1154
Henry II crowned King of England
Six weeks after Stephen's death, the twenty-one-year-old Henry of Anjou was crowned at Westminster alongside Eleanor. He inherited a kingdom in such disarray that contemporaries said the devil had walked it. Within three years he had pulled down most of the illegally built castles of the Anarchy, restoring royal authority with a speed and thoroughness that announced a new style of energetic, personally driven kingship.
Al-Idrisi completes the Book of Roger
At Palermo, a Moroccan geographer working for Roger II of Sicily finished a massive world map engraved on a silver disk and a companion Arabic treatise describing every place a traveler had ever reported. His map placed south at the top and would set European cartography a century ahead. The Tabula Rogeriana remained the most accurate world map for three hundred years, consulted by navigators and scholars well into the Renaissance.
Adrian IV elected pope
Nicholas Breakspear, a poor English priest who had worked his way to the top of a Provencal monastery and been used as a papal diplomat, was elected the first and so far only English pope. He would spend his reign wrestling with Barbarossa and a Roman republic. Adrian's remarkable ascent from a Hertfordshire village to the throne of St. Peter remains one of the most improbable careers in medieval ecclesiastical history.
Adrian IV grants Ireland to Henry II
By the bull Laudabiliter, the first English pope - Nicholas Breakspear - reportedly granted the lordship of Ireland to Henry II for the purpose of reforming the Irish church. The bull's authenticity has been debated for centuries, but the English kings cited it when they needed justification. Whether genuine or forged, the document provided the legal fig leaf for Anglo-Norman intervention in Ireland that would shape the island's history for eight hundred years.