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Saint Nicholas's Day, not October

The traditional date for this event is 6 December 1273, the feast of Saint Nicholas — not 6 October, as the listing has it. On that day Thomas Aquinas reportedly underwent an extraordinary alteration while celebrating Mass in Naples.

Canonization testimony attributed to Bartholomew of Capua, a legally trained contemporary, says that after the Mass Aquinas ceased his regular writing and dictation and put aside his writing instruments.

Straw

When his companion and secretary Reginald of Piperno pressed him to continue, Aquinas reportedly answered that he could not, because what he had written seemed slight — like straw — compared with what had been revealed to him.

That line is reported speech transmitted by others, not a surviving sentence in Aquinas's hand. The whole episode reaches us through canonization testimony and hagiographic biographies recorded decades later.

Stopped at Question 90

The Summa halts in the middle of its treatment of penance, at Part III, Question 90, and was still unfinished at Aquinas's death. By then it ran to 512 questions and 2,669 articles.

The familiar ending was supplied afterwards: a posthumous Supplement assembled largely from his earlier commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, not newly completed work. Tradition reads the Naples episode as mystical revelation; modern writers have also proposed stroke, illness or exhaustion, and none of these can be proved.

Day one belonged to Chen

Chen Youliang had failed to take Nanchang. Abandoning most of the siege in 1363, he sought a decisive naval engagement, and on 30 August his larger fleet met Zhu Yuanzhang's relief force on Lake Poyang in Jiangxi.

Chen's deep-draft armored tower ships held close formation and repelled the attacks. Zhu's flagship grounded during the assault, was freed by the wakes of the fighting ships and escaped. Modern sources differ by a day on the opening date, giving 29 or 30 August.

Five weeks, not one battle

The initial fleet engagement ran four days. Over those days Zhu exploited shallower-draft vessels, low seasonal water, a favourable wind, firearms and fire ships, and his land force relieved Nanchang.

He then blockaded Chen's route toward the Yangzi for about a month. The final battle began on 4 October; Chen Youliang was killed during his attempted escape and the surviving Han force surrendered. Accounts differ over whether the fatal arrow struck his head or his eye.

Numbers and names to handle carefully

Reported force sizes vary sharply. Dreyer-based accounts give Zhu about 100,000 people and nearly 1,000 vessels against roughly 300,000 of Chen's soldiers, sailors and marines; other retellings say 200,000 versus 650,000. These are reported source figures, not verified headcounts.

The belligerents were Chen's breakaway state, normally called Chen Han, and Zhu's rival regime — often called Ming retrospectively, though Zhu did not proclaim that dynasty until 1368.

What the Sejong Sillok entry says

The Veritable Records of King Sejong, at the close of the twelfth lunar month of his twenty-fifth year — 1443 — report that the king personally made 28 vernacular letters and called the system Hunminjeongeum.

The entry describes the letters as combining in initial, medial and final sounds. It says the system could write both learned textual material and Korea's vernacular speech.

The entry records the creation as happening during that month, and no source identifies a particular day. Its filing position is not proof that creation or announcement happened then.

Why 30 December is the edge of a window, not a day

The entry is filed under the 30th day of the twelfth lunar month, but its text says only “this month,” not “this day.”

In the adopted conversion, that lunar month spans approximately 30 December 1443 to 28 January 1444 in the proleptic Gregorian calendar. The listed 30 December is the opening of that window — the earliest possible Gregorian date, not a conversion of the filing day and not a verified event date.

The exact day of the 1446 publication is unknown as well, and South Korea's modern Hangul Day is commemorative rather than a preserved date.

The script goes to court, and meets a protest

The entry was a record of the script's creation, not publication of the surviving explanatory manual. On 16 February 1444 Sejong assigned scholars to translate a rhyme book using the new letters, and four days later Choe Manri, deputy director of the Hall of Worthies, led a memorial opposing the script's use.

The explanatory book — the Hunminjeongeum with its Haerye commentary — was promulgated in the ninth lunar month of 1446. Jeong Inji wrote its postface, though the official accounts describe the commentary as the collective work of Hall of Worthies scholars rather than naming him its leader.

Sejong's original inventory was 17 consonants and 11 vowels. The Academy of Korean Studies names eight scholars traditionally credited with compiling the 1446 explanations and examples.

25 November 1491, the royal camp in the Vega

At the royal camp in the Vega of Granada on 25 November 1491, Ferdinand and Isabella concluded capitulations with Yusuf ibn Comixa and Abu-Casim al Muley, acting for Granada's ruler Muhammad XII, known as Boabdil.

Granada's side agreed to deliver the Alhambra and the city's fortifications after a specified interval, and to become subjects of the Catholic Monarchs.

What the monarchs promised in return

The monarchs guaranteed security of persons and property, continued possession of homes and estates, protection of mosques and religious endowments, and adjudication of Muslim disputes by Muslim law and Muslim judges.

