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Snapshot · 1100

The world in AD 1100

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TL;DR — In AD 1100 crusaders held Jerusalem, Seljuk brothers fought over Iran, Huizong began his Song reign over 100 million people, and Tiwanaku had no year-round residents.

China’s population had reached 100 million by 1100, by the reckoning of Columbia University’s Asia for Educators, which adds that it probably already exceeded the population of all of Europe; that year a new Song emperor, Huizong, took the throne. Farther west the Turkish Seljuk sultanate was split between the sons of Malikshah, the Fatimid caliphs in Cairo ruled through their viziers, and a Frankish lord had held Jerusalem since July 1099. Alexios I Komnenos had governed Byzantium for 19 years, and England had a new king, Henry I. On the Mississippi floodplain Cahokia was growing toward its peak, while in the Andes the city of Tiwanaku had been without permanent residents for close to a century. Nobody yet lived in New Zealand, and on the newest dating nobody would for another 150 years.

Africa

Egypt was ruled from Cairo by the Fatimids, whose throne the vizier al-Afdal had given in 1094 to al-Musta’li, the younger brother of the designated heir Nizar; Farhad Daftary writes in the Encyclopaedia Iranica that the later Fatimids ruled “as mere puppets in the hands of their viziers,” and that the Seljuks had already pushed them out of Syria by 1078. The court workshops still turned out luxury cloth: a tiraz band of linen, silk and gold thread in the Cleveland Museum of Art, dated 1094 and naming al-Musta’li in its inscription, represents in the museum’s words “the final artistic and technical height” of these imperial textiles. Far to the south, on Mapela Hill in southwestern Zimbabwe, a 2014 study led by Shadreck Chirikure dated stone-walled terraces with solid adobe (dhaka) floors to the 11th century, almost two hundred years before Mapungubwe, which the same paper places between 1220 and 1290. The nearby Limpopo settlement of K2, of the same Leopard’s Kopje culture, is dated there to 1000 to 1200.

West Asia

Malikshah had died in 1092, and C. Edmund Bosworth’s Iranica entry on his son Berkyaruq records that the boy was only 13; Berkyaruq held Iraq and western Iran, while his half-brother Muhammad Tapar held Azerbaijan and Arran with the support of Muhammad’s full brother Sanjar, and the two waged “continuous warfare” until they divided the empire in 1104, a few months before Berkyaruq died at 25. Peter Jackson, writing in the same encyclopedia, argues that the early successes of the First Crusade came above all from the disunity of the Islamic world, with Syria split between Tutush’s sons, Ridwan in Aleppo and Duqaq in Damascus. The crusaders took Jerusalem on July 15, 1099, and an account collected in Fordham University’s Medieval Sourcebook says they chose Godfrey as head of the city eight days later; Anna Komnene’s later history records that when Godfrey died the Latins sent for his brother Baldwin at Edessa and made him King of Jerusalem. In the third book of his history, the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres wrote of the settlers: “we who were Occidentals now have been made Orientals.”

Europe

Alexios I Komnenos had ruled in Constantinople since his predecessor Nicephorus Botaniates abdicated on April 4, 1081, and the crusading armies had crossed his lands on their way east. His daughter Anna, who described herself as “born and bred in the purple,” later gave the 11th book of her history of his reign, the Alexiad, to the First Crusade, covering 1097 to 1104. In England, Henry I took the throne in 1100 on the death of his brother William and, in a charter issued at his coronation in London, promised to remove “the bad customs by which the kingdom of England was unjustly oppressed.” The editors of the Fordham sourcebook note that this Charter of Liberties reads almost exactly like Magna Carta and served as its model in 1215.

East Asia

Huizong, whose reign the Cleveland Museum of Art dates from 1100 to 1126, inherited a country whose population, by Columbia’s figures, had doubled between 750 and 1100 while its money supply grew tenfold and paper money came into use. The emperor had an eye for tea wares; he called the fine streaks in the black glaze of Jian bowls “hare’s fur” and remarked that such bowls should be deep and wide so the tea powder could be whisked properly. On his northern border the Khitan Liao dynasty (907 to 1125) held a strip of land that included modern Beijing, and the Song had been paying it silver and silk each year since the peace of Shanyuan, which Columbia’s module dates to 1004 and a caption it quotes to 1005. In Japan the court still sat at Heian-kyo, modern Kyoto, in the Heian period that Columbia’s timeline runs from 794 to 1185, before warrior government moved to Kamakura.

South Asia

At Ghazna, Mas’ud III had succeeded his father Ibrahim in 1099, after a 40-year reign in which Ibrahim had made peace with the Seljuks; Bosworth writes that the Ghaznavid state, shorn of its western lands, now mounted its raids across the plains of northern India from Lahore in the Punjab. Those raids, he adds, “rarely went forward unchallenged,” and in the early 12th century the Ghaznavid armies met the Paramaras of Malwa and the Gahadavalas of Kanauj. In Bihar the Pala king Ramapala was on the throne; the Cleveland Museum of Art dates his reign from 1078 or 1079 to at least 1130 and assigns to it a votive plaque of soft, ivory-like stone, a type of carving the museum says was made above all in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Central Asia

Since 1089 the Qarakhanid khans of Transoxania had been Seljuk vassals. Michal Biran’s Iranica entry records that Malikshah marched into the region that year, deposed the reigning khan and made the Western Khanate a vassal state, after which the Eastern Khanate, ruled from Kashgar and Balasaghun in the Chu valley, submitted as well. In the first decades of the 12th century the western khans tried several times to win back their independence, and each attempt was checked by Sanjar, then the Seljuk governor of Khorasan. The khans still prized the Turkic title Tamghaj Khan, “the Khan of China,” which Biran calls a highly prestigious Qarakhanid title.

The Americas

On the Mississippi floodplain in what is now Illinois, Cahokia was entering its largest phase; a 2021 lake-sediment study by David Pompeani and six colleagues cites an estimated peak population of 15,000 to 20,000 between 1100 and 1200, and calls its Monks Mound the largest pre-Columbian earthwork in North America north of Mexico. In the Southwest, the National Park Service writes that new construction at Chaco Canyon slowed in the 1100s and 1200s, while Aztec, on the Animas River to the north, may have become “a center in its own right as Chaco’s influence waned after 1100”; its West Ruin held at least 400 interconnected rooms around an open plaza. In the Andes, no one lived at Tiwanaku year-round any more. A Bayesian chronology built from 102 radiocarbon dates by Erik Marsh and 10 colleagues puts the end of permanent residence at about AD 1010 (970 to 1050) and the last temporary camps at roughly 1050.

Oceania

New Zealand was still uninhabited in 1100. Older estimates placed the first landings anywhere between the 12th and 14th centuries, but a 2022 model of 1,558 radiocarbon dates by Magdalena Bunbury, Fiona Petchey and Simon Bickler puts the settlement of the North Island at AD 1250 to 1275 and of the South Island at 1280 to 1295. Tonga, the first part of Polynesia to be settled, had been inhabited for many centuries: David Burley and three colleagues date the first Lapita landfall, at Nukuleka on Tongatapu, to a 16-year window of 2846 to 2830 calibrated years before present. For Australia, the sources below record no event dated to this year.

Sources

Cite this article

APA
LETTER. (2026, September 29). The world in AD 1100. Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1100/
Chicago
LETTER. “The world in AD 1100.” Our Earth's History, September 29, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1100/.
MLA
LETTER. “The world in AD 1100.” Our Earth's History, 29 Sep. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1100/.

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