May 2

On the first Friday of 567 Saladin had the sermon in Cairo read for the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, ending two centuries of Fatimid rule; al-ʿAdid died days later. Saladin’s family, the Ayyubids, went on to rule Egypt and Syria until their own Mamluk soldiers killed the last sultan of Egypt.

Turanshah’s father’s Mamluk slave-soldiers, Baybars among them, cut him down at Fariskur; Joinville, a prisoner on the Nile, heard of it. The Mamluks now ruled Egypt, and would for more than 250 years.

The Tuscan town banned bringing in the sick or the dead from outside, had coffins nailed shut, set graves two and a half braccia deep, limited mourners at funerals and barred the sale of the dead’s clothes. They are among the earliest surviving plague regulations.

He had gone to France in 1516 as a guest of Francis I, with the Mona Lisa in his baggage. Vasari has him die in the king’s arms, but Francis was elsewhere that day.

He was sixty-seven. Vasari has him die in the arms of Francis I, a scene Ingres painted in 1818, but the king was elsewhere: a royal act was issued at Saint-Germain-en-Laye the day before, a two-day ride away.

Melzi took the papers home to Vaprio d’Adda, and from them compiled the Treatise on Painting. After his death his heirs let them go; the sculptor Pompeo Leoni cut many sheets out and pasted them into albums, among them the Codex Atlanticus. Perhaps half the pages are lost.

After his flank march routed the Union right, Jackson rode ahead in the dark and North Carolina troops mistook his party for cavalry. He lost his left arm and died of pneumonia eight days later.

James Reese Europe led some 125 Black musicians, with banjos, mandolins and ten pianists, in a “Concert of Negro Music”. It was not yet jazz, but it was syncopated, and it came 26 years before Benny Goodman was said to have brought jazz to the hall. The Clef Club was also a union and booking…

A German and Austro-Hungarian army under Mackensen broke the Russian line in Galicia after a short, heavy bombardment. In the Great Retreat that followed Russia lost all of Russian Poland; Warsaw fell on 5 August.

By 8 to 1 the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s law for sterilising the “feeble-minded”. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Carrie Buck, 21, was sterilised that October. The ruling has never been overturned.

Zhukov’s and Konev’s fronts, some two and a half million men, attacked across the Oder and encircled the city. Its garrison surrendered on 2 May, the day Yevgeny Khaldei photographed a Red Army flag over the Reichstag.

The Allies landed in Sicily in July 1943 and fought up the peninsula for almost two years against German defensive lines drawn across the mountains. Mussolini fell on 25 July 1943, and the Germans in Italy surrendered on 2 May 1945, days before the rest.

Twelve years in which both sides turned what they took from Germany into missiles that could carry an atomic bomb across an ocean. The first satellites rode on those missiles.

His brother Magnus cycled down the mountain road and found an American private. Within months Operation Paperclip had brought von Braun and more than a hundred of his engineers to Texas, while the Soviets took Peenemünde’s workshops and the people who had stayed behind.

BOAC’s de Havilland Comet G-ALYP flew the first jet airliner service, London to Johannesburg, with five stops, in about 23 and a half hours. Its cabin was quiet, pressurised and flew twice as high as the propeller airliners.

Jets halved journey times, flew above the weather and, with the wide-bodies of the 1970s, made flying cheap enough for holidays. By 2003 the world’s airlines carried well over a billion passengers a year.

Bad snow and exhaustion slowed the climb up the Lhotse Face for more than two weeks; George Lowe spent eleven days cutting steps up it. Hunt’s whole plan hung on getting loads to the South Col.

With adults afraid for their jobs, schoolchildren marched instead, and hundreds were arrested on the first day. On 3 May Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor turned fire hoses and police dogs on them in Kelly Ingram Park. The photographs went round the world.

The 30-kilometre zone is emptiedChernobyl Exclusion Zone

On 2 May the Politburo's Nikolai Ryzhkov and Yegor Ligachev came to the commission's new base in Chernobyl town and ordered everyone out within 30 kilometres. Evacuations in Ukraine and Belarus reached about 116,000 people by the end of 1986. The area is still the Exclusion Zone.

Border guards began rolling up the electrified alarm fence along the Austrian border. It was worn out, and Prime Minister Miklós Németh had left its repair out of the budget; he told Gorbachev in March and heard no objection.

Talks began at Groote Schuur in May 1990 and ended with an interim constitution in November 1993. Around them raged a war between ANC and Inkatha supporters in Natal and on the Reef, fed in part by elements of the security forces. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission put the dead of 1990 to…

From the first meeting of the ANC and the government at Groote Schuur to an interim constitution took three and a half years, two breakdowns and a referendum. The breakthrough was the “sunset clauses” proposed by the Communist Party’s Joe Slovo: five years of power-sharing and guarantees for white…