Middle Ages
Notre-Dame de Paris: Building the Great Gothic Cathedral
Notre-Dame became one of the largest and most influential Gothic cathedrals in Europe and the religious heart of medieval Paris.
Region
Europe
Middle Ages
Stefan Nemanja: Founder of Serbia's Nemanjić Dynasty, c. 1166
Nemanja made Serbia an independent regional power and founded the Nemanjić dynasty, which ruled Serbia until 1371.
Middle Ages
Averroes (Ibn Rushd): Philosopher of Cordoba and Aristotle
Ibn Rushd's commentaries made him the leading interpreter of Aristotle for medieval Jewish and Latin Christian scholars, who called him simply 'the Commentator'.
Middle Ages
Anglo-Norman Invasion of Ireland (1169): Strongbow Arrives
Anglo-Norman lords seized much of eastern Ireland, and Henry II's arrival in 1171 established the English crown's claim to lordship over Ireland.
Middle Ages
Murder of Thomas Becket (1170): Death in Canterbury Cathedral
Becket was killed in his own cathedral; he was canonised in 1173, Henry II did public penance, and Canterbury became one of Europe's great pilgrimage centres.
Middle Ages
Leaning Tower of Pisa: Why the Medieval Bell Tower Tilts
The campanile was completed in the fourteenth century with a permanent tilt, which engineers reduced and stabilised between 1990 and 2001.
Middle Ages
Battle of Legnano (1176): Lombard League Defeats Barbarossa
Decisive victory for the Lombard League; Frederick made peace with the pope in 1177 and recognised the cities' self-government at Constance in 1183.
Middle Ages
Tale of Igor's Campaign: The 1185 Raid and the Epic It Inspired
Igor's force was destroyed by the Cumans and he was captured, though he later escaped; the defeat became the subject of the most famous work of early East Slavic literature.
Middle Ages
Uprising of Asen and Peter (1185): The Second Bulgarian Empire
The revolt ended Byzantine rule over northern Bulgaria and founded the Second Bulgarian Empire, which lasted until the Ottoman conquest of 1393-1396.
Middle Ages
Third Crusade (1189-1192): Richard the Lionheart and Saladin
The crusaders recovered Acre and the coast from Tyre to Jaffa but not Jerusalem; the Treaty of Jaffa (1192) allowed Christian pilgrims to visit the city.
Middle Ages
Maimonides and the Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190)
Maimonides completed the Guide for the Perplexed around 1190, a landmark of medieval philosophy that shaped Jewish, Islamic and Christian thought.
Middle Ages
Captivity of Richard the Lionheart (1192): A King for Ransom
Richard was released at Mainz on 4 February 1194 after England raised a ransom of 150,000 marks, one of the heaviest financial burdens of the medieval English state.