Everybody was cold war fighting. Obama, Biden, Europe. Ukraine is their plaything.

Press call out Russia. But it seems to be the West influencing Ukrainian elections. 

Ukraine’s politics from 2000 to 2025 repeatedly spilled into other countries: energy cutoffs, a passenger-jet shootdown, loan-guarantee leverage, sanctions, and then a full-scale war.

Kuchma (2000–2004)

Leonid Kuchma’s second term was marked by the September 2000 disappearance and murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze and the Cassette Scandal tapes. “Ukraine Without Kuchma” protests in 2000–01 failed to remove him but built the opposition that later led the Orange Revolution. Abroad, Ukraine was still living under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which it had given up Soviet nuclear weapons for security assurances from Russia, the United States, and Britain.

Orange Revolution and Yushchenko (2004–2010)

The November 2004 runoff was awarded to Viktor Yanukovych amid fraud claims. Mass protests forced the Supreme Court to void it; Viktor Yushchenko won the 26 December rerun with about 52 percent. Moscow had backed Yanukovych and treated the result as a Western-sponsored colour revolution.

Yushchenko’s term was unstable at home and disruptive abroad. Gas disputes with Russia cut supplies through Ukraine in January 2006 and again in January 2009, leaving parts of the EU short of gas in midwinter. Those crises drove later European efforts to bypass Ukraine, including Nord Stream.

Yanukovych (2010–2014)

Yanukovych beat Yulia Tymoshenko in February 2010 (about 49 to 45 percent). He extended Russia’s Black Sea Fleet lease in Crimea and jailed Tymoshenko in 2011. In November 2013 he suspended an EU Association Agreement. The Euromaidan protests followed. After about 100 protesters were killed on 18–20 February 2014, parliament voted on 22 February to remove him; he fled to Russia. Moscow calls this a coup; Kyiv and most Western governments call it a removal after lethal repression.

Crimea, Donbas, and MH17 (2014–2015)

Russian forces seized Crimea within days. A disputed March referendum was followed by annexation, unrecognised by Ukraine and most states. The EU, US, and others imposed sanctions. Armed takeovers in Donetsk and Luhansk, backed by Russian personnel and weapons, became open war from April 2014. Petro Poroshenko won a May election with about 55 percent.

On 17 July 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down over separatist-held Donbas. All 298 people on board were killed, most of them Dutch, with Malaysian, Australian, and other nationals. The Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team found it was hit by a Buk missile supplied by Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade and fired from separatist-controlled territory. In November 2022 a Dutch court convicted three men linked to the Donetsk separatist command — Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinskiy, and Leonid Kharchenko — of murder and sentenced them to life; a fourth was acquitted. Russia denies involvement and has called the process political.

France and Germany brokered the Minsk agreements (September 2014 and February 2015) with Russia and Ukraine. They froze the line but were never fully implemented.

The prosecutor firing and the loan guarantee (2015–2016)

In December 2015 Vice President Joe Biden told President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk that the United States would withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee unless Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was removed. Biden later described it himself: he said he was leaving in six hours and that if the prosecutor was not fired, Ukraine would not get the money. Parliament dismissed Shokin on 29 March 2016.

The official US, EU, and IMF position was that Shokin was blocking corruption cases, including inside his own office, and that his removal was a shared donor condition. The IMF separately warned in early 2016 that a large support package depended on a real anti-corruption effort. The controversy is that Biden’s son Hunter sat on the board of Burisma, a gas company owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, from 2014, and Shokin’s office had touched cases involving Zlochevsky. Critics treat the threat as a conflict of interest; Biden and Western officials say there was no active case against Hunter and that allies wanted Shokin gone for failure to prosecute. Poroshenko later told Biden he had no corruption charges against Shokin but had pressed him to resign anyway.

Zelenskyy, the Trump call, and the road to invasion (2019–2022)

Volodymyr Zelenskyy beat Poroshenko in April 2019 with about 73 percent. On 25 July 2019 President Donald Trump asked him to look into Biden and into a theory about 2016 election interference. A whistleblower complaint led to Trump’s first impeachment; the Senate acquitted him. Military aid that had been paused was released.

Through 2021 Russia massed troops and demanded legal limits on NATO. On 24 February 2022 it launched a full-scale invasion.

War and the international system (2022–2025)

Martial law has barred presidential, parliamentary, and local elections since that day. Votes due in 2023 and 2024 were not held; parliament has repeatedly affirmed they wait until martial law ends. Russia calls Zelenskyy illegitimate after May 2024; Ukrainian law extends his powers until martial law is lifted.

