The world in AD 1300

Africa

In the Ethiopian highlands the Solomonic dynasty was a generation old. The Library of Congress country study for Ethiopia records that an Amhara noble, Yekuno Amlak, drove out the last Zagwe ruler about 1270, and that after his death in 1285 his sons and grandsons fought over the throne; sometime around 1300 the dynasty settled the matter by confining every male descendant except the reigning king and his sons to a guarded mountaintop prison, a practice kept until the early 16th century. On the Zimbabwe plateau, gold was being worked at Great Zimbabwe. A 2023 study by Jasmine Vieri, Shadreck Chirikure, Paul Lane and Marcos Martinón-Torres reports crucibles and gold from 13th- to 17th-century contexts in the valley and nearby areas, and dates one of the site’s excavated middens, on the Eastern Ridge, from the early 14th to the early 15th century.

• Who built Great Zimbabwe, and why was the answer buried?1300
• How much gold did Mansa Musa bring to Cairo in 1324?1324
• A gold rhinoceros from Mapungubwe Hill, found in the 1930s1250
• Churches cut from rock: Francisco Álvares at Lalibela in the 1520s1200

West Asia

The Ilkhan Ghazan, who ruled Iran from 1295 to 1304, had converted to Islam on June 17, 1295, but Encyclopaedia Iranica’s entry by Reuven Amitai notes that his new faith did not change his war with the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria. He launched more Syrian campaigns than any other Ilkhan. The first, in 1299, ended in a victory near Homs and a short occupation of Damascus, and early in 1300 he withdrew from the country, perhaps for logistical reasons or because of raids on his eastern provinces, after which the Mamluks retook Syria without difficulty. A second advance later in 1300 turned back in harsh winter weather, and in 1303 his army was defeated at Marj al-Suffar south of Damascus. At court his vizier Rashid al-Din had been set to write a history of Genghis Khan and his successors, the work that later became the core of the Jami al-tawarikh.

• Ibn Battuta's 29 years: what the Rihla records, and what it invents1325
• A letter that ended a siege: Baybars at Krak des Chevaliers, 12711271
• From 800,000 to two million: the dead of Baghdad, February 12581258
• Alamut's library, 1256: what Juvayni kept and what he burned1256

Europe

On February 22, 1300, Boniface VIII proclaimed the year a jubilee in the bull Antiquorum habet. The Holy See’s own history of jubilees states that at least two million people came to Rome that year, that the painter Giotto took part, and that Dante Alighieri was almost certainly among the visitors. In Paris, Philip IV, called the Fair, was enlarging the royal palace on the Île de la Cité; the Centre des monuments nationaux dates its Salle des Gens d’Armes, a hall of 1,785 square meters where between 1,000 and 2,000 royal servants and soldiers ate each day, to between 1300 and 1314. Ghazan sent embassies to the pope and the European kings proposing a joint campaign against the Mamluks, and although nothing came of them, Iranica records that rumors of Mongol successes in Syria around 1300, “much of it apocryphal,” caused “a great stir in western Europe.”

• Where did the Black Death start? Tombstones near Issyk-Kul1347

East Asia

Khubilai Khan, who completed the conquest of southern China in 1279, had died in 1294, and his grandson Temür Öljeitü now held the throne; Iranica records that Ghazan kept in contact with Temür and eventually received his formal recognition. Asia for Educators at Columbia University counts Khubilai’s failed seaborne wars against the Mongols’ later weakness in China: two fleets sent against Japan, in 1274 and 1281, after the shogunate refused to submit to Mongol envoys in 1268 and 1271, and a landing on Java in 1292 that was abandoned within a year. The Venetian merchant Marco Polo, whom the same site places in China from 1275 to 1291, had since returned to Europe with his accounts of Persia, China, Central Asia and Southeast Asia.

• A hull on the seabed off Takashima, the Mongol fleet of 12811281
• Which Empire Was the Largest in History — Was It Really Rome?1279
• What Pulled the Trigger on History's Largest Empire — the Mongol Empire?1206
• How Did the Nomads of the Steppe Swallow the World?1206

South Asia

Delhi was ruled by the Khaljis, a Turkish or Turkicized dynasty that Gavin Hambly, writing in Encyclopaedia Iranica, dates from 1290 to 1320, and in 1300 its sultan was Ala al-Din Khalji, who reigned from 1296 to 1316. Beyond the Indus stood the Chaghatayid Mongols, whose occupation of Afghanistan let them take over the direction of Mongol pressure on India; their commander Qutlugh Qocha died on the march home from an invasion of India in about 1299. A decade later Ala al-Din added the Alai Darwaza gateway of 1311 to his unfinished extension of the Quwwat al-Islam mosque in Delhi; in Catherine Asher’s account, the Persian inscriptions on its facade call him a “king of Darius-like splendor.”

