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A death dated by a deed

No contemporary narrative identifies the day Osman died. The evidence is an endowment document from Mekece, dated 724 AH / 1324 CE, which shows Osman already dead and Orhan succeeded to his place.

That charter is regarded as the earliest surviving Ottoman document whose authenticity is not disputed. Modern scholarly chronologies place Osman's death and Orhan's accession around 1324 on the strength of it.

The decisive evidence for the succession is therefore a legal endowment, not the much later narrative chronicles.

The one place he cannot have died

The claim that Osman died at Bursa in 1324 is chronologically untenable: Bursa did not fall to the Ottomans until 1326. A tradition places his death at Söğüt instead, and says his remains were moved to Bursa later.

Later Ottoman chronicles commonly put his death after the conquest of Bursa, but they were written at least a century afterwards and conflict with the 1324 document.

The cause is unknown. Later tradition attributes it to illness, often gout, but no contemporary source establishes one.

What the Mekece charter names

The document records Orhan alongside four other sons of Osman, a daughter, wives and three sons of Orhan — rare contemporary evidence for the family of a dynasty whose early generations are otherwise barely documented.

Orhan appointed Şerefeddin Mukbil to administer the endowment of the Mekece dervish lodge. Osman's birthplace, birth year, accession year and exact age at death all remain uncertain; the conventional reign of about twenty-five years is derived from conventional endpoints, circa 1299–1324.

Within the limited resolution of that evidence, the succession appears to have been orderly, and Orhan ruled until about 1362.

A date that has to be converted

The near-contemporary Split chronicle A Cutheis Tabula puts the start of the plague epidemic in the Dalmatian port at Christmas Day, 25 December 1347 by modern reckoning. Its surviving formula reads as 25 December 1348.

Because the chronicle uses a Nativity-style year that begins on Christmas Day, historians interpret that as 25 December 1347 in the modern January-to-December system. Silently rewriting the manuscript's 1348 as 1347 makes the date look more certain than it is.

What Marino a Cutheis actually recorded

'First cases' is modern shorthand. The chronicle records the beginning of an epidemic, not named or medically diagnosed patients.

It describes the deaths of nobles and other residents, flight from the city, and bodies left without customary burial. It calls the dead innumerable and supplies no death total at all.

Cutheis depicts families facing an immediate choice: flee to save themselves, or stay and bury their relatives.

What the chronicle does not say

It identifies no ship, traveller or route as the source. Cutheis does not mention Caffa and names no Genoese plague ships; maritime introduction through the stricken Adriatic is plausible context rather than something the source preserves.

The Tabula survives only in fragments, and its wolves, demonic imagery and unnatural animal behaviour work as literary and moral motifs as much as observation.

The record of Split's outbreak is a fragmentary medieval chronicle, not a public-health register of the first diagnosed patient in Croatia.

Thursday within the octave of Epiphany, 1386

At Vawkavysk on 11 January 1386, four Polish envoys issued a document in the name of Poland's nobles, magnates and community of the realm, choosing and accepting Jogaila as their prospective lord and king and giving Queen Jadwiga to him in lawful matrimony.

They were Włodko of Charbinowice, captain of Lublin; Piotr Szafraniec, sub-steward of Kraków; Mikołaj Bogoria, castellan of Zawichost; and Krystyn of Ostrów, warden of Kazimierz.

The same document guaranteed safe passage and conduct in Poland for Jogaila, his brothers, Lithuanian nobles and their representatives.

Why he needed a piece of paper to cross the border

Jogaila had ratified his own side of the marriage-and-crown negotiations at Krewo the previous August. Before entering Poland without an army, he needed the Polish political community's reciprocal pledge and its protection.

He was already travelling between Vilnius and Poland when the envoys reached him, so the parchment was at once a political commitment and a practical safeguard.

It was the Polish counterpart to promises Jogaila had already made — not a fresh occasion on which the conversion and marriage terms were first put to him.

Seven weeks to a coronation

The completed, public pre-election followed at Lublin on 2 February. Jogaila entered Kraków on 12 February, was baptised on 15 February, married Jadwiga on 18 February and was crowned on 4 March.

Historians describe the Vawkavysk act variously as an election, a pre-election, a reciprocal ratification or a safe-conduct; it did not itself complete the legal and ceremonial steps required for kingship.

The original is a modest parchment 29 centimetres wide and 18 high, and of its four seals only the attachment strips survive.

27 September 1480, at Medina del Campo

At Medina del Campo on 27 September 1480, Ferdinand and Isabella issued commissions under the 1478 papal bull to two Dominicans: Juan de San Martín, prior of San Pablo in Burgos, and Miguel de Morillo, associated with the order's Aragonese province.

Dr Juan Ruiz de Medina, a secular cleric and member of the royal council, served as their legal assessor. The first field team was three men.

One archdiocese, not a country

The two were commissioned to act in the archdiocese of Seville. This was a specific deployment, not the simultaneous opening of tribunals throughout the monarchs' territories.

The crown had held the appointment power since 1478 and used it only now, after an interval in which church leaders had pursued pastoral instruction of conversos.

