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Before dawn, 18 May 1291

Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil launched a general assault on Acre before dawn on 18 May 1291, the morning after negotiations failed. An eyewitness remembered a huge drum sounding as Mamluk forces attacked from all sides.

Weeks of bombardment and mining had already left exploitable breaches. Mamluk troops penetrated the defenses and pushed into the burning city, and organized Frankish resistance collapsed during the day.

The run to the harbour

Guillaume de Beaujeu, master of the Knights Templar, was mortally wounded while helping defend the area around St Anthony's Gate. Jean de Villiers, master of the Hospitallers, fought in the defense, was wounded and was evacuated.

Civilians crowded the lanes toward the harbour, carrying children and pleading with sailors for escape.

Henry II of Cyprus had arrived with a relief fleet of forty ships on 4 May; on 18 May he was evacuated by sea with other survivors.

Ten more days at the water's edge

By nightfall the Mamluks controlled Acre apart from the Templars' fortified seaside complex, which resisted until 28 May. That last stand was centred on the complex, not a citywide defense by surviving knights.

Acre was the last major mainland stronghold, but the remaining small Frankish coastal positions were abandoned or captured over the following months rather than falling at once.

No defensible total exists for those killed, enslaved or successfully evacuated.

Three positives out of seven

A mortality crisis struck the Christian community buried at Kara-Djigach and nearby Burana, in the Chüy Valley of present-day Kyrgyzstan, across 1338 and 1339. Ten East Syriac tombstones at Kara-Djigach say outright that the buried person died of pestilence.

Researchers sampled seven individuals — five from Kara-Djigach, two from Burana — and found evidence of Yersinia pestis in three, all from Kara-Djigach. Two high-quality genomes were reconstructed, representing a single strain.

What the genomes place, and what they do not

That strain sits as the most recent common ancestor of the major Y. pestis diversification associated with the second plague pandemic. Comparison with modern plague diversity supports emergence somewhere in central Eurasia, possibly the extended Tian Shan region.

It does not prove the bacterium first evolved inside these cemeteries. Saying a strain originates in 1338 is stronger than the evidence allows: this is an epidemic documented across two years by inscriptions and burial distribution, not a datable event.

The blank between here and Crimea

The researchers found no evidence identifying the environmental trigger, the animal host, or the route of introduction into the community. The narrow sampling cannot reconstruct where the strain travelled next.

Of the 467 surviving dated tombstones in the study dataset, 456 come from Kara-Djigach and 11 from Burana; a separate study counts 118 of the 159 headstones erected between 1338 and 1345 as belonging to the mortality crisis. What happened between the Chüy Valley and the Black Sea remains unknown.

2 January 1492: the Alhambra changes hands

Boabdil formally surrendered Granada and the Alhambra to Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon on 2 January 1492, implementing capitulations negotiated the previous November.

Castilian troops entered the Alhambra through the Gate of Seven Floors and occupied the fortified palace complex. Gutierre de Cárdenas is associated with the secret advance occupation that preceded the public transfer.

Columbus's first-voyage journal says he witnessed the monarchs' banners being raised on the Alhambra, and the defeated ruler leaving Granada and paying homage to the monarchs and to Prince Juan.

Brought forward by fear of revolt

Granada was isolated, besieged and threatened by hunger. Fear that opposition inside the city might derail the agreement helped bring the transfer forward, ahead of the forty days the capitulations had allowed.

Íñigo López de Mendoza, count of Tendilla, was entrusted with securing the conquered fortress and city.

What ended, and what did not

By the end of the day royal standards flew over an occupied Alhambra, the Nasrid government had ceased to rule, and Boabdil had withdrawn toward the Alpujarras.

The transfer ended independent Muslim political rule in Iberia, not Muslim presence: a large population remained in Granada, initially under the capitulations' protections for religion, property, law and local institutions.

The chronicles differ over the precise sequence and location of the several handovers, and the celebrated 1882 painting by Francisco Pradilla is not eyewitness evidence for the ceremony.

