On This Day
1244 – Pope Innocent IV arrives at Lyon for the First Council of Lyon.[1]
The First Council of Lyon (Lyon I) was the thirteenth ecumenical council, as numbered by the Catholic Church, taking place in 1245.
The First General Council of Lyon was presided over by Pope Innocent IV. Innocent IV, threatened by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, arrived at Lyon on 2 December 1244, and early the following year he summoned the Church’s bishops to the council later that same year. Some two hundred and fifty prelates responded including the Latin Patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, and Aquileia (Venice) and 140 bishops. The Latin emperor Baldwin II of Constantinople, Raymond VII, Count of Toulouse, and Raymond Bérenger IV, Count of Provence were among those who participated. With Rome under siege by Emperor Frederick II, the pope used the council to excommunicate and depose the emperor with Ad Apostolicae Dignitatis Apicem,[1] as well as the Portuguese King Sancho II.[2] The council also directed a new crusade (the Seventh Crusade), under the command of Louis IX of France, to reconquer the Holy Land.[3]
At the opening, on 28 June, after the singing of the Veni Creator, Spiritu, Innocent IV preached on the subject of the five wounds of the Church and compared them to his own five sorrows: (1) the poor behaviour of both clergy and laity; (2) the insolence of the Saracens who occupied the Holy Land; (3) the Great East-West Schism; (4) the cruelties of the Tatars in Hungary; and (5) the persecution of the Church by the Emperor Frederick.
The council of Lyon was rather poorly attended. Since the great majority of those bishops and archbishops present came from France, Italy and Spain, while the Byzantine Greeks and the other countries, especially Germany, were but weakly represented, the ambassador of Frederick, Thaddaeus of Suessa, contested its ecumenicity in the assembly itself.[4] In a letter, Innocent IV had urged Kaliman I of Bulgaria to send representatives. In the bull Cum simus super (25 March 1245), he also urged the Vlachs, Serbs, Alans, Georgians, Nubians, the Church of the East and all the other Eastern Christians not in union with Rome to send representatives. In the end, the only known non-Latin cleric present was Peter, the bishop of Belgorod and vicar of the metropolitanate of Kiev, who provided Innocent with intelligence on the Mongols prior to the council. His information, in the form of the Tractatus de ortu Tartarorum, circulated among attendees.[5]
The condemnation of the emperor was a foregone conclusion. The objections of the ambassador, that the accused had not been regularly cited, that the pope was plaintiff and judge in one, and that therefore the whole process was anomalous, achieved as little success as his appeal to the future pontiff and to a truly ecumenical council.[6]
At the second session on 5 July, the bishop of Calvi and a Spanish archbishop attacked the emperor’s behaviour, and in a subsequent session on 17 July, Innocent pronounced the deposition of Frederick. The deposition was signed by one hundred and fifty bishops and the Dominicans and Franciscans were given the responsibility for its publication. However, Innocent IV did not possess the material means to enforce the decree.
The Council of Lyon promulgated several other purely disciplinary measures:
It obliged the Cistercians to pay tithes
It approved the Rule of the Grandmontines
It decided the institution of the Octave of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin
It prescribed that cardinals were to wear a red hat[7]
It prepared thirty-eight constitutions which were later inserted by Boniface VIII in his Decretals, the most important of which decreed a levy of a twentieth on every benefice for three years for the relief of the Holy Land.[8]
Among those attending was Thomas Cantilupe who was made a papal chaplain and given a dispensation to hold his benefices in plurality.[9]
915 – Pope John X crowns Berengar I of Italy as Holy Roman Emperor (probable date).[1]
Berengar I (Latin: Berengarius, Perngarius; Italian: Berengario; c. 845 – 7 April 924[1]) was the king of Italy from 887. He was Holy Roman Emperor between 915 and his death in 924. He is usually known as Berengar of Friuli, since he ruled the March of Friuli from 874 until at least 890, but he had lost control of the region by 896.[2]
Berengar rose to become one of the most influential laymen in the empire of Charles the Fat, and he was elected to replace Charles in Italy after the latter’s deposition in November 887. His long reign of 36 years saw him opposed by no less than seven other claimants to the Italian throne. His reign is usually characterised as troubled because of the many competitors for the crown and because of the arrival of Magyar raiders in Western Europe. His death was followed by an imperial interregnum that lasted 38 years until Otto I was crowned emperor in 962.
