Annus mirabilis

• 1. A Phrase for Impossible Years

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  Annus mirabilis is Latin for "year of miracles", and the same phrase has been applied to a medieval siege and a basketball comeback. Both earned the label. Both earned it for the same reason: that what happened that year seemed to defy probability so thoroughly that ordinary language failed. Its recognized counterpart is annus horribilis. Between the fourteenth century and the twenty-first, the phrase has marked more than a dozen separate years. Some describe a single individual working at the limits of human capacity. Others describe nations, campaigns, or entire industries achieving something their contemporaries called impossible. What does it take to earn the phrase? And who gets to decide?

• 2. War's Miraculous Years

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  Eight years into the Hundred Years' War, Edward III of England chose 1345 to re-escalate the conflict. He sent Henry, Earl of Derby, to Gascony with a small force, and personally led the main English army toward northern France. Edward's own offensive was undone by a storm that scattered his fleet. Derby, meanwhile, won victories at Bergerac and Auberoche. The following spring, John, Duke of Normandy, led a French counter-attack against Derby's position. Edward responded by landing 10,000 men in northern Normandy.

  The English army sacked Caen, slaughtering its population. They then cut a path along the left bank of the Seine to within 20 miles of Paris. On the 26th of August 1346, they met a French army led by King Philip VI at the Battle of Crecy and destroyed it. The army promptly laid siege to Calais. Derby's first victory near Bergerac came in late August 1345. The Calais siege began on the 4th of September 1346. The fighting between those two dates became Edward III's annus mirabilis.

  In 1625, during the Thirty Years' War, Spain won five major engagements: Breda, Genoa, Bahia, San Juan, and Cadiz. The victories were immortalized in a series of paintings in the Hall of Realms of the Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid. Gaspar de Guzman, the Count-Duke of Olivares, was the favorite of Philip IV of Spain. He had promoted an explicit policy of military reputation, and the 1625 victories seemed to confirm its success. Olivares delivered what became probably his most famous statement in reference to these victories: "God is Spanish and fights for Spain."

  In 1706, the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV of France achieved what historian James Falkner later called "a Year of Miracles". Their key victories were the Battle of Ramillies and the Siege of Turin. By 1759, British forces had accumulated victories across North America, Europe, India, and several naval theaters. That run of success became associated with William Pitt and marked the turning point of the Seven Years' War. James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, also earned the designation for his Scottish campaigns of 1644-1645 in the War of the Three Kingdoms.

  The same phrase would next be applied not to an army but to a pair of books.

• 3. Discovery Rewrites the World

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  Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543, arguing that the Earth moved around the Sun. That same year, Andreas Vesalius published De humani corporis fabrica, transforming the science of anatomy and the practice of medicine. Historians have traditionally regarded 1543 as the opening of the wider Scientific Revolution, the movement that produced modern science in Europe. Two major fields changed direction in a single calendar year.

  In January 1492, a different kind of transformation was under way. Isabella I and Ferdinand II of Spain completed the conquest of Granada. The Reconquista, centuries long, was over. Muslim rule of the Iberian Peninsula had ended. Later that year, the same monarchs sponsored Christopher Columbus on his first Atlantic crossing. Europeans arrived on the Americas for the first time on the 12th of October. Antonio de Nebrija published his Gramatica de la lengua castellana the same year. It was the first grammar composed for a modern Western European language other than Latin. In that year, Spain concluded one of history's longest military campaigns, arrived at an unknown continent, and produced a landmark in European linguistics.

  The scientific tradition that 1543 helped launch would produce its next major annus mirabilis in 1665. The circumstances were unexpected.

• 4. Newton's Plague Year

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  When Cambridge University closed in 1665 because of plague, Isaac Newton was 23 years old. He was sent home to the countryside. The time forced on him by the plague proved unusually productive.

