1100
Cahokia at its zenith
On the Mississippi floodplain across from present-day St. Louis, a city of perhaps twenty thousand people hummed around earthen pyramids taller than anything north of Mexico. Copper from Superior, shell from the Gulf, and obsidian from the Rockies passed through its plazas. At its peak, Cahokia's Monks Mound covered more ground than the Great Pyramid at Giza, anchoring a ceremonial landscape unmatched anywhere in pre-Columbian North America.
Baldwin crowned King of Jerusalem
A year after his brother Godfrey died refusing the title of king in the city where Christ had worn thorns, Baldwin of Boulogne marched south from Edessa and accepted the crown in Bethlehem on Christmas morning. The Latin kingdom now had a monarch willing to rule like one, consolidating Crusader holdings along the Levantine coast and forging the feudal institutions that would govern the Holy Land for nearly a century.
Henry I crowned King of England
Rushing ahead of his absent elder brother Robert, Henry swore a Coronation Charter promising to end his predecessor's abuses. The document, hastily drafted to buy baronial loyalty, would be dusted off a century later as a template for Magna Carta. Henry sealed it three days after his brother's suspicious death in the New Forest, moving with a speed that suggested the succession had been long rehearsed.
Easter Islanders carve first moai
On the tiny volcanic island in the eastern Pacific, Rapa Nui stoneworkers began quarrying tuff from the slopes of Rano Raraku and raising stylized ancestor figures on stone platforms along the coast. The carving, rolling, and erecting of moai would continue for three centuries. Some statues eventually weighed over eighty tonnes, their coral-and-obsidian eyes gazing inland to watch over the settlements of their descendants.
Chimu state rising at Chan Chan
On the arid Peruvian north coast, the successors of the Moche began consolidating a new kingdom whose capital Chan Chan would grow into the largest adobe city in the pre-Columbian Americas, irrigated by long canals cut from highland rivers. At its height the city covered some twenty square kilometers, its labyrinthine walled compounds housing artisans who worked gold, silver, and Spondylus shell for the Chimu lords.
Death of William Rufus in the New Forest
An arrow pierced the lung of England's red-faced king while he hunted stag among the oaks. Walter Tirel fled for France without stopping to bury him. Within three days William's younger brother Henry had seized the royal treasury at Winchester and crowned himself. Whether the death was accident, plot, or something stranger, no investigation was ever conducted, and the charcoal-burner who found the body carted it to Winchester in a farm wagon.
Cliff dwellings rising at Mesa Verde
On the green plateau of the Four Corners, Ancestral Pueblo masons began working sandstone blocks into multi-room houses tucked under the lips of vast sandstone alcoves. The architecture answered both a colder century and a more violent one; the high dwellings were defensible. Some alcoves sheltered communities of two hundred or more, with kivas carved into the bedrock floors and granaries sealed with clay to store years of maize.