1013
Sweyn Forkbeard conquers England
This time the Danish king came not to plunder but to take the throne. London held out, but the rest of the country submitted. By Christmas, Ethelred had fled to Normandy and Sweyn was acclaimed king. His reign would last barely five weeks before sudden death at Gainsborough. The Norman exile of Ethelred's sons planted the dynastic seeds that would bear fruit in 1066.
Al-Biruni measures the earth
At a fort in northern India, the Khwarezmian polymath used a clever geometrical method involving the angle of declination from a mountain peak to estimate the earth's radius with remarkable accuracy. His result, computed on a scrap of paper, was within a few percent of modern values. The technique, requiring only a mountaintop and an astrolabe, was elegant proof that brilliance needs no elaborate apparatus.
Suryavarman I expands Khmer Empire into Thailand
The Khmer king pushed his armies westward into the Chao Phraya basin, nearly doubling the number of cities under Angkor's control from twenty to fifty. He built the mountain-top temple of Preah Vihear on a cliff overlooking the Cambodian plain, a sandstone assertion of divine kingship perched on the edge of the sky.
Thietmar of Merseburg writes his Chronicle
The German bishop completed his invaluable chronicle of Ottonian and early Salian history, recording everything from imperial politics to Polish expansion to the customs of pagan Slavs on his eastern frontier. His frank and gossipy prose preserved details of early eleventh-century life that no other source bothered to set down on parchment.