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Arriving at the solstice

Bohemond of Antioch and Baldwin of Boulogne, count of Edessa, entered Jerusalem on 21 December 1099 with Archbishop Daimbert of Pisa and a large pilgrimage party, having travelled south from northern Syria.

Both men had stayed behind to secure Antioch and Edessa while the main army took the city in July. Fulcher of Chartres, Baldwin's chaplain, travelled with them and wrote that the arrivals worshipped at the Holy Sepulchre and visited Jerusalem's other holy places.

Christmas at Bethlehem

On 24 December the party went to Bethlehem for the Christmas vigil, returning to Jerusalem on Christmas morning.

Godfrey of Bouillon received them as ruler of a polity barely five months old. Fulcher remembered that the smell of unburied bodies still hung around the city's walls.

A patriarch replaced before the year ended

During the closing days of December, Daimbert was chosen as Latin patriarch in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, displacing Arnulf of Chocques, whose July selection had been judged irregular.

The exact day and canonical stage are unsettled. Some modern chronologies place Daimbert's accession on 25 December; Fulcher's narrative and its editorial chronology put the selection between 26 and 31 December; one scholarly reconstruction dates his consecration to 25 December and another to soon after New Year 1100.

A manhunt and a petition

In the eleventh lunar month of Bunji 1 — December 1185 in modern Japanese government chronologies — Yoritomo's envoy Hōjō Tokimasa negotiated with the Kyoto court for authority to pursue Minamoto no Yoshitsune and Minamoto no Yukiie and to exercise new powers in western Japan. How much of that was the real point turns on provenance: the contemporary rationale on record concerns pursuit and policing — suppressing rebels without repeatedly dispatching eastern warriors across the country — while a later account specifically presents Yoshitsune's pursuit as the arrangement's avowed justification.

The court, operating under the dominant influence of Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa, granted more than a pursuit warrant. The contemporary diary Gyokuyō records approval on the twenty-ninth day of that month for Yoritomo's side to deploy provincial agents and collect provisions.

Five shō from every tan

The authorization permitted a commissariat levy on public and private estates alike: five shō of rice per tan of land. The Kanagawa prefectural archive equates one shō to 1.8 litres and one tan to 993 square metres.

The levy and the authority to deploy provincial agents helped extend the Kamakura regime's reach beyond its eastern base.

Not a shogunate in one stroke

Yoritomo did not receive the title sei-i taishōgun until 1192, and some of the 1185 powers were curtailed the following year. The court kept its provincial governors, and estate owners, temples and court institutions continued alongside the new Kamakura appointees.

The later chronicle Azuma Kagami describes the grant using nationwide shugo and jitō, but research based on contemporary evidence argues the request chiefly concerned temporary provincial pursuit powers. Historians propose 1180, 1183, 1185, 1190 and 1192 as foundation dates for the bakufu.

The writ issued in Kyoto

The imperial court appointed Minamoto no Yoritomo sei-i taishōgun on the twelfth day of the seventh month of Kenkyū 3 — 21 August 1192 by the Julian conversion behind the listed date. The surviving appointment text names him and bears that date.

Yoritomo was not present. He was in Kamakura, and the Azuma Kagami records that news of the appointment reached the city on the twentieth day of the seventh month.

The document traveled instead of the man

Opposition at court had stood in the way of the revived military title while Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa lived. He died earlier in 1192, and the appointment followed.

There was no journey to Kyoto for investiture. Imperial messengers carried the writ to Kamakura, where it was presented at Tsurugaoka Wakamiya through Yoritomo's retainer Miura Yoshizumi.

The Azuma Kagami puts the messengers' arrival on the twenty-sixth day of the seventh month.

What the title did not create

Nothing changed in Kamakura by nightfall, because Yoritomo had not yet heard. The title gave an established warrior ruler court legitimacy; the governing offices and the nationwide shugo-jitō authority had developed before 1192.