Incidents with international fallout included the Bucha killings, documented after Russian forces left in April 2022; the July 2022 Black Sea grain deal, brokered by Turkey and the UN and later abandoned by Russia; the September 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines; and the March 2023 ICC arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin over the deportation of Ukrainian children. The US, EU, UK, and others imposed sweeping sanctions and sent tens of billions in weapons and budget aid. In July 2025 protests in Kyiv forced the government to reverse a law that would have weakened the anti-corruption bodies NABU and SAPO, after Western donors objected. By the end of 2025 martial law was still being extended in 90-day blocks, and the war remained the fact that organised Ukraine’s relations with everyone else.

= For October 6th 

October 6 is a day of broken armies, broken calendars, and kings pulled back to the city they could no longer rule.

105 BC — Arausio. Near modern Orange, on the Rhône, two Roman armies met the Cimbri and Teutones and were destroyed. Consul Gnaeus Mallius Maximus outranked proconsul Quintus Servilius Caepio, but Mallius was a new man and Caepio a noble; they camped apart and would not act as one command. Caepio attacked alone. His force was wiped out, his camp sacked, and Mallius’s army was then cut down in turn. Ancient figures put the dead at about 80,000 soldiers and another 40,000 servants and camp followers — a loss later writers set beside Cannae, and in some accounts above it. Mallius’s two sons were among the dead. A young Sertorius swam the river and lived. Rome did not fall that autumn: the Cimbri turned toward Spain instead of Italy. The political result was Gaius Marius, repeated consulships, and the army reforms that followed a Republic that had run out of trained men.

69 BC — Tigranocerta. Thirty-six years later the same date went the other way. In the Third Mithridatic War, Mithridates of Pontus had taken refuge with his son-in-law, Tigranes the Great of Armenia. Lucius Licinius Lucullus crossed into Armenia with a small field army — Plutarch gives him about 16,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry — and besieged Tigranocerta, Tigranes’ new capital in what is now southeastern Turkey. Tigranes came down with a huge composite host; ancient totals of 150,000 to 300,000 are not credible, but he badly outnumbered the Romans. Lucullus feigned a withdrawal, crossed a ford, and struck the Armenian right. The host broke. The city surrendered. It was too late in the season to chase Tigranes into the highlands, and Lucullus never turned the victory into a lasting conquest of Armenia.

AD 23 — Chang’an. Wang Mang, founder of the Xin dynasty, had seized the Han throne in AD 9 and tried to remake landholding, currency, and offices on a Confucian model. Flood, famine, and the Red Eyebrows and Lulin rebellions undid him. After the Xin defeat at Kunyang in the summer of 23, irregular forces entered Chang’an around 4–5 October. Wang, still in imperial dress and holding the seals, was taken to the Terrace Bathed by Water. On 6 October the last stand failed. A merchant, Du Wu, killed him. He was decapitated, and the short Xin dynasty ended. The Han restoration that followed was itself a civil war before the Eastern Han settled at Luoyang.

404 — Constantinople. Aelia Eudoxia, augusta and wife of the weak eastern emperor Arcadius, died of the complications of a seventh pregnancy. Chroniclers say the child died in the womb; bleeding followed, then infection. She had already borne the future Theodosius II and the formidable Pulcheria. Earlier that year she had driven John Chrysostom into exile after years of open war between patriarch and court. Her death did not restore him.

618 — Yanshi. In the wreck of the Sui, Wang Shichong held Luoyang in the name of the puppet Yang Tong. Li Mi, the strongest rebel in the region, had blockaded him. On 5–6 October Wang gambled on a sortie. He surprised Li’s camp north of Yanshi, sent cavalry in behind it, and — by one account — paraded a bound lookalike of Li Mi so the besiegers would think their leader was taken. Li escaped with a remnant and submitted to the Tang; most of his officers and territory went over to Wang. Wang soon deposed Yang Tong and proclaimed his own Zheng dynasty. It did not last. Li Mi later rebelled against the Tang and was caught and killed.

1539 — Anhaica. Hernando de Soto’s expedition forced its way into the Apalachee capital, Anhaica, on the site of modern Tallahassee, and wintered there until March 1540, living on Apalachee stores and buildings. Members of the expedition likely heard the first Christmas mass in what became the United States. De Soto never founded a colony. He died of fever in 1542; his body was sunk in the Mississippi.

1582 — a day that did not happen. In Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain, 4 October was followed by 15 October. The Gregorian reform dropped ten days to pull the calendar back onto the solar year. October 6, with the days around it, simply did not occur in those kingdoms.

1600 — Florence. Jacopo Peri’s Euridice was performed at the Palazzo Pitti for the proxy wedding of Maria de’ Medici to Henry IV of France. Peri’s earlier Dafne (1597) is lost; Euridice is the earliest opera that survives, a marker of the new recitative style that later ages bundled into the Baroque.