• Fondest of making gifts and of shedding blood: Ibn Battuta's Delhi1334
• Konark's Sun Temple: a stone chariot, and a hall filled with sand1250
• Iltutmish's written heir: Razia, sultan of Delhi, 1236–12401236
• An iron pillar older than its mosque: the Qutb Minar complex, Delhi1199

Central Asia

The paramount ruler of Central Asia was not a Chaghatayid but Qaidu, a grandson of Ögedei, who had been elected Great Khan in opposition to Khubilai around 1271. Peter Jackson’s Iranica entry says Qaidu held a stranglehold on the Chaghatai lands for more than three decades, with the Chaghatai khan Du’a, who reigned from about 1282 to 1306, as his loyal partner in wars against Khubilai’s supporters in Mongolia and against the Ilkhans in Iran. Their raids tended to coincide with the Ilkhan’s absence; in 1301, while Ghazan campaigned against the Mamluks, their forces struck Fars and Kerman. Qaidu died in 1303, and by 1309 the realm he had founded had broken up, most of it passing to the Chaghatayids.

• Not as big as Saint Denis: William of Rubruck measures Karakorum, 12541254
• A forty-meter arc under a Samarkand hill: Ulugh Beg's observatory1429

The Americas

At Mesa Verde, in the Four Corners region, the National Park Service records that most of the cliff dwellings had been built during the 1200s, and people began moving south in the middle of that century; over several decades the Ancestral Pueblo people left entirely, in a period of persistent drought, limited resources and social change. Their descendants among the Pueblo and Hopi peoples founded or joined villages along the Rio Grande, the Little Colorado drainages and the Hopi Mesas. At Cahokia, in the Mississippi valley, the two-mile stockade around the city’s center had been begun around AD 1100, and the historic site records that it was rebuilt three times over 200 years, work that on those figures ran to about 1300.

• Chan Chan's adobe walls and the rains of 2016 and 20171300
• Cliff Palace, 150 rooms and 23 kivas: Mesa Verde, 1888 to 19061250
• Radiocarbon says 1420: Machu Picchu's age and its return from Yale1450

Oceania

New Zealand was newly settled. A 2013 study in PLOS ONE led by Rebecca Kinaston places Wairau Bar, on the northern coast of the South Island, among the earliest settlements, with radiocarbon dates around the end of the 13th century, and treats its burials as roughly contemporaneous at about AD 1300. The site covered at least 11 hectares, and its graves held ornaments of Archaic East Polynesian type along with the eggs and bones of the moa, an extinct flightless bird. No written account of the year survives from anywhere in Oceania.

• A 13-year-old's find at Wairau Bar in 1939, and a return in 20091300
• Ash from AD 1314 and the dating of New Zealand's first settlement1314
• Three stones at Heketa, the Haʻamonga ʻa Maui trilithon of Tongatapu1200
• Did the moai of Rapa Nui walk? What the 2012 experiment showed1400

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Iranica: GHAZAN KHAN, MAHMUD
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: CHAGHATAYID DYNASTY i. History
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: DELHI SULTANATE i. Political and cultural history
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: DELHI SULTANATE ii. Architecture
• Asia for Educators, Columbia University: The Mongols in China, Military Successes and Failures
• Asia for Educators, Columbia University: Khubilai Khan (1215-1294)
• Asia for Educators, Columbia University: Marco Polo (1254-1324)
• Jubilee 2025 (Holy See): Jubilees throughout History
• Centre des monuments nationaux, Conciergerie: The royal palace and its admirable Gothic architecture
• Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, Ethiopia: A Country Study, The Restoration of the Solomonic Line (public-domain text as reproduced at countrystudies.us)
• Vieri, Chirikure, Lane and Martinón-Torres, Archaeological science, globalisation, and local agency: gold in Great Zimbabwe, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 15 (2023)
• National Park Service, Mesa Verde National Park: People
• Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site: Explore
• Kinaston et al., The First New Zealanders: Patterns of Diet and Mobility Revealed through Isotope Analysis, PLOS ONE 8 (2013)