4 settembre

Diocletian and his successors ruled openly as dominus, lord, with Persian-style court ceremony, a larger army and bureaucracy, and heavier taxes to pay for both.

Odoacer, commander of the barbarian troops in Italy, deposed the teenage emperor, whose name joined Rome’s founder to its first emperor, and pensioned him off to a villa near Naples. He sent the regalia to Constantinople: the West no longer needed an emperor of its own.

Edward landed at Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue in Normandy with an army of perhaps 14,000 and marched east, burning as he went, to within sight of Paris. Clifford Rogers argues the devastation was the point: a king who could not protect his people would have to fight or lose their loyalty.

Eleven months of blockade starved the town out after Philip’s relief army came and went without fighting. Froissart tells of six burghers offering their lives in their shirts, halters round their necks, and Queen Philippa begging them off. Edward expelled most of the townspeople and settled…

The Tower held the navy’s gunpowder, and the fire was coming along Tower Street towards it. Dockyard men from Woolwich and Deptford blew up the houses in its path. Now begins the practice of blowing up of houses in Tower-streete, those next the Tower, which at first did frighten people more than…

Sir William Batten dug a pit in the Navy Office garden for his wine, and Pepys put his office papers in it. That evening he and Sir William Penn dug another. And in the evening Sir W. Pen and I did dig another, and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other…

The City’s hall of government burned on Tuesday night. Its solid oak roof smouldered for hours without flame, and its stone walls and medieval crypt survived; they stand today. In a bright shining coal as if it had been a palace of gold, or a great building of burnished brass. — Thomas Vincent

Fire posts along the Fleet ditch were meant to hold the western edge. Early on Tuesday, driven by the gale, the flames jumped the river and outflanked them, and the fire ran on up Fleet Street.

The worst day. The fire jumped the Fleet river, which everyone had hoped would stop it, and burned St Paul’s, the Guildhall, Cheapside and Ludgate. In the evening the wind finally eased.

Wooden scaffolding put up for repairs caught, then the roof. The booksellers of Paternoster Row had stored their stock in the crypt of St Faith’s beneath the choir, and all of it burned. The stones of Paules flew like granados, the Lead mealting downe the streetes in a streame. — John Evelyn

After a long dry summer, a strong wind from the east blew the fire westward, away from the Tower and into the heart of the City. It swung and eased on the evening of Tuesday 4 September, and only then could the firebreaks hold.

A Salish camp of “33 Lodges about 80 men 400 Total and at least 500 horses” threw white robes over the strangers’ shoulders and smoked with them. Talk ran through a chain of five languages, from Salish through a Shoshone boy, Sacagawea, Charbonneau and a French-speaking private into English. The…

Britain went to war to win compensation for the destroyed opium and open China to trade. The Royal Navy did most of the fighting, but the Company supplied ships, Indian troops and, above all, the opium revenue at stake.

King Frederick William IV of Prussia laid the foundation stone of the completion as a monument to German unity. The Central Cathedral Building Society raised about 60 per cent of the money; the builders used steam engines, rails and an iron roof. The last stone was set on the south spire on 14…

After British warships began seizing slavers inside Brazilian harbours, the Eusébio de Queirós law made the trade piracy and was enforced. Landings fell from tens of thousands a year to almost none within two years.

Lee’s first invasion of the North, hoping to win Maryland, sway the autumn elections and impress Britain and France. It ended at the Potomac with none of the three.

The family moved to Rajkot when his father became its diwan. At the Alfred High School he was a middling, painfully shy pupil. When a visiting inspector set a spelling test and the teacher nudged him to copy his neighbour’s “kettle”, he would not, and was the only boy to get it wrong.

To win his mother’s consent he vowed before a Jain monk not to touch wine, women or meat. The elders of his caste, the Modh Banias, forbade the voyage and declared him an outcaste when he went anyway. His first son, Harilal, was not two weeks old.

Renfield’s violence comes at noon, unusually, and goes in five minutes; by five he is cheerful, catching flies and marking his tally on the door, and begs for his notebook back. Walking back from Lucy’s at sunset Seward hears him shout again: the changes follow no pattern Seward can find.

Seward’s daily telegram: “Patient still better to-day.”

1.6 seconds off in one go, and 4:04.6 at the end of Hägg’s summer of records.

When rioting broke out again he fasted until Calcutta stopped. After three days local gang leaders came to lay down their weapons at his bedside, and the city stayed quiet through the autumn.

Governor Orval Faubus sent the Arkansas National Guard to keep nine Black students out of Central High School. Elizabeth Eckford, arriving alone, walked through a jeering mob. The nine were Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence…

Under pressure from Republicans in an election year, Kennedy warned publicly that if Cuba received offensive weapons “the gravest issues would arise”. The same day Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin assured Robert Kennedy that Moscow was sending Cuba nothing offensive.

Every Monday after the five o’clock prayers for peace at the Nikolaikirche, marchers walked the inner ring road. Their numbers grew from a small gathering in early September to hundreds of thousands by November. The marches paused for Christmas and went on until March 1990.

189 governments adopted the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, with twelve areas for action, from poverty and education to violence and the girl child. On 5 September Hillary Clinton told delegates that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights”.

A second try after Chandrayaan-2’s lander crashed in 2019. The lander Vikram and rover Pragyan were built to work for one lunar day, about fourteen Earth days, and did not wake after the night.