1683 — Germantown. Thirteen families from Krefeld, Mennonites and Quakers, under Francis Daniel Pastorius, founded Germantown outside Philadelphia — the first lasting German settlement in British North America. German-American Day is still kept on this date.

1723 — Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin, seventeen, walked into the city after running away from his brother James’s Boston print shop. He arrived with little money and, in his own telling, a loaf under each arm and one in his mouth. The arrival is the start of the Philadelphia career.

1762 — Manila. A British force under Brigadier-General William Draper and Rear-Admiral Samuel Cornish closed a short siege. Manila fell on 6 October. Spain’s government in the islands did not; the Real Audiencia withdrew and kept resisting in the provinces. Britain held the city until the 1763 Treaty of Paris returned it. The occupation was a sideshow of the Seven Years’ War with a long memory in the Philippines.

1777 — the Hudson. Sir Henry Clinton came up from New York and stormed Forts Clinton and Montgomery, the American works guarding the Hudson Highlands, under George and James Clinton. The river chain was broken and Kingston was burned. It was too late to matter. Burgoyne was already trapped above Albany and surrendered at Saratoga eleven days later. The forts were a tactical British success that did not save the campaign.

1789 — Paris. On 5 October market women, and then the National Guard under Lafayette, marched to Versailles over bread and the king’s refusal to accept the August decrees and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. On 6 October the palace was invaded, guards were killed, and Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the dauphin were brought back to Paris. Versailles ceased to be the seat of the monarchy. The king was now in the capital, under the eye of the crowd that had fetched him.

How FBI took 5 years to catch the wrong guy

Pipe bombs of Jan 6th 2021 inside job

That video is a commentary interview, not a court finding. It is a Viva Frei stream from about 2–3 October 2026, hosted with former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin, under a title close to “Did the FBI Coerce a FALSE CONFESSION Out of The Alleged Jan. 6 Pipe Bomber?” (the “FALS” spelling is a typo in the share text). The YouTube link circulating with that title is youtu.be/cQn9_7dKRzw. A related version also ran on Rumble as “How to Coerce a False Confession.”

The video’s claim is that the FBI took almost five years to name Brian Cole Jr., and that he had not been hiding from the surveillance the Bureau already had.

Devices were placed the night of 5 January 2021. Cole was arrested on the morning of 4 December 2025, walking to a 7-Eleven near the Woodbridge, Virginia home where he lived with his parents. That is four years and eleven months. On the show, former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin treats that gap as the point: no flight, no new identity, no move. Same house, same daily routine, neighborhood walks with his dog, work tied to his father’s bail-bond business and deliveries. The guest’s line is that this man “evaded” the FBI for five years while living in his parents’ house, in plain sight of the same phone, car, and purchase records the Bureau later called decisive.

What the video says the interview shows:

• The session ran about four hours on the day of the arrest, starting from a gunpoint stop on the way to the store, before he was taken to a judge the lawyers say was minutes away.
• He denied being the hooded figure on the video. Agents told him lying to federal agents was another crime and that more denials would make it worse. After a pause he said “yes.”
• They warned they could bring his family in and put them through the same interview.
• He was distressed on the recording: chills, gagging, repetitive speech the defense calls stimming. Agents wrapped him in a blanket.
• A defense expert, Richard Leo, is cited for the claim that the tactics — guilt-presumptive questioning, evidence ploys, minimization and maximization, implied threats — are the kind shown to raise the risk of a false admission, especially in someone later diagnosed with level-1 autism.
• The “yes,” on this telling, was not recognition of the video. He had just said he did not recognize the person. It was the product of being told that “no” was itself a crime, after which he began repeating the agents’ account.

Seraphin’s claim on the show is that this is how a false confession is produced, and that Cole does not match the hooded figure the FBI had on camera from the start.

=

For October 5th

The Catholic and Orthodox churches did not divide on one day. They grew apart for centuries, healed more than once, and only later treated the breach as permanent. The council of 869 is one of the early fractures, and it did not hold.

For the first centuries there was one church with several chief sees. Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem were the five patriarchates. Rome had a primacy of honour as the see of Peter and Paul, and the only apostolic see in the West. Constantinople had the emperor, the court, and from the sixth century the title “ecumenical patriarch.” Greek in the East, Latin in the West, different liturgies, and two ideas of authority were already in place before anyone spoke of a schism. The East thought of Rome as the senior patriarch, whose voice mattered most in a council. The popes of the ninth century were already claiming a jurisdiction that could judge other patriarchs.

Photius sat in the middle of that argument. In 858 the emperor Michael III deposed Patriarch Ignatius and replaced him with Photius, a lay scholar and head of the imperial chancery. He was elected, tonsured and ordained through the grades to the patriarchate within about a week. Ignatius’s party appealed to Rome. Pope Nicholas I refused to recognise the appointment. Canon law, as Rome read it, did not allow a layman to be rushed to the highest see, and it did not allow an emperor to depose a patriarch and have Rome rubber-stamp the result.