Yoritomo was not the first man ever to bear the title — it had much older precedents, and Minamoto no Yoshinaka received it in 1184. He was the first Kamakura shogun.

Whether 1192 should be called the shogunate's founding year remains debated; proposed institutional starting points include 1180, 1183, 1185 and 1192.

Monday, 12 April 1204: the second try

The crusader and Venetian fleet renewed its assault on Constantinople's Golden Horn defenses on Monday, 12 April 1204, after the attack of 9 April had failed. The ships had been repaired and tied together in pairs to carry their ladders.

A north wind drove two of them, Pilgrim and Paradise, against a tower. A Venetian and the French knight Andrew of Urboise entered it, and other attackers followed.

Four towers, three gates, one postern

Elsewhere a small force broke through a blocked postern. Crusader eyewitness traditions name the clerk Aleaume of Clari as the first man through it, followed by ten knights and about sixty sergeants on foot.

The knights took four towers, opened or broke through three gates, and rode toward Emperor Alexios V's camp. The defenders withdrew, leaving the attackers in possession of part of the city by evening.

Alexios V escaped through the Golden Gate during the night, and a fire set between the opposing quarters burned through the night and the following day.

The citywide plunder begins the next morning

On 13 April the crusaders found no organized opposition. They occupied the imperial palaces and spread through the city taking booty.

The Byzantine eyewitness Niketas Choniates describes the desecration of churches, the theft of reliquaries, violence and sexual assault during the sack. Villehardouin reports 50,000 silver marks paid to Venice out of the declared booty and at least 100,000 more divided among the crusaders.

Contemporaries admitted that much was concealed, and the loot and casualty totals repeated since are not secure enough to state as audited counts.

Two letters patent

In documents issued on 6 and 7 October 1337, Edward III used the title King of France while appointing continental allies as his lieutenants. The surviving record is these two letters patent, not one formal ceremony or declaration.

It was a tentative diplomatic claim rather than his regular royal style. Scholarly accounts distinguish this experiment from his open, official assumption of the French crown in 1340.

Why he reached for the title

Philip VI had declared Edward's Duchy of Aquitaine forfeit on 24 May 1337, amid disputes over homage, Gascon jurisdiction, Scotland and Edward's sheltering of the exiled Robert of Artois.

Edward was not rejecting a claim by Philip: Philip had occupied the French throne since 1328. Edward was denying Philip's kingship and advancing his own hereditary case.

The defiance on All Saints' Day

Later in October Edward referred to Philip of Valois who calls himself king of France, denying the title in diplomatic language.

On All Saints' Day his ambassadors, among them Bishop Henry Burghersh of Lincoln, delivered a defiance to Philip and explained Edward's hereditary claim. That defiance, delivered on 1 November, converted the feudal dispute into an explicitly dynastic one; Philip's confiscation of Aquitaine in May remains the conventional opening trigger of the war.

Not 1 September

No consulted scholarly source supports 1 September 1347 as the date plague arrived at Marseille. A Marseille chronicle — the annals of Saint-Victor — places the outbreak's beginning around All Saints' Day, 1 November 1347.

Modern reconstructions accordingly put the recognized outbreak around 1 November, or more conservatively by November of that year. Other scholarship has placed the arrival as late as January 1348.

Working backwards from the dead

Ole Benedictow reads recognition on 1 November as evidence that an infected ship from the Genoese network had contaminated the city roughly seven weeks earlier, before mid-September.

On that reading, 1 November is probably not a literal ship-arrival date. On Benedictow's reconstruction it marks recognition of the outbreak or the beginning of visible mortality, not secure documentation of a plague ship docking that morning.

An Angevin port, not yet French

Marseille was geographically in what is now France but politically belonged to the Angevin County of Provence; it joined the French crown only in the late fifteenth century.

Once established the city became a major Mediterranean epidemic focus, spreading plague through Provence and along coastal, river and overland connections. Before the end of 1347 plague was present elsewhere in Provence and on Corsica, and it reached further southern French regions during 1348.

