28 september

William moved east to Hastings within days and threw up another castle there: the Tapestry shows men digging a mound, labelled HESTENGA CEASTRA. Then he harried the country, Harold’s own earldom, to draw him south. The Tapestry shows a house set alight as a woman and her child flee.

They came ashore unopposed inside the walls of the Roman fort of Anderitum. Harold’s coast guard had gone home three weeks before, and Harold himself was nearly 400 kilometres away at York. The Chronicle’s manuscripts disagree by a day: D has the eve of Michaelmas, 28 September, E Michaelmas Day…

Hayreddin Barbarossa’s galleys faced a larger Holy League fleet under the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria, who pulled back after a day’s skirmishing. The eastern Mediterranean was an Ottoman sea for the next thirty years.

Twelve years of peace under Ahmed III and his grand vizier Nevşehirli İbrahim Pasha: garden palaces at Sadabad, an embassy to Paris, tulip bulbs at fortune prices. A revolt led by Patrona Halil, an Albanian ex-Janissary, ended it.

About 8,000 Continentals and militia and about 8,000 French under Rochambeau and the fleet dug parallels toward Cornwallis’s lines.

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.

Prince Nikolaus Esterházy’s new palace on the Hungarian plain became his court’s summer home, and Haydn, his Kapellmeister, wrote symphonies, operas and trios for it. He told his biographer Georg August Griesinger: “I was cut off from the world … and so I had to become original.” The post ended…

Reading Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population “for amusement”, Darwin saw that if many more are born than can live, small favourable differences would be kept and others lost. “Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work”, he wrote in his autobiography.

Seventeen years from the Free Womb law to the Golden Law, in which abolitionist clubs, lawyers, rafters and the enslaved themselves wore slavery down while the parliament of coffee planters stalled.

Brazil declared free every child born to an enslaved mother from that day. But the owner could keep the child’s labour until age 21, or hand the child to the state at eight in return for a bond.

After a night’s sleep Seward finds Van Helsing’s ideas “outrages on common sense” and wonders whether the professor’s mind has become unhinged. He even asks whether Van Helsing could have done it himself, and notes the arguments against: “he is so abnormally clever”.

With influenza already in the city, Philadelphia held a war bond parade watched by some 200,000 people. Within days every hospital bed was full; in the week ending 16 October 4,597 Philadelphians died of influenza and pneumonia.