The fight then moved to Bulgaria. Both Rome and Constantinople wanted the new Bulgarian church. Nicholas wrote to the Bulgars attacking Greek customs: married clergy, the leavened bread of the Eucharist, and other rites. Photius answered in 867 with a council in Constantinople that deposed and anathematised Nicholas and the Western church. The charge that lasted was the Filioque. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed says the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. In Spain, and then more widely in the Latin West, churches had added “and from the Son” — Filioque — to stress the Son’s full divinity against Arianism. Rome itself adopted the addition later. Photius called the addition a corruption of the creed and a theological error. The East’s objection was twofold: that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, the Son being involved in the Spirit’s sending but not in his eternal origin; and that no one see had the right to alter a creed fixed by an ecumenical council.

That council of 867 did not last the year. Basil I murdered Michael III, took the throne, and restored Ignatius. Nicholas died in November 867. His successor, Adrian II, condemned Photius, and Basil called the council that opened in Constantinople on 5 October 869. It sat until 28 February 870. It restored Ignatius, anathematised Photius, burned the acts of the 867 synod, and issued 27 canons. The papal legates pressed for a clear submission to Roman judgment. Attendance was poor: about a dozen bishops at the opening, never more than about a hundred. The West later counted this as the Fourth Council of Constantinople and the eighth ecumenical council. The East never did.

It also failed on the ground. Ignatius died in 877. Photius became patriarch again, with Basil’s support, and Pope John VIII recognised him in return for concessions on Bulgaria and a promise not to press the Filioque quarrel. A much larger council in Constantinople in 879–80 rehabilitated Photius, annulled the council of 869–70, and was accepted at the time by John VIII’s legates. Rome later repudiated that acceptance. Photius died in communion with Rome, or near enough to it that the breach closed. The Orthodox Church venerates him as a saint. The Catholic Church does not count his rehabilitating council.

What survived was the pair of questions. Does the Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son, or from the Father alone? And is the pope the monarch of the whole church, or the first among patriarchs who cannot rewrite a council’s creed or depose an eastern bishop on his own? Those questions were quiet for long stretches. They were not settled.

The date everyone remembers is 16 July 1054. Patriarch Michael Cerularius had closed Latin churches in Constantinople and attacked Western rites, especially unleavened bread. Pope Leo IX sent Cardinal Humbert. Humbert was abrasive, Leo had in fact already died, and on 16 July Humbert laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia. It named Cerularius and his supporters, and it condemned the Greek doctrine of the Spirit, married priests, and leavened bread. Cerularius excommunicated the legates in return. The two bulls did not excommunicate whole churches. Most bishops, east and west, never heard of them. Communion had already been patchy; it continued, in places, afterwards.

The split became a fact in the crusading era. The massacre of Latins in Constantinople in 1182, and then the Fourth Crusade’s sack of the city in 1204, turned a quarrel of theologians and patriarchs into a wound ordinary people remembered. A Latin patriarch was set up in Constantinople. Reunion was signed at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274 and again at Florence in 1439, both times under political pressure — the second time with the Ottoman siege already in view. Neither union survived contact with the eastern clergy and people. After 1453 Constantinople was Ottoman, and Moscow came to call itself the Third Rome. The anathemas of 1054 were lifted by Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras in 1965. That removed a symbol. It did not restore communion.

So the council of 869 matters as a rehearsal. A pope and an emperor deposed a patriarch; a thin council ratified it; a fuller council undid it; Rome and Constantinople kept different memories of which council had spoken for the church. The later schism grew from that disagreement about authority, from the Filioque, and from the political rupture of 1204, not from a single anathema in 869 or 1054.

=

These are the standard “on this day” entries for 5 October. A few of the ancient dates are calendar conversions, and one revolutionary claim is looser than the list makes it sound.

539 BC — Babylon falls to Cyrus. The Nabonidus Chronicle puts the entry into the city on the 16th of Tašrītu in the 17th year of Nabonidus. Sippar had fallen two days earlier without a fight; Nabonidus fled, then was taken when he returned. The man who entered was Ugbaru (Gobryas), governor of Gutium, with Cyrus’s army. Cyrus himself came in about a fortnight later, in Arahsamna. Parker and Dubberstein’s Babylonian chronology converts the 16th of Tašrītu to 12 October Julian, which is about 5–6 October on the proleptic Gregorian calendar — hence the date on modern lists. The Cyrus Cylinder presents the takeover as peaceful and as the choice of Marduk; Herodotus and the book of Daniel remember a festival night and a breached river defence. What is solid is the political result: the Neo-Babylonian empire ended, and Cyrus’s edict let the Judean exiles go home. That is the hinge Second Isaiah and the book of Ezra both hang on.

