12 februari

A French and Scottish force attacked a supply convoy bringing Lent provisions to the besiegers. Sir John Fastolf drew up his carts as a barricade and beat them off, and the field was left strewn with herring from the broken barrels.

At the flat in the Domgasse, Haydn heard three of the six string quartets Mozart would dedicate to him, then turned to Leopold: “your son is the greatest composer known to me in person or by name.” Leopold passed it on to Nannerl, word for word.

The empress dowager Longyu issued the edict for the six-year-old Xuantong Emperor, Puyi, in a settlement negotiated by Yuan Shikai, who became president of the Republic the next month. It ended 2,132 years of emperors. Puyi kept his title and the inner palace until he was expelled in 1924.

The Manchus, Jurchen united by Nurhaci, who founded a Later Jin in 1616, renamed their state Qing in 1636 and took Beijing in 1644. Under the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors (1661–1796) the empire roughly doubled in size, taking Taiwan, Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, and its population…

He sent back the Kaisar-i-Hind medal he had won for his ambulance work and called on Indians to boycott British courts, schools, councils and cloth, promising swaraj within a year. Allied with the Muslim Khilafat movement, it became the largest challenge to the Raj since 1857. Crowds burned…

Whiteman’s orchestra premiered George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue before an audience of critics and composers. The press already called Whiteman, a white bandleader who played polished, written-out dance music, the “King of Jazz”, a title the Black originators never gave him.

On 1 February two sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death in a garbage truck. Some 1,300 Black sanitation workers walked out, carrying placards that read “I AM A MAN”. The city recognised their union on 16 April, twelve days after King’s death.

American C-141s landed at Gia Lâm airport in Hanoi to collect the first prisoners of war. By the end of March 591 Americans had been released. Many had been held for years, some since 1964.

The first Winter Games out of step with the Summer ones, only two years after Albertville. Norwegians lined the cross-country trails in the snow in their tens of thousands, and Norway topped the medal table at home.

Arising from the independent counsel’s inquiry into his relationship with a White House intern, the House approved perjury before a grand jury (228–206) and obstruction of justice (221–212). The Senate acquitted on 12 February 1999, 45–55 and 50–50.