August 12

Urban set the departure for the Feast of the Assumption. Armies under Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond of Taranto, Robert of Normandy and Robert of Flanders met at Constantinople and marched together. By the siege of Jerusalem, Raymond of Aguilers reckoned, they had no more than…

A month after taking Jerusalem the crusaders surprised the Fatimid vizier al-Afdal’s relief army outside Ascalon at dawn. It ended the crusade, but Ascalon itself stayed Fatimid until 1153.

The first voyage beyond India. Ma Huan, a Muslim interpreter who knew Arabic and Persian, sailed on it; his account of the lands they saw is the best source there is. Squadrons also went to Bengal and the Maldives.

Zhu Di took the reign name Yongle, “perpetual happiness”. He moved the capital to Beijing, sent five campaigns into Mongolia, and sent six of the seven fleets to show the world the Ming had a new and rightful emperor.

An English captain’s seizure of Fougères broke the truce, and Charles declared war. Town after town opened its gates rather than face the French guns, and Normandy fell in a year after thirty years of English rule, ending with Cherbourg.

The register calls him “Lionard de Vincy, noble Milanese, first painter and engineer and architect of the king”. The church was pulled down in the early nineteenth century; the bones reburied in the château’s Chapel of Saint-Hubert in 1874 are only presumed to be his.

At Allahabad Shah Alam II signed a farman making the Company his diwan: the collector of the revenues of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, some of the richest land in Asia. In return it paid him 26 lakh rupees a year. The wider settlement, the Treaty of Allahabad, was signed on 16 August. From here on…

Below the pass Hugh McNeal stood with a foot on each side of the rivulet, to “bestride the mighty & heretofore deemed endless Missouri”. At the top of the Continental Divide Lewis expected to look down on a plain running to the Columbia. He saw “immence ranges of high mountains still to the West”:…

South through the Bitterroot and Big Hole valleys to the canoes cached at Camp Fortunate, down to the Three Forks, then overland to the Yellowstone. Half the horses vanished one night, most likely to Crow horsemen; Clark went on in two dugouts lashed together.

With the current they covered in six weeks what had taken five months going up, sometimes over seventy miles a day. Every week they met more traders’ boats coming the other way.

Nez Perce guides showed Lewis the “road to the buffalo” over what is now Lewis and Clark Pass. From the falls he rode north with three men up the Marias into Blackfeet country, and found the river did not reach far enough north to push the border.

Clark’s party came down to find Lewis lying wounded in a pirogue. Apart from Floyd two years before, everyone who had set out from Fort Mandan was alive.

Sister Agatha, of the Hospital of St. Joseph and Ste. Mary, writes for Jonathan, “not strong enough to write”, who has been under their care for nearly six weeks with a violent brain fever. She adds that in his delirium he raved “of wolves and poison and blood”, and that he rushed into the station…

Twice in the night Lucy tries to get out and is impatient at finding the door shut. By morning she is in better spirits, and tells Mina all about Arthur.

The treaty signed in January offered Colombia $10 million and $250,000 a year for a canal zone. The Colombian Senate rejected it unanimously, holding out for better terms.

Some 2,500 delegates in the Bolshoi Theatre, meant to rally the nation behind the government. The right cheered Kornilov; Moscow’s workers answered with a one-day general strike on the opening day.

A flame burned in a tower above the stadium for the first time, and women ran and jumped at the Olympics for the first time, in five athletics events. Exhausted finishers in the 800 metres gave officials an excuse to drop it until 1960.

I wasn’t saying the Beatles are better than Jesus or God or Christianity. — Lennon at the Astor Tower Hotel The second of two press conferences at the hotel, hours before the last American tour opened that night. Epstein had thought of calling the tour off. The Ku Klux Klan picketed the shows in…

Eighty-seven days.

The New Zealander took 1.6 seconds off Bayi’s time. It was exactly ten seconds faster than Bannister.

Almost four years. Walker won the Olympic 1500 metres in Montreal in 1976, and in 1985 became the first man to run a hundred miles under four minutes.

Fred Haise and Gordon Fullerton separated from the 747 at about 7,000 metres and glided to Rogers Dry Lake in five and a half minutes. It proved an orbiter could land like an aeroplane, without power.

$1,565, built mostly from other companies' parts, with an operating system licensed from Microsoft. Microsoft kept the right to sell MS-DOS to anyone, so clone makers could build compatible machines, and “PC” came to mean any computer that ran its software.

Run by a private committee with almost no public money, the Games made a surplus, and every city wanted one again. Carl Lewis won the same four events as Jesse Owens in 1936.

Maersk declared her capacity as 11,000 TEU, counting heavy boxes; by the usual measure she carried well over 13,000. She was the largest container ship yet built.

London became the first city to hold three Summer Games. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Brunei sent women for the first time, so every team had women on it, and women’s boxing joined the programme.

The first NASA spacecraft named for a living person, the physicist Eugene Parker, who predicted the solar wind and watched it launch. Venus flybys pull its orbit ever closer to the Sun.