1108
Louis VI crowned King of France
Louis the Fat inherited a Capetian kingdom that scarcely reached past Orleans. Over three decades he would spend his considerable energy hunting down robber barons between Paris and the Loire, turning a patchwork lordship into something that finally felt like royal domain. His patient castle-by-castle subjugation of the petty lords of the Ile-de-France gave his Capetian successors the territorial base from which they would eventually build a nation.
Sena dynasty patronizes Sanskrit learning in Bengal
Under Ramapala and his Sena successors, the kings of Bengal supported a late and brilliant flowering of Sanskrit scholarship at Vikramashila and Nalanda, producing grammarians, logicians, and court poets of enduring reputation. Yet the Buddhist institutions that had thrived there for seven unbroken centuries were already entering their terminal decline under mounting pressure from Turkish raiders advancing steadily from the west.
Zaragoza falls to the Almoravids
The Taifa kingdom of Zaragoza, long a literate and tolerant Muslim polity on the Ebro, was absorbed into the Almoravid empire after a succession crisis. It would remain Muslim for only another decade before King Alfonso I of Aragon took it for the Reconquista. Under Taifa rule, Zaragoza had been one of the great centers of Islamic learning in Spain, its court sheltering philosophers and translators who bridged Arabic and Latin thought.
Treaty of Devol
Bohemond of Antioch, defeated and humiliated, swore vassalage to Emperor Alexios I for Antioch and promised to return territories to the empire. The treaty was never fully implemented; Bohemond died before he could do so and his nephew Tancred simply ignored it. The document nonetheless established a Byzantine legal claim to Antioch that Constantinople would invoke for decades whenever relations with the Franks soured.