Post-Classical / Medieval

Between 529 and 534 CE the emperor Justinian I, working through a commission led by the jurist Tribonian, produced a sweeping codification of Roman law that became known as the Corpus Juris Civilis.

In 533 the emperor Justinian I dispatched his general Belisarius with about 16,000 men to recover Roman Africa from the Vandals, who had held Carthage since 439.

Launched in 535, Justinian's Gothic War aimed to recover Italy from the Ostrogothic kingdom established by Theodoric.

In early 536 CE a massive volcanic eruption—most likely in Iceland, though North American sources have also been proposed—injected vast quantities of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, creating a dense dust veil that dimmed the sun…

On 27 December 537 the emperor Justinian I inaugurated the rebuilt church of Hagia Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom, in Constantinople, less than six years after fire had destroyed its predecessor during the Nika riots of 532.

First appearing in Roman Egypt in 541 and reaching Constantinople in 542, the Plague of Justinian was the earliest historically documented pandemic of bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis.

Around 550 CE the great Mesoamerican metropolis of Teotihuacan, located in the Valley of Mexico northeast of present-day Mexico City, entered a sharp and irreversible decline marked by a deliberate, large-scale burning of its monumental…

According to the Nihon Shoki, in 552 CE King Seong (Seongmyeong) of the Korean kingdom of Baekje sent a diplomatic mission to the Yamato court of Emperor Kinmei bearing a gilt-bronze image of Shakyamuni Buddha, Buddhist sutras, ritual…

In April 562 CE the Maya city of Tikal suffered a catastrophic defeat in a conflict recorded with the celestial glyph epigraphers call a 'star war', a designation reserved for the era's most decisive military confrontations.

In 568, only fourteen years after Justinian's costly reconquest, the Lombards under King Alboin crossed the Alps into a depopulated and war-weary Italy, accompanied by Saxon and other allies.

In 589 the armies of the Sui dynasty, founded by Emperor Wen (Yang Jian) in 581, conquered the southern Chen dynasty and reunified China for the first time since the fall of the Han in 220 CE, ending nearly four centuries of division known…

Elected bishop of Rome in 590 as plague ravaged the city, Gregory I, later called Gregory the Great, reshaped the western Church and the role of the papacy.

Around the 6th and 7th centuries CE, a powerful new mode of Hindu devotion known as bhakti crystallised in the Tamil country (Tamilakam) of South India, articulated through the ecstatic vernacular hymns of two groups of poet-saints: the…

Two colossal standing Buddha statues were carved into the sandstone cliffs of the Bamiyan Valley in central Afghanistan, along a key branch of the Silk Road linking the Indian subcontinent with Central Asia.

Between 605 and 609 the Sui emperor Yang mobilised millions of conscripted labourers to build and link a vast inland waterway system, the Grand Canal, connecting the rice-rich Yangtze valley in the south to the political heartland and…

In April 606 the sixteen-year-old Harshavardhana ascended the throne of Thanesar following the assassination of his brother Rajyavardhana, and he soon consolidated power over the small successor states left by the collapse of the Gupta…

According to Islamic tradition, around 610 CE the Meccan merchant Muhammad, then about forty, received the first of the revelations that would form the Quran while meditating in the Cave of Hira on Jabal al-Nour near Mecca.

During the great Byzantine–Sasanian war of 602–628, Persian forces under Khosrow II overran the empire's eastern provinces, and in 614 they besieged and stormed Jerusalem.

On 18 June 618 Li Yuan, known by his temple name Gaozu, proclaimed the Tang dynasty after the collapse of the Sui, inaugurating a regime that would preside over one of the most cosmopolitan and culturally brilliant eras in Chinese history.

In 622 CE Muhammad and his followers migrated from Mecca to the oasis town of Yathrib, soon renamed Medina, to escape mounting persecution by the Quraysh.

In 628 CE the Indian mathematician and astronomer Brahmagupta completed the Brahmasphutasiddhanta ("Correctly Established Doctrine of Brahma") at Bhillamala (modern Bhinmal), then capital of the Gurjara realm in northwestern India.

In 635 CE the Syriac monk Alopen, a missionary of the Church of the East (often called Nestorian Christianity), arrived in the Tang capital of Chang'an after travelling the Silk Road from the Sasanian-Persian sphere, marking the first…

Over six days in August 636, the army of the Rashidun Caliphate, with Khalid ibn al-Walid playing a leading role, decisively defeated a much larger Byzantine force near the Yarmuk River on the borders of present-day Syria, Jordan and…

Between 639 and 642 CE the Arab general Amr ibn al-As led a swift campaign that wrested Egypt from the Byzantine Empire.

