Mathew Lyons

When paying off the Vikings failed to yield lasting peace, on 13 November 1002 king Æthelred ordered the slaughter of England’s Danes instead.

On 9 October 1771 masterpieces of Dutch art destined for Catherine the Great sank with the Vrouw Maria off the coast of Finland.

On 1 October 1868 King Mongkut – who reigned as Rama IV – passed away having trod a delicate course to keep Thailand free of European empires.

On 27 September 1130 a Norman usurper gained a crown from a desperate pope and the Kingdom of Sicily was born.

As the Ottoman Empire crumbled, the Greek and Armenian quarters of Smyrna were set ablaze on 13 September 1922 by the vengeful Turkish army.

On 28 August 1839, the earl of Eglinton hosted a ‘medieval’ tournament to mark Queen Victoria’s coronation. It was a damp squib.

In The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492, Marcy Norton shows through Indigenous American practices and beliefs that colonisation was a catastrophe for the natural world.

Entrepreneur Hugh Donald McIntosh struck white gold when London’s Black and White Bar opened on 1 August 1935.

On 10 July 1873, decadent duo Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud’s poetic frenzy ended with a gunshot.

In a BBC interview on 1 July 1952, self-taught linguist Michael Ventris announced that he had deciphered the Linear B script of Minoan Crete.