Our Earth's History
Snapshot · 1200

The world in AD 1200

Edited by LETTER · Researched and written with AI assistance, checked against the sources below · How we make it

Published

TL;DR — Tekish of Khwarazm and the scholar Zhu Xi died in 1200, French counts took the cross, Delhi was Ghurid ground and Temüjin’s 1206 assembly lay six years ahead.

The shah of Khwarazm died in June 1200 and left his son a state that had pushed west as far as Hamadan but still stood under the overlordship of the Qara Khitay. That same year Saladin’s younger brother, al-Adil, became head of the Ayyubid family confederation, and in Flanders and Champagne counts were taking the cross for a crusade that would end at Constantinople in 1204. A Turkish commander of the Ghurid sultans had held Delhi since 1192. In China the scholar Zhu Xi, who had argued for the Four Books as the basis of Confucian learning, died. In North America, Cahokia had begun to shrink, and at Mesa Verde ancestral Pueblo families were building homes in cliff alcoves beside springs.

Africa

The Ayyubids had ruled Egypt since 1168, when, as R. Stephen Humphreys writes in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, the Kurdish family seized power there before extending its rule to Yemen, Syria and much of the Jazira. In 1200 al-Adil Sayf al-Din took the lead of the confederation, a position he held, by Humphreys’s dates, until 1218, and kept his authority by handing the major appanages to his own sons. Far to the south, a 2023 study led by Jasmine Vieri dates Great Zimbabwe to 1000 to 1600. Crucibles from 11th- and 12th-century layers on its Hill Complex are the earliest indirect evidence of gold production there, and the same paper notes that written reports have gold leaving the Swahili coast for the Indian Ocean by the early 12th century.

West Asia

Saladin had died in 1193, and the system he built outlived him: Humphreys writes that after taking Aleppo in 1183 he parceled his conquests out as appanage states among three of his sons, a nephew and his younger brother. The Abbasid caliph al-Nasir (r. 1180–1225) had backed the Khwarazmshah Tekish out of fear that the Ghurids would push into central Iran. C. Edmund Bosworth’s Iranica entry on Tekish records that the last Great Seljuk sultan, Toghril III, was killed in battle at Rayy in 1194, after which Khwarazmian forces occupied western Iran as far as Hamadan and the caliph was compelled to invest the shah with the region. Relations between caliph and shah, Bosworth adds, “always remained uneasy.”

Europe

The crusade that ended at Constantinople was still being raised. Geoffrey of Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne, who later wrote its chronicle, dates the first vows to a tournament at Ecri on November 28, 1199, where Count Thibaut of Champagne, “not more than twenty-two years of age,” took the cross with Count Louis of Blois; on February 23, 1200, the first day of Lent, Count Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault and his wife, Mary, followed at Bruges. Through that year, he writes, “no two months passed without assemblings in parliament at Compiègne,” until the barons chose six envoys, Villehardouin among them, who reached Venice in February 1201. The preaching had been ordered by Pope Innocent III, elected on January 8, 1198, at the age of 37, according to the notes of the chronicle’s translator, Frank T. Marzials.

East Asia

Zhu Xi, whose life Columbia University’s Asia for Educators dates from 1130 to 1200, wrote commentaries on all of the Four Books and pressed for them as the basis of Confucian study and the civil service examinations. His Song dynasty held only the south. The Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115 to 1234), the same module explains, had defeated the Khitans in the early 12th century and then pushed the Song out of North China. In Japan the Minamoto family had set up a government at Kamakura, south of modern Tokyo, in 1185, and in 1192 Minamoto Yoritomo was given the title shogun “to signify his military control over the country.”

South Asia

Nasr Hasan Zaidi’s Iranica entry on Qutb al-Din Aybak, a Turkish commander bought as a youth by the Ghurid sultan Muizz al-Din Muhammad, records that in 1192 Aybak occupied the forts of Meerut and Delhi, “the latter became the seat of Muslim rule.” Bosworth dates Aybak’s Quwwat al-Islam mosque at Delhi to 1192, where Zaidi gives 1191 to 1192, and puts the completion of a second mosque at Ajmer, converted from a former Hindu college, in 1200. Under the brothers Ghiyath al-Din at Firuzkuh and Muizz al-Din at Ghazna, whose joint rule Bosworth dates to 1203, the Ghurid empire reached its greatest extent, and Bosworth credits Ikhtiyar al-Din Muhammad Khalji with carrying its conquests east into Bengal, though his entry gives no year for that campaign.

Central Asia

Tekish, whose name Bosworth glosses from Turkish as “he who strikes in battle,” had ruled Khwarazm from Gurganj since 1172 with the help of the Qara Khitay, and he never grew strong enough to break free of them; as late as 1194 he had to ask them for help against the Ghurids at Balkh. When he died in June 1200 his second son, Ala al-Din Muhammad, succeeded him, and the Ghurid Ghiyath al-Din took most of the towns of Khorasan as far west as Bistam. On the steppe to the northeast, Temüjin, probably born in 1167 by David O. Morgan’s reckoning, was building his power through an alliance with Toghril, khan of the Kereyits, and his supremacy over the tribes of Mongolia would be recognized at an assembly in 1206. Morgan notes that knowledge of his early life depends on a single Mongolian work, the Secret History of the Mongols, most of it written probably in 1228 or 1240.

The Americas

On the Mississippi floodplain, Cahokia’s population and influence had begun to decline before 1200, Nicholas Kessler and four colleagues write, though the rate of that decline is uncertain; the same team dated the felling of the Mitchell Log, the largest known marker post in the Cahokia area, to around 1124 and found that the tree had probably been carried at least 180 kilometers. At Mesa Verde, the National Park Service says, the ancestors of Pueblo people built most of the cliff dwellings between 1180 and 1300, near seep springs, as extended droughts probably made mesa-top reservoirs less reliable. The masonry rooms of Step House went up around 1200, some five centuries after pithouses were dug in the same alcove. On the north coast of Peru, a 2026 study by George Olah and five colleagues dates the Chimú Empire to 1200 to 1470 and describes its capital, Chan Chan, as made up mainly of 13 royal compounds in the lower Moche Valley.

Oceania

On Pohnpei in Micronesia, Nan Madol, more than 100 artificial islets and the capital of an island-wide chiefdom under the Saudeleur Dynasty, had entered the second of two building phases identified in 2024 by Chuan-Chou Shen and 21 colleagues from coral and charcoal dates. They place the first phase, from the 10th to the 12th century, at the dynasty’s rise, and the second, from the late 12th to the early 15th century, at its decline, both centuries earlier than previously believed. In Tonga, Christina Stantis and colleagues date a Chiefdom Period to about 750 to 150 years before present, in which the paramount elite, headed by the Tu’i Tonga, sent junior chiefs to outlying islands and drew fine mats, sandalwood and canoes back to Tongatapu. A 2020 study by David Sear and colleagues argues that wetter conditions after about AD 1150 supported the settlement of more central islands of East Polynesia and, eventually, of its far eastern and southern edges; for Australia, the sources below date no event to this year.

Sources

Cite this article

APA
LETTER. (2026, September 29). The world in AD 1200. Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1200/
Chicago
LETTER. “The world in AD 1200.” Our Earth's History, September 29, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1200/.
MLA
LETTER. “The world in AD 1200.” Our Earth's History, 29 Sep. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1200/.

Text licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Found an error? Tell us.