1 September 1348

A new truce between England, France and their allies is dated to 1 September 1348 in the New Cambridge Medieval History. The Black Death had reached Paris around 20 August and prevented full collection of France's newly approved war tax, about 3,000,000 livres tournois.

The agreement being renewed had technically lapsed weeks earlier: the original Truce of Calais ran from 28 September 1347 to 7 July 1348.

Not an unspoken pause

This was a continuation of a formal instrument, not merely a de facto halt. The Truce of Calais had been signed in September 1347 and was repeatedly prolonged until it collapsed in 1355.

Negotiations and formal instruments continued after 1 September. A commonly cited extension is dated 13 November 1348 and ran to 1 September 1349.

Where the fighting carried on

The truce stopped major Anglo-French field campaigns. It did not eliminate warfare: sporadic fighting continued in Brittany, the Calais Pale and Gascony.

Philip VI's government had prepared a renewed war effort, and plague disrupted the taxation and mobilisation behind it.

Representatives of the two crowns prolonged a legal truce while each retained its territorial position.

Durham, summer into November

The epidemic reached York on 21 May 1349 and swept the Durham region in late summer. Durham records show panic in July, when peasants at Houghton-le-Spring refused new holdings for fear of the approaching plague.

By November a Durham official could collect nothing at West Thickley: the entry says all its inhabitants were dead. Among the county's Benedictines, 55 of 83 monks are reported dead.

An English cog in Vågen

The near-contemporary Lögmanns-annáll, whose early portion was likely written by the Icelandic priest Einar Hafliðason, says an English cog entered Vågen, Bergen's harbour. After some cargo was unloaded the crew died, and deaths began among the townspeople.

A medical-historical article dates that arrival probably to early September; other summaries suggest August or late summer generally. The annal names Vågen; Askøy belongs to later retellings and should not be stated as fact. In autumn King Magnus Eriksson described plague as having broken out throughout Norway and Halland, and ordered processions, masses, offerings and fasting.

Mecca, and a man who lived

Recent scholarship places plague in northwestern Arabia, including Mecca, during 749 AH — April 1348 to March 1349 — probably carried from Egypt with hajj traffic. That Islamic year straddles both Gregorian years and cannot be assigned wholly to either.

Estimated English population mortality by 1350 runs to 40–55 percent, but medieval annalists' figures contain conspicuous literary exaggeration. Manorial records also preserve what such numbers lose: at Warboys, a laborer named John Flemyng fell ill in the summer outbreak and recovered.

Easter as an endpoint

A Novgorod chronicle says the epidemic that began there in September 1352 continued until Easter — 24 March 1353 — with sudden deaths following the coughing of blood. That local wave has something the supposed global ending does not: a stated last day.

Phylogeographic research places the final European spread in northwestern Russia, at Pskov and Novgorod, between 1351 and 1353, probably by a Baltic route rather than directly from the neighbouring Golden Horde.

Moscow's spring

Evidence reviewed in a Russian medical-history journal indicates plague had reached Moscow by spring 1353. Metropolitan Theognost died on 11 March, Grand Prince Simeon Ivanovich on 26 April, and Simeon's brother Andrei of Serpukhov on 6 June.

The plague attribution is probable rather than uniformly explicit: Russian chronicles disagree on dates and sometimes record deaths without naming the disease, so several of these diagnoses are historical inferences.

What 'subsided' actually means

Modern genomic scholarship conventionally defines the Black Death as the 1346–1353 opening episode of the second plague pandemic and says it abated in 1353. There was no single day when it ended everywhere; the year labels a geographically staggered process.

It does not mean Yersinia pestis disappeared. One study describes the first Russian wave as running from 1352 to 1355, and the second pandemic continued through recurrent epidemics for centuries. The listing's parenthetical 1331 is not supported as a start date for the conventionally defined Black Death.