Thursday, 6 September 1492

Columbus sailed from the port of La Gomera on the morning of Thursday, 6 September 1492 with all three vessels, after taking on water, firewood, meat and other provisions.

A vessel arriving from El Hierro reported that three Portuguese caravels were allegedly cruising nearby to seize him. The journal presents Portuguese jealousy as Columbus's interpretation rather than as independently established fact.

Two days going nowhere

The fleet made almost no immediate progress. Calm left it between La Gomera and Tenerife the following morning, and it remained nearly stationary until a northeast wind arose late on 8 September.

Once that wind arrived the ships took a westward course. La Gomera had been their final provisioning stop before the ocean passage.

What the record actually is

The voyage itself had begun at Palos on 3 August; the Canaries stop was for repairs and supplies, and the Pinta had returned to La Gomera on 2 September.

Columbus's original log is lost. The surviving Diario is Bartolomé de las Casas's later abridgement, which sometimes summarises Columbus in the third person and sometimes preserves apparent first-person passages.

The 6 September date is explicit in it. The journal says only "the port of La Gomera"; identifying that with present-day San Sebastián is conventional.

One documented man, one merchant

The concrete 1502 record concerns Juan de Córdoba, a Seville merchant, who sent one enslaved Black man to Hispaniola alongside other commercial agents to help sell merchandise.

It followed a royal instruction of 16 September 1501 in which Ferdinand and Isabella told the incoming governor Nicolás de Ovando that Black slaves and other slaves born under Christian rule could be allowed to travel to the Indies. Jews, Muslims, heretics and recent converts were excluded; certain enslaved Black people were explicitly not.

Four different firsts

The listing's claim collapses several distinct questions. A free Black man — Juan Moreno, or Juan Prieto — is documented in connection with Columbus's early voyages, so these were not the first Africans in the Americas.

The earliest enslaved Black arrivals were ladinos transported through Iberia, people who had lived in Iberian Christian society. They were not captives on a documented direct voyage from the African coast; the first presently known slave ships sailing directly from African embarkation points to the Caribbean date to the mid-1520s.

Escapes within a year

By 1503 Ovando was complaining that enslaved ladinos in Hispaniola were escaping and resisting. He asked the Crown to stop sending more, and a restrictive royal order followed that year.

No exact day, ship or passenger list for a plural 1502 group has been established. A securely documented Crown shipment of seventeen enslaved Africans followed in 1505, which is why historians keep isolated early arrivals separate from organized shipments.

Early on 24 August 1516, north of Aleppo

The armies of Ottoman Sultan Selim I and Mamluk Sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri met early on 25 Rajab 922 — 24 August 1516 — on the plain of Marj Dabiq, north of Aleppo. The battle ended in a swift Ottoman victory.

Ottoman firearm superiority contributed to the result, as did the last-minute defection of units led by Khayrbak, the Mamluk governor of Aleppo.

A sultan who vanished

Al-Ghawri collapsed during the battle and disappeared in the rout. Because his body was never recovered, the competing accounts of his end — beheaded, poisoned, crushed, or by suicide — cannot be resolved.

The Ottomans captured the Cairo Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil III and several senior qadis, while most surviving Mamluk troops fled toward Damascus.

What was not settled that day

The victory left Aleppo exposed, and Ottoman forces entered the city four days later, on 28 August.

Egypt remained under Mamluk resistance until 1517, and Cairo went without an effective sultan until Tumanbay's investiture around 10 October 1516.

Published army strengths and casualty totals for the battle vary enormously, and scholars disagree over whether the captured caliph and qadis formally offered allegiance to Selim afterward.

A letter, not a hammer

On 31 October 1517 Martin Luther wrote respectfully to Albrecht of Brandenburg, archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg, and enclosed ninety-five propositions concerning indulgences. Albrecht was the senior authority responsible for the campaign Luther was criticizing.

