The world in AD 1350

Africa

Back in Morocco, Ibn Battuta stayed a little over two years before setting out across the Sahara on February 13, 1352, in a caravan of Sijilmasa merchants, according to his own account in H. A. R. Gibb’s 1929 translation. At the oasis of Taghaza he found houses and mosques built of salt blocks, and he recorded the price rise along the route: “At Iwalatan a load of salt brings eight to ten mithqals; in the town of Malli [Mali] it sells for twenty to thirty, and sometimes as much as forty.” He reached the Mali capital on June 28, 1352, met its ruler, Mansa Sulayman, and left on February 27, 1353. Charles Beckingham, writing in Encyclopaedia Iranica, calls the Rehla unreliable as history but counts its Mali section among those that matter because few other sources exist.

• Kulwa in the Travels: Kilwa in 1331 and five coins in Australia1331
• How much gold did Mansa Musa bring to Cairo in 1324?1324
• Who built Great Zimbabwe, and why was the answer buried?1300
• A gold rhinoceros from Mapungubwe Hill, found in the 1930s1250

West Asia

Baghdad in 1350 answered to Hasan-e Bozorg, founder of the Jalayirid line, who had fought his way through the collapse of the Ilkhanate after the death of Abu Said in 1335. Peter Jackson’s Iranica entry notes that he never claimed sovereign status and kept the lesser title of olus-beg, or chief amir, until his death in July 1356, by which time he held power only in Iraq. Two years earlier Ibn Battuta had passed through Damascus in late July 1348, when the Mamluk viceroy ordered three days of fasting; Muslims, Jews and Christians walked out together to a mosque south of the city to pray. By the traveler’s own count, deaths in Damascus stayed under two thousand a day while Cairo’s reached 24,000 a day.

• 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

Boccaccio opened the Decameron with the arrival of “that deadly pestilence” in Florence in 1348, which he said had begun “some years before in the East.” The year 1350 was a jubilee in Rome because Pope Clement VI had agreed in 1342, at the request of the Roman people, to hold jubilees every 50 years instead of every century, according to the Holy See’s history of jubilees. In France a new king, John II, called the Good, began a reign that the Cleveland Museum of Art’s catalogue of his gold coinage dates 1350 to 1364. Across the Channel, the gold noble struck for Edward III in 1351, now in the same museum, named him in Latin “of England France and Ireland King”; the museum calls the noble the first English gold coin produced in larger numbers.

• Where did the Black Death start? Tombstones near Issyk-Kul1347
• How did a 21-year-old sultan take Constantinople in 1453?1453
• "I, Johan Fust, have borrowed 1,550 guilders": Gutenberg Bible, 14551455

East Asia

China’s Mongol rulers had run short of money for the dikes and canals that earlier dynasties maintained, according to Asia for Educators at Columbia University. In the 1340s floods shifted the course of the Yellow River and left many people homeless, and in the 1350s bands of displaced peasants joined into the rebel forces that began to push the Mongols out; the Ming took control in 1368. Japan was in the Nanbokuchō period, which the Cleveland Museum of Art dates from 1336 to 1392. An ink scroll the museum dates to about 1350 shows a monk mending his robe as a form of meditation, a subject that, it notes, usually formed a pair with one of reading by moonlight.

• The Jikji colophon of 1377 and a Paris copy shelved as Coréen 1091377
• How big was the Mongol Empire next to Rome and Britain?1300
• Why did Zheng He's treasure fleets sail seven times, then stop?1405
• A hull on the seabed off Takashima, the Mongol fleet of 12811281

South Asia

Muhammad bin Tughluq held the throne of Delhi from 1325 to 1351, and Firuz Shah followed him and ruled until 1388; Gavin Hambly writes in Iranica that under these two the sultanate reached “the zenith of its splendor.” The same Tughluqid century also saw the start of the fragmentation of the sultanate into smaller states. Ibn Battuta had served Muhammad bin Tughluq for eight years after crossing the Indus in September 1333, and he gives extensive information on the sultan in the third volume of his Travels, though Beckingham warns that its dates are often inconsistent.

• Fondest of making gifts and of shedding blood: Ibn Battuta's Delhi1334
• 'Never seen a place like it': Abdur Razzaq at Vijayanagara, 14431443
• Konark's Sun Temple: a stone chariot, and a hall filled with sand1250
• Iltutmish's written heir: Razia, sultan of Delhi, 1236–12401236

Central Asia

From the 1340s the Chaghatai khanate appears to have divided in two, Peter Jackson writes in Iranica. In Transoxania real power lay with tribal amirs who kept princes of Chaghatai’s line as figurehead khans, the strongest of them Qazaghan, who died in 1358; the eastern khan Tughluq Temür would invade after his death. Qazaghan waged war on Muizz al-Din of the Kart dynasty, ruler of Herat since 1331 or 1332, who had used the Ilkhanate’s fall to declare independence. Bertold Spuler’s Iranica entry describes his long reign, which lasted until 1370 or 1371, as a time of prosperity for a realm reaching from Marv and Nishapur to the Hindu Kush.

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

The Americas

Paquimé, near the headwaters of the Casas Grandes River in Chihuahua, reached its height in the 14th and 15th centuries, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). INAH estimates the remains at some 2,000 rooms in adobe houses with T-shaped doors, and it describes one compound, the House of the Macaw, where niches for breeding the birds survive. Traders there brought turquoise and copper from the north, salt from the Samalayuca desert and shells from the Pacific coasts, and sent out polychrome pottery. INAH’s own pages give the city’s span differently, from 700 to 1475 on one and a population center rising after about 1200 on another.

• Chan Chan's adobe walls and the rains of 2016 and 20171300
• Radiocarbon says 1420: Machu Picchu's age and its return from Yale1450
• 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

Moa, the giant flightless birds of New Zealand, were disappearing from the South Island within a few generations of Polynesian settlement. A 2014 study in Nature Communications by Richard Holdaway, Morten Allentoft and colleagues combined 270 radiocarbon dates on moa bone with dated eggshell from archaeological sites and placed Polynesian settlement in the early 14th century. It puts the end of the moa in the eastern lowlands between 1324 and 1391, and on the whole South Island between 1406 and 1446. On their models the human population had not reached 2,000 by 1400, among the lowest densities recorded for any recent hunter-gatherer society.

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

Sources

• Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook: Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa 1325-1354 (trans. H. A. R. Gibb, 1929)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: EBN BATTUTA
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: JALAYERIDS
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: CHAGHATAYID DYNASTY i. History
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: AL-E KART
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: DELHI SULTANATE i. Political and cultural history
• Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook: Boccaccio, The Decameron, Introduction (trans. J. M. Rigg, 1921)
• Jubilee 2025 (Holy See): Jubilees throughout History
• Cleveland Museum of Art: Noble of Edward III, 1351 (1969.160)
• Cleveland Museum of Art: Mouton d'Or of King Jean le Bon of France, 1350-1364 (1964.372)
• Asia for Educators, Columbia University: The Mongols in China, Public Works Failures
• Cleveland Museum of Art: Monk Mending Clothes in the Morning Sun, c. 1350 (1962.163)
• INAH, Lugares INAH: Zona arqueológica de Paquimé (Casas Grandes), World Heritage listing
• INAH, Lugares INAH: Paquimé
• Holdaway, Allentoft, Jacomb, Oskam, Beavan and Bunce, An extremely low-density human population exterminated New Zealand moa, Nature Communications 5 (2014)