456 — the Suebi broken on the Órbigo. Theodoric II, king of the Visigoths, moved into Iberia on the orders of the short-lived western emperor Avitus. With him were Burgundian forces under Chilperic I and Gundioc, and Frankish contingents. On the river Urbicus (the Órbigo), near Astorga in Gallaecia, they defeated the Suebi under Rechiar. Rechiar was captured and later executed. Suebic power in the north-west did not vanish at once, but the battle ended their bid to dominate the peninsula and left the Visigoths as the coming power in Hispania.

610 — Heraclius crowned. Heraclius, son of the exarch of Africa, sailed on Constantinople against the usurper Phocas. The Excubitors deserted, the city opened, and Phocas was killed — by Heraclius’s own hand in some accounts, after the exchange “Is this how you have ruled?” / “And will you rule better?” On 5 October, in the chapel of St Stephen in the Great Palace, Patriarch Sergius crowned him, and he married Fabia, who took the name Eudocia. He inherited a wreck: Avars in the Balkans, Khosrow II already using Maurice’s murder as a pretext for war. Syria, Palestine and Egypt would fall; the True Cross would be carried off. Heraclius’s answer was personal command, a rebuilt army, and the campaign that ended at Nineveh in 627. The peace he won was brief. Within a decade the same provinces were lost again, this time to the Arabs.

816 — Louis the Pious crowned at Reims. Louis was already emperor. Charlemagne had crowned him co-emperor at Aachen on 11 September 813, and he had ruled alone since his father’s death in 814. Pope Stephen IV came north anyway. On Sunday 5 October, during Mass at Reims, Stephen anointed him and set on his head a crown said to have been Constantine’s. Ermengarde was crowned with him and hailed Augusta. Louis had prostrated himself before the pope. The act did not make him emperor; it reattached the imperial title to a papal coronation, which Charlemagne’s 813 ceremony had sidestepped. Reims became the place where French kings were crowned.

869 — the council that deposed Photius. The Fourth Council of Constantinople, counted in the West as the eighth ecumenical council, opened on 5 October 869 and sat until 28 February 870. Emperor Basil I and Pope Adrian II wanted Photius out. Photius, a lay scholar raised abruptly to the patriarchate in 858, had been deposed once, restored, and had anathematised Pope Nicholas I in 867. The council restored Ignatius, anathematised Photius, burned the acts of his 867 synod, and issued 27 canons. Attendance was thin — a dozen bishops at the start, never more than about a hundred. The East does not receive it. Photius was patriarch again from 877, and the council of 879–80, far better attended, rehabilitated him. This is one of the fractures that later hardened into the schism.

1143 — Portugal recognised at Zamora. On 5 October, at Zamora, with the papal legate Cardinal Guido de Vico present, Alfonso VII of León and Castile — who styled himself emperor of the Spains — acknowledged his cousin Afonso Henriques as king of Portugal. Afonso had already won the field against his mother at São Mamede in 1128 and had used the royal title after Ourique in 1139. The text of the treaty is lost. What survived is the political fact: the Leonese crown stopped contesting the title, and Afonso signed as rex Portugallensis. Full papal recognition waited until Alexander III’s bull Manifestis Probatum in 1179. Portugal still marks 5 October, though the modern national holiday is the republic of 1910, not Zamora.

1450 — Jews expelled from Lower Bavaria. Louis IX, Duke of Bavaria-Landshut, called Louis the Rich, ordered the Jews out of his part of Bavaria. This sits in the long fifteenth-century squeeze on German Jewish communities — debt cancellation dressed as piety, local expulsions before the larger ones of the 1490s. It was not the end of Jewish life in all Bavaria; Regensburg’s community lasted until 1519. It was a ducal clearance of Lower Bavaria.

1550 — Concepción founded. Pedro de Valdivia founded the city on 5 October 1550, at Penco on the Bay of Concepción, as a southern anchor of Spanish Chile against the Mapuche frontier. Earthquakes and Araucanian war forced later moves; the modern city stands inland of that first site. The date is the official foundation.

1582 — a day that did not happen. Pope Gregory XIII’s bull cut ten days from October so that the spring equinox, and therefore Easter, would fall where the Council of Nicaea had put it. In Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Polish–Lithuanian lands, 4 October was followed by 15 October. The 5th through the 14th do not exist in those countries for that year. France waited until December; Protestant states longer; Britain until 1752.