Whether Luther also posted the theses on the Castle Church door — and whether on that day — is disputed. He never mentioned a door-posting, and the story was first recorded nearly three decades later. Posting academic notices was routine in any case, so the defiant hammering scene is dramatized.

What the ninety-five actually argued

The propositions invited a disputation at Wittenberg and asked absent scholars to take part by correspondence. No evidence shows the proposed formal debate ever took place.

The text challenged claims that indulgences freed people from every penalty while still recognizing a limited, declaratory role for papal remission. Thesis 38 says papal remission should not be despised.

Three printings by New Year

There was no instantaneous break with Rome and no documented public debate. The theses circulated in manuscript and, within weeks, appeared in three German printings — Leipzig, Nuremberg and Basel.

Albrecht referred them to theologians and to Rome, which turned the dispute into an ecclesiastical case.

A letter dated 10 January 1519

On that day the Hieronymite friars Luis de Figueroa and Alonso de Santo Domingo reported to Charles V that viruelas — the pustular sickness generally identified as smallpox — was still raging among Hispaniola's Indigenous population. The outbreak had probably begun in December 1518 rather than starting sometime in 1519 as the listing says.

The friars reported that almost one-third of the remaining Indigenous people had already died or were dying. The same letter said Indigenous people on San Juan — Puerto Rico — had begun dying of the same disease.

Written by men counting labour

The mortality disrupted a colonial programme that was concentrating surviving Taíno people into settlements, and it threatened the labour available for Hispaniola's gold mines. That economic alarm is what prompted the report.

Those figures were produced by colonial officials concerned with labour and mining; the near-one-third proportion is contemporary but cannot be independently counted. Taíno communities were already under severe strain from enslavement, forced labour, displacement, hunger and earlier disease.

A pandemic story that will not hold

Alfred Crosby grouped the later spread through Mexico, Central America and perhaps Peru into a pandemic beginning in 1519. That chronology is now too compressed.

Central Mexico's well-documented outbreak began in 1520, after the Narváez expedition reached the Gulf coast. A pre-conquest Andean epidemic identified as smallpox is dated by some scholars to around 1524–1526 and rejected by others. Las Casas later said the disease was carried by someone from Castile, but the specific carrier and chain of transmission cannot be identified.

The identification itself rests on retrospective description. Sixteenth-century viruelas named a pustular appearance and could cover diseases other than smallpox; smallpox is the best-supported reading of the friars' report, not a laboratory finding.

Late February, not 4 March

The best-supported modern chronology, from INAH, places Hernán Cortés's arrival at the Maya island of Cozumel around 27 February 1519. The listed 4 March comes from older reference traditions; some chronologies attach 4 or 5 March to an attempted departure from Cozumel followed by a return.

Cortés had sailed from Cuba that February despite Governor Diego Velázquez's attempt to revoke his command, with eleven ships and, in the INAH reconstruction, 508 soldiers and 100 sailors.

Captives freed, property returned

Pedro de Alvarado's ship arrived first. According to Bernal Díaz, the island's inhabitants fled and Alvarado's party seized food, religious objects and three people — two men and one woman — along with about forty chickens.

When Cortés arrived he imprisoned the pilot Camacho for separating from the fleet, rebuked Alvarado, freed the captives and returned the seized property.

Two castaways, two answers

During the stay the expedition learned of two Spanish shipwreck survivors living among Maya communities. Jerónimo de Aguilar joined Cortés and became a Maya–Spanish interpreter before the fleet continued to Tabasco.

Gonzalo Guerrero stayed with his Maya family. Neither the Mexica nor La Malinche was present at Cozumel: the islanders were Maya, and she joined the expedition later, in Tabasco.

Wednesday, 28 November 1520

Antonio Pigafetta, who accompanied the expedition, records that on Wednesday, 28 November 1520 the fleet came out of the strait and entered what he called the Pacific Sea.

