The world in AD 1150

Africa

Along the Swahili coast of East Africa, coral-built mosques and tombs had been going up since the 11th century, which a 2023 genetic study led by Esther Brielle describes as a transition “generally understood as coinciding with the widespread adoption of Islam.” From the ancient DNA of people buried at six towns, among them Kilwa, Songo Mnara and Mtwapa, the team concluded that African and Asian ancestry began to mix by about AD 1000, with predominantly African women and Asian men forming families in the elite stone towns. Before about 1500 the Southwest Asian share was mainly Persian-related, which the authors call consistent with the Kilwa Chronicle. That chronicle, the oldest history told by people of the coast, was put into writing only in the 16th century.

• Churches cut from rock: Francisco Álvares at Lalibela in the 1520s1200
• A gold rhinoceros from Mapungubwe Hill, found in the 1930s1250
• Who built Great Zimbabwe, and why was the answer buried?1300

West Asia

Zengi, lord of Mosul, had taken the crusader county of Edessa in 1144, at a moment when, as the historian James Brundage writes in his introduction to William of Tyre’s account, Jerusalem was ruled by Queen Melisende as regent for her 13-year-old son, Baldwin III. Louis VII of France landed near Antioch on March 19, 1148, and went on to Jerusalem, where Conrad III of Germany was waiting. On June 24 a council at Acre of the princes then in the Holy Land chose to attack Damascus, which William calls “the largest city of lesser Syria.” The attack failed. William blamed some of the Latin princes of the East, who, he alleged, took money from the Damascenes to steer the army away from the orchards and the river, and he wrote that “a company of kings and princes such as we have not read of through all the ages” went home “covered with shame and disgrace.”

• One Cairo storeroom, 193,000 fragments: the Geniza goes to Cambridge1100
• Alamut's library, 1256: what Juvayni kept and what he burned1256
• From 800,000 to two million: the dead of Baghdad, February 12581258
• A letter that ended a siege: Baybars at Krak des Chevaliers, 12711271

Europe

Conrad set out for home by way of Constantinople soon after Damascus, Brundage notes, and Louis VII of France followed in the summer of 1149 without attempting any further campaign. The mood in the West soured. An anonymous annalist at Würzburg, writing under the year 1147, called the crusade preachers “pseudo prophets” and sorted the crusaders by motive: some “lusted after novelties and went in order to learn about new lands,” others were escaping poverty, debts or the service owed to their lords. Only a few, he wrote, went with a holy purpose.

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

East Asia

Five years before 1150, a painter named Li You finished an album leaf, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, of a herdboy with a water buffalo, a calf and a pet myna bird; the museum reads the buffalo, which plowed without gain for itself, as a metaphor for the official, and says such ox-herding pictures were given as gifts in court circles. The museum places him under the Southern Song dynasty, which it dates from 1127 to 1279. Columbia University’s Asia for Educators says that during the Song, maritime trade exceeded overland foreign trade for the first time, and that ships from ports such as Quanzhou sailed from Japan to East Africa, where shards of Song porcelain have been found. It quotes the historian Lynda Noreen Shaffer, who dates the steady growth of Chinese seafaring “from the twelfth century to the fifteenth.”

• The Mongol war machine of horses, tens and borrowed engineers1206
• Otrar, 1218, the murdered caravan that turned the Mongols west1218
• A hull on the seabed off Takashima, the Mongol fleet of 12811281
• How big was the Mongol Empire next to Rome and Britain?1300

South Asia

Ghazna, the old Ghaznavid capital in eastern Afghanistan, had a new enemy. Ala al-Din Husayn, who ruled Ghur from 1149 to 1161 by C. Edmund Bosworth’s dates in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, opened war on the Ghaznavid sultan Bahramshah to avenge two brothers, beat him in battle and drove him into India. Ghazna and Bost were then sacked, their colleges and libraries despoiled and the buildings of earlier sultans destroyed, which earned the Ghurid ruler the name Jahansuz, “world incendiary”; Bosworth’s entry gives no year for the sack. The Ghurids did not annex the Ghaznavid lands, and Bahramshah soon came back from the Punjab.

