18 juni

While Emperor Michael III was away fighting the Arabs, a Rus’ fleet of about 200 ships came down the Bosporus and plundered the suburbs and islands. Patriarch Photius preached two sermons on it, aghast that an unknown people from the far north could fall on the imperial city. The walls held.

One of the most famous physicians in Italy, he wrote the first plague advice for Perugia and other towns, blaming corrupted air rising from the earth. He died of the plague himself, reportedly caught from his patients.

With Parliament unable to meet, Edward III and his council ordered every able-bodied man and woman under sixty without land to work for whoever needed them, at the wages of 1346–1347. Workers who asked more, and employers who paid it, were to be punished. Parliament made it the Statute of…

Charles V reopened the war by hearing appeals from Gascon lords against the Black Prince, and this time the French refused pitched battle: they let English raids burn themselves out and took back castles one by one. By 1380 England held little but Calais, Cherbourg, Brest, Bordeaux and Bayonne.…

French horsemen found the English archers before they could plant their stakes and rode them down. Chroniclers put the English dead at about 2,000 and the French loss at a handful. Lord Talbot was captured, and Fastolf, who got away, was accused for years of running.

K. 297, played on Corpus Christi. At the rehearsal the orchestra scraped through it twice so badly that he meant to stay away. On the night a passage in the first Allegro drew applause in mid-movement, and he went to the Palais-Royal for an ice and a rosary.

After Loyalist and Haudenosaunee raids on the frontier, Washington ordered “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements”. Sullivan’s army burned about 40 towns of the Seneca and Cayuga and their crops. Thousands of refugees spent a bitter winter near Fort Niagara, where many died.…

From France’s declaration of war to Waterloo, with only a year’s truce. The war bought cannon and shot from the ironmasters, but blockades shut markets and bread prices soared, and the slump of 1811–12 fed the Luddite unrest.

The rani of Jhansi, whose state the Company had annexed, fought in cavalry dress and died in battle at Kotah-ki-Serai. She became the best-remembered leader of the rising.

Alfred Russel Wallace, collecting in the Malay Archipelago, sent an essay that set out natural selection on its own. Darwin forwarded it to Lyell the same day: “Your words have come true with a vengeance… I never saw a more striking coincidence.” Whether the letter really arrived that day, or…

Renfield has swapped the flies for several very big spiders in a box, which he feeds with the flies. The flies are diminishing, though he is using half his own food to attract more of them.

Kerensky toured the front to rouse the troops, and the offensive in Galicia gained ground for a few days. Then units began voting against attacking, and a German counterstroke on 6 July turned it into a rout.

Not the focused ten-man study the proposal described: people came and went over about eight weeks, and no joint result came out of it. But the field got its name there. McCarthy and Minsky stayed for most of the summer; Newell and Simon came for the first fortnight and brought the one program that…

STS-7 had the first crew of five. Ride, a physicist, worked the robot arm to release and catch back a German satellite, SPAS-01. She flew twenty years after Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.

OceanGate’s carbon-fibre submersible lost contact about an hour and three-quarters into a dive to the wreck. Its debris was found on the seafloor four days later, some 500 m from Titanic’s bow. The five people on board died: Stockton Rush, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood and…

In the PURPOSE 1 trial in South Africa and Uganda, none of the 2,134 young women given a lenacapavir injection every six months acquired HIV. The FDA approved it in June 2025 and the WHO recommended it the next month.