Around 650 CE the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, ordered the production of an authoritative written text of the Quran to halt disputes over differing recitations that had emerged as Islam spread among peoples speaking different dialects.

The First Fitna was the first civil war within the Muslim community, triggered by the assassination of the caliph Uthman by rebels in 656 CE amid grievances over alleged nepotism.

By the later 7th century the kingdom of Srivijaya, centred on Palembang in southeastern Sumatra, had emerged as the dominant thalassocracy of maritime Southeast Asia, controlling the Malacca and Sunda Straits that linked the Indian Ocean…

On 10 October 680 CE, near Karbala in present-day Iraq, a small band of relatives and supporters of Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of Muhammad, was surrounded and massacred by the far larger army of the Umayyad caliph Yazid I.

Convened by the emperor Constantine IV and meeting from November 680 to September 681, the Third Council of Constantinople is reckoned the Sixth Ecumenical Council by the Orthodox and Catholic churches.

The Dome of the Rock, completed around 691–692 CE under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik, is the oldest surviving monument of Islamic architecture and the earliest major religious building erected by a Muslim ruler.

On 16 October 690 CE, Wu Zetian formally declared herself huangdi (emperor), supplanting the Tang dynasty with her own short-lived Zhou dynasty and becoming the only woman in the history of China to rule as emperor in her own right rather…

Adi Shankara, a Hindu philosopher and theologian born at Kaladi in Kerala and active in the first half of the eighth century CE, systematised the non-dualist (Advaita) school of Vedanta and reinvigorated orthodox Brahminical thought…

In 711 CE a mainly Berber army under the commander Tariq ibn Ziyad, dispatched from North Africa by the Umayyad governor Musa ibn Nusayr, crossed the strait that now bears Tariq's name (Gibraltar, from Jabal Tariq) and invaded the…

From the summer of 717 the Umayyad Caliphate mounted its greatest assault on Constantinople, sending a large army under Maslama across Anatolia and an enormous fleet into the Sea of Marmara to take the Byzantine capital and open the road…

Around 726 the emperor Leo III the Isaurian began to turn imperial policy against the veneration of religious images, and by 730 he had formally prohibited the use of icons, inaugurating the first phase of Byzantine Iconoclasm.

In October 732 CE, somewhere between Tours and Poitiers in central Gaul, the Frankish leader Charles Martel and his infantry defeated a raiding army of the Umayyad governor of al-Andalus, Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, who was killed in the…

In 732 CE the rulers of the Second Turkic Khaganate (Göktürks) erected the Kül Tigin memorial stele in the Orkhon Valley of present-day central Mongolia, soon followed by a companion monument for Bilge Khagan around 735 CE and the slightly…

Beginning with Abu Muslim raising the black banners of the Hashimiyya movement in Khurasan in 747, the Abbasid Revolution channelled discontent among non-Arab Muslims (mawali), Shi'a sympathisers and easterners against Umayyad rule.

The mid-eighth century marked the apex of the Tang dynasty's golden age of Chinese poetry, the so-called High Tang, dominated by Li Bai (701-762) and Du Fu (712-770), traditionally regarded as the two greatest poets in the Chinese literary…

In July 751, near the Talas River on the border of present-day Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, an Abbasid army under Ziyad ibn Salih defeated the Tang Chinese forces of Gao Xianzhi in the only direct military clash between the Caliphate and…

In 754 Pope Stephen II travelled to Francia and anointed Pepin the Short as king, sanctioning the Carolingian usurpation of the Merovingian throne, while Pepin in return pledged to defend Rome against the Lombards.

In December 755 the powerful frontier general An Lushan rose in revolt against the Tang dynasty, seizing the eastern capital Luoyang and then the main capital Chang'an, forcing Emperor Xuanzong to flee and proclaiming a rival Yan dynasty.

On 30 July 762, the second Abbasid caliph al-Mansur commissioned a new capital on the west bank of the Tigris, officially named Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace.

Under the patronage of the Tibetan emperor Trisong Detsen, the Indian Buddhist scholar Shantarakshita and the tantric master Padmasambhava founded Samye, the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet, in the Yarlung valley region southeast of…

Begun around 780 in central Java under the Sailendra dynasty and completed over roughly six decades, Borobudur is the largest Buddhist monument in the world.