The agreement also provided regulated emigration to North Africa for inhabitants who chose to leave, including royal shipping during an initial period.

The Granada municipal transcription of Luis del Mármol's recension specifies ten large ships maintained for seventy days, three years of property-tax relief, and 500 prominent relatives held as hostages for ten days during the transfer.

The city did not change hands that day

The Alhambra was not handed over on 25 November. Muhammad XII formally surrendered Granada on 2 January 1492.

How long he was given is itself unsettled: the Mármol-based transcription says forty days, while a modern scholarly synthesis reports surrender within sixty.

"Treaty of Granada" compresses a bundle of capitulations and related grants, and surviving recensions and later transcriptions organise and count the clauses differently — so the traditional figure of sixty-seven articles describes one textual tradition rather than every instrument.

5 August 1498, on the Paria Peninsula

Boats from Columbus's third-voyage squadron reached the Paria Peninsula, on the South American mainland in present-day Venezuela, on 5 August 1498.

A Spanish agent performed a formal act of possession on the mainland for Ferdinand and Isabella, following the customary ceremonies. Columbus called the country the "Island of Gracia," not realising that it was continental South America.

Who actually went ashore

The accounts disagree. Captain Pedro de Terreros reportedly planted a cross and took possession on Columbus's behalf, while Captain Hernán Pérez later maintained that Columbus himself came ashore.

Columbus was reportedly suffering from prolonged insomnia and badly impaired eyes at the time.

The date of the landing and the possession ceremony is well supported; whether Columbus personally stepped ashore that day is disputed by the surviving accounts.

Pearls, gold, and a report preserved indirectly

The squadron continued west along Paria's coast within the following days, encountered populated settlements, and traded for gold ornaments and pearls.

Columbus's own third-voyage report is not an intact daily log. It survives through later copies or digests, especially Bartolomé de las Casas's work, so fine-grained reconstructions depend on comparing derivative accounts.

The ceremony placed a formal European claim on Paria. It did not create ownership in the eyes of the Indigenous peoples already living there.

Wednesday, 22 April 1500

Cabral's India-bound fleet sighted a high, rounded mountain and lower wooded land on the coast of present-day Bahia on Wednesday, 22 April 1500.

Cabral named the mountain Monte Pascoal and, in the eyewitness wording of the fleet secretary Pero Vaz de Caminha, named the land Terra da Vera Cruz.

A night at nineteen fathoms

The crews sounded 25 fathoms. At sunset they anchored about six leagues offshore in 19 fathoms and remained there overnight.

No Portuguese landing, Indigenous encounter or formal possession ceremony is recorded on 22 April; those occurred during the following days.

Seven or eight people were first observed on the beach the next morning, and Nicolau Coelho went ashore on 23 April.

Thirteen ships bound somewhere else

The fleet was primarily an expedition to establish diplomatic and commercial relations in India, not one organised principally to colonise Brazil. Whether its far westward course deliberately sought land or produced an unintended landfall remains debated.

Caminha wrote Terra da Vera Cruz, while other early accounts and later tradition used Ilha da Vera Cruz; the initial naming formula is not uniform across sources.

Calling the event a discovery reflects a European documentary and imperial perspective: the land was already inhabited, and possible earlier European sightings remain debated.

Cairo, 28 to 30 January 1517

After losing at Ridaniyya on 22 January 1517, Tumanbay secretly re-entered Ottoman-occupied Cairo during the night of 27–28 January and attacked the Ottoman garrison.

Mamluk soldiers and Cairene residents constructed barricades and trenches, and Ottoman units used cannon and firearms through several days of street fighting.

The numbers in the Ottoman log

On 30 January Selim's forces definitively retook Cairo, and Tumanbay escaped with a small group of followers.

The contemporary Ottoman log attributed to Haydar Çelebi reports 4,000 Egyptian soldiers and Arabs killed, and about 400 captured Circassians brought before Selim and beheaded.

Captured Mamluks were subjected to mass executions while the Ottoman government simultaneously proclaimed amnesties to induce others to surrender.

What 30 January did not end

Cairo's fall did not terminate Tumanbay's reign or Mamluk resistance. He remained at large until late March and was executed in April.

Al-Mutawakkil III was not deported that day. He was still active in Cairo after the fighting, and his forced journey toward Constantinople did not begin until 2 June 1517.

No contemporary evidence supports the later story that he ceremonially transferred the caliphate to Selim.

13 September 1541

John Calvin returned to Geneva on 13 September 1541 — the city whose General Council had banished him and Guillaume Farel on 23 April 1538.

On arriving, he told Geneva's Council that the church needed an orderly constitution committed to writing.

Thirteen days to a draft

The authorities placed ministers and councillors on a working group to prepare the church regulations later called the Ecclesiastical Ordinances.

A draft was before the Council on 26 September. After revision, the General Council approved the Ordinances on 20 November 1541.

