May 29 in History

In 330 AD, the Roman emperor Constantine I formally dedicated a new imperial capital on the Bosphorus, on the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium. Renamed Constantinople, it would remain the center of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire until its fall to the Ottomans in 1453. For more than a thousand years it was one of the largest and wealthiest cities in Europe, a bridge between Europe and Asia and a guardian of Greek and Roman learning, law, and Christian tradition. (Although the event is listed under Italy, the city itself stood in what is now Istanbul, Turkey; the Italian link lies in its origins as a Roman project.)

In 526 AD a powerful earthquake struck Antioch, the great Byzantine city on the Orontes River in what is now southern Turkey. Ancient sources put the death toll at around 250,000, which would make it one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. That figure should be treated with caution, but even a much lower number would mark the quake as a catastrophe that shook the eastern Roman world at the start of Justinian's reign.

On 29 May 1913, at the newly opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, the Ballets Russes premiered The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps), a ballet with music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky. The performance became legendary for the commotion it provoked in the audience, and the work itself is now regarded as one of the landmarks of twentieth-century music, a decisive break with the conventions of Romantic harmony and rhythm.

On 29 May 1953, the New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary and the Sherpa climber Tenzing Norgay became the first people confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth at roughly 8,850 meters. Their ascent ended decades of attempts on a peak that had come to symbolize the limits of human endurance, and it made both men international celebrities.