In 780 CE, Chancellor Yang Yan persuaded Emperor Dezong of Tang to adopt the Two-Tax System (liangshui fa), a sweeping fiscal reform enacted to rebuild state finances shattered by the An Lushan Rebellion.

From the late 780s Charlemagne launched a sweeping cultural and educational reform later termed the Carolingian Renaissance.

On 8 June 793 Scandinavian raiders attacked the wealthy monastery of Lindisfarne, an island off the coast of Northumbria that was a preeminent centre of Christianity in early medieval England.

Around 794–795, under the caliph Harun al-Rashid, the first recorded paper mill in the Islamic heartland was established in Baghdad, reportedly organised by the Barmakid vizier and using locally available techniques for producing paper…

In 794 CE, Emperor Kanmu moved the imperial court from Nagaoka-kyo to a newly built capital named Heian-kyo, the "Capital of Peace and Tranquility," on the site of modern Kyoto.

On Christmas Day 800, during Mass at St Peter's Basilica in Rome, Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne 'Emperor of the Romans' (Imperator Romanorum).

Across the southern Maya lowlands of present-day Guatemala, Belize and southern Mexico, the great Classic-era city-states entered terminal decline during the 9th century.

During the Islamic Golden Age, the unification of a vast territory under Arab and Muslim rule enabled an unprecedented diffusion of crops, irrigation technologies, and farming techniques across the Old World, a phenomenon the historian…

Around 805 CE the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, working with his Barmakid vizier Yahya ibn Khalid, established what is traditionally regarded as the first true bimaristan, or general hospital, in Baghdad.

Working at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad under the caliph al-Ma'mun, the Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi compiled, around 820, his treatise Al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa-l-muqabala (The Compendious Book on…

During the reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun (813-833 CE), Baghdad's House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma) became the focal point of a vast, state-sponsored effort to translate the scientific and philosophical heritage of the Greek world…

Signed on 10 August 843, the Treaty of Verdun ended a bitter civil war among the grandsons of Charlemagne by dividing the Carolingian Empire among the three surviving sons of Emperor Louis the Pious.

The Huichang Persecution was a state-directed suppression of Buddhism in Tang China that reached its peak in 845 CE under Emperor Wuzong, named for his Huichang reign era (841-846).

Around the 9th century CE, artisans at Igbo-Ukwu in present-day Anambra State, southeastern Nigeria, produced an extraordinary corpus of leaded-bronze and copper objects using highly sophisticated lost-wax (cire perdue) casting, the…

Dated to 11 May 868 by its own colophon, the Chinese Diamond Sutra is the earliest complete, dated printed book known to survive, produced by woodblock printing during the late Tang dynasty.

The Zanj Rebellion was a massive slave uprising that erupted in 869 CE in the salt marshes of lower Mesopotamia near Basra, in the heartland of the Abbasid Caliphate.

In 878, after years of Viking conquest that had overrun most of Anglo-Saxon England, Alfred the Great of Wessex emerged from hiding in the Somerset marshes, rallied the West Saxon levies, and decisively defeated the Great Heathen Army…

The Persian physician Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (Rhazes, c. 865–925), who served as chief physician in Baghdad, produced in the early tenth century his treatise Kitab fi al-jadari wa-l-hasba (A Treatise on Smallpox and…

Dated to Saka year 822, corresponding to 21 April 900 CE, the Laguna Copperplate Inscription is the earliest known calendar-dated written document found in the Philippines.

In 918 the general Wang Geon, honoured as King Taejo, overthrew the unstable Taebong ruler Gung Ye and founded the Goryeo dynasty, from whose name the Western word 'Korea' derives.

On 16 January 929, the Umayyad emir Abd al-Rahman III of Córdoba assumed the title of caliph and Commander of the Faithful, taking the regnal name al-Nasir li-din Allah.

Around 934 CE, Satuq Bughra Khan, a ruler of the Kara-Khanid (Qarakhanid) confederation in Central Asia, embraced Islam and made it the state religion, making the Kara-Khanids the first major Turkic dynasty to convert.

In December 938, the Vietnamese commander Ngo Quyen decisively defeated an invading fleet of the Chinese state of Southern Han at the mouth of the Bach Dang River, near present-day Ha Long Bay in northern Vietnam.