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771 – Austrasian king Carloman I dies, leaving his brother Charlemagne king of the now complete Frankish Kingdom.
Carloman I (28 June 751 – 4 December 771), also Karlmann, was king of the Franks from 768 until his death in 771. He was the second surviving son of Pepin the Short and Bertrada of Laon and was a younger brother of Charlemagne. His death allowed Charlemagne to take all of Francia and begin his expansion into other kingdoms.
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63 BC – Cicero gives the fourth and final of the Catiline Orations.[1]
The Catilinarian Orations (Latin: M. Tullii Ciceronis Orationes in Catilinam; also simply the Catilinarians) are a set of speeches to the Roman Senate given in 63 BC by Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of the year’s consuls, accusing a senator, Lucius Sergius Catilina (Catiline), of leading a plot to overthrow the Roman Senate. Most accounts of the events come from Cicero himself. Some modern historians, and ancient sources such as Sallust, suggest that Catiline was a more complex character than Cicero’s writings declare, and that Cicero was heavily influenced by a desire to establish a lasting reputation as a great Roman patriot and statesman.[1] This is one of the best-documented events surviving from the ancient world, and has set the stage for classic political struggles pitting state security against civil liberties.[2]
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963 – Pope Leo VIII is appointed to the office of Protonotary and begins his papacy as antipope of Rome.
Pope Leo VIII (c. 915 – 1 March 965) was a Roman prelate who claimed the Holy See from 963 until 964 in opposition to John XII and Benedict V and again from 23 June 964 to his death. Today he is considered by the Catholic Church to have been an antipope during the first period and the legitimate pope during the second. An appointee of Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, Leo VIII’s pontificate occurred after the period known as the saeculum obscurum.
Born On This Day
1578 – Agostino Agazzari, Italian composer and theorist (d. 1641)
Agostino Agazzari (2 December 1578 – 10 April 1640) was an Italian composer and music theorist.
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1368 – Charles VI of France (d. 1422)[11]
Charles VI (3 December 1368 – 21 October 1422), nicknamed the Beloved (French: le Bien-Aimé) and later the Mad (French: le Fol or le Fou), was King of France from 1380 until his death in 1422. He is known for his mental illness and psychotic episodes that plagued him throughout his life.
He ascended the throne at the young age of eleven, his father leaving behind a favorable military situation, marked by the reconquest of most of the English possessions in France. First placed under the regency of his uncles, the Dukes of Burgundy, Anjou, Berry, and Bourbon, Charles decided in 1388, aged 20, to emancipate himself. In 1392, while leading a military expedition against the Duchy of Brittany, the king had his first attack of delirium, during which he attacked his own men in the forest of Le Mans. A few months later, following the Bal des Ardents (January 1393) where he narrowly escaped death from burning, Charles was again placed under the regency of his uncles, the dukes of Berry and Burgundy.
From then on, and until his death, the king alternated between periods of mental instability and lucidity. Power was held by his influential uncles and by his wife, Queen Isabeau of Bavaria. His younger brother, Louis d’Orléans, also aspired to the regency and saw his influence grow. The enmity between Louis d’Orléans and John the Fearless, successor of Philip the Bold as Duke of Burgundy, plunged France into the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War of 1407–1435, during which the king found himself successively controlled by one or the other of the two parties.
In 1415 his army was crushed by the English at the Battle of Agincourt, which led to Charles’ signing of the Treaty of Troyes, which entirely disinherited his son, the Dauphin and future Charles VII, in favour of his future son-in-law Henry V of England. Henry was thus made regent and heir to the throne of France, and Charles married him to his daughter Catherine de Valois. However, Henry died shortly before Charles, which gave the House of Valois the chance to continue the fight against the English, leading to their eventual victory and the end of the Hundred Years’ War in 1453. He was succeeded in law by his grandson, the infant Henry VI of England, but Charles’ own son crowned himself first in Reims and was regarded as the true heir by the French.
