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No day, and an unsteady year

There is no securely documented event-day in 1525. Later chronicles report a widespread illness in Tawantinsuyu and the sudden death of the Inca ruler Huayna Capac in the northern part of his realm, usually placed at or near Quito.

Even the year is disputed: proposed dates for his death range from 1524 to 1530. The Metropolitan Museum's approximate chronology separates a major epidemic around 1525 from Huayna Capac's death around 1527, so folding both into one exact year is the listing's own invention.

What the chroniclers actually wrote

Early and later chroniclers disagreed about the illness, describing smallpox, measles, fever, rash, boils and other symptoms. Pedro Cieza de León attributed the death to a highly contagious smallpox pestilence; Juan de Betanzos reported a disabling illness with a scab- or leprosy-like skin condition rather than an unambiguous diagnosis.

In the tabulation by McCaa, Nimlos and Hampe Martínez, six of seventeen chroniclers say smallpox, three say fever, two measles, two severe rash or skin inflammation, and the rest something else again. Those authors argue clear evidence for Andean smallpox before 1558 is lacking; Noble David Cook defends the early-smallpox reading using early colonial testimony.

What followed the death

Huayna Capac's death removed the reigning sovereign, and his embalmed body was carried toward Cuzco. Succession accounts report that the intended candidate Ninan Cuyochi also died, and Cuzco elites then enthroned Huáscar.

The conflict with Atahualpa developed later; it was not a same-day consequence. Nor can the mortality be reconstructed reliably — the museum chronology's word is simply thousands, with no documented count behind it.

The commutation

The leading modern reconstruction puts the execution at Cajamarca on 26 July 1533. Atahualpa's sentence of burning was commuted to death by garrote on condition that he accept Christian baptism; sources disagree over his baptismal name, giving either Francisco or Juan.

He had been a prisoner since 16 November 1532 — eight months and ten days, if 26 July is accepted — and the promised ransom had already been delivered, melted and divided.

A rumour that scouts could not confirm

Cieza de León's investigation says Pizarro broke the agreement made with Atahualpa and ordered his death after false reports that warriors were approaching. Cieza records that Hernando de Soto returned from reconnaissance without finding the army.

Immediately afterward, Spanish and Inca ceremonies acclaimed Túpac Huallpa, another son of Huayna Cápac, as the new Inca under Spanish sponsorship.

Why 29 August cannot stand

Pizarro's now-lost letter of 29 July was already reporting both the execution and Túpac Huallpa's appointment to Charles V, which makes the traditional 29 August date impossible. That later date first appears in Juan de Velasco's eighteenth-century history and was repeated by Prescott and others.

Raúl Porras Barrenechea decisively rejected 29 August but at first established only a late-July or early-August window; reconstructions have proposed 20, 26 and 27 July. No surviving contemporaneous execution record supplies an uncontested day. A documentary reconstruction puts the Spanish departure from Cajamarca on 11 August 1533.

The fair opened on 4 October 1534

The Leipzig Michaelmas fair opened on 4 October 1534 with the first complete edition of Luther's Bible translation available for sale. The fair continued through 11 October.

The book was printed in Wittenberg, by Hans Lufft. The Michaelmas fair itself was in Leipzig — a rival commercial centre, not Luther's town.

Six parts, two volumes

Lufft printed the edition as six separately titled and foliated parts — Pentateuch, historical books, poetic books, prophets, Apocrypha and New Testament — normally bound in two volumes.

The visual program included decorative initials and 117 woodcuts associated with the Cranach workshop and other artists.

An unbound copy sold at Leipzig for 2 guilders and 8 groschen.

Not one man's work, and not the first German Bible

The edition completed Luther's previously published New Testament and Old Testament installments with assistance from Wittenberg scholars including Philipp Melanchthon, Justus Jonas and Caspar Cruciger.

It was the first complete edition of Luther's translation, not the first German Bible; printed German Bibles existed before him.

Buyers could now obtain the New Testament, Old Testament and Apocrypha as one coordinated complete edition, and demand produced further complete editions in 1535 and 1536.

Royal assent, 18 December 1534

The sixth session of Henry VIII's Reformation Parliament ran from 3 November through 18 December 1534, and 18 December was the session's closing and royal-assent date.

The enacted statute, 26 Henry VIII c.1, required Henry VIII and his royal successors to be accepted as the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England.

Title, jurisdiction, and profits

The act attached to the imperial Crown not only the title but the church-related honours, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, profits and commodities.

Its wording deliberately presented Parliament as confirming an existing right — Henry "is and oweth to be" head of the English Church — rather than inventing or granting a revocable one.

Confirming, not creating

The statute converted into parliamentary law a royal-supremacy claim already recognised by the English convocations and proclaimed by Henry earlier in 1534.

It was not the entire break with Rome in one stroke, and it did not turn English doctrine and worship Protestant: Henry retained many traditional Catholic teachings and practices.

