1178
Jayavarman VII defeats the Cham at Angkor
After Cham naval raiders had sailed up the Tonle Sap and sacked Angkor itself in a humiliating surprise attack the previous year, the aging prince Jayavarman VII rallied the scattered Khmer forces and drove the invaders from Cambodian soil in a decisive naval battle. His subsequent reign would produce Angkor Thom, the Bayon, and the most ambitious building program Southeast Asia had ever witnessed.
Southern Song perfect paddlewheel warships
Song naval engineers along the Yangtze perfected treadmill-powered paddlewheel warships - armored vessels driven by crews working internal mechanisms rather than oars or sails - capable of ramming enemy craft and outmaneuvering the Jin river fleets at will. The technology, centuries ahead of anything in the Western world, gave the Southern Song decisive and lasting control of China's vital inland waterways.
Canterbury monks see lunar event
Five Canterbury monks, watching a new crescent moon, reported it split and spewed fire. Modern astronomers have linked the sighting to a possible meteoric impact that may have formed the young crater Giordano Bruno on the lunar far side - one of the only pre-modern eyewitness records of a lunar impact.
Andrei Bogolyubsky assassinated
The prince of Vladimir-Suzdal, who had sacked Kiev seven years earlier and begun to build his northern Russian principality as the real center of Rus, was murdered by his own courtiers. His death stalled the northward shift of Russian political gravity by a generation. Andrei had attempted to rule as an autocrat in a political culture that expected princes to share power with their boyars, and the boyars took their revenge.