The world in AD 1050

Africa

Nasir-i Khusraw, philosopher, poet and traveler, reached Cairo in 1047 and stayed three years to further his Ismaili education. Farhad Daftary writes in the Encyclopaedia Iranica that he saw al-Mustansir there and grew close to al-Mu’ayyad of Shiraz, later head of the Fatimid mission, who had fled Persia and arrived in Cairo in 1046. Al-Mustansir reigned from 1036 to 1094, and in Daftary’s account the Fatimid state began its rapid decline in those years even as its missionary work abroad reached its peak. The court workshops kept weaving his name into cloth: a striped cloth of linen and silk in the Cleveland Museum of Art, dated 1049 to 1050 and probably worn as a turban, carries an Arabic inscription asking help from God for “the Imam a[l-Mustansir bi-Allah],” with small birds in roundels that the museum reads as harpies with human faces.

• Churches cut from rock: Francisco Álvares at Lalibela in the 1520s1200

West Asia

Isfahan had already given in once, to a siege in 1046 and 1047, and its Kakuyid ruler Abu Mansur Faramurz had gone back to paying tribute. In 1050 Toghril Beg besieged the city again; C. Edmund Bosworth writes that it surrendered after a year, that Toghril treated its people favorably, pulled down part of the walls and moved his capital there from Ray, and that Abu Mansur received the towns of Abarquh and Yazd in exchange. The chronicler Ibn al-Athir, quoted by Xavier de Planhol in the same encyclopedia, has Toghril bringing from Ray “all that he possessed in gold, provisions, and arms, to make it his permanent residence.” Five years later, in 1055, Toghril entered Baghdad.

• One Cairo storeroom, 193,000 fragments: the Geniza goes to Cambridge1100

Europe

Michael Keroularios, patriarch of Constantinople, wrote to Peter, patriarch of Antioch, in June or July 1054 about a rumor that Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem still named the pope in their church prayers. His letter lists what he took to be Latin errors, among them unleavened bread in the Eucharist, an addition to the creed, shaving and the rule against married priests, and it warns that “the Romans are not spitted on only one pike.” The translator, Tia M. Kolbaba, calls it one of the earliest lists of Latin errors and notes that reformers in the Latin church were at that very time pushing married men out of the priesthood.

• When were Vikings in North America? A solar storm says AD 10211021

East Asia

Bi Sheng, who lived from 990 to 1051, made the first movable type, one piece for each character, in baked clay that was very fragile; Columbia University’s Asia for Educators adds that movable type was never widely used in China because whole-block printing cost less. Six years before 1050, the military manual Wujing zongyao, the “Collection of the Most Important Military Techniques,” had recorded the first true gunpowder formula and explained how to produce it on a large scale. The same source says gunpowder was first used in war as an incendiary, in small paper or bamboo packets tied to arrows and lit with a fuse.

South Asia

For the Ghaznavid sultans, now shut out of Khorasan and ruling from Ghazna and the Punjab, Bosworth calls the late 1040s and early 1050s “something of a ‘Time of Troubles’”: Mawdud’s reign ended in 1048 or 1049, and that of Mahmud’s surviving son Abd al-Rashid ended in 1052, when a Turkish commander also named Toghril seized the throne at Ghazna for several months. The scholar Abu Rayhan al-Biruni had served this court for more than three decades and had finished his book on India in 1030; Bosworth thinks it probable that he learned Sanskrit in the northwestern lands under Ghaznavid rule. His death date is disputed. Scholars in Tashkent put it at December 11, 1048, but al-Biruni wrote his book on pharmacology when, by his own statement, he was over 80, which would place him still alive after 1050.

• Why did Rajendra Chola send a fleet against Srivijaya in about 1025?1025
• An iron pillar older than its mosque: the Qutb Minar complex, Delhi1199

Central Asia

Around 1040, Michal Biran writes, the Qarakhanid state split into two independent khanates, an eastern one held by the Hasanid branch of the ruling family and a western one held by the Alids, with a contested border near the Syr Darya and the Fergana valley often changing hands. The western khanate was consolidated under Tamghach Khan Ibrahim ibn Nasr, who ruled from 1040 to 1069 and whom the Muslim sources widely describe as just and devout. To the southwest, on May 23, 1040, some 16,000 Turkmen under the brothers Toghril Beg and Chaghri Beg had defeated the Ghaznavid sultan Mas’ud I outside Dandanqan, a small walled town between Marv and Sarakhs in present-day Turkmenistan, and all of Khorasan lay open to them.

• A sealed room at Mogao, opened in 1900: the Dunhuang Library Cave1000
• A minaret rebuilt in 1127: the Kalyan tower of Bukhara1127

The Americas

Cahokia, in the American Bottom of the Mississippi floodplain, emerged around 1050 as the largest city north of modern-day Mexico, according to a 2025 PLoS ONE study by Nicholas Kessler, Timothy Pauketat and three colleagues, who give its population as 20,000 or more. The city’s urban Lohmann phase is dated 1050 to 1100, and with it came large marker posts, tree trunks set upright in plazas and on mounds; from the hundreds of ramped post pits found so far, archaeologists project that thousands of such poles stood in and around the central precincts at any one time between 1050 and 1200. The largest known, the Mitchell Log, was a bald cypress brought from at least 180 kilometers away and felled around 1124.

• Who carried 200,000 trees into Chaco Canyon, and why did they leave?1050
• PLOS ONE's 102 dates put Tiwanaku's collapse at AD 1010 to 10501010
• Monks Mound and 120 others: Cahokia on the Mississippi, 1050 to 13501100
• How the Maya counted Venus, and the book that kept the countAD 900

Oceania

Mud from lake beds on Atiu, in the southern Cook Islands, holds traces of pigs or people on an untouched landscape from around AD 900, a change in lake carbon around 1000 and heavy human disturbance from about 1100. David Sear and his co-authors, writing in 2020, read this as exploration and return voyages from the west with settlement following a century or two later, and they tie the voyages to a drought of 200 to 400 years in the likely source region, with Samoa a probable departure point. The date of East Polynesian colonization is much debated, and their timeline puts the first arrivals earlier than current models do.

• Three stones at Heketa, the Haʻamonga ʻa Maui trilithon of Tongatapu1200
• Basalt logs on a reef: Nan Madol, Pohnpei, built from about AD 11801200
• How did Polynesians find Hawaii and New Zealand without a compass?1200

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Fatimids, relations with Persia (Farhad Daftary)
• Cleveland Museum of Art: Striped tiraz, 1049–50 (1950.528)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Kakuyids (C. Edmund Bosworth)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Isfahan ii. Historical Geography (Xavier de Planhol)
• Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University: Michael Keroularios, Letter to Patriarch Peter of Antioch (concerning Schism of 1054), trans. Tia M. Kolbaba
• Asia for Educators, Columbia University: Printing and Movable Type
• Asia for Educators, Columbia University: Gunpowder
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Ghaznavids (C. Edmund Bosworth)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Biruni, Abu Rayhan i. Life (C. Edmund Bosworth)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Ilak-Khanids (Michal Biran)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Dandanqan (C. Edmund Bosworth)
• Kessler, Benson, Pauketat, Kirk and Therrell, Age and origin of a Cahokian wooden monument at the Mitchell site, Illinois, USA, PLoS ONE 20 (2025), via PubMed Central
• Sear et al., Human settlement of East Polynesia earlier, incremental, and coincident with prolonged South Pacific drought, PNAS 117 (2020), via PubMed Central