May 29 in History

The walls that had protected Christendom's greatest city for a thousand years finally broke. On May 29, 1453, Sultan Mehmed II's Ottoman forces breached the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople after a 53-day siege, ending the Byzantine Empire and reshaping the political geography of Europe, Asia, and the Mediterranean world. Constantinople had survived over twenty sieges in its 1,123-year history. The triple-layered Theodosian Walls, built in the fifth century, were the most formidable fortifications in the medieval world. But by 1453, the Byzantine Empire had been reduced to the city itself and a few scattered territories. Emperor Constantine XI commanded roughly 7,000 defenders against an Ottoman army of 80,000 or more. Mehmed brought a weapon the walls had never faced: a massive cannon cast by the Hungarian engineer Orban, capable of firing stone balls weighing over 600 pounds. The bombardment opened breaches in the walls, though the defenders repaired them nightly. The final assault came before dawn on May 29. Three waves of Ottoman troops attacked the breaches. The Genoese commander Giovanni Giustiniani was wounded and carried from the wall, and his men broke. Ottoman Janissaries poured through the gaps. Constantine XI died fighting, probably near the Gate of St. Romanus. His body was never conclusively identified. Mehmed allowed his troops three days of plundering, then rode into the Hagia Sophia and ordered it converted into a mosque. The fall of Constantinople closed the overland trade routes to Asia that had enriched Italian merchant cities for centuries, accelerating the search for sea routes that led to the European Age of Exploration. Greek scholars fleeing to Italy carried manuscripts that fueled the Renaissance. The Ottoman Empire, now controlling both sides of the Bosporus, became the dominant power in southeastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean for the next four centuries. Mehmed was 21 years old. He renamed the city Istanbul, made it his capital, and earned the title Fatih: the Conqueror.

The audience started rioting before the dancers reached the second movement. On May 29, 1913, Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring premiered at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris, and the reaction was so violent that the music could barely be heard over the shouting, stomping, and fistfights in the seats. Stravinsky had composed the score for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The music depicted pagan Russia, a world of fertility rituals, tribal dances, and human sacrifice. Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed movements that deliberately violated every rule of classical ballet: turned-in feet, hunched postures, heavy stomping, and angular gestures that looked more like seizures than dance. The trouble began during the Introduction. Stravinsky's dissonant chords and irregular rhythms confused an audience expecting the lush romanticism of Tchaikovsky. When the curtain rose and the dancers began stamping and jerking, the fashionable Parisian crowd split. Supporters cheered. Traditionalists hissed, whistled, and shouted insults. Fistfights broke out between factions. The Comtesse de Pourtales reportedly yelled, "This is the first time in 60 years that anyone has dared make fun of me." Nijinsky stood in the wings shouting counts to his dancers, who could not hear the orchestra over the audience. Diaghilev ordered the house lights flicked on and off to quiet the crowd. The police were called. The performance continued to its conclusion, including the sacrificial dance in which the chosen maiden dances herself to death. The scandal was short-lived. A concert performance of the score one year later received an ovation. Within a decade, The Rite of Spring was recognized as the most important composition of the twentieth century. Its rhythmic innovations, polytonal harmonies, and raw primitivism influenced every subsequent school of modern music, from jazz to minimalism. Stravinsky had composed a 33-minute piece that demolished the boundary between beauty and barbarism and forced Western music to rebuild itself from the wreckage.

Two men stood where no human had ever stood and spent exactly 15 minutes at the top of the world. On May 29, 1953, New Zealand beekeeper Edmund Hillary and Nepali Sherpa Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest at 11:30 AM, completing the first confirmed ascent of the highest point on Earth at 29,032 feet. The mountain had repelled every previous attempt. British expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s had established that reaching the summit was theoretically possible but practically lethal. George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared near the summit in 1924, and whether they reached the top before dying remains one of mountaineering's great mysteries. The 1953 British expedition, led by Colonel John Hunt, was a massive logistical operation involving 362 porters, 20 Sherpa climbers, and tons of supplies staged at progressive camps up the mountain. Hunt's plan called for two summit attempts. The first pair, Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, reached the South Summit on May 26 but turned back from exhaustion and oxygen problems. Hillary and Tenzing, the second pair, set out from a high camp at 27,900 feet on the morning of May 29. The final obstacle was a 40-foot rock face near the summit, now called the Hillary Step. Hillary wedged himself into a crack between the rock and an overhanging cornice of snow and hauled himself up. Tenzing followed. They reached the summit shortly after, shook hands, and Tenzing buried chocolate and biscuits in the snow as a Buddhist offering. Hillary took photographs, but no image of Hillary at the summit exists because Tenzing did not know how to operate the camera. News of the ascent reached London on the morning of Elizabeth II's coronation, June 2, 1953, and was received as a gift to the new queen and the nation. Hillary was knighted. Tenzing received the George Medal. Both men maintained throughout their lives that they had reached the summit together, refusing to say who stepped on top first.

