6 april

Retreating toward Damietta, the army sick with scurvy and dysentery, Louis was captured at Fariskur. Damietta and a huge ransom bought back the king and his army.

Qalawun’s son al-Ashraf Khalil brought a huge army and dozens of siege engines. Abu’l-Fida helped haul one, “the Victorious”. The Templars’ fortress by the sea held out ten days after the city fell.

Petrarch recorded it in the flyleaf of his Virgil: Laura died in Avignon “in the first hour of the day” on 6 April 1348, twenty-one years to the day after he first saw her in church. A friend’s letter brought him the news at Parma on 19 May.

Fifty-three days. Perhaps 80,000 men against about 7,000 defenders on 22 kilometres of walls. Mehmed’s great bronze cannon, cast by a Hungarian founder named Orban who had first offered it to the emperor, fired seven times a day.

Perhaps 7,000 defenders held the walls against an Ottoman army many times larger, with great bronze guns cast by a Hungarian founder, Orban, that battered the land walls for seven weeks.

He died on Good Friday after a short fever, and was buried at his own wish in the Pantheon. His unfinished Transfiguration stood by his body as it lay in state.

Two days after Harrison’s death Tyler was sworn in at Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel and insisted he was president, not acting president. Critics called him “His Accidency”, but Congress accepted it and every successor since has followed. The 25th Amendment wrote it into the Constitution in 1967.

The Confederate commander was hit behind the knee while leading the attack and died within the hour, the highest-ranking officer killed on either side in the war.

A surprise attack drove Grant’s army back to the Tennessee River; Union reinforcements turned it around on the second day. The 23,746 casualties (NPS) were more than in all America’s earlier wars together.

Union cavalry and infantry cut off Lee’s rearguard and captured eight generals and thousands of men. 9,980 casualties (NPS), most of them Confederate prisoners.

The young emperor swore five articles before the gods and his court. The first promised that “deliberative assemblies shall be widely established and all matters decided by open discussion”; the last, that knowledge would be sought throughout the world. Japanese calendar: Keiō 4, 3rd month, 14th day

Four days after Wilson asked Congress for war, telling it that “the world must be made safe for democracy”, the House voted 373 to 50 and he signed the declaration the same day. The Senate had voted 82 to 6 on 4 April.

A New Style date. The tsar’s fall helped: in his war message four days earlier, Wilson could now count Russia among the democracies and spoke of the “wonderful and heartening things” happening there.

The new acts let the government jail political suspects without trial. His call for a day of fasting and a halt to work was his first all-India campaign. When it turned violent he called it off and called his own haste a “Himalayan miscalculation”.

After a dawn bathe in the sea he picked up a lump of natural salt from the mud flats, breaking the law. Across India people boiled seawater and sold salt openly; by the end of the year some 60,000 had been jailed.

The British taxed salt and forbade Indians to make their own. He set out from Sabarmati with seventy-eight marchers from the ashram and walked about 390 kilometres to the sea in twenty-four days, aged sixty. Village officials resigned along the route, and the world’s press followed. He vowed not…

Gandhi and 78 followers walked about 390 kilometres from Ahmedabad to the sea at Dandi, where he picked up a lump of natural salt in defiance of the salt tax. Some 60,000 people were jailed in the civil disobedience that followed.

Intelsat I could carry 240 telephone calls or one television channel across the Atlantic. Owned by an international consortium, it was the first satellite built to earn money.

Pioneer 10’s twin, retargeted after Jupiter to make the first flight past Saturn. Its routine mission ended in 1995 when it no longer had the power to run its instruments.