March 28

The Praetorian Guard murdered the emperor Pertinax after 87 days, then sold the throne: Didius Julianus outbid the prefect of the city with 25,000 sesterces a soldier. He lasted 66 days.

Father and son alone this time, over the Brenner to Verona, Milan, Bologna, Florence, Rome and Naples. Italy made opera composers, and the point of the journey was to come home with a commission from an Italian house. Wolfgang’s postscripts to Nannerl mix German, Italian and nonsense.

Texans marching on Colorado’s gold fields won the fight in the pass, but a Union detachment under John Chivington burned their supply train at Johnson’s Ranch, and the Confederate invasion of New Mexico fell apart. Chivington led the Sand Creek Massacre two years later.

He rented a villa in the seaside village of Le Coq-sur-Mer, where the Belgian government posted two policemen at the door. The SA searched the Caputh house for weapons and found a bread knife. In September he hid in a hut on a Norfolk heath, then sailed from Southampton for America.

His ship docked at Antwerp and he went straight to German officials in Brussels, handed in his passport and renounced his citizenship, for the second time in his life. The same day he resigned from the Prussian Academy before it could throw him out.

During the lunar new-year truce 77,000 to 84,000 communist troops, by different counts, attacked cities across the South: 36 of the 44 provincial capitals, five of the six autonomous cities, and Saigon itself. Hanoi hoped for a general uprising; none came, and the Viet Cong lost much of its…

Three months later the fault broke again just to the south: Mw 8.6, under Nias and Simeulue, at 23:09 local time. It killed between about 900 and 1,300 people by different counts, most of them on Nias, but raised only a small tsunami. On Simeulue, people ran for the hills again.

Trials in Orange Farm in South Africa, Kisumu in Kenya and Rakai in Uganda found that medical male circumcision cut men’s risk of acquiring HIV from women by about 60 per cent. The WHO and UNAIDS recommended it for high-prevalence countries.