13 stories from this century.
Two years after Baghdad's destruction, a Mongol army stood poised to take Egypt — the last great power of the Islamic world. At Ain Jalut in Galilee on 3 September 1260, the Mamluk sultan Qutuz and his general Baibars destroyed it: the first major Mongol defeat that was never avenged. Weeks later, Baibars murdered Qutuz and took the throne.
Read the story →At its height around 1200, Greater Angkor covered some 1,000 km² and may have held close to a million people, sustained by a vast engineered water network. By the mid-15th century the court was gone to the south. Not 'lost' — Angkor Wat never ceased to be a shrine — the city was undone, modern research suggests, by its own infrastructure meeting megadroughts and floods.
Read the story →Between the 11th and 15th centuries a Shona state built Great Zimbabwe: granite walls up to 11 metres high, laid without mortar, at the hub of a gold trade reaching the Indian Ocean. Colonial Rhodesia officially attributed it to Phoenicians, Arabs — anyone but Africans — and censored archaeologists who reported the truth. The country took its name from the ruins at independence.
Read the story →Between roughly 1250 and 1500, the people of Rapa Nui — the most remote inhabited island on Earth — carved nearly a thousand moai and moved statues of many tonnes kilometres without wheels or draft animals. The famous 'ecocide' parable of a society that destroyed itself has been heavily revised: the catastrophic collapse came after European contact — slave raids and smallpox reduced the population to 111 by 1877.
Read the story →The Fourth Crusade was contracted in 1201 to invade Egypt. By 1202 the crusaders could not pay for the Venetian fleet they had ordered. They diverted to attack the Christian Byzantine capital at Constantinople, where they installed an Angelid pretender. When he could not pay either, they sacked the city on 12-15 April 1204. The Eastern Orthodox-Catholic schism became permanent.
Read the story →The English barons forced King John to seal Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June 1215, accepting limits on royal arbitrary action. Pope Innocent III annulled it on 24 August 1215. John repudiated it. The First Barons' War followed within weeks. The charter was reissued — with modifications — in 1216, 1217, and 1225, and the 1225 version became the canonical text that survives in English common law to the present.
Read the story →Hulagu Khan's Mongol army of approximately 150,000 besieged Baghdad on 29 January 1258. The Abbasid Caliph al-Musta'sim surrendered on 10 February. The Mongol sack ran from 13 to 20 February 1258. Casualty estimates range from 200,000 to 800,000 dead. The Tigris reportedly ran black with ink from the destroyed libraries and red with blood from the killed. The Abbasid Caliphate of 750-1258 ended.
Read the story →According to a 13th-century Dominican chronicle, an English-born woman called Joan reigned as Pope John VIII from about 855 to 858 CE, gave birth during a Lateran procession, and was killed by the crowd. No 9th- or 10th-century source mentions her. The story is almost certainly a 13th-century fabrication. It was treated as historical fact for 400 years.
Read the story →John Iwyn was a 13th-century London mercer who donated a small property on the southern edge of Newgate Street to the newly-arrived English Franciscans in 1224. The donation became the foundation site of the Greyfriars church and friary — the most important Franciscan foundation in medieval England and the eventual burial site of four major English queens.
Read the story →In 1257 an Indonesian volcano called Samalas erupted with the largest eruption of the last seven thousand years. The sulphate signal appears in polar ice cores from both Greenland and Antarctica. Medieval European chronicles record the cold summer of 1258. It took until 2013 to identify the source.
Read the story →The Tyburn gallows at the western edge of medieval London were the main public execution site for the English crown from 1196 to 1783. About sixty thousand people died there. The site is now a traffic junction at Marble Arch, with a plaque almost nobody reads.
Read the story →In 1274 and again in 1281, Kublai Khan sent invasion fleets against Japan. Both times — once after a single battle and once after seven weeks of fighting — typhoons destroyed the Mongol ships. The Japanese called the wind divine.
Read the story →Old London Bridge stood for six hundred years, carried houses and shops on its back, and dammed the river so completely that the Thames froze upstream. When they tore it down in 1831 the river never froze again.
Read the story →