The ships that emerged were Trinidad, Concepción and Victoria. Santiago had been wrecked earlier while reconnoitring the coast, and San Antonio had deserted inside the strait — men aboard confined Captain Álvaro de Mesquita and turned back toward Spain.

Two records of the same passage

Francisco Albo's navigational log records the fleet issuing from the strait past the western capes later identified as Cabo Fermoso and Cabo Deseado, and then sailing northwest and north.

Magellan had pressed on after reconnaissance boats confirmed that the maze of channels opened onto a great western sea, and after searching unsuccessfully for the missing San Antonio.

What the sources do not say

Pigafetta's surviving account already uses terms meaning Pacific or peaceful sea, but records no naming ceremony on 28 November. His original journal is lost; four later manuscript versions survive.

These were the first recorded European ships to sail from the Atlantic into the Pacific through the southern South American strait. Vasco Núñez de Balboa had reached the ocean's American shore in 1513.

Pigafetta puts the subsequent voyage without fresh provisions at three months and twenty days.

Late afternoon, 16 November 1532

Atahualpa entered Cajamarca's plaza late in the afternoon of 16 November 1532 in a litter, accompanied by a ceremonial retinue. Hernando Pizarro's account says he left his armed men behind after Spanish assurances that he could come unarmed.

Francisco Pizarro had divided his 168 mounted and foot soldiers among the buildings bordering the plaza, where they waited armed and out of sight.

An exchange, then the attack

The Dominican Vicente de Valverde approached Atahualpa with Christian and Spanish claims to authority. After their exchange the Spaniards attacked with cavalry, cannon and steel weapons, killing or wounding many members of the retinue and seizing Atahualpa alive.

Spanish and Indigenous accounts differ over Valverde's precise words, over whether the object handed to Atahualpa was a Bible, a breviary or another Christian book, and over whether he threw it or merely dropped it.

What the plaza was, and was not

This was not 168 Spaniards defeating Atahualpa's field army. The immediate victims were the ruler's crowded, largely unprepared ceremonial retinue inside the plaza; his principal armed force remained outside Cajamarca.

Francisco de Xerez reported more than 2,000 Inca dead excluding the wounded — an eyewitness-era estimate rather than a verifiable body count.

The only commonly reported Spanish wound in the plaza was to Francisco Pizarro's hand, inflicted by another Spaniard as he tried to keep Atahualpa alive.

Midnight in the Wei valley

Around midnight on 23 January 1556 a destructive earthquake struck the Wei River region of Shaanxi during the Jiajing reign. Ming records say the ground shook simultaneously in Shaanxi, Shanxi and Henan.

Accounts describe city walls and buildings collapsing or sinking, the ground opening, springs erupting, the Wei River overflowing, and hills, roads and waterways substantially altered. In the loess plateau, cliff-cut cave dwellings and landslides buried inhabitants; the survivor Qin Keda reported entire cave-dwelling families crushed.

By morning

Survivors searched for relatives and dug people out of debris. At noon, survivors had still not eaten because their cooking vessels, grain and flour were buried. Fires, flooding, landslides and continuing shocks compounded the destruction, and Qin's account says officials answered looting and panic with summary executions.

The date is the conventional Julian rendering; the same instant is 2 February in the proleptic Gregorian calendar, and the twelfth day of the twelfth month of Jiajing 34 in the Chinese calendar.

The number, and what it is

The Ming Veritable Records preserve a memorial reporting at least 830,000 named dead plus uncounted others. That figure comes from a memorial preserved in annals, not a forensic count, and scholars differ over whether it represents direct deaths or longer-term demographic loss.

Magnitude is likewise reconstructed. Estimates derived from historical intensity reached 8.25–8.5, while a 2020 study of the faults found Mw 7.5 plausible and Mw 8.0 a reasonable upper limit. That work finds the Weinan Fault probably ruptured, likely together with the Huashan segment — about 90 km of fault in combination.