1009
Fatimid caliph orders Holy Sepulchre destroyed
The unstable caliph al-Hakim, whose reign produced an encyclopedia of bizarre decrees, ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem leveled. Workmen pried up its marble floors. The shock rippled west and would be cited decades later as a grievance that justified the First Crusade. Byzantine emperor Constantine IX eventually negotiated permission to rebuild the church in 1048, though on a much reduced scale.
Ly Cong Uan founds the Ly dynasty in Vietnam
A Buddhist palace guard raised in a monastery seized the Vietnamese throne from the decadent Le dynasty and proclaimed a new era. Within a year he would move his capital to Thang Long, the modern site of Hanoi, where a dragon was said to have risen from the Red River. The Ly dynasty would rule an increasingly confident Vietnam for over two centuries.
Sack of Cordoba begins
Berber mercenaries rampaged through the Umayyad capital in a struggle over the caliph's throne, burning the palace-city of Madinat al-Zahra and ransacking its libraries. The dazzling Andalusian metropolis never fully recovered. Within twenty years the caliphate would dissolve into petty taifa kingdoms across the south. Manuscripts looted from the royal library scattered across the Mediterranean, turning up for centuries in collections from Fez to Cairo.
Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim founds Dar al-Ilm in Cairo
The eccentric Fatimid caliph established a House of Knowledge in Cairo, stocking it with thousands of volumes on astronomy, medicine, philosophy, and grammar, and providing ink, pens, and paper free to all scholars. Despite al-Hakim's erratic persecutions elsewhere, the Dar al-Ilm became one of the great libraries of the medieval Islamic world, rivaling Baghdad's faded memory.