1607 — the knives and Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi, a Servite friar and Venice’s theological adviser in the Interdict fight with Paul V, was attacked on the night of 5 October as he came down the bridge by Santa Fosca toward his convent. Five men; fifteen thrusts by the count of holes in hat, hood and collar; three wounds that landed, one stiletto left in the cheekbone. He lived. Asked who had done it, he said Agnosco stylum Romanae Curiae — “I recognise the style of the Roman Curia,” with stilus also meaning dagger. The attackers fled toward the papal nuncio’s house and on to Rome. Venice gave him a safer lodging. He went back to his work on the history of the Council of Trent.

1665 — Kiel. Christian Albert, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, founded the university on 5 October. It still bears his name: Christian-Albrechts-Universität.

1789 — the women march to Versailles. On the morning of 5 October, women from the Paris markets, after days of bread shortage and rumour, set off for Versailles. They wanted grain, and they wanted the king to sanction the August decrees and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The National Guard followed under Lafayette, partly to lead the march and partly to keep it from becoming a sack. That night and the next morning the palace was invaded; two guards were killed. On the 6th Louis XVI agreed to move to Paris. The court came back to the Tuileries in the train of the crowd. The revolution ceased to be something that happened at a safe distance from the king.

1793 — the calendar, not a single act of abolition. Lists often say Christianity was disestablished in France on this day. What the Convention actually did on 5 October 1793 was accept Gilbert Romme’s scheme for a republican era beginning on 22 September 1792, the day the Republic had been proclaimed. The calendar itself was decreed on 24 October and backdated. Sunday disappeared; saints’ days were replaced by the names of plants, tools and weather; the aim was to take Christian time out of ordinary life. Dechristianisation was already a campaign — closed churches, the Cult of Reason, death for non-juring priests and those who hid them — not a statute passed on the 5th that ended the faith by decree. The Republican calendar lasted until 1806.

The day runs from a change of empire in Babylon to a change of calendar in Paris, with coronations, a council, a new kingdom and a failed killing in between.

Catholic Orthodox Schism

Shades of christianity

The Catholic and Orthodox churches did not divide on one day. They grew apart for centuries, healed more than once, and only later treated the breach as permanent. The council of 869 is one of the early fractures, and it did not hold.

For the first centuries there was one church with several chief sees. Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem were the five patriarchates. Rome had a primacy of honour as the see of Peter and Paul, and the only apostolic see in the West. Constantinople had the emperor, the court, and from the sixth century the title “ecumenical patriarch.” Greek in the East, Latin in the West, different liturgies, and two ideas of authority were already in place before anyone spoke of a schism. The East thought of Rome as the senior patriarch, whose voice mattered most in a council. The popes of the ninth century were already claiming a jurisdiction that could judge other patriarchs.

Photius sat in the middle of that argument. In 858 the emperor Michael III deposed Patriarch Ignatius and replaced him with Photius, a lay scholar and head of the imperial chancery. He was elected, tonsured and ordained through the grades to the patriarchate within about a week. Ignatius’s party appealed to Rome. Pope Nicholas I refused to recognise the appointment. Canon law, as Rome read it, did not allow a layman to be rushed to the highest see, and it did not allow an emperor to depose a patriarch and have Rome rubber-stamp the result.

The fight then moved to Bulgaria. Both Rome and Constantinople wanted the new Bulgarian church. Nicholas wrote to the Bulgars attacking Greek customs: married clergy, the leavened bread of the Eucharist, and other rites. Photius answered in 867 with a council in Constantinople that deposed and anathematised Nicholas and the Western church. The charge that lasted was the Filioque. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed says the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. In Spain, and then more widely in the Latin West, churches had added “and from the Son” — Filioque — to stress the Son’s full divinity against Arianism. Rome itself adopted the addition later. Photius called the addition a corruption of the creed and a theological error. The East’s objection was twofold: that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, the Son being involved in the Spirit’s sending but not in his eternal origin; and that no one see had the right to alter a creed fixed by an ecumenical council.

That council of 867 did not last the year. Basil I murdered Michael III, took the throne, and restored Ignatius. Nicholas died in November 867. His successor, Adrian II, condemned Photius, and Basil called the council that opened in Constantinople on 5 October 869. It sat until 28 February 870. It restored Ignatius, anathematised Photius, burned the acts of the 867 synod, and issued 27 canons. The papal legates pressed for a clear submission to Roman judgment. Attendance was poor: about a dozen bishops at the opening, never more than about a hundred. The West later counted this as the Fourth Council of Constantinople and the eighth ecumenical council. The East never did.

It also failed on the ground. Ignatius died in 877. Photius became patriarch again, with Basil’s support, and Pope John VIII recognised him in return for concessions on Bulgaria and a promise not to press the Filioque quarrel. A much larger council in Constantinople in 879–80 rehabilitated Photius, annulled the council of 869–70, and was accepted at the time by John VIII’s legates. Rome later repudiated that acceptance. Photius died in communion with Rome, or near enough to it that the breach closed. The Orthodox Church venerates him as a saint. The Catholic Church does not count his rehabilitating council.