The Eldgjá eruption, which began in the spring of 939 CE and continued at least episodically until the autumn of 940 CE, was the largest effusive (lava-producing) volcanic eruption on Earth in the last few millennia.

The Medieval Warm Period, also called the Medieval Climate Anomaly or Medieval Climate Optimum, was an interval of relatively warm climate lasting from roughly 950 to 1250 CE, most pronounced in the North Atlantic region and parts of…

Over three days in August 955, King Otto I of East Francia (Germany) annihilated a large invading Magyar (Hungarian) army near Augsburg on the Lech river.

On 2 February 962, Pope John XII crowned Otto I of Germany as emperor at Old St Peter's Basilica in Rome, reviving the Western imperial title that had lapsed for nearly four decades since the decline of the Carolingian line.

In 969 CE the Ismaili Shia Fatimid Caliphate, based in Ifriqiya (modern Tunisia), conquered Egypt under the general Jawhar al-Siqilli, acting on behalf of Caliph al-Muizz li-Din Allah.

After the Fatimid general Jawhar al-Siqilli conquered Egypt and founded the new city of Cairo in 969 for the Ismaili Shi'a caliph al-Mu'izz li-Din Allah, construction of the al-Azhar mosque began in 970 and was completed in 972.

Tiwanaku, the dominant highland polity of the south-central Andes near Lake Titicaca, disintegrated rapidly around 1000–1050 CE, closing the Andean Middle Horizon alongside the contemporaneous waning of the Wari state to the north.

Around the turn of the first millennium, Chinese tradition places the legendary origin of variolation, the earliest known technique for deliberately inducing immunity to smallpox by exposing healthy people to material from a mild case of…

Around the year 1000, the trans-Saharan caravan trade in West African gold and Saharan salt reached its height under the dominance of the Ghana Empire (Wagadou), which acted as the indispensable middleman between the goldfields of the…

Around the year 1000, the Andalusian physician Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi (Albucasis, c.

Between about 1003 and 1010 the Chola emperor Rajaraja I built the great Brihadisvara (Rajarajeswaram) temple at Thanjavur, dedicated to Shiva, as the imperial state temple of the expanding Chola state.

In the early eleventh century the noblewoman and lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu, serving at the imperial court in Heian-period Japan, wrote The Tale of Genji, a sprawling prose narrative of the loves, intrigues and melancholy of the…

On 8 March 1010 CE the poet Abolqasem Ferdowsi completed the Shahnameh ("Book of Kings"), the national epic of Greater Iran, after roughly three decades of work begun around 977 CE in his native Tus in the Khorasan region.

In 1012, amid a severe drought across the lower Yangtze and Huai River valleys, the Song emperor Zhenzong ordered the procurement and distribution of an early-ripening, drought-resistant rice variety that had originated in the Champa…

While residing at the fortress of Nandana in Pind Dadan Khan (in the Punjab region of present-day Pakistan), the Persian polymath Abu Rayhan al-Biruni devised an innovative method to determine the radius of the Earth using a single…

Between about 1020 and 1125 CE the Ancestral Puebloan builders of Chaco Canyon in present-day New Mexico carried out a series of vast additions to Pueblo Bonito, the largest of the canyon's great houses.

The Arab polymath Ibn al-Haytham (Latinised as Alhazen, c. 965 - c. 1040) composed his seven-volume Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics) in Cairo between roughly 1011 and 1021, traditionally during a period of house arrest under the Fatimid…

In 1023 the Northern Song government established a state Jiaozi Office at Yizhou in Sichuan and took over the issue of jiaozi, creating the world's first official, government-backed paper currency.

Around 1025 the Persian polymath Ibn Sina (Avicenna, c. 980–1037) completed al-Qanun fi al-tibb, the Canon of Medicine, a five-book encyclopedia that synthesised Greek, Roman, Persian and Indian medical traditions with his own…

In 1025 the Chola emperor Rajendra I launched a long-distance naval expedition across the Bay of Bengal against the Srivijayan thalassocracy of maritime Southeast Asia, an almost unique example of large-scale overseas force projection from…

Between roughly 1040 and 1048 the artisan Bi Sheng, working during China's Northern Song dynasty, invented the world's first known movable type, cutting an individual character into moist clay for each glyph and firing the pieces hard.

