1147
Siege of Lisbon
An English, Flemish, and German flotilla of crusaders bound for the Holy Land stopped in the Tagus estuary and, at Afonso Henriques's request, helped besiege Lisbon. After seventeen weeks the city fell. Many of the crusaders settled there; the first Anglo-Portuguese alliance was soldered in its ruins. The conquest of Lisbon gave Portugal its greatest port and eventual capital, transforming a small northern county into an Atlantic-facing kingdom.
Almohads overthrow the Almoravids
Abd al-Mumin's puritanical Berber movement, proclaiming the unity of God against what it called Almoravid laxness, completed its conquest of Morocco and prepared to cross into al-Andalus. Within a decade the Almohad caliphs would rule from the Atlantic to Libya. Their empire was the largest Berber state in North African history, governed by a cadre of theologians who fused tribal solidarity with a distinctive monotheist theology.
Second Battle of Dorylaeum
Conrad III's German crusaders, exhausted and running short of water on the Anatolian plateau, were ambushed by Seljuk horse archers and cut to ribbons. Fewer than one in ten made it back to Nicaea. The Second Crusade was crippled before it ever reached Syria. The disaster repeated the pattern of the Crusade of 1101, proving that the overland route across Anatolia remained a death trap for western armies.
Moscow first mentioned in chronicles
A Russian chronicler recorded that Prince Yury Dolgoruky of Suzdal invited his ally Sviatoslav of Novgorod-Seversk to dine with him at a settlement called Moskov. It is the earliest written mention of the riverside town that would eventually become the Russian capital. The site, a minor wooden fort on the Moskva River surrounded by dense forest, gave no hint of the sprawling metropolis it would become.