The foundations of the Tower of Pisa, the campanile for Pisa Cathedral (above), were laid today in 1173. Only three metres deep, and in soft, easily compressed ground, the foundations began to sink when the tower was just two storeys high. In the following century, the degree of wonk was so bad that the stonemasons made the top floors with one side taller than the other. The tower, recently restored, currently leans at a drunken 3.97 degrees. It disproves the saying of Jesus that you can’t build a house on sand, by showing that you can, but only with the help of 30 million Euros of remedial work.
At 11.02 this morning in 1945, a second atomic bomb, dropped by the United States, destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki, immediately killing an estimated 35 to 40,000 people. The world-changing atrocity came just three days after the Hiroshima bomb, and effectively ended the Second World War. Takashi Nagai, a 37 year-old Catholic physician working in the university medical school, was hurled into the air by the blast and buried under the debris of his shattered office, ‘as though a huge, invisible fist had gone wild and smashed everything in the room’. He later wrote an account of his experience in the book, The Bells of Nagasaki, which at first the US occupying forces would not let him publish.
‘The bells are ringing! These are the bells of the Angelus ringing out from the ruined cathedral, echoing across the atomic wilderness and telling us that dawn has come. Under the direction of Ichitaro, Iwanaga and the young men of Honno dug up those bells from beneath the atomic rubble and debris. The bells had fallen fifty meters from the cathedral tower but were not broken.’ Takashi Nagai, The Bells of Nagasaki
Pierre d’Ailly, the French theologian, Cardinal and cosmographer, died today in 1420. His book, Imago Mundi, attempted to catalogue everything known about cosmography in the medieval world, but seriously underestimated the size of the Earth. When Christopher Columbus bought a copy, it led him to believe he could voyage directly to India by sailing West from Spain, which he attempted to do in 1492, but unexpectedly bumped into the Americas.
‘The west coast of Africa cannot be far removed from the east coast of India, for in both those countries elephants are found.’ Pierre d’Ailly, Imago Mundi
Today in 1650, it became illegal in England and Wales to claim to be God. The punishment set by an act of Cromwell’s Parliament was six months’ imprisonment for a first offence, and banishment for a second. However, the punishment could actually be much more severe, as James Nayler, the Quaker prophet, discovered. In 1656, he rode into Bristol on horseback with women laying their cloaks in the mud before him, hailing him as the Prince of Peace. For this, he was locked in the pillory, his forehead was branded with a B for blasphemer, and a red-hot iron was driven through his tongue. Three years later, he left prison a broken man.
Izaak Walton, the author of The Compleat Angler, is said to have been born today, a Stafford boy, in about 1593. He worked in London as a linen draper, where he became the churchwarden of John Donne’s church, and eventually retired to a cottage in Staffordshire on the River Meece, where he wrote his meditation on angling. The book beautifully combines technical detail with conversation, songs, theology and storytelling. Walton also wrote biographies of the poets John Donne and George Herbert.
‘No life so happy and so pleasant as the life of a well-governed angler; for when the lawyer is swallowed up with business, and the statesman is preventing or contriving plots, then we sit on cowslip-banks, hear the birds sing, and possess ourselves in as much quietness as these silent silver streams, which we now see glide so quietly by us. Indeed, my good scholar, we may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, “Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did”; and so, if I might be judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling.’ Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler
Image: José Luiz