1060
Roger de Hauteville begins conquest of Sicily
Robert Guiscard's younger brother crossed from Calabria to Messina and began wresting Sicily from its Arab emirs in campaigns that would run for three decades. The eventual Norman kingdom of Sicily would be a multicultural marvel, with Greek, Arabic, and Latin used side by side at court. Roger's methodical approach, castle by castle and town by town, showed a patience rare among Norman adventurers.
Song China's Population Surpasses One Hundred Million
Census records from the Song dynasty suggest the empire's population crossed the hundred-million mark around this period - making it by far the most populous state on earth. The demographic surge was fed by improved rice strains from Vietnam, expanded irrigation, and the relative peace of the dynasty's southern heartland. This vast population both enabled and demanded the commercial revolution underway: more mouths meant more markets, more labor, and more tax revenue for an ambitious state.
Cahokia's Monks Mound rising
On the Mississippi floodplain, thousands of labor-gangs were hauling baskets of earth to raise the great platform mound that would eventually stand a hundred feet tall with a base larger than the Great Pyramid. The leaders of Cahokia commanded labor on a scale unmatched anywhere north of Mesoamerica. Atop the mound stood the chief's wooden residence, overlooking a grand plaza where thousands gathered for ceremonies.
Baphuon Temple Completed at Angkor
Udayadityavarman II's great state temple, the Baphuon, reached completion after years of construction. Its sandstone galleries enclosed bas-reliefs depicting both cosmic mythology and the quotidian rhythms of Khmer life - rice harvests, cockfights, market scenes. The temple's sheer mass would later prove its undoing: the soft ground beneath began to subside almost immediately, a problem restorers would still be solving a thousand years later.
Death of Henry I of France
The Capetian king who had spent most of his reign fighting his brother and his vassals died at the monastery of Vitry-aux-Loges, leaving his eight-year-old son Philip I on a shaky throne. Count Baldwin V of Flanders served as regent, and the young king survived to reign for nearly fifty years.