15 May in history
8 events that happened on 15 May, from 392 to 1957.
✦ Anniversary of the day
589 CE 1,437 years ago
King Authari of the Lombards marries Theodelinda at Verona
Authari, king of the Lombards, married Theodelinda, daughter of the Bavarian duke Garibald I, at Verona, in a political alliance meant to reinforce his royal position. A Catholic, she later encouraged the Lombards to move from Arian to Catholic Christianity.
908 CE 1,118 years ago
Constantine VII is crowned Byzantine co-emperor
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, son of Emperor Leo VI and his fourth wife, Zoe Karbonopsina, was crowned Byzantine co-emperor. Nominally emperor from 913 and in real power from 945, he sponsored the treatise De Administrando Imperio.
1252 CE 774 years ago
Pope Innocent IV authorises torture by inquisitors
The bull Ad extirpanda permitted secular authorities to use torture to extract confessions from suspected heretics. It set a precedent for inquisitorial practice for centuries.
1602 CE 424 years ago
Bartholomew Gosnold names Cape Cod
English navigator Bartholomew Gosnold reached the Massachusetts peninsula and named it for the abundant cod his crew caught there. His voyage was an early English exploration of New England.
1618 CE 408 years ago
Johannes Kepler confirms his third law of planetary motion
Kepler found that the square of a planet's orbital period is proportional to the cube of its distance from the Sun. Published in Harmonices Mundi, the law later underpinned Newton's theory of gravitation.
1940 CE 86 years ago
Nylon stockings go on sale across the United States
Shoppers bought some four million pairs of DuPont nylon stockings on the first day of nationwide sales. The synthetic fibre transformed fashion and was soon diverted to wartime parachutes.
1957 CE 69 years ago
Britain tests its first thermonuclear weapon design
Operation Grapple saw a British bomb dropped near Malden Island in the Pacific. Its yield fell short of a true hydrogen bomb, but later tests that year succeeded and secured US nuclear cooperation.
Born on 15 May 5
Died on 15 May 7
Dates as the sources give them: in the Julian calendar before 1582, and in some countries for longer (Britain until 1752, Russia until 1918). Only people whose day of birth or death the records agree on are listed.