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AD 34 – Persius, Roman poet (d. 62)
Aulus Persius Flaccus (/ˈpɜːrʃiəs, ˈpɜːrʃəs/; 4 December 34 – 24 November 62 AD) was a Roman poet and satirist of Etruscan origin. In his works, poems and satires, he shows a Stoic wisdom and a strong criticism for what he considered to be the stylistic abuses of his poetic contemporaries. His works, which became very popular in the Middle Ages, were published after his death by his friend and mentor, the Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Cornutus.
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1389 – Zbigniew Oleśnicki, Polish cardinal and statesman (d. 1455)
Zbigniew Oleśnicki (Polish: [ˈzbiɡɲɛf ɔlɛɕˈɲitskʲi]; 5 December 1389 – 1 April 1455), known in Latin as Sbigneus, was a high-ranking Roman Catholic clergyman and an influential Polish statesman and diplomat. He served as Bishop of Kraków from 1423 until his death in 1455. He took part in the management of the country’s most important affairs, initially as a royal secretary under King Władysław II Jagiełło and later as the effective regent during King Władysław III’s minority. In 1439 he became the first native Polish cardinal.
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846 – Hasan al-Askari, Arabian 11th of the Twelve Imams (d. 874)
Hasan ibn Ali ibn Muhammad (Arabic: حَسَن ٱبْن عَلِيّ ٱبْن مُحَمَّدُ, romanized: Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad; c. 846 – 874), better known as Hasan al-Askari (Arabic: حَسَن ٱلْعَسْكَرِيّ, romanized: Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī), was a descendant of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. He is regarded as the eleventh of the Twelve Imams, succeeding his father, Ali al-Hadi. Hasan Al-Askari was born in Medina in 844 and brought with his father to the garrison town of Samarra in 848, where the Abbasid caliphs held them under close surveillance until their deaths, even though neither were politically active. After the death of al-Hadi in 868, the majority of his following acknowledged his son, al-Askari, as their next Imam. Al-Askari’s contact with the Shia population was restricted by the caliphs and instead he communicated with his followers through a network of representatives. He died in Samarra in 873-874 at the age of about twenty-eight and was buried in the family home next to his father, which later developed into al-Askari shrine, a major center for Shia pilgrimage. Shia sources commonly hold the Abbasids responsible for the death of al-Askari and his father. A well-known early Shia commentary of the Quran is attributed to al-Askari.
Al-Askari died without leaving an obvious heir, which created widespread confusion and fragmented the Shia community into several sects, all of which disappeared within a few decades except the Twelver Shia. The Twelvers hold that al-Askari had a son, commonly known as Muhammad al-Mahdi (lit. ’the rightly guided’), who was kept hidden from the public out of the fear of Abbasid persecution. Al-Mahdi succeeded to the imamate after the death of his father and entered a state of occultation. His life is said to be miraculously prolonged until the day he manifests himself again by God’s permission to fill the earth with justice. Though in occultation, the Imam still remains responsible in Twelver belief for the spiritual guidance of humankind and the Shia accounts of his occasional encounters with the pious are numerous and popular.
FYI
NASA: Astronomy Picture of the Day
What a feelin’, being’s believin’, I can have it all, now I’m dancing for my life.
Irene Cara,
singer, actor
1959-2022
Irene Cara Escalera (March 18, 1959[note 1] – November 25, 2022) was an American singer, songwriter and actress. Cara rose to prominence for her role as Coco Hernandez in the 1980 musical film Fame, and for recording the film’s title song “Fame”, which reached No. 1 in several countries.
In 1983, Cara sang and co-wrote the song “Flashdance… What a Feeling” (from the film Flashdance), for which she shared an Academy Award for Best Original Song and won a Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1984. Prior to her success with Fame, Cara portrayed the title character Sparkle Williams in the original 1976 musical drama film Sparkle.
The Associated Press’ best photos of the year.
