1176
Battle of Legnano
The Lombard League's infantry, fighting around a carroccio ox-cart draped with the communal standard, broke Barbarossa's cavalry charge and routed the imperial army. Barbarossa was unhorsed and presumed dead for a week. The imperial dream of direct rule over Italy died on that field. The battle proved that well-organized urban militias could defeat feudal cavalry, a lesson that Italian cities would build upon for the next two centuries.
Battle of Myriokephalon
Manuel I Komnenos marched a huge Byzantine army into a steep Anatolian pass and found it blocked with felled trees. The Seljuk Sultan Kilij Arslan II's cavalry poured down from the heights and destroyed the column. The defeat ended Byzantine hopes of reconquering central Anatolia. Manuel compared the disaster to Manzikert a century earlier, and the parallel was apt: both battles marked irreversible stages in the Turkish absorption of Asia Minor.
First stone London Bridge begun
Henry II commissioned the priest-architect Peter of Colechurch to replace the Saxon wooden bridge across the Thames with a stone one. The new bridge would take thirty-three years to complete, carry houses and a chapel, and stand for six centuries. Its nineteen pointed arches constricted the river's flow so dramatically that shooting the rapids beneath them became a rite of passage for London boatmen, some of whom drowned in the attempt.
First eyre of English justices in common
Henry II dispatched teams of royal judges on a general visitation of the counties, applying the Assize of Northampton. The regular eyres they established would bring the king's justice into every English village within a generation, eroding seigneurial courts. The travelling justices heard criminal cases, settled land disputes, and inspected local government, creating a uniform legal system that bound the kingdom together more effectively than any army.