Compiled around 1040–1044 under the Northern Song dynasty by Zeng Gongliang and colleagues, the military encyclopaedia Wujing Zongyao ('Complete Essentials from the Military Classics') contains the earliest known written formulas for…

Around 1050 CE the settlement at Cahokia, across the Mississippi River from modern St. Louis, expanded dramatically into the largest urban centre of pre-Columbian North America north of Mexico.

Beginning around 1050, the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym, Bedouin Arab tribal confederations from Upper Egypt with origins in the Najd and Hejaz, migrated westward in large numbers into Ifriqiya and the wider Maghreb.

In 1054 the long-building rift between the Latin (Roman) and Greek (Byzantine) churches hardened into formal schism.

King Anawrahta (r. 1044-1077), founder of the Pagan (Bagan) Empire in Upper Burma, made Theravada Buddhism the dominant religion of his realm, beginning the tradition's enduring ascendancy in mainland Southeast Asia.

The death of the childless King Edward the Confessor in January 1066 triggered a contested succession to the English throne.

Working from merchants' reports and earlier writings in Cordoba in al-Andalus, the geographer Abu Ubayd al-Bakri completed his Kitab al-Masalik wa-al-Mamalik (Book of Roads and Kingdoms) in 1068.

On 26 August 1071, near Manzikert (modern Malazgirt in eastern Anatolia), the Byzantine army under Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes was decisively defeated by the Seljuk forces of Sultan Alp Arslan.

Toward the end of the eleventh century the ruler of Kanem, Mai Umme Jilmi (also rendered Humai), embraced Islam, replacing the older Duguwa line with the Sayfawa dynasty that would rule Kanem and later Bornu for some eight centuries.

The Investiture Controversy was a decades-long struggle between popes and emperors over who held the right to appoint (invest) bishops and abbots.

In 1076 the Almoravids, a militant Berber Muslim movement from the western Sahara, are traditionally said to have sacked Koumbi Saleh, the great trading capital of the Ghana Empire.

Following the collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba in 1031, al-Andalus fractured into rival taifa kingdoms.

Between 1088 and 1092 the Song official and engineer Su Song (1020-1101) directed the construction at Kaifeng of a roughly ten-metre water-powered astronomical clock tower.

The earliest unambiguous descriptions of the magnetic compass appear in Song China.

The High Middle Ages saw the birth of the university, a self-governing corporation of masters and students with the power to grant degrees — an institution with no clear precedent in antiquity.

At the Council of Clermont in November 1095, Pope Urban II called on the warriors of Western Christendom to march east, aid the Byzantine Empire against the Seljuk Turks, and recover Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre from…

Around 1095 CE, while serving as professor at the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad, the Persian theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali completed Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), a systematic critique of the Aristotelian and…

Commissioned by the Khmer king Suryavarman II in the first half of the 12th century and built over roughly three decades, Angkor Wat at Yasodharapura (Angkor) is the largest religious structure in the world, covering some 160 hectares.

Around 1140–1144 Abbot Suger rebuilt the choir of the royal abbey church of Saint-Denis, near Paris, in a new style that combined the pointed arch, the rib vault and the flying buttress to dissolve solid walls into screens of stained glass.

After the Christian reconquest of Toledo in 1085, the city's rich Arabic libraries and its mixed population of Arabic-, Hebrew- and Romance-speaking scholars made it the leading centre for translating learning into Latin.

Tula (Tollan) in present-day Hidalgo, the principal centre of the Toltec state and famous for its colossal Atlantean warrior columns, was largely abandoned and its ceremonial core burned during the 12th century, with traditional…

Historians traditionally date the origins of the Hanseatic League to 1159, when Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, rebuilt and refounded the Baltic port of Lübeck after seizing the area from Adolf II of Holstein.

Working in Córdoba and Seville through the 1170s and 1180s, the Andalusian philosopher, jurist and physician Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126–1198) produced the most systematic body of commentary on Aristotle's works yet attempted, organised in…

By the late 12th century the city-state of Ife (Ile-Ife) in what is now southwestern Nigeria had emerged as a prosperous and influential kingdom, the sacred and political heartland of the Yoruba people.

During the Southern Song dynasty, the scholar Zhu Xi (1130-1200) forged the definitive synthesis of Neo-Confucianism (lixue, the "School of Principle"), integrating the metaphysics of earlier Northern Song masters such as Zhou Dunyi, Zhang…

During the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the Zagwe king Gebre Mesqel Lalibela commissioned a remarkable complex of monolithic churches cut directly downward into the volcanic rock of the Ethiopian highlands.