By Jack Guy, CNN: Stunning images of nature shortlisted for Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice Award
By Juliana Kim, NPR: A new writer tweeted about a low book signing turnout, and famous authors commiserated
Wickersham’s Conscience: Geology: The Galapagos Triple Junction
By Tom Whitwell, Magentic Notes: 52 things I learned in 2022
By Saima May Sidik, Undark: In Alaska, a Mystery Over Disappearing Whales
Leadership Freak: 3 Powers of Proactive Worry
Dance with elephants when they’re young.
You can ignore problems, but you can’t escape them. Baby elephants get bigger; eventually you face them down.
It’s easier to dance with baby elephants than full-grown bulls.
By Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics: Remember When the Internet Lost Its Mind Over This Gift-Wrapping Trick? Here’s the Secret. The diagonal gift wrap hack that went viral.
Interesting as I have read that Steve Miller is not a nice person.
By Max Marshall, Texas Monthly: Growing Up With Steve Miller In 2007, the man who topped the charts with ‘The Joker’ and ‘Rock’n Me’ took a thirteen-year-old guitarist and would-be songwriter under his wing. More than a decade later, he’s still teaching me lessons on how to be an adult.
By Emma Roth: The Verge: This is why streaming Netflix, Disney Plus, and HBO Max keeps getting more expensive
It’s a lose-lose situation. While some streamers are losing money by paying to get content on their platforms, others are losing money by distributing it on their own platforms. The result? Price hikes.
Apologies for the paywall.
By Matthew Shaer, The New York Times: Where Does All the Cardboard Come From? I Had to Know. Entire forests and enormous factories running 24/7 can barely keep up with demand. This is how the cardboard economy works.
By Amanda Ripley, Harvard Business Review: How to Work with Someone Who Creates Unnecessary Conflict Several actions you can take to identify these people and mitigate their negative impact.
By Harold Holzer, Smithsonian Magazine: How Northern Publishers Cashed In on Fundraising for Confederate Monuments In the years after the Civil War, printmakers in New York and elsewhere abetted the Lost Cause movement by selling images of false idols.
What if you could shrink all of time into 10 minutes? Timelapse of the entire universe
Ideas
By jlord911: LED Cloudscape Bedroom Lighting/Lamp Effect
By akashv44: LED Copy Pad
By thescientistformerlyknownasNaegeli: Soda Can Strip Cutter
Recipes
By Becky Krystal, The Washington Post: This Buttery British Shortbread Is Our New Favorite 5-Ingredient Treat Mary Berry comes through again, with a five-ingredient recipe that you can throw together in minutes.
By MacKenzie Smith, creator of Grilled Cheese Social: Collard Greens, Bacon and White Cheddar Strata
By In The Kitchen With Matt: 3-Ingredient Chocolate Ice Cream (No Machine)
Just the Recipe: Paste the URL to any recipe, click submit, and it’ll return literally JUST the recipe- no ads, no life story of the writer, no nothing EXCEPT the recipe.
DamnDelicious
RecipeTinEats
- Easy Slow Cooker BBQ Shredded Beef June 16, 2026Slow Cooker BBQ Shredded Beef is what you make when you want a big batch of crowd-pleasing food with relatively little effort. The succulent pulled beef is smothered in an incredible homemade barbecue sauce, and there’s so many ways to serve it – pile into sliders, heap onto plates or stuff into baked potatoes! Easy... […]Nagi
- Coffee Cake with Cinnamon Streusel June 12, 2026Firstly, thank you for the Jaffle love. 🥰 Hit the Jaffle button above to see what he got up to today! Secondly – cake. Specifically, Coffee Cake! A classic crumb cake with a jammy cinnamon ribbon, loaded with lots and lots of nubbly, extra crunchy cinnamon streusel. Outrageously good. Coffee Cake with Cinnamon Streusel This... […]Nagi
wikimedia
- Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for June 18 June 18, 2026Picture of the day Red-headed weaver (Anaplectes rubriceps leuconotus) male building nest in the Soysambu Conservancy, Kenya.
- Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for June 17 June 17, 2026Picture of the day Lt. Col. Nick Rutgers preparing his F-15 Eagle for flight
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