1132
Southern Song establish the world's first standing navy
Emperor Gaozong established a permanent naval command headquartered at Dinghai with a fleet of hundreds of paddlewheel warships and marines armed with fire-lances and thunder-crash bombs. The standing navy - the first in world history organized as a permanent, professional branch of the military rather than an ad hoc wartime levy - would prove the dynasty's single most effective defense against the Jurchen Jin's repeated attempts at invasion from the north.
Abelard composes Historia Calamitatum
In a remote Breton abbey where his own monks had tried to poison him, the philosopher began dictating a confessional letter cataloguing his affair with Heloise, his castration by her uncle's thugs, and his serial ecclesiastical humiliations. The Latin autobiography has no real precedent. Its unflinching self-examination and literary brilliance spawned a correspondence with Heloise that remains the most famous love-letter exchange of the Middle Ages.
Fulk establishes border castles
Newly arrived in the Crusader kingdom, Fulk of Anjou fortified the coastal road with castles at Ibelin, Beth Gibelin, and Blanchegarde, meant to isolate Egyptian-held Ascalon. The castles, built by local stonemasons using Byzantine-influenced techniques, would anchor the Latin defense of the southern kingdom. Their garrison forces, drawn from newly enfeoffed Frankish knights, created a network of lordships that gave the kingdom its characteristic feudal geography.
Founding of Rievaulx Abbey
A dozen Cistercian monks from Clairvaux, led by the future Aelred's mentor, settled in a steep Yorkshire valley and began building an abbey that within fifty years would have six hundred monks and lay brothers. It was the mother house of the English Cistercians. Under Aelred's abbacy the community became famous for its warmth and intellectual life, a rare combination in an order that prized austerity above all else.
Jin dynasty establishes civil examinations
The Jurchen conquerors, having toppled the sophisticated civilization of northern Song China by sheer force of arms, turned around and adopted its Confucian examination system wholesale to recruit the Chinese administrators they desperately needed. The move revealed the enduring paradox of nomadic conquest: to govern the literate world they had taken by the sword, the horsemen had to become the scholars they had defeated.