On 4 July 1187 the Ayyubid sultan Saladin (Salah al-Din) decisively defeated the main army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin in Galilee.

Following the Ghurid conquest of Delhi, Qutb al-Din Aibak began the Qutb Minar around 1199 beside the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, the earliest congregational mosque of the Delhi Sultanate, which was raised from the spoils of demolished temples.

Around 1200 CE, seafaring Polynesians and Indigenous South Americans made transoceanic contact in eastern Polynesia, a meeting long suspected and finally confirmed by genetics.

Called by Pope Innocent III to recover Jerusalem by way of Egypt, the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) was diverted by debts owed to Venice and entanglement in a Byzantine dynastic dispute.

In 1206, after the death of his master Muhammad of Ghur, the Turkic slave-general Qutb al-Din Aibak assumed power in northern India and established himself at Delhi, founding the Mamluk or Slave dynasty and inaugurating the Delhi Sultanate.

At a great kurultai (assembly) on the Onon River in 1206, the steppe chieftain Temüjin was proclaimed Genghis Khan, supreme ruler of a newly unified Mongol nation (the Yeke Mongghol Ulus).

In 1206, the polymath Badi al-Zaman Abu al-Izz Ismail ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari (1136-1206) completed the Kitab fi Ma'rifat al-Hiyal al-Handasiyya (The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices) while serving as chief engineer at the…

In 1215, rebellious English barons confronted the unpopular King John over heavy taxation, arbitrary justice and the abuses of royal power that had followed his military failures in France.

After the Khwarazmshah Muhammad II executed Mongol envoys and merchants at Otrar, Genghis Khan launched a devastating invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire, the dominant power of Central Asia and Persia.

As the great northern Yucatan centre of Chichen Itza waned, the walled city of Mayapan rose in the early 13th century to become the dominant political and cultural capital of the Postclassic Maya, holding sway over much of the peninsula…

Around 1235 the Mandinka prince Sundiata Keita defeated the Sosso king Sumanguru Kante at the Battle of Kirina, on the upper Niger in what is now Mali.

During the western campaign led by Batu Khan and the general Subutai, the Mongols stormed Kiev after a short siege, with the city falling on 6 December 1240.

Within roughly a single century, around A.D. 1190-1290, Polynesian seafarers discovered and colonised nearly all of the remaining habitable islands of the eastern Pacific, including the Hawaiian archipelago to the north, Rapa Nui (Easter…

Around 1242, the Arab physician Ala al-Din Ibn al-Nafis (c. 1213-1288) set out the first known description of the pulmonary (lesser) circulation of the blood in his Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna's Canon (Sharh Tashrih al-Qanun).

East Polynesian voyagers in double-hulled ocean canoes settled Aotearoa New Zealand around the late thirteenth to early fourteenth century, the last major landmass on Earth to be reached by humans.

Between roughly the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries the Shona capital of Great Zimbabwe became the largest stone-built settlement in sub-Saharan Africa, housing perhaps 18,000 people at its mid-fourteenth-century peak.

Around 1250 CE, roughly half a century after Polynesian voyagers settled Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the islanders began carving the monumental stone statues known as moai.

In 1257 CE, the Samalas volcano within the Mount Rinjani volcanic complex on the island of Lombok, Indonesia, produced one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the Holocene, rated VEI 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index.

Between 29 January and 10 February 1258, a vast Ilkhanate Mongol army led by Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, besieged and stormed Baghdad.

On 3 September 1260, at Ain Jalut ('Spring of Goliath') in the Jezreel Valley of Palestine, the Mamluk army of Egypt under Sultan Qutuz and the general Baybars decisively defeated a Mongol force commanded by Hülegü's lieutenant Kitbuqa.

The Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), teaching at Paris and in Italy, produced the most influential synthesis of medieval Christian thought.

Around 1267 the ruler Merah Silu of Samudra Pasai, on the northern coast of Sumatra, converted to Islam and took the name Malik al-Salih, founding what is generally regarded as the first Islamic sultanate in Southeast Asia.

In 1271 Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, proclaimed the Yuan dynasty, adopting a Chinese dynastic name and claiming the Mandate of Heaven and orthodox succession from earlier Chinese dynasties.

