1133
Al-Idrisi begins his world map for Roger II
The Moroccan geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi arrived at the cosmopolitan Norman court in Palermo and began compiling what would become the most accurate world map of the medieval era, synthesizing the geographical knowledge of Greek, Arabic, and Norman sources into a unified whole. The resulting silver planisphere and its accompanying Book of Roger described lands stretching from Scandinavia to the forests of the Sudan.
Work begins on Durham cathedral vault
Masons at Durham completed the stone vaulting over the nave, a ribbed vault that was among the earliest in Europe and the first substantial pointed-rib solution to the engineering problem of spanning wide spaces. Durham was the workshop where Romanesque crossed into Gothic. The vault's engineering innovations allowed builders to open clerestory windows far larger than earlier barrel-vaulted churches could support, flooding the nave with light.
Earthquake damages Samarra on the Tigris
A powerful earthquake struck the old Abbasid capital of Samarra on the middle Tigris, toppling the upper courses of its famous spiral minaret - the Malwiya - and rupturing the ancient irrigation canals that had sustained the Mesopotamian agricultural heartland for over a thousand years. The quake accelerated the region's slow demographic hemorrhage southward toward Baghdad and left much of the once-great city permanently abandoned.
Lothair III crowned Emperor
The Saxon king, escorted into Rome through back streets by Bernard of Clairvaux because Anacletus held St. Peter's, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor at the Lateran. The compromise ceremony carried a cost: Lothair had to do homage to Pope Innocent for the former lands of Matilda of Tuscany. The humiliation was depicted in a painting at the Lateran that infuriated later emperors, who saw it as proof of papal arrogance.
St Bartholomew's Fair licensed in London
Henry I granted his jester-turned-canon Rahere the right to hold an annual cloth fair at Smithfield beside the priory Rahere had built after surviving malaria in Rome. The fair would run every August for more than seven centuries. It grew from a modest cloth market into one of England's great commercial and theatrical gatherings, famous for its puppet shows, sideshows, and the annual spectacle of livestock sales.