1057
Anawrahta Conquers Thaton and Transforms Burma
After a three-month siege, King Anawrahta's forces breached the walls of Thaton on the seventeenth of May, capturing the Mon kingdom's royal family, its monks, and - crucially - its copies of the Theravada Buddhist canon. Thirty thousand captives, including artisans and scribes, were marched north to Pagan. The conquest fused Mon literary and artistic traditions with Burmese military power, creating a civilization whose temple-studded plains still astonish today.
Fall of Kairouan to Hilalian Arabs
The Banu Hilal Arab tribesmen sacked Kairouan, ending centuries of prosperity for the Maghreb's greatest center of Islamic learning. Refugee scholars fled west to Fez and north to Andalusia. The Zirid court withdrew to the coast. Berber rural North Africa had been transformed permanently into an Arabic-speaking hinterland, and the region's agricultural economy would not fully recover for generations after the devastation.
Macbeth killed at Lumphanan
Malcolm Canmore finally caught up with his cousin Macbeth in an Aberdeenshire battle and killed him. Macbeth's stepson Lulach briefly succeeded before also being killed. Malcolm III took the Scottish throne and would marry Saint Margaret, beginning a long English-Scottish royal entanglement that endured for centuries. Margaret's Anglicizing reforms of the Scottish church would reshape the kingdom's religious and cultural character permanently.
Chola-Chalukya Wars Grind On in the Deccan
The endless rivalry between the Chola and Western Chalukya dynasties consumed another year of southern India's energies. Rajendra II continued prosecuting the war his brother had died fighting, pushing into the Deccan with armies that stretched supply lines to breaking point. Neither side could deliver a knockout blow - the conflict had become the subcontinent's Hundred Years' War, bankrupting treasuries and burning villages from coast to coast.