July 12

Raymond of Toulouse spent his last years besieging Tripoli from a castle he built on the hill opposite, Mont Pèlerin, and died there in 1105. His son Bertrand took the city; the last crusader state to be founded, it was the second-last to fall.

The garrison bought its lives with a promise: 200,000 dinars, 1,500 Christian prisoners and the True Cross. Bahaʾ al-Din’s date, Friday 17 Jumada II 587, falls on the same day in the tabular calendar.

Released by Saladin, King Guy besieged Acre with a small army and was himself besieged by Saladin’s. For two years each side’s camp starved and sickened as crusaders arrived by sea; Queen Sibylla and her daughters died there.

Edward landed at Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue in Normandy with an army of perhaps 14,000 and marched east, burning as he went, to within sight of Paris. Clifford Rogers argues the devastation was the point: a king who could not protect his people would have to fight or lose their loyalty.

For Francis I’s entry into Lyon, the city’s Florentine merchants presented a lion of Leonardo’s design that walked forward and opened its chest to show a cluster of lilies, the French royal flower.

The Franciscan Diego de Landa burned Maya books and idols at an auto de fe; he wrote that the Maya “regretted to an amazing degree” their loss. Only four Maya books survive. His own account of Yucatán, with a garbled “alphabet”, later became a key to reading the glyphs.

We found a large number of books in these characters and […] we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction. — Diego de Landa, translated by Alfred M. Tozzer The Franciscan inquisition that led up to it had Maya nobles and commoners hoisted by…

Shams al-Din Ilyas Shah united Bengal under one sultan. His son built the Adina Mosque at Pandua, the largest mosque in the subcontinent in its day. Bengali literature flourished at court. The Mughals ended it at Rajmahal.

Baptised in the parish church; probably also the day he was born. Dates before September 1752 are Old Style.

Sent to win an alliance for the United States, Franklin lived at Passy in a fur cap and plain coat and became the salons’ image of the New World’s virtue. In 1784 he sat with Lavoisier on the royal commission that found Mesmer’s animal magnetism to be imagination.

The king had dismissed the popular minister Necker the day before. At the Café de Foy, the young journalist Camille Desmoulins climbed on a table and told the crowd to arm itself. They pinned green leaves to their hats as a badge.

Priests and bishops became elected, salaried officials. When the clergy were made to swear an oath to it, about half refused: the split between the Revolution and the Church that fed the Vendée revolt.

Boiling off liquefied air fraction by fraction, Ramsay and Morris Travers found krypton (“hidden”) on 30 May, neon (“new”) in June and xenon (“stranger”) in July. Ramsay's young son suggested “novum” for the second; his father made it Greek.

German and Italian aircraft bombed the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April 1937. Picasso painted his answer, nearly eight metres wide, for the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the Paris world’s fair. He refused to let it go to Spain until democracy returned; it arrived in 1981 and hangs in the Reina…

The Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army counter-attacked the II SS Panzer Corps head-on near a railway station on the southern face of the salient. The Soviets lost far more tanks than the Germans, but the German advance in the south stopped there.

A few shillings bought one shellac disc at Percy Phillips’s studio in the back of his house: Buddy Holly’s song and a McCartney–Harrison original, “In Spite of All the Danger”. The only copy passed from member to member until the pianist John Duff Lowe kept it; McCartney bought it back in 1981.

Side by side up the volcano, the two Frenchmen touched shoulders. Poulidor gained 42 seconds, not enough: Anquetil won by 55 seconds, and Poulidor never wore the yellow jersey in fourteen Tours.

Hours before the match Ronaldo had a convulsive fit; he was left off the team sheet, then put back on it, and played far below his best. Zinedine Zidane headed two goals from corners, and that night a million people filled the Champs-Élysées.

Croatia, at their first World Cup, finished third. Iran beat the United States 2–1 in Lyon after the players had posed together and swapped white roses before kick-off.

The FDA approved Atripla, three drugs in one pill a day. In the late 1990s combination therapy could mean twenty pills or more, some to be taken on an empty stomach and some with food.

Four years and nine days.

The longest reign in the women’s mile.

The Dutch runner, born in Ethiopia, took 0.23 seconds off Masterkova’s record. That autumn she won the world 1500 and 10,000 metres.

President Biden unveiled the first the evening before: a deep field of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, taken in half a day where Hubble had needed weeks. Then came the Carina Nebula, Stephan’s Quintet, the Southern Ring Nebula and water in the air of a distant planet.