  Newton stated and proved the binomial theorem. He discovered calculus. He developed a theory of color. He formulated the universal law of gravitation. He also worked on motion and optics. The story most persistently attached to this period is that of Newton's apple. He was alleged to have observed an apple falling from a tree and connected the observation to his thinking about gravity. Whether or not the apple episode is accurate, Newton's work on universal gravitation dates from this period. The years 1665 and 1666 together became Newton's annus mirabilis.

  The law of universal gravitation that Newton developed during these years would hold as the foundation of physics until 1905.

• 5. Einstein at Twenty-Six

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  Albert Einstein was 26 years old in 1905, and in that year he published four papers in Annalen der Physik. Each paper addressed a different area of physics. The four subjects were the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, the special theory of relativity, and the mass-energy relationship expressed as E = mc2. These four articles became known collectively as his Annus Mirabilis papers.

  Annalen der Physik published all four papers in 1905. At 26, Einstein was among the youngest scientists to earn the annus mirabilis label.

  The phrase had also found its way to an English cricket pitch, where one batsman's statistics made the case without argument.

• 6. Cricket, Hollywood, and Comebacks

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  Harry Altham credited 1871 as W. G. Grace's annus mirabilis, and the statistics behind that verdict are extreme by any measure. Grace scored 2,739 runs in all first-class matches that season, the first time anyone had cleared 2,000 first-class runs in a single season. Harry Jupp was the nearest competitor, with 1,068. Grace's seasonal average was 78.25; the next-best batsman playing more than a single innings averaged 39.57, barely more than half Grace's figure. Of the 17 centuries scored across all first-class matches that year, Grace accounted for 10. His season highlight came at The Oval, in the South v North match, where he scored 268, the highest of his career at that point. Among his ten centuries was the first ever scored at Trent Bridge in a first-class match.

  Sixty-eight years later, 1939 produced a different kind of annus mirabilis. Hollywood released a concentration of films that year which are now regarded as classics or foundational to their genres. They include The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, and Wuthering Heights, among many others.

  Between June 2016 and March 2017, four major sports produced the largest comebacks in the histories of their respective championships. In June 2016, LeBron James's Cleveland Cavaliers became the first team in NBA Finals history to overcome a 3-1 deficit in games. In November 2016, the Chicago Cubs overcame the same deficit to win the World Series, their franchise's first since 1908. In February 2017, Tom Brady's New England Patriots trailed the Atlanta Falcons by 25 points in the third quarter of the Super Bowl. Their 34-28 victory was the first Super Bowl comeback from that margin. On the 8th of March 2017, Luis Suarez, Lionel Messi, and Neymar led FC Barcelona against PSG in the Champions League. They overturned a four-goal first-leg deficit to win 6-5 on aggregate. The Super Bowl game became known as 28-3. Barcelona's comeback was called la Remontada.

  Portugal had its own annus mirabilis in 2016-17, and it involved not goals or box scores but three pillars of the national character.

• 7. A Nation's Year of Wonders

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  Portugal is known as "the country of the 3 Fs": Football, Fado, and Fatima. Between July 2016 and May 2017, the country achieved a historic milestone in all three. On the 10th of July 2016, the Portugal national team won their first major football trophy at UEFA Euro 2016. Ten months later, on the 13th of May 2017, Salvador Sobral won the Eurovision Song Contest for Portugal with his song Amar pelos dois. It was Portugal's first-ever victory in the contest. That same day, Pope Francis visited Fatima to mark the centenary of the Marian Apparitions of 1917. The period from Portugal's Euro victory in July 2016 to Pope Francis's Fatima visit in May 2017 became Portugal's annus mirabilis.

  In 1963, four future NBA Most Valuable Players were born: Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Hakeem Olajuwon, and Karl Malone. No other year has produced as many NBA MVPs. In 1972, four future Ballon d'Or winners were born: Zinedine Zidane, Rivaldo, Luis Figo, and Pavel Nedved. The Ballon d'Or has an average of two future winners born per year. In 1972, the world produced four, twice what the averages predict.