, and the Chief Black Eunuch’s men stabbed him in the palace the next year.

De Lesseps called an international congress to choose a route and then steered it to his own answer: a canal at sea level, like Suez, through Panama. It passed by 74 votes to 8, with many delegates absent or abstaining. The French engineer Adolphe Godin de Lépinay proposed damming the rivers into…

Nijinsky’s stamping choreography and Stravinsky’s pounding, irregular rhythms set off laughter, whistling and fights loud enough to drown the orchestra; Nijinsky stood on a chair in the wings shouting counts to the dancers, and Pierre Monteux kept conducting. At a concert performance in Paris a…

Under clear skies in northeast Brazil, their small four-inch lens gave a deflection of 1.98 arcseconds against Einstein’s 1.75. The big astrographic telescope, its mirror warped by the Sun’s heat, gave a Newtonian-looking 0.93, and the team set it aside, a choice argued over ever since.

Arthur Eddington, a Quaker spared conscription on condition he led the expedition, set up on a cocoa plantation on the island of Príncipe. Cloud hid the Sun until the eclipse was half over, and most of his 16 plates showed no stars. He cabled home: “Through cloud. Hopeful.”

She had laid its foundation stone in 1925, and a second American tour in 1929 paid for a gram of radium for it. Bronia became its director. It treated cancer patients in the country she had left, which was independent again since 1918.

Their tracks had blown over. Lowe climbed up from the South Col to meet them with hot soup, and Hillary told him: “Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.”

Hillary and Tenzing left Camp IX at 6.30 a.m., each with a load of about 30 pounds, most of it oxygen. They took turns to lead up the ridge in soft, dangerous snow.

At 9 a.m. they were on the South Summit. Ahead lay a narrow, corniced ridge that nobody had seen close up. Hillary reckoned they had about four and a half hours of oxygen left.

Near the top a rock step about 40 feet high blocked the ridge. Hillary wedged himself into a crack between the rock and the cornice and worked his way up it; Tenzing followed on the rope.

At 11.30 a.m. Hillary and Tenzing stood on the summit. They stayed about fifteen minutes: Hillary photographed Tenzing holding up his ice axe with four flags, and Tenzing left sweets and biscuits in the snow as an offering. Years later Tenzing wrote that Hillary had stepped on top first.

Twenty-three days after Oxford, at the Midland championships and without pacemakers. It was not a world record, because the IAAF did not yet ratify women’s times at the mile, and the press paid it a fraction of the attention Bannister got.

Five years after forcing Bulgaria’s Turks to take Slavic names, Todor Zhivkov told them on television they were free to go to Turkey. More than 300,000 left that summer, until Turkey closed its border; tens of thousands later came back.