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Founding of the Knights Templar
Nine French knights led by Hugh de Payens approached Baldwin II in Jerusalem and offered to guard pilgrim roads to the Jordan River. The king gave them quarters on the Temple Mount above what he thought were Solomon's stables. An order destined for fabulous wealth was born in poverty, and within two decades the Templars would command fortresses across the Holy Land and banking houses across Europe.
Death of Alexios I Komnenos
After thirty-seven years stitching the Byzantine Empire back together from the wreckage of Manzikert, the emperor who had summoned the First Crusade and then watched it march past him died in Constantinople. His daughter Anna began writing her account of his reign, the Alexiad. Her history, composed in classicizing Greek, remains the single most important source for the First Crusade from the Byzantine perspective.
First Arctic Norse voyage to Markland recorded
Icelandic sources from this period mention a bishop of Greenland's Gardar see sailing west to Markland - probably Labrador - on diocesan business. The voyages to the North American mainland continued sporadically from the Greenland colony, two centuries after Leif Erikson. These journeys were likely motivated by the need for timber, a scarce resource in treeless Greenland, where driftwood alone could not sustain a Norse settlement indefinitely.
Death of Baldwin I of Jerusalem
Campaigning deep into the Egyptian desert, the Crusader king fell ill from an old wound and ordered his cook to embalm his body in salt and carry it home for burial at the Holy Sepulchre beside his brother Godfrey. He was laid to rest on Palm Sunday. Baldwin had transformed a fragile pilgrim settlement into a functioning feudal kingdom, conquering every major coastal port from Beirut to the borders of Egypt.
Pope Gelasius II elected and attacked
The elderly curial administrator Giovanni di Gaeta was elected pope and immediately kidnapped by Henry V's Roman supporters, the Frangipani. He was rescued, fled to France, and died at Cluny within a year. Such was the normal condition of the Roman papacy in this century, when election to the throne of St. Peter was as likely to bring exile as it was to bring spiritual authority.