1145
Quantum praedecessores and the Second Crusade
Pope Eugenius III, a Cistercian protege of Bernard, issued the bull calling for a new crusade to recover Edessa, promising indulgences identical to those of the First Crusade. Bernard of Clairvaux took up the commission and began preaching it across France and Germany the next year. At Vezelay, Bernard spoke so compellingly that the crowd tore his cloak to pieces for relics before he had finished speaking.
Almohads defeat the last Almoravids at Oran
Abd al-Mu'min's Almohad army crushed the last significant Almoravid field force in a pitched battle near the port city of Oran, breaking Almoravid military power in the central Maghreb for good. The decisive victory opened the road west to the great cities of Marrakesh and Fez, and within two years the entire Almoravid empire - stretching from the Senegal River to the Ebro - would pass to Almohad control.
Weiqi flourishes in Southern Song court
The ancient board game of weiqi - known centuries later in the West as Go - reached new heights of strategic sophistication in the Southern Song court, where professional players competed in imperially sponsored tournaments before large audiences of scholars and officials. Treatises on opening theory and endgame technique multiplied, and mastery of the game became inseparable from the education of any truly cultivated gentleman.
Muslim mob sacks Cordoba
As Almoravid authority in al-Andalus collapsed, riots and factional fighting broke out in the city that had been the ornament of the Islamic West. The great library of al-Hakam II, already reduced by earlier civil wars, lost thousands more volumes to fire and looting. The destruction marked the end of Cordoba's preeminence as a center of Islamic learning, a role that shifted permanently to other cities in the Almohad domains.
Bernard's De Consideratione begun
The abbot of Clairvaux began the treatise of pastoral and political advice he would dedicate to his former pupil Pope Eugenius III. It is one of the sharpest reform statements of the century, castigating papal legalism and warning against the temptations of temporal power. Bernard argued that the pope's true authority lay in moral example rather than legal coercion, a message that later reformers would rediscover and amplify.