1186
Ghurids conquer Lahore
Muhammad of Ghor captured the great Punjabi city of Lahore and imprisoned the last Ghaznavid sultan Khusrau Malik, ending a dynasty that had ruled from the banks of the Ravi for nearly two centuries. The conquest threw open the road to Delhi and the rich Gangetic plain beyond, setting the stage for the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate - the first enduring Muslim state in northern India.
Henry VI marries Constance of Sicily
Barbarossa's son married the thirty-one-year-old aunt and heiress of the young Sicilian king William II at Milan. The marriage, dismissed at the time as unlikely to matter, would in a few years bring the Hohenstaufen dynasty the throne of Sicily and the blood feud with the papacy that doomed them.
Maimonides becomes Saladin's court physician
Moses ben Maimon, the Jewish philosopher and doctor who had fled Almohad Spain via Morocco to Fustat, was appointed chief physician to Saladin's vizier and later to the sultan himself. Patients waited in line outside his house each afternoon after he returned from court. His medical writings, composed in Arabic, synthesized Greek and Islamic medical traditions with his own clinical observations, earning him a reputation that extended far beyond the Jewish community.
Tsunami strikes the Japanese coast
A powerful earthquake off the Kii Peninsula generated a devastating tsunami that swept inland along the exposed shores of the Inland Sea, destroying fishing villages, coastal temples, and harbor infrastructure. The disaster was recorded in the personal diary of the Kyoto courtier Kujo Kanezane, who noted the strange omens and interpreted them as heaven's unmistakable displeasure with the bloody civil war then raging between the Taira and Minamoto warrior clans.
Vlachs and Bulgarians rebel
Theodor and Asen, two brothers from the Balkan Vlach-Bulgarian population, rose against Isaac II Angelos's taxation demands at Tarnovo. Their rebellion coalesced into the Second Bulgarian Empire, which the Byzantines would spend the next fifteen years failing to put down. The brothers fortified Tarnovo on its dramatic hilltop position above the Yantra River, making it one of the most defensible capitals in southeastern Europe.