23 January 1368, south of Zhong Mountain

On the fourth day of the first lunar month — 23 January 1368 — Zhu Yuanzhang sacrificed to Heaven and Earth south of Zhong Mountain at Nanjing and assumed the imperial throne at the southern suburban altar.

His accession proclamation named the realm Great Ming and designated the year as the first year of the Hongwu era.

What one document did

The same proclamation made Lady Ma empress and Zhu Biao heir apparent, bestowed imperial titles on four generations of Zhu's ancestors, and ordered the announcement circulated throughout the realm.

In it the new emperor reminded the realm that he came from "common stock" in the Huai region.

The Yuan had not fallen yet

Zhu's armies were still conquering territory when he took the throne. The Yuan capital Dadu remained outside his control until later in 1368, and Toghon Temür still reigned there.

The proclamation changed Zhu's claimed status immediately. It did not instantly end Yuan rule or complete the conquest of China.

Hongwu was the era name rather than a personal one; "Hongwu Emperor" is a retrospective label derived from the reign era.

The morning of 19 October 1469

Isabella, heir to Castile, and Ferdinand, King of Sicily and heir to Aragon, married on the morning of 19 October 1469 at the private Valladolid residence of Juan de Vivero. She was 18; he was 17.

They exchanged consent, and the priest Pedro López de Alcalá immediately celebrated a nuptial Mass with blessings. The couple then sent letters to Henry IV, to cities and to private recipients stating that their marriage had been contracted on Thursday, 19 October.

Clandestine, with two thousand witnesses

Henry IV's consent had not been obtained. Isabella took the Aragonese match to reinforce her precarious position in the Castilian succession, while Ferdinand's father sought Castilian support against French pressure.

Ferdinand crossed hostile Castilian territory at night, disguised among merchants, and narrowly escaped a stone thrown by a sentinel. According to J. H. Elliott the couple were short enough of money that they had to borrow to pay their wedding expenses.

The preparations were secret; the ceremony was not. The marriage act reports more than 2,000 people present.

Two crowns still separate

A purported papal dispensation was presented because the couple were related within prohibited degrees. Elliott and other modern historians regard the displayed bull as spurious, while Valladolid ecclesiastical scholarship argues that a papal legate had separately supplied a valid secret dispensation; an indisputably authentic bull followed under Sixtus IV in 1471.

Ferdinand was not yet Ferdinand II of Aragon that day. The wedding united no crowns — it intensified the Castilian succession dispute instead.

Isabella did not become queen until 1474, and Ferdinand inherited Aragon only in 1479.

Into a river-like harbour

The fleet sighted Cuban land before nightfall on 27 October 1492, waited offshore in heavy rain, and approached the nearest coast on the morning of 28 October 1492. The ships entered a deep, unobstructed harbour that the journal describes as river-like, its mouth given as twelve brazas, and anchored about a cannon-shot inside. Surviving transcriptions of the journal disagree over whether that measurement is the mouth's depth or its width.

Columbus named the river and harbour San Salvador. Indigenous guides taken from Guanahani had described a large island associated with gold, pearls and trade, which he read through his expectation of reaching Cipango.

Two houses, nothing touched

Columbus went ashore by boat and reached two houses whose occupants appeared to have fled. Inside were a dog that did not bark, fires, palm-fibre nets and cord, horn hooks, bone fishing spears and other fishing equipment.

He ordered that nothing be touched. Two canoes also withdrew when their occupants saw the Europeans preparing a boat, so the journal records no face-to-face encounter there that day.

Where, exactly, remains open

The 28 October arrival and landing are explicit in the surviving journal; the disputed element is the modern location. Bariay in present-day Holguín Province is the conventional Cuban identification, but proposals have ranged from Nuevitas and Puerto Padre through Gibara, Jururú, Bariay, Vita, Naranjo and Samá to Baracoa.

The journal's ambiguous coastal description cannot securely prove the province, so 'what is now Holguín' belongs in the article as a conventional identification rather than a coordinate. On 29 October the fleet raised anchor and began exploring westward along Cuba's northern coast.