The recognised target group was conversos — baptised Christians suspected of heresy or Judaizing — not Jews who had never converted.

What had still not happened

The commissions made the authorisation operational, but no investigation or prosecution started at Medina del Campo that day. San Martín and Morillo travelled to Seville, sought cooperation from Andalusian authorities and began work there.

People were leaving Seville before the first auto de fe, reacting to the tribunal's arrival and its demands. An auto de fe was in any case a ceremony of penance and sentencing; those condemned to death were handed to secular authorities for execution.

Torquemada's appointment and the central governing machinery came later.

Why 1506 ended up on the calendar

No contemporary document records Leonardo da Vinci finishing most of the Mona Lisa in 1506. The milestone is an inference: Giorgio Vasari wrote in 1550 that Leonardo worked on Lisa's portrait for four years, and four years added to a picture known to be underway by October 1503 lands about there.

Vasari was writing decades later and never saw the painting now in the Louvre. He also said Leonardo left the portrait unfinished.

The note in the margin of a Cicero

The secure contemporary evidence is a marginal note by Agostino Vespucci, written into a printed volume of Cicero in October 1503, saying that Leonardo was then at work on the head of Lisa del Giocondo.

That note proves Leonardo was painting a portrait of Lisa in October 1503. It does not establish the later history of the panel now in Paris.

Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo was the Florentine wife of the silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. The Louvre identifies her as the sitter, and Vespucci's note corroborates it.

The panel went to France with him

The Louvre now dates the object broadly to 1503–1519 and says Leonardo kept it, went on working on it, and left it unfinished at his death.

Leonardo took the painting to France himself. François I bought it from him in 1518 — before Leonardo died in 1519, not after.

The morning of All Saints' Day, 1512

On the morning of 1 November 1512, Michelangelo's completed vault was uncovered as Pope Julius II entered the Sistine Chapel to celebrate Mass.

Julius formally inaugurated the chapel with its new ceiling at a Solemn High Mass that day. Giorgio Vasari recorded that the vault was uncovered on All Saints' morning as the pope came in to say Mass.

31 October was the deadline, not the reveal

Michelangelo had completed the second half of the vault by 31 October, which is what made the chapel available for the next morning's liturgy.

What the finished work replaced was the chapel's earlier painted starlit ceiling. Nine Genesis scenes now ran down the centre of the vault.

Not an exhibition, and not yet "il divino"

"Exhibited to the public" is less secure than "unveiled during papal Mass." The institutional sources establish a solemn liturgical inauguration but do not document a modern-style opening to unrestricted crowds.

Vasari records satisfaction and rejoicing rather than the amazed, speechless throngs of later retellings.

The accolade "il divino" was not attached to this unveiling either. Its first securely identified literary application is Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, published in 1516.

Seven in the morning, 4 July 1519

At 7 a.m. on 4 July 1519, Martin Luther and Johann Eck formally began their phase of the Leipzig Disputation in the Pleißenburg.

Luther's appearance replaced the preceding Eck–Karlstadt phase, which had run through 3 July on free will, grace and good works — six sitting days, feast days excluded.

The stated subject that morning was the authority, or more precisely the primacy, of the Roman pope.

Divine law, or comparatively recent decrees

Eck argued that a single sovereignty in the earthly Church had been instituted by Christ and by divine law.

Luther's opposing thesis held that claims for Roman supremacy rested on comparatively recent papal decrees, contradicted by Scripture and by earlier church history.

Eck's preparatory thesis asserting the divine institution of papal supremacy had implicitly targeted Luther, and that is what drew him in.

Deference, and a complaint about absent inquisitors

Luther opened by accepting the procedural terms Karlstadt and Eck had already established.

He said he would have avoided the contentious issue out of deference to the pope and the Roman Church had Eck's thesis not drawn him into it.

He also complained in that opening that the inquisitors who had repeatedly accused him of heresy were absent now that a public examination was available.

12 December 1531, in the tradition

According to the Nican Mopohua tradition, Mary intercepted Juan Diego beside Tepeyac on 12 December 1531 while he was seeking a priest for his gravely ill uncle.

She assured him that his uncle had recovered and directed him to gather flowers from the hilltop — flowers growing, in the narrative, among rock, thorns, prickly pear and mesquite in the frost of December.

Zumárraga had asked for a convincing sign before acting on the reported request to build a shrine.

The flowers and the cloak

Juan Diego carried the flowers in his tilma to Juan de Zumárraga's residence. When he opened the garment, the flowers fell out and an image of Mary was said to appear on the cloth.

In the narrative Zumárraga and those present knelt. He removed the tilma from Juan Diego and placed it in his private chapel.

The following day the bishop's party inspected the requested shrine site and found Juan Diego's uncle recovered. The image was then displayed in Mexico City's principal church.

The dates arrived later than the story

The apparition and the miraculous imprint are matters of Catholic tradition, not events established by contemporary documentation.

The Nican Mopohua says only that the story began on a Saturday a few days into December 1531. A 2026 scholarly analysis reports that the now-familiar 9–12 December chronology was not associated with the devotion until Mateo de la Cruz's 1660 work.