What survived was the pair of questions. Does the Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son, or from the Father alone? And is the pope the monarch of the whole church, or the first among patriarchs who cannot rewrite a council’s creed or depose an eastern bishop on his own? Those questions were quiet for long stretches. They were not settled.

The date everyone remembers is 16 July 1054. Patriarch Michael Cerularius had closed Latin churches in Constantinople and attacked Western rites, especially unleavened bread. Pope Leo IX sent Cardinal Humbert. Humbert was abrasive, Leo had in fact already died, and on 16 July Humbert laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia. It named Cerularius and his supporters, and it condemned the Greek doctrine of the Spirit, married priests, and leavened bread. Cerularius excommunicated the legates in return. The two bulls did not excommunicate whole churches. Most bishops, east and west, never heard of them. Communion had already been patchy; it continued, in places, afterwards.

The split became a fact in the crusading era. The massacre of Latins in Constantinople in 1182, and then the Fourth Crusade’s sack of the city in 1204, turned a quarrel of theologians and patriarchs into a wound ordinary people remembered. A Latin patriarch was set up in Constantinople. Reunion was signed at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274 and again at Florence in 1439, both times under political pressure — the second time with the Ottoman siege already in view. Neither union survived contact with the eastern clergy and people. After 1453 Constantinople was Ottoman, and Moscow came to call itself the Third Rome. The anathemas of 1054 were lifted by Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras in 1965. That removed a symbol. It did not restore communion.

So the council of 869 matters as a rehearsal. A pope and an emperor deposed a patriarch; a thin council ratified it; a fuller council undid it; Rome and Constantinople kept different memories of which council had spoken for the church. The later schism grew from that disagreement about authority, from the Filioque, and from the political rupture of 1204, not from a single anathema in 869 or 1054.

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These are the standard “on this day” entries for 5 October. A few of the ancient dates are calendar conversions, and one revolutionary claim is looser than the list makes it sound.

539 BC — Babylon falls to Cyrus. The Nabonidus Chronicle puts the entry into the city on the 16th of Tašrītu in the 17th year of Nabonidus. Sippar had fallen two days earlier without a fight; Nabonidus fled, then was taken when he returned. The man who entered was Ugbaru (Gobryas), governor of Gutium, with Cyrus’s army. Cyrus himself came in about a fortnight later, in Arahsamna. Parker and Dubberstein’s Babylonian chronology converts the 16th of Tašrītu to 12 October Julian, which is about 5–6 October on the proleptic Gregorian calendar — hence the date on modern lists. The Cyrus Cylinder presents the takeover as peaceful and as the choice of Marduk; Herodotus and the book of Daniel remember a festival night and a breached river defence. What is solid is the political result: the Neo-Babylonian empire ended, and Cyrus’s edict let the Judean exiles go home. That is the hinge Second Isaiah and the book of Ezra both hang on.

456 — the Suebi broken on the Órbigo. Theodoric II, king of the Visigoths, moved into Iberia on the orders of the short-lived western emperor Avitus. With him were Burgundian forces under Chilperic I and Gundioc, and Frankish contingents. On the river Urbicus (the Órbigo), near Astorga in Gallaecia, they defeated the Suebi under Rechiar. Rechiar was captured and later executed. Suebic power in the north-west did not vanish at once, but the battle ended their bid to dominate the peninsula and left the Visigoths as the coming power in Hispania.

610 — Heraclius crowned. Heraclius, son of the exarch of Africa, sailed on Constantinople against the usurper Phocas. The Excubitors deserted, the city opened, and Phocas was killed — by Heraclius’s own hand in some accounts, after the exchange “Is this how you have ruled?” / “And will you rule better?” On 5 October, in the chapel of St Stephen in the Great Palace, Patriarch Sergius crowned him, and he married Fabia, who took the name Eudocia. He inherited a wreck: Avars in the Balkans, Khosrow II already using Maurice’s murder as a pretext for war. Syria, Palestine and Egypt would fall; the True Cross would be carried off. Heraclius’s answer was personal command, a rebuilt army, and the campaign that ended at Nineveh in 627. The peace he won was brief. Within a decade the same provinces were lost again, this time to the Arabs.

816 — Louis the Pious crowned at Reims. Louis was already emperor. Charlemagne had crowned him co-emperor at Aachen on 11 September 813, and he had ruled alone since his father’s death in 814. Pope Stephen IV came north anyway. On Sunday 5 October, during Mass at Reims, Stephen anointed him and set on his head a crown said to have been Constantine’s. Ermengarde was crowned with him and hailed Augusta. Louis had prostrated himself before the pope. The act did not make him emperor; it reattached the imperial title to a papal coronation, which Charlemagne’s 813 ceremony had sidestepped. Reims became the place where French kings were crowned.