Around 1271 the young Venetian merchant Marco Polo set out with his father and uncle along the Silk Road, reaching the court of Kublai Khan in China by the mid-1270s.

Kublai Khan twice attempted to subjugate Japan, drawing on the resources of his Yuan empire and the subdued Korean kingdom of Goryeo.

Around 1286 an unknown craftsman in northern Italy, probably in the vicinity of Pisa, fixed two convex glass lenses in a frame of wood, bone or metal to create the first wearable eyeglasses, designed to correct the far-sightedness that…

Between 1277 and 1287, the Yuan dynasty of Kublai Khan launched a series of campaigns against the Pagan Empire after its king, Narathihapate, refused demands for tribute and submission.

On 9 April 1288, the forces of Dai Viet, commanded by the Tran-dynasty grand commander Tran Hung Dao, annihilated the invading Yuan-Mongol fleet on the estuary of the Bach Dang River in present-day Quang Ninh Province, northern Vietnam.

In the first half of the fourteenth century the Swahili city-state of Kilwa Kisiwani, on an island off the coast of present-day Tanzania, reached the height of its power.

Beginning in the spring of 1315, relentless rains and unusually cold weather ruined harvests across northern Europe from Ireland and England through France, the Low Countries, Germany, Scandinavia and Poland.

In 1324 Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca with an entourage that Arab chroniclers numbered in the tens of thousands, accompanied by hundreds of attendants bearing staffs of gold and camels laden with…

In 1325 the Mexica, a Nahuatl-speaking people who had migrated into the Valley of Mexico as subordinate latecomers, founded their city of Tenochtitlan on a swampy island in Lake Texcoco.

Following Mansa Musa's celebrated pilgrimage to Mecca (1324), the Mali Empire ruler returned around 1325 and made Timbuktu a hub of Islamic scholarship, commissioning mosques including the Djinguereber and recruiting scholars such as the…

In 1327, shortly after returning from his celebrated pilgrimage, Mansa Musa commissioned the Djinguereber Mosque at Timbuktu, a great congregational mosque built of mud brick and timber in the Sudano-Sahelian style.

In 1336 the brothers Harihara I and Bukka Raya of the Sangama family founded the Vijayanagara Empire on the Tungabhadra river in the Deccan, naming it after its new capital, Vijayanagara (the City of Victory, near modern Hampi).

The Genoese Black Sea trading colony of Kaffa (modern Feodosia) in Crimea was besieged in the 1340s by Jani Beg, khan of the Golden Horde, amid conflict with the Italian merchants.

In October 1347 Genoese ships fleeing the besieged Crimean port of Caffa carried plague to Sicily, and within three years the pandemic caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis had reached almost every corner of Europe, the Middle East and…

In 1368 Zhu Yuanzhang, a former peasant and Buddhist novice who had risen as a rebel commander amid the Red Turban revolts, proclaimed the Ming dynasty and took the reign name Hongwu, meaning vastly martial.

Around 1370 the Turco-Mongol warlord Timur (Tamerlane), of the Barlas tribe in Transoxiana, seized sole power after years of warfare and proclaimed himself restorer of the Mongol empire, ruling in the name of the Chagatai khans.

In 1374, the actor-playwright Kan'ami Kiyotsugu (1333–1384) and his troupe performed sarugaku at the Imagumano shrine in Kyoto before the young Ashikaga shogun Yoshimitsu (1358–1408), who was so impressed—particularly by Kan'ami's…

In July 1377, monks at Heungdeok Temple in Cheongju, then part of Goryeo Korea, printed the Jikji (full title Baegun hwasang chorok buljo jikji simche yojeol), an anthology of Seon (Zen) Buddhist teachings compiled by the monk Baegun…

After the papacy returned from Avignon to Rome under Gregory XI in 1377, the disputed election of Urban VI in April 1378 split the Latin Church.

In the summer of 1381 a mass uprising erupted across south-eastern England, the largest popular rebellion of medieval English history.

In 1398 the Central Asian conqueror Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane, led a massive army from his capital Samarkand across the Indus into northern India, claiming to punish the Delhi Sultanate's tolerance of its Hindu subjects.

Around 1400 CE the island of Yap in the western Caroline Islands developed one of the world's most distinctive monetary and exchange systems, anchored by rai stones, large carved disks of crystalline calcium carbonate (calcite) valued as…

Around the turn of the fifteenth century in present-day Kerala, southern India, the mathematician and astronomer Madhava of Sangamagrama (c.