What he did not bring back

Calvin did not establish Protestant worship in Geneva for the first time. Farel had been organising Reformed worship there since 1533, and Calvin himself had already worked in the city from 1536 to 1538.

Nor did he unveil a finished doctrinal system on 13 September; his immediate project was an institutional and liturgical constitution for an existing Reformed church.

The settlement did not make him an unchecked civic ruler: the Ordinances divided religious functions among pastors, teachers, elders and deacons, while Geneva's councils retained coercive civic powers.

The traditional first of April

Local tradition assigns 1 April 1545 to a Spanish group headed by Juan de Villarroel taking possession of Cerro Rico, after confirming Diego Huallpa's discovery of rich silver ore.

What is firmly supported is broader and vaguer: in April 1545 Spaniards began exploiting the first silver vein revealed by the Indigenous discoverer. Sources variously distinguish discovery, possession, mine registration, first exploitation and the beginning of settlement, and later April dates also appear in the historiography.

A camp, not a city

A mining settlement grew beside Cerro Rico without a conventional city-founding ceremony, and no foundation act securely survives. It was an asiento de minas — a mining seat — dependent on La Plata rather than a formally constituted imperial city.

The mountain rises to roughly 4,800 metres and the settlement sat at about 4,000. Potosí did not receive its own council and territorial jurisdiction until 1561, sixteen years after the rush began.

Who found it

Diego Huallpa, also written Gualpa or Wallpa, was an Indigenous Andean prospector whose later testimony credited him with the find. Once Spaniards learned of it, claimants moved rapidly to possess and exploit the veins.

In that testimony Huallpa said a fierce wind knocked him down and his hands sank into silver-rich ground. The better-known llama-and-campfire story is one of several later legends.

St James's Palace, 17 November 1558

Mary I died at St James's Palace on 17 November 1558, aged 42 years and nine months. Even modern accounts disagree on the hour: Historic Royal Palaces gives approximately 4–5 a.m., while a medical-historical study gives 7 a.m.

Her prolonged final illness was marked by fever, abdominal swelling, headaches, confusion and failing vision. Proposed explanations include a reproductive-system cancer, influenza or another fever, ovarian disease and a pituitary tumour; the medical-historical study leaves the question unresolved.

Queen by the same day

The crown passed immediately to her half-sister Elizabeth, whose accession proclamation treated subjects' allegiance as beginning from the time of Mary's death.

Elizabeth was at Hatfield when Mary died and was proclaimed queen in London that same day. A London company record says caps and gloves were thrown into the air at the Cheapside proclamation at 11 a.m.

What did not change that day

Philip II, Mary's frequently absent consort, acquired no continuing right to rule England after her death.

England's formal religious settlement was not altered on accession day; the principal parliamentary settlement came in 1559.

Among Mary's effects was a prayer book opened to intercessions for expectant mothers; Historic Royal Palaces says the page was stained with tears.

Antwerp, 22 July 1581

At an ordinary meeting in Antwerp on 22 July 1581, the rebel States General adopted a resolution declaring Philip II to have forfeited his lordship over the participating Netherlands provinces.

The resolution ordered the cancellation of Philip's seal, substitution of the Generality's seal, and preparation of an ordinance in the form of a placard.

Four days to a placard

Jan van Asseliers, secretary of the central government, prepared the surviving draft using the 22 July resolution. The manuscript is covered with deletions and marginal additions.

The resulting Plakkaat van Verlatinghe was dated at The Hague on 26 July, printed and circulated as law, releasing officials and inhabitants from their oaths to Philip.

Replacing a lord, not founding a republic

The measure sought to replace a failed lord. It did not announce that the provinces had decided to form a republic.

Francis, Duke of Anjou had already contracted with the States in 1580; he was not newly appointed sovereign at the 22 July meeting, and he was inaugurated as Duke of Brabant only in February 1582.

"Act of Abjuration" is a conventional English title: the measure contained no ceremonial oath by which the States General collectively abjured Philip.

8 August 1588 — or 29 July, depending on the calendar

During the preceding night, eight English fireships were sent toward the Armada's anchorage off Calais, causing Spanish captains to cut anchor cables and scatter.

On 8 August 1588 in the Gregorian calendar — 29 July under the Julian calendar then used in England — the English fleet, about 136 vessels after reinforcement, closed with the dispersed Armada off Gravelines.

A day at close range

The running battle lasted through the day. Spanish ships were heavily damaged, some were driven ashore, and at least three sank.

A Spanish captain's estimate, cited in Geoffrey Parker and Colin Martin's source notes, gives about 600 killed and 800 injured, although only a few ships sank in the action.

Driven the wrong way

Unable to regain a westward route through the Channel or make the planned junction with Parma's invasion army, the Armada was forced into the North Sea and began the return voyage around Scotland.

English pursuit continued until 12 August, when ammunition and supplies ran low.

The action did not physically destroy the Armada: many of the expedition's ship losses occurred later, during the storm-battered return around Scotland and Ireland.