869 — the council that deposed Photius. The Fourth Council of Constantinople, counted in the West as the eighth ecumenical council, opened on 5 October 869 and sat until 28 February 870. Emperor Basil I and Pope Adrian II wanted Photius out. Photius, a lay scholar raised abruptly to the patriarchate in 858, had been deposed once, restored, and had anathematised Pope Nicholas I in 867. The council restored Ignatius, anathematised Photius, burned the acts of his 867 synod, and issued 27 canons. Attendance was thin — a dozen bishops at the start, never more than about a hundred. The East does not receive it. Photius was patriarch again from 877, and the council of 879–80, far better attended, rehabilitated him. This is one of the fractures that later hardened into the schism.

1143 — Portugal recognised at Zamora. On 5 October, at Zamora, with the papal legate Cardinal Guido de Vico present, Alfonso VII of León and Castile — who styled himself emperor of the Spains — acknowledged his cousin Afonso Henriques as king of Portugal. Afonso had already won the field against his mother at São Mamede in 1128 and had used the royal title after Ourique in 1139. The text of the treaty is lost. What survived is the political fact: the Leonese crown stopped contesting the title, and Afonso signed as rex Portugallensis. Full papal recognition waited until Alexander III’s bull Manifestis Probatum in 1179. Portugal still marks 5 October, though the modern national holiday is the republic of 1910, not Zamora.

1450 — Jews expelled from Lower Bavaria. Louis IX, Duke of Bavaria-Landshut, called Louis the Rich, ordered the Jews out of his part of Bavaria. This sits in the long fifteenth-century squeeze on German Jewish communities — debt cancellation dressed as piety, local expulsions before the larger ones of the 1490s. It was not the end of Jewish life in all Bavaria; Regensburg’s community lasted until 1519. It was a ducal clearance of Lower Bavaria.

1550 — Concepción founded. Pedro de Valdivia founded the city on 5 October 1550, at Penco on the Bay of Concepción, as a southern anchor of Spanish Chile against the Mapuche frontier. Earthquakes and Araucanian war forced later moves; the modern city stands inland of that first site. The date is the official foundation.

1582 — a day that did not happen. Pope Gregory XIII’s bull cut ten days from October so that the spring equinox, and therefore Easter, would fall where the Council of Nicaea had put it. In Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Polish–Lithuanian lands, 4 October was followed by 15 October. The 5th through the 14th do not exist in those countries for that year. France waited until December; Protestant states longer; Britain until 1752.

1607 — the knives and Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi, a Servite friar and Venice’s theological adviser in the Interdict fight with Paul V, was attacked on the night of 5 October as he came down the bridge by Santa Fosca toward his convent. Five men; fifteen thrusts by the count of holes in hat, hood and collar; three wounds that landed, one stiletto left in the cheekbone. He lived. Asked who had done it, he said Agnosco stylum Romanae Curiae — “I recognise the style of the Roman Curia,” with stilus also meaning dagger. The attackers fled toward the papal nuncio’s house and on to Rome. Venice gave him a safer lodging. He went back to his work on the history of the Council of Trent.

1665 — Kiel. Christian Albert, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, founded the university on 5 October. It still bears his name: Christian-Albrechts-Universität.

1789 — the women march to Versailles. On the morning of 5 October, women from the Paris markets, after days of bread shortage and rumour, set off for Versailles. They wanted grain, and they wanted the king to sanction the August decrees and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The National Guard followed under Lafayette, partly to lead the march and partly to keep it from becoming a sack. That night and the next morning the palace was invaded; two guards were killed. On the 6th Louis XVI agreed to move to Paris. The court came back to the Tuileries in the train of the crowd. The revolution ceased to be something that happened at a safe distance from the king.

1793 — the calendar, not a single act of abolition. Lists often say Christianity was disestablished in France on this day. What the Convention actually did on 5 October 1793 was accept Gilbert Romme’s scheme for a republican era beginning on 22 September 1792, the day the Republic had been proclaimed. The calendar itself was decreed on 24 October and backdated. Sunday disappeared; saints’ days were replaced by the names of plants, tools and weather; the aim was to take Christian time out of ordinary life. Dechristianisation was already a campaign — closed churches, the Cult of Reason, death for non-juring priests and those who hid them — not a statute passed on the 5th that ended the faith by decree. The Republican calendar lasted until 1806.

The day runs from a change of empire in Babylon to a change of calendar in Paris, with coronations, a council, a new kingdom and a failed killing in between.