1115
Aguda founds the Jin dynasty
The Jurchen chieftain on the Amur frontier proclaimed himself emperor of a new dynasty, declaring independence from the Khitan Liao he had just defeated. Within a dozen years his horse archers would be smashing through the Great Wall and sacking the Song capital. The Jin state fused Jurchen tribal organization with Chinese bureaucratic practice, creating a hybrid polity that would govern northern China for over a century.
Bernard founds Clairvaux
Bernard of Citeaux led twelve monks to a marshy valley the locals called the Valley of Wormwood, renamed it the Clear Valley, and started a monastery that within a generation would be the most famous religious house in Europe and its abbot Christendom's most feared preacher. From Clairvaux, Bernard would launch theological controversies, recruit crusaders, mentor a pope, and shape the religious imagination of the twelfth century.
Hassan-i Sabbah dies at Alamut
The founder of the Nizari Ismailis of Alamut, the original Old Man of the Mountain, died in his mountain fortress in northern Persia after forty years of state-building. His successors inherited a network of impregnable castles and disciplined daggers. Hassan had turned assassination into a strategic weapon, dispatching lone killers against Seljuk viziers and generals with a theatrical precision that made the word itself synonymous with targeted murder.
Mixtec ruler Eight Deer sacrificed
In the Mixtec highlands of Oaxaca, the warrior-king Eight Deer Jaguar Claw, whose exploits are recorded in codex paintings, was defeated and ritually sacrificed by a coalition of rival city-states at Tilantongo. His death reshaped the political fabric of pre-Columbian southern Mexico. The codex narratives of his life form one of the most detailed biographical records of any individual in the pre-contact Americas, spanning decades of war and diplomacy.
Matilda of Tuscany dies
The great Italian countess who had sheltered Pope Gregory VII at Canossa while Emperor Henry IV shivered in the snow outside, and who had fought imperial armies for four decades, died leaving her vast allodial lands to the Papacy. The legacy would tangle church and empire for another century, as successive emperors disputed the bequest and popes insisted on their claim to the richest estates in central Italy.
Battle of Sarmin
Roger of Salerno, ruling Antioch during its prince's captivity, surprised a Seljuk army of eight thousand under Bursuq ibn Bursuq and scattered them in the hills east of the Orontes. A lean Crusader outpost, written off by Baghdad, had held. The victory bought the principality of Antioch another four years of relative security before the catastrophe at the Field of Blood shattered its military power.