Commissioned during the reign of Timur (Tamerlane) and associated with his senior wife Saray Mulk Khanum, the Bibi-Khanym Mosque was built between roughly 1399 and 1404 to be the great congregational mosque of his imperial capital…

Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming admiral Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch in the service of the Yongle Emperor, commanded seven great maritime expeditions across the South China Sea and Indian Ocean.

In 1428, under the Mexica ruler Itzcoatl, the city-states of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan joined in a military and political pact that historians call the Aztec Triple Alliance, the institutional foundation of the Aztec Empire.

The siege of Orleans, begun by English forces in October 1428, marked the high tide of English power in the Hundred Years' War.

Around 1428, the Timurid ruler and astronomer Ulugh Beg, grandson of Timur (Tamerlane), completed a monumental observatory at Samarkand in Transoxiana (modern Uzbekistan).

In 1431, after a siege that Thai chronicle traditions describe as lasting roughly seven months from 1430, Ayutthayan (Siamese Tai) forces under King Borommarachathirat II captured and looted Angkor, the great capital of the Khmer Empire…

In 1438 the prince Cusi Yupanqui seized power at Cusco after repelling an invasion by the rival Chanka confederation, a war his father Viracocha Inca had fled as unwinnable.

In the German city of Mainz around 1440 to 1450 the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg developed a system of printing with reusable cast-metal movable type, combining a durable type-metal alloy, oil-based ink and an adapted screw press into a…

In August 1444 a fleet of six ships organised by the Lagos tax-collector Lançarote de Freitas returned from raids on the Bay of Arguin (modern Mauritania) and landed roughly 235 captive Africans at Lagos in southern Portugal.

Within fifty years of Gutenberg's movable-type press (c. 1455), printing spread explosively across Europe.

The Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy, was founded when five northeastern woodland nations—the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—united under a constitution known as the Great Law of Peace (Kaianere'kó:wa or Gayanashagowa).

Around 1452 CE a colossal volcanic eruption in the Shepherd Islands of present-day Vanuatu destroyed the island of Kuwae, splitting it and leaving a submarine caldera roughly 6 by 12 km across between the modern islands of Epi and Tongoa.

On 29 May 1453, after a siege of some seven weeks begun on 6 April, the army of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople, extinguishing the Byzantine Empire that had endured for over a thousand years as the eastern continuation…

In 1468 Sonni Ali, ruler of the rising state of Songhai based at Gao on the Niger bend, captured Timbuktu, then held by the Tuareg, and in 1473 took the inland port of Jenne, supplanting the declining Mali Empire as the dominant power in…

Around 1470 the Inca, under the general and future emperor Topa Inca Yupanqui, conquered Chimor, the powerful Chimu kingdom of Peru's north coast, and absorbed its capital Chan Chan.

Between roughly 1490 and 1530 Italian art reached the apex known as the High Renaissance, dominated by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Raphael. Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa (c.

On 3 May 1491, the ManiKongo (king) Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptised as João I at Mbanza Kongo, marking the first conversion of a sub-Saharan African monarch to Roman Catholicism.

On 12 October 1492 an expedition led by the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus, financed by the Crown of Castile, made landfall on an island in the Bahamas that its Lucayan inhabitants called Guanahani and that Columbus renamed San…

Following Columbus's voyages, sustained Atlantic contact set off the Columbian Exchange, a vast two-way transfer of crops, animals, peoples and pathogens between the Old and New Worlds.

Signed on 7 June 1494 by the Crowns of Castile and Aragon and the Kingdom of Portugal, the Treaty of Tordesillas drew an imaginary meridian from pole to pole 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands.

On 20 May 1498 the Portuguese commander Vasco da Gama anchored near Calicut (Kozhikode) on India's Malabar Coast, becoming the first European to reach India by sea.

Around 1499, Guru Nanak (1469-1539), a spiritual teacher from the Punjab region of South Asia, experienced a profound mystical revelation while bathing in the Bein (Vein) river near Sultanpur Lodhi, after which he declared 'There is no…

On 22 April 1500 a Portuguese fleet commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral, bound for India along Vasco da Gama's route, made landfall on the coast of present-day Bahia in South America.

Over roughly a century and a half from about 1500 to 1650, prices across Europe rose on average around sixfold, an unprecedented era of sustained inflation contemporaries struggled to explain.