1104
Crusaders take Acre
With Genoese galleys blockading the harbor and Baldwin's knights pressing from the land, the port surrendered on terms that were promptly broken as soon as the gates opened. The Latin kingdom gained its most valuable Mediterranean window, a window it would not relinquish easily. Acre would grow into the commercial capital of the Crusader states, its bazaars a polyglot tangle of Italian, Arabic, and French voices.
Hekla erupts in Iceland
The mountain the Icelanders were already calling the Gateway to Hell split open and smothered a quarter of the island in ash. Farms in the Thjorsa valley, settled for generations, were abandoned overnight. It was the largest tephra fall since Iceland's colonization two centuries earlier, blanketing pastures in a grey crust that killed livestock and forced dozens of families to migrate north to less fertile ground.
Disaster at Harran
Bohemond of Antioch and Baldwin of Edessa, marching against a Turkish coalition near the Balikh River, were routed and Baldwin was taken captive. The defeat checked Crusader expansion in northern Syria and emboldened Muslim warlords who had been probing the new Frankish states. Baldwin spent four years in captivity before a ransom could be scraped together from the meagre treasuries of the Latin principalities.
Baldwin I takes Arsuf
The King of Jerusalem captured the small coastal fortress of Arsuf from its Fatimid garrison and stationed a Latin lord there. Such small successes, patiently accumulated, gave the Crusader kingdom control of the Mediterranean shoreline within a decade of its founding. Each captured port added another link to the maritime supply chain connecting the Latin East to Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, without which the kingdom could not survive.