1116
Song embassy reaches the Jurchen court
Hoping to forge an alliance against their mutual enemy the crumbling Liao dynasty, the Song court dispatched envoys by sea to the Jurchen Jin, bearing gifts of silk and diplomatic flattery. The ambassadors returned with promises of joint military action - a pact that would succeed brilliantly in destroying the Liao and then catastrophically backfire when the Jurchen themselves turned on their Song allies.
Battle of Philomelion
Byzantine Emperor Alexios I, in his sixties, led one last campaign into central Anatolia and defeated a Seljuk army under Sultan Malik Shah. The victory halted Turkish raids briefly but the underlying balance remained unchanged. Alexios returned to Constantinople in triumph. It was the old emperor's final campaign; within two years he would be dead, leaving the empire to his son John II and the chronic problem of Anatolia unsolved.
Adelaide del Vasto sails for Jerusalem
The widowed regent of Sicily, lured by Baldwin I's offer of a crown, arrived in Acre with ships laden with Sicilian gold. Baldwin set aside his Armenian wife to marry her, then repudiated Adelaide when the gold ran out. The slight hardened Sicilian hatred of the Crusader kingdom for generations.
Siege of Tyre launched
Baldwin I began the first serious Crusader attempt to take the Phoenician port of Tyre. The siege was unsuccessful, hampered by Egyptian naval intervention and lack of Latin ships. The city would only fall eight years later, after Venetian galleys blockaded its harbor. Tyre's formidable double-harbor defenses, built on a causeway Alexander the Great had constructed fifteen centuries earlier, made it the hardest coastal target on the Levantine shore.