New Spain still used the Julian calendar in 1531. A nominal Julian 12 December corresponds to 22 December in the proleptic Gregorian calendar; the modern feast keeps the nominal date.

Dawn, 15 November 1533, on the road to Cusco

At dawn on 15 November 1533, Francisco Pizarro arranged his horse and foot soldiers and advanced toward Cusco expecting an attack. No opposing force appeared on the road.

Manco Inca Yupanqui had warned Pizarro — then four leagues from the city — that the Atahualpa-aligned general Quizquiz intended to burn Cusco.

A Spanish advance party of about 40 horsemen had fought Quizquiz's troops outside the city the day before. Those forces withdrew during the night.

In at the hour of high mass

According to Pizarro's secretary Pedro Sancho, the force entered Cusco without further battle on Friday 15 November, "at the hour of high mass."

Pizarro lodged the Spaniards in buildings around the principal plaza but ordered them to bring their horses into the plaza and sleep in tents there in case Quizquiz's army returned. The precaution ran for a month.

Sancho was Pizarro's secretary writing an official conquest account. His figure of 200 Inca dead in the previous day's clash is the conquerors' own uncorroborated number.

Not the end of anything

The following day Pizarro recognized Manco as lord, seeking to separate Cusco's factions from Quizquiz and mobilize local forces against him.

Quizquiz remained active, and Manco launched a major rebellion and siege in 1536.

The formal Spanish foundation and naming of "the very noble and great city of Cuzco" belongs to March 1534, not to the November entry.

27 September 1540, beside the church of St Mark

Pope Paul III promulgated Regimini militantis Ecclesiae on 27 September 1540, granting papal recognition to the Society of Jesus as a religious order.

The bull was issued at Rome beside the church of St Mark and placed the new Society under papal protection.

Cardinal Bartolomeo Guidiccioni, who reviewed the proposal, had initially opposed adding another religious order but ultimately accepted the institute.

What the Formula said

The bull approved and incorporated the 1540 Formula of the Institute, which defined the Society's purposes as preaching, spiritual exercises, charitable work, Christian instruction and hearing confessions.

The Formula bound the Society and its members to papal obedience, and contemplated missions among Turks, in India, among heretics or schismatics, and among other Christians.

It also set a ceiling of sixty members. That cap was temporary and was subsequently removed.

Recognized, but not yet led

The bull approved an existing group and its Formula rather than convening anything new. After their Jerusalem plan failed, the companions had offered themselves for papal missions, decided to remain a permanent body, drafted an institute, and secured Paul III's oral approval in 1539.

The Society still had to elect a superior general. Ignatius's election took place in April 1541.

16 August 1559, in Geneva

The colophon of the definitive Latin edition records that Robert Estienne completed printing it at Geneva on 16 August 1559.

It was Estienne's last dated work; he died on 7 September.

The colophon securely establishes completion of printing, although it does not necessarily identify the first day copies were sold.

Four books, eighty chapters

The edition recast Calvin's treatise into four books and eighty chapters, advertised on its title page as so greatly enlarged that it could almost be considered a new work.

The volume ran to [16], 564 and [28] pages — theological text, preliminary matter and an index — roughly five times the size of the first Latin edition.

That four-book structure broadly echoes the Apostles' Creed, though the individual books are not merely paraphrases of four creed clauses.

How many editions is itself a question

This was Calvin's final authorially revised Latin form of the Institutes. The corresponding definitive French edition followed in 1560.

Bibliographies count editions differently, because they variously include reprints and intermediate impressions. The Folger calls this the definitive fourth edition, while other scholarly lists count five or more Latin editions.

8 April 1546: two decrees, not one

At its Fourth Session on 8 April 1546, the Council of Trent promulgated a decree receiving the listed books of the Old and New Testaments as sacred and canonical, and receiving apostolic traditions concerning faith and morals with equal reverence.

That canon decree declared anathema anyone who knowingly rejected the listed books in their entirety, as customarily read in the Catholic Church and contained in the Old Latin Vulgate, or deliberately rejected the specified traditions.

A separate decree the same day governed the edition and use of Scripture. The two were distinct enactments of one session.

What "authentic" actually covered

The second decree declared the Old Vulgate authentic for public lectures, disputations, sermons and expositions. It did not simply proclaim one particular printed Bible the Church's universally exclusive text.

There was no single standardized Vulgate printing in 1546. The same decree ordered Scripture — especially the Vulgate — printed as correctly as possible, and required ecclesiastical examination and written approval of books on sacred subjects, to be supplied free of charge.

The session did not resolve whether vernacular Bible translation and reading were legitimate, and practices continued to vary across Catholic regions.

The vote that was not this vote

The frequently repeated tally of 24 to 15 with 16 abstentions was not the vote by which the 8 April decree was promulgated.

Hubert Jedin's account treats 15 and 16 as alternative minority counts of a single preliminary vote — one taken on 15 February 1546 — rather than as 15 opponents plus a separate bloc of 16 abstainers.