The act made Henry "Supreme Head." "Supreme Governor" was Elizabeth I's title under the 1559 settlement.

Basel, June 1543

Johannes Oporinus's Basel press issued Andreas Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica libri septem in June 1543. The colophon specifies the month but gives no day.

The publication combined Vesalius's anatomical text with an unusually extensive program of woodcut illustrations based on dissections he conducted while professor of anatomy and surgery at Padua.

Blocks carried over the Alps

The woodblocks had been cut, probably in Venice, then packed and transported across the Alps to Oporinus in Basel.

The identities of the artists remain disputed. The National Library of Medicine describes multiple possible artists and treats Jan Steven van Calcar's role as a theory rather than an established fact.

Seven books, one volume

The Fabrica presented human anatomy in seven books within one large volume — not seven separately published volumes — and drew direct attention to errors Vesalius found by comparing ancient anatomical claims with his own dissections.

He challenged numerous Galenic anatomical claims without discarding the entire Galenic physiological framework.

The atlas and its shorter companion, the Epitome, entered circulation from the same press; the record preserves no single launch day and no overnight scientific conversion.

21 October 1600: blocking the Nakasendō

After Ishida Mitsunari withdrew from Ōgaki Castle, his Western Army formed a defensive line around Sekigahara on 21 October 1600, blocking the Nakasendō route toward Sawayama and Osaka. Tokugawa Ieyasu pursued and confronted it there.

Following a rainy night and a misty morning, Eastern troops attacked the Western line. Accounts identify Ii Naomasa as initiating the action ahead of Fukushima Masanori, who had been designated to attack first.

Decided by who did not fight

Large Western contingents on Mount Nangū remained inactive because Kikkawa Hiroie, secretly aligned with Ieyasu, blocked the Mōri forces behind him from entering the battle.

Kobayakawa Hideaki's force of about 15,600 descended Mount Matsuo and attacked its nominal ally Ōtani Yoshitsugu. The resulting attack from two directions broke the Western line; Ukita Hideie, Konishi Yukinaga and Mitsunari fled, and Ieyasu's army won within hours.

No contemporary account tells the whole battle

Nippon.com emphasises that no detailed contemporary letters or diaries narrate the battle as a whole, so exact timings and battlefield anecdotes require caution. One NPS reconstruction gives an opening around 7:30 a.m.; other accounts read a document as placing it near 10:00.

Mitsunari directed Western operations, but the coalition's nominal commander, Mōri Terumoto, stayed at Osaka Castle throughout.

The battle did not itself create the Tokugawa shogunate: Ieyasu received the shogunal title in 1603, and the Toyotomi house survived at Osaka until the campaigns of 1614–1615.

Fushimi Castle, 24 March 1603

On the twelfth day of Keichō 8's second month — 24 March 1603 — the imperial envoy Kajūji Mitsutoyo came to Ieyasu at Fushimi Castle and conveyed Emperor Go-Yōzei's appointment of him as sei-i taishōgun.

The investiture occurred at Fushimi, south of Kyoto, not at Edo. Wooden clappers announced the imperial representatives' entrance before they presented the decree.

What came with it

Ieyasu simultaneously received the office of Minister of the Right, leadership of the Minamoto lineage and of the Junna and Shōgaku academies, and permission to use an ox carriage and armed attendants.

After the ceremony he hosted a banquet and sent the imperial delegates back to Kyoto with silver, gold and a horse bearing a raised gold saddle marked with his crest.

A formality over an existing fact

Sekigahara had already made Ieyasu Japan's dominant military power. The appointment supplied the established legal and ceremonial title through which a warrior government could be formalised; it did not give him control he had lacked the previous day.

1603 became the conventional founding year of the Edo bakufu, whose political headquarters was Edo even though the investiture took place at Fushimi and Kyoto remained the imperial capital.

Two years later Ieyasu surrendered the title to his son Hidetada — a signal that shogunal succession would be Tokugawa and hereditary.

8 March 1618: conceived and discarded the same day

Kepler later recorded that the relationship now called his third law first came into his mind on 8 March 1618. He tested it, calculated unsuccessfully, and rejected it as false.

Nothing was announced. The date marks a first conception, not a completed verification.

What the relation proposed

The idea tied planetary orbital periods to mean distances from the Sun: in modern notation, the squares of the periods stand in proportion to the cubes of the orbital semimajor axes.

Kepler was finishing Harmonice mundi at the time, hunting for a mathematical relation of exactly this kind and testing the new ratio against data derived from Tycho Brahe's observations.

15 May, and a book being prepared for print

Kepler returned to the relation on 15 May 1618 and accepted it once it agreed with his long analysis of Brahe's observations — work he described as invoking seventeen years of observation.

He wrote that when the calculation finally came out he thought at first he was dreaming, or that he had assumed his conclusion among his premises. The result forced revisions to a book already being prepared for print; Harmonice mundi appeared in 1619.

