this day in history

On 16 August 1717, Prince Eugene of Savoy broke an Ottoman army twice the size of his own in the mist outside Belgrade. It was a masterpiece of tactical audacity - and a reminder of how quickly imperial triumphs unravel.

On 15 August 1209, Carcassonne - the supposedly impregnable stronghold of the Trencavel viscounts and shield of the Cathar heresy - surrendered to the Albigensian Crusade. The Pope called it a holy war. The map of France calls it something else.

On 14 August 70 BC, a Roman jury convicted the governor Gaius Verres of extortion after his own advocate, Quintus Hortensius, gave up the defence as hopeless. The case that dethroned Rome's most celebrated lawyer made the reputation of the man who beat him: Cicero.

On 13 August 1876, Das Rheingold opened the first complete Ring cycle at the first Bayreuth Festival. Wagner's politics have aged badly. The fifteen-hour work he built a theatre to house has not.

On 12 August 1624, Charles de La Vieuville - the minister who had personally forced Richelieu onto the royal council four months earlier - was arrested for corruption. By the next evening, the cardinal had his job, and would keep it for eighteen years.

On 11 August 1315, Edward II of England stopped at St Albans and could not find bread for himself or his household. Three years of ruined harvests followed, killing perhaps a tenth of Northern Europe. The richest continent on earth was, within living memory of its own kings, unable to feed itself.

On 10 August 1519, Ferdinand Magellan's fleet left Seville to circle the globe. He died two-thirds of the way through, killed on a beach in the Philippines by a chieftain named Lapu-Lapu - about whom almost nothing certain is known, and who is now that country's first national hero.

On 9 August 378, Emperor Valens marched an exhausted army into a Gothic cavalry charge at Adrianople and lost two-thirds of it in an afternoon. His body was never recovered - fitting, since the disaster had started years earlier as an administrative failure, not a battle.

On 8 August 870, exactly a year after their nephew died, Louis the German and Charles the Bald finished carving up his kingdom - a split they had actually agreed to a year before he died. Charles the Bald, in particular, made a career out of showing up at family funerals with the paperwork ready.

Joseph Marie Jacquard died on 7 August 1834, decades after a Lyon mob smashed his automated loom and sold it for scrap. The punched cards that survived became the ancestor of every computer running today.