Friday the 13th is not unlucky because of the Templars.
They really were arrested on Friday 13 October 1307, but the superstition is first recorded only in the 19th century, and the Templar link is later still.
More amazing facts
- 1300 · 1303 Dante booked a place in Hell for a living pope.
- 1300 · 1944 Coins of the Kilwa Sultanate in East Africa were found in Australia.
- 1300 · 1910 On finding a bronze head at Ife in 1910, the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius decided it was a relic of Atlantis.
- 1300 Medieval people did drink water; beer was not a forced substitute for 'unsafe' water.
- 1306 · 1727 For over 400 years spectacles had no arms: people held them, pinched them on the nose or tied them on with ribbons.
- 1311 · 1324 Mansa Musa said he came to the throne because his predecessor sailed off into the Atlantic.