23 May 1618: nine in the morning at the Bohemian Chancellery

At about 9 a.m. on 23 May 1618, Protestant and Hussite members of the Bohemian estates walked into the Bohemian Chancellery at Prague Castle and confronted four of the ten royal regents.

Two were spared and escorted out: Supreme Burgrave Adam of Sternberg and Grand Prior Matthew Lobkowitz. Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice and Vilém Slavata the assembly condemned as enemies of the land, of religious liberties, and of the public peace.

Out the window

Martinice, Slavata, and the chancellery secretary Philip Fabricius were thrown through a window into the castle moat. A partisan contemporary account puts the drop at thirty cubits. All three survived.

Why they survived cannot be settled. A contemporary Catholic account describes a rocky moat and miraculous Marian protection; the famous dung heap belongs to later Protestant polemic.

From condemnation to revolutionary government

The estates believed Habsburg officials were subverting the Letter of Majesty, and blamed Martinice and Slavata for an imperial answer that rejected their grievances and prohibited further assemblies. What happened in the chancellery that morning was a summary political condemnation and a shouted vote, not a lawful trial.

The violence converted the estates' confrontation with Habsburg government into open revolt. Jindřich Matyáš Thurn and Václav Vilém of Roupov led a revolutionary administration that mobilised armed forces — against a government that was, in 1618, still Emperor Matthias's; Ferdinand was already Bohemian king but did not become Holy Roman Emperor until 1619.

1637, Leiden: printed without an author

Jan Maire printed the first edition at Leiden in 1637. Descartes's name did not appear on the publication as author.

The volume bound the Discours de la méthode together with three scientific works — La Dioptrique, Les Météores and La Géométrie — described on the title page as essays or demonstrations of the method. The short opening Discourse was followed by more than four hundred pages of optics, meteorology and geometry.

Four precepts and one certainty

Part II set out four precepts: accept only what is clear, divide difficulties, proceed from simpler to more complex objects, and review completely.

Part IV gave the French formulation commonly translated "I think, therefore I am" as the first secure principle reached through doubt. The Discourse is partly autobiographical, and says expressly that it is showing how Descartes conducted his own reason rather than prescribing wholesale doubt for everyone.

Why these three essays

Descartes had withheld The World after Galileo's condemnation. For this volume he chose less overtly controversial material that could show what the method could accomplish without disclosing his entire natural philosophy.

La Géométrie introduced a powerful geometrical calculus linking algebraic equations to the construction and classification of curves — though not the perpendicular x-y coordinate system now taught under his name. Marin Mersenne helped circulate the book, and by October 1637 Kenelm Digby had read it and recommended it to Thomas Hobbes.

Judgment day in Westminster Hall

On 27 January 1649 Charles I was brought before a public session of the High Court of Justice in Westminster Hall for judgment. He had repeatedly refused to plead, denying that a court created by the Commons had jurisdiction over a king.

Before sentence he asked to be heard by the Lords and Commons in the Painted Chamber. Objections among the commissioners forced an adjournment — John Downes argued the request should be allowed — but the majority, with Cromwell pressing them to proceed, rejected it.

Tyrant, traitor, murderer, public enemy

Lord President John Bradshaw pronounced Charles guilty of high treason and characterized him with four labels: tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy. The court sentenced him to death by severing his head from his body.

The charge had been drafted and presented by Solicitor-General John Cook: that Charles had abused a limited public trust and levied war against Parliament and the people. The court treated his refusal to plead as tacit confession and heard 33 witness depositions for additional assurance.

Sixty-seven, then fifty-nine

Parliamentary Archives research records 67 judges as passing sentence. The separate execution warrant ultimately received 59 signatures — the two counts are not the same thing.

The verdict, the warrant and the execution were three separate events: 27, 29 and 30 January. The date is English Old Style; contemporary legal records could call it 27 January 1648, because the civil year began on 25 March.

30 January 1649: from St James's to a scaffold at Whitehall

On 30 January 1649 Charles I was escorted under guard from St James's Palace to Whitehall, where he waited several hours before passing through the Banqueting House to an outdoor scaffold.

The warrant behind it was dated 29 January 1648/9 and survives on a single parchment carrying 59 signatures and seals. It ordered the beheading in the open street before Whitehall, between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.

A speech almost nobody heard

Troops held the larger crowd beyond hearing distance, so Charles addressed only the people near him. A contemporary authorized pamphlet preserves what he said.

He signalled when he was ready, and a heavily disguised executioner killed him with one blow of the axe. That man's identity is unknown; Richard Brandon and William Hulet are among the proposed candidates, and no identification is secure.

What was and was not settled that day

The same day the Commons prohibited anyone from proclaiming a successor as king of England or Ireland. The monarchy itself had not been abolished: Parliament did that in March, and declared England a Commonwealth and Free State on 19 May.

The prohibition did not reach Scotland. The Scottish Estates proclaimed Charles II king on 5 February.