• An iron pillar older than its mosque: the Qutb Minar complex, Delhi1199
• Iltutmish's written heir: Razia, sultan of Delhi, 1236–12401236
• Konark's Sun Temple: a stone chariot, and a hall filled with sand1250
• Why did Rajendra Chola send a fleet against Srivijaya in about 1025?1025

Central Asia

Sanjar, son of Malikshah, had been Great Sultan of the Seljuks since 1118, and Deborah G. Tor’s Iranica entry notes that medieval Muslim writers counted him the longest-reigning Muslim ruler before the Mongols. In 1141, at Qatwan in Transoxiana, he suffered the first defeat of his career against the Qara Khitay, an offshoot of the Khitan rulers of northern China, and Transoxiana was lost to Muslim rule; one chronicle puts his ransom payments and war costs at over 4 million dinars. Tor argues against reading Qatwan as the end of his power, pointing to the 12 years that followed, in which he put down a revolt by the Khwarazmshah Atsiz and, in 1152, a Ghurid challenge. His fall came in 1153 at the hands of the Ghuzz, the Seljuks’ own tribe, who held him captive for three and a half years.

• A minaret rebuilt in 1127: the Kalyan tower of Bukhara1127
• Not as big as Saint Denis: William of Rubruck measures Karakorum, 12541254
• A sealed room at Mogao, opened in 1900: the Dunhuang Library Cave1000

The Americas

Scarlet macaws were being bred in the American Southwest by the early 1100s. At Old Town, a Mimbres site in southwestern New Mexico, a 2023 study by Cyler Conrad and colleagues identified 14 eggshell specimens found with the bones of a breeding-age scarlet macaw, dated by context and radiocarbon to the early 1100s. Birds had reached Chaco Canyon between about 1000 and 1100, the authors note, but without any sign of breeding there. The only other proposed breeding site, Paquimé in northwestern Mexico, dates to after 1275.

• Monks Mound and 120 others: Cahokia on the Mississippi, 1050 to 13501100
• Who carried 200,000 trees into Chaco Canyon, and why did they leave?1050
• Cliff Palace, 150 rooms and 23 kivas: Mesa Verde, 1888 to 19061250
• Mound B and the plaza at Moundville: a town that became a necropolis1250

Oceania

Fatu Hiva, the easternmost island of equatorial Polynesia, gives the earliest date for contact with the Americas. A 2020 genetic study led by Alexander Ioannidis, which analyzed 807 people from 17 island populations and 15 Native American groups, dated Native American ancestry there to about 1150, with later dates of 1200 in the northern Marquesas and 1230 on Mangareva, and traced it to a group most closely related to the Indigenous people of present-day Colombia. The authors raise the possibility that the first Polynesian settlers of the Marquesas found a small Native American population already there. On Nuku Hiva, the largest Marquesan island, Melinda Allen, Tara Lewis and Nick Porch dated a waterlogged deposit with an adzed timber and microcharcoal to 1129 to 1212, around the time of human arrival. For Australia, the sources below give no event in this year.

• 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
• A 13-year-old's find at Wairau Bar in 1939, and a return in 20091300

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Sanjar, Ahmad b. Malekshah (Deborah G. Tor)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Ghurids (C. Edmund Bosworth)
• Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University: William of Tyre, The Fall of Edessa, trans. James Brundage
• Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University: William of Tyre, The Fiasco at Damascus, 1148, trans. James Brundage
• Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University: Annales Herbipolenses, s.a. 1147, A Hostile View of the Crusade, trans. James Brundage
• Asia for Educators, Columbia University: International Trade
• Cleveland Museum of Art: Li You, Man, Buffalo, and Calf, 1145 (1960.41)
• Brielle et al., Entwined African and Asian genetic roots of medieval peoples of the Swahili coast, Nature 615 (2023), via PubMed Central
• Conrad et al., Scarlet macaw (Ara macao) breeding at the Mimbres archaeological site of Old Town (early AD 1100s), PNAS Nexus 2 (2023), via PubMed Central
• Allen, Lewis and Porch, Lost bioscapes: Floristic and arthropod diversity coincident with 12th century Polynesian settlement, Nuku Hiva, Marquesas Islands, PLoS ONE 17 (2022), via PubMed Central
• Ioannidis et al., Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement, Nature 583 (2020), via PubMed Central