1105
Henry IV forced to abdicate
The Holy Roman Emperor, excommunicated once for appointing his own bishops and hounded for decades by his own son, was lured to a meeting at Ingelheim and coerced into handing over the imperial regalia. Henry V had his throne; his father escaped to die a fugitive. The elder Henry spent his last months wandering the Rhineland pleading with bishops for support, a spectacle that horrified even his enemies.
Mi Fu paints in the Song academy
The eccentric Chinese painter and calligrapher Mi Fu, famous for bowing to unusual rocks and refusing to sit where an ordinary man had sat, developed his misty ink-wash landscapes under imperial patronage. His techniques would be studied and imitated for a thousand years. Mi Fu's method of building mountains from horizontal ink-dots rather than outlines revolutionized the literati painting tradition and earned him a place alongside the greatest Song masters.
Kilwa Kisiwani emerges as Indian Ocean entrepot
On a coral island off the Swahili coast, the Shirazi sultans of Kilwa consolidated their grip on the gold trade flowing north from the Zimbabwe plateau. Merchants from Aden, Gujarat, and the Persian Gulf dropped anchor in its harbor, and the Great Mosque began its ambitious expansion in coral-stone blocks - a monument that still stands against the Indian Ocean wind today.
Pagan Kingdom flourishes under Kyansittha
In upper Burma, the aging King Kyansittha presided over a golden age of Theravada Buddhism, commissioning the elegant Ananda Temple at Pagan - a masterpiece of Mon architecture whose gilded spire rose high above the flat Irrawaddy plain. His court patronized Pali scholarship, maintained diplomatic contact with the Song dynasty, and sent missions of monks to study in Sri Lanka.