500 CE until 1500 CE
When the air is just right, a large ring appears around the moon. A similar effect makes it look like three suns are rising at once; this may have helped the English king Edward IV win the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross in 1461.
July 15 is Saint Swithun’s Day. Legend has it that, if it rains today, we’re in for forty more days of bad weather. It’s like Groundhog Day, but instead of a whistlepig there’s a saint who was buried outdoors.
Batman lives in Gotham City. Where did the name come from? Its history follows a circuitous route via the 19th century equivalent of Mad magazine, smart idiots who hated public infrastructure, goats, and Robin Hood’s King John.
For three years in the middle of the 12th century, the Tu’i Tonga Empire was ruled by a piece of wood.
A tiny yolkless egg shows up in your henhouse. Today, we know this to be a chicken’s first training egg. In the 12th century? It came from a rooster, and you better throw it over your house or it will be born a monster.
Most people know that smallpox was the first disease that we have completely eradicated in the wild. But what was the second, and what does it have to do with Egyptian plagues, measles, and cattle?
Around 1311 CE, the mansa (sultan) of the Mali Empire sent hundreds of ships to find the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. They were lost at sea, so on the next expedition he sailed into the Atlantic himself. He was never seen again.
We think of rocket launchers as a modern invention, but the Koreans were using them four hundred years ago. The hwacha could fire two hundred rockets at once, blowing up enemies more than a hundred metres away.
In 1492, the Columbus expedition sighted and visited land. We’re still not sure which island in the Caribbean he landed on, but did he see a UFO the night before?
The hand is a flexible and convenient mnemonic device. The knuckle mnemonic tells us the number of days in a month, but a musical mnemomic called the Guidonian hand has been around for eight hundred years.
