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On 17 July 1402, Zhu Di crowned himself the Yongle Emperor four days after his nephew's palace burned to the ground with three unidentifiable bodies inside. He then erased that reign from the calendar, had 873 people executed over one scholar's refusal to pick up a pen, and built one of the most productive 22 years in Chinese history.
On 16 July 1054, three papal legates laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia during the Saturday liturgy. The pope who had sent them had been dead for three months. Historians still call it the formal start of the Great Schism.
On 15 July 1099, Crusaders broke into Jerusalem after a five-week siege and three years of marching. Raymond of Aguilers described men riding through the Temple Mount in blood up to their horses' bridles.
On 14 July 1789, Parisians stormed the Bastille after four hours of fighting that killed 98 attackers and one defender. Inside, they found seven prisoners in a fortress the state had already scheduled for demolition.
On 13 July 1260, the Livonian Order marched roughly 8,000 men and 190 knights to Lake Durbe to punish a Samogitian raid. It lost its own master, its Prussian marshal, and 150 knights in an afternoon, after its own allies walked off the field over a prisoner dispute.
On 12 July 1562, Fray Diego de Landa burned thousands of Maya idols and 27 painted codices at Maní. Only four Maya books survive anywhere today. The man who destroyed them later wrote the one document that let scholars start reading what was left.
In the autumn of 911, Charles the Simple gave the Viking warlord Rollo a stretch of land around Rouen he could not defend anyway. No copy of the deal survives, and the best account of it was written a century later by a chronicler paid to flatter Rollo's descendants. Out of that shaky record came Normandy, and eventually England's ruling class.
On 10 July 1553, Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen of England. She was sixteen, Protestant, and a pawn in a plot to keep Mary Tudor off the throne. Nine days later the Privy Council abandoned her. Within a year she was dead.
On 9 July 1762, Catherine rode into St Petersburg in a borrowed Guards uniform, won over three regiments in a morning, and forced her husband, Peter III, to sign away the Russian throne by nightfall. He was dead within eight days; she reigned for the next thirty-four years.
On 8 July 1709, Peter the Great crushed Charles XII's Swedish army at Poltava. Charles fought from a litter with a bullet wound in his foot. Nine years of Swedish invincibility ended in an afternoon, and Russia stepped into the space it left behind.