London filled with bonfires, wine flowing from public fountains, and church bells that did not stop ringing for days. On May 29, 1660, Charles II entered his capital on his 30th birthday to reclaim the throne, ending eleven years of republican government and restoring the English monarchy after the upheavals of civil war, regicide, and the Cromwellian Protectorate. England had beheaded Charles I in 1649 and abolished the monarchy. Oliver Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector until his death in 1658, but his son Richard lacked the authority to hold the regime together. The army fractured. Parliament deadlocked. General George Monck, commanding the army in Scotland, marched south and engineered a political settlement that brought Charles II back from exile on the Continent. The Declaration of Breda, issued by Charles on April 4, 1660, promised religious toleration, payment of army arrears, and a general pardon for actions during the civil wars and Interregnum, with exceptions to be determined by Parliament. The terms were deliberately vague, designed to make restoration palatable to as many factions as possible. Charles entered London in a procession that took seven hours to pass through the streets. The diarist Samuel Pepys recorded the scene from the Strand, noting the "infinite crowd" and the universal joy. The new king was tall, witty, and politically shrewd, having spent nine years in exile learning exactly how much a monarch could and could not demand. The Restoration brought back the monarchy, the House of Lords, the Church of England, and the theater. It also brought the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666, both of which reshaped the capital. Charles ruled for 25 years, navigating religious conflicts, parliamentary opposition, and secret alliances with France while carefully never provoking the kind of crisis that had cost his father his head. The bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were dug up and posthumously executed. The living regicides were hunted down. But the principle that Parliament could check royal power, established by blood in the 1640s, survived the Restoration intact, emerging even stronger in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

A wooden schooner completed a journey that no vessel had ever made: all the way around North America. On May 29, 1950, the RCMP schooner St. Roch arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, completing the first circumnavigation of the North American continent after a career of Arctic voyages that had already made it one of the most accomplished ships in maritime history. The St. Roch was built in 1928 for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to patrol Canada's Arctic waters and resupply remote detachments. The 104-foot wooden vessel, reinforced with Australian ironbark to withstand ice pressure, spent years at a time in the Arctic, often deliberately frozen into the pack ice for winter. Her Norwegian-born captain, Henry Larsen, developed an intimate knowledge of Arctic navigation that no other mariner of his era matched. In 1940-42, Larsen sailed the St. Roch from Vancouver to Halifax through the Northwest Passage, becoming the first vessel to transit the passage from west to east. The voyage took 28 months, with two winters locked in ice. In 1944, Larsen made the return trip in just 86 days, becoming the first vessel to complete the Northwest Passage in a single season and the first to transit it in both directions. The 1950 circumnavigation completed the loop. The St. Roch sailed from Halifax south through the Panama Canal and up the Pacific coast to Vancouver, connecting her earlier Arctic transits into a continuous circuit around the continent. The total distance covered across her voyages exceeded the circumference of the globe. The St. Roch was retired from service in 1954 and is now preserved at the Vancouver Maritime Museum. She remains the only vessel to have circumnavigated North America, a feat unlikely to be repeated in the age of icebreakers and GPS precisely because no one has a reason to do it the hard way again.

Bernie Kerik, former New York City Police Commissioner who led the NYPD through the September 11 aftermath, died at 69 after a career defined by both public heroism and personal scandal. His 2010 federal conviction for tax fraud and false statements overshadowed his post-9/11 leadership, though a presidential pardon in 2020 restored his civil rights. Kerik was born in 1955 in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Paterson. He served in the U.S. Army as a military policeman, worked undercover narcotics in New York, and rose through the ranks of the NYPD's corrections department before being appointed Commissioner by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in August 2000. His tenure during the September 11 attacks placed him at the center of the largest emergency response operation in American history, coordinating NYPD operations while Ground Zero was still burning. His public profile soared, and President George W. Bush nominated him for Secretary of Homeland Security in 2004. The nomination collapsed within days when it emerged that Kerik had employed an undocumented nanny and had failed to pay related taxes, a scandal that was only the beginning. Federal investigators uncovered a pattern of tax fraud, false statements on his application for a White House position, and unreported gifts from companies doing business with the city. He pleaded guilty in 2009 and served three years in federal prison. President Donald Trump pardoned him in February 2020. Kerik spent his post-prison years as a criminal justice reform advocate, a trajectory that mirrored the complicated narratives of public officials whose genuine contributions are inseparable from genuine misconduct.