— Volume CXLVII · A Daily Almanac of Notable Events —
[ Wednesday ]
in the year of our calendar MMXXVI
“The present is the living sum-total of the whole past.”
— Thomas Carlyle, Characteristics, 1831
Romulus, having marked out the boundary furrow with a bronze plough drawn by a white bull and white cow, is said by traditional reckoning to have founded the city of Rome upon the Palatine Hill. The date, recorded by Varro as the eleventh of the Kalends of May, is observed in the Roman calendar as the Parilia, a pastoral festival of purification predating the city itself.
— Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, I.7; Varro, De Re Rustica, II.1.9.
In the wake of Alexander's death at Babylon, the partition of his empire among the Diadochi continues this spring; Perdiccas, holding the royal seal, summons the satraps to council. The dissolution of the largest empire then known sets the stage for three centuries of Hellenistic civilisation across three continents.
— Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, XVIII.
The Berber commander Tariq ibn Ziyad, having crossed the strait that would later bear his name (Jabal Tariq — Gibraltar), advances into the Iberian peninsula, beginning the rapid Umayyad conquest of Visigothic Hispania. Within seven years, all but the mountainous north would fall under Caliphate rule.
— Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam, Futuh Misr, c. 871.
A young woman from Domrémy-la-Pucelle, having been examined by the doctors at Poitiers and granted command of the relief force, enters the besieged city of Orléans by the Burgundy Gate. Jeanne d'Arc would, within nine days, lift the seven-month English siege — an event the chronicler Jean Chartier described as “the turning of the tide of the war.”
— Jean Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, c. 1461.
Gran Canaria falls to the forces of the Crown of Castile after a five-year campaign, completing a key stage of the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands. The archipelago would become the principal staging-point for transatlantic voyages within a single decade.
— Bernaldéz, Memorias del reinado de los Reyes Católicos.
Henry VIII of England is proclaimed king at Greenwich Palace following the death of his father Henry VII the previous day. The young king, not yet eighteen, would within two months marry Catherine of Aragon and inaugurate a reign whose ecclesiastical convulsions would re-fashion the English state.
— Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke, 1548.
Lieutenant James Cook, in command of HMB Endeavour, makes his first landing on the eastern coast of New Holland at a place he records as “Stingray Harbour” — later renamed Botany Bay in honour of the botanical riches collected by Joseph Banks. The encounter, lasting eight days, marked the beginning of European charting of the eastern Australian seaboard.
— Cook, Journals, ed. Beaglehole, vol. I, pp. 304–313.
Federal forces under Flag Officer David G. Farragut capture New Orleans, the largest city of the Confederacy and the chief port of the Mississippi delta. The city's surrender, accomplished without naval bombardment of the civilian quarter, is regarded by Mahan as the campaign that “cut the Confederacy in two.”
— A.T. Mahan, The Gulf and Inland Waters, 1883.
The Easter Rising at Dublin enters its sixth and final day; Pádraig Pearse issues the order of unconditional surrender at the General Post Office on Sackville Street. Sixteen of the leaders would be executed by firing squad in the weeks that followed — transforming, as Yeats wrote, “a terrible beauty” into the founding myth of the Irish Republic.
— W.B. Yeats, Easter, 1916; Foster, Modern Ireland, 1988.
American forces of the U.S. 7th Army liberate the concentration camp at Dachau, Bavaria; in the same hours, German forces in Italy sign the instrument of unconditional surrender at Caserta, and Adolf Hitler concludes his political testament in the Führerbunker at Berlin. The European war's end stood at a matter of days.
— Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau, 2001; Kershaw, The End, 2011.
Operation Frequent Wind concludes the evacuation of American personnel and at-risk Vietnamese civilians from Saigon by helicopter from the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy and the Defense Attaché Office — the largest such operation in history. The following morning, the city would fall to North Vietnamese forces, ending the Second Indochina War.
— Snepp, Decent Interval, 1977.
Civil unrest erupts in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the four police officers tried for the assault of Rodney King. Six days of disorder would result in the deaths of sixty-three persons and damage estimated at one billion dollars — the costliest urban uprising in twentieth-century America.
— Webster Commission, The City in Crisis, 1992.
At Westminster Abbey, His Royal Highness Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, is married to Catherine Middleton in a ceremony witnessed by an estimated two billion persons — the most widely observed marriage in human history. The British monarchy, in the closing months of the long reign of Elizabeth II, enters its modern phase.
— The Times (London), 30 April 2011, p. 1.