Thinking back on that occasion, the king recalls that it was the look in the ox's eyes, like that of an innocent man being led to execution, that led him to substitute the lamb.
Over the course of the year, hundreds of events were held to mark the occasion, with the king attending many of them.
The envy of fellow artists, who accused Velázquez of only being able to paint heads, is said to have been the occasion of the king's ordering him to paint a historical subject, the Expulsion of the Moriscos (lost), in competition with other court painters.
According to Simon Keynes: In this period, a diploma can be characterised as a formal and symbolic record, in Latin, of an occasion when the king, acting in a royal assembly, and with the consent of the ecclesiastical and secular orders, created an estate of "bookland" at a specified place, and conveyed it on the privileged terms defined by the "book", or diploma, to a named beneficiary.
The Monk of St Denis wrote in his chronicle, "What distressed her above all was to see how on all occasions ... the king repulsed her, whispering to his people, 'Who is this woman obstructing my view?
But when they ran out of verses, the firing resumed.On that occasion, it was the king who eventually put an end to the violence.
On the last such occasion, Mani presented the king with his first book, the Shāpuragān (Shabuhragan), a summary of his teachings ("dedicated to Shāpūr") written in the Middle Persian language, which provides further evidence of a degree of royal favour.
Edward VI wrote in his journal of the occasion "There was a king of arms made for Ireland, whose name was Ulster, and whose province was Ireland, and he was...the first herald of Ireland".
A royal birth, a wedding, even a successful surgical operation on the king were occasions for elaborate fetes, with sumptuous banquets and music composed for the occasion.
The battles of Crécy and Poitiers gave the English a powerful toehold on the continent; they even captured the French king, Philip, occasioning a peace treaty in 1360.
TALK OF KING inevitably occasions thoughts of New York's melancholy early history: The Dutch brought the first slaves to New Amsterdam in 1625, and by 1750 slaves made up 14percentt of New York's population.
