1209
Francis of Assisi founds his order
A cloth merchant's son who had stripped naked in the Assisi piazza to renounce his inheritance gathered eleven companions and walked to Rome. Innocent III, wary but curious, verbally approved their rule of absolute poverty. The Franciscans set out barefoot along the Italian roads, preaching repentance to peasants and lepers in a voice the institutional church had nearly forgotten how to use.
Mongol campaign subdues the Uighurs
The Uighur kingdom of Qocho, a literate Buddhist and Manichaean oasis state along the northern Silk Road, submitted peacefully to Genghis Khan and provided scribes who gave the Mongols their first written script. Uighur administrators would staff Mongol chanceries from Karakorum to Tabriz for generations. Their vertical alphabet, adapted from Syriac through Sogdian, became the mother script of Mongolian and Manchu writing.
Massacre at Beziers in Languedoc
Crusader troops under Simon de Montfort and the legate Arnaud Amalric stormed the city and killed thousands of inhabitants, Catholic and Cathar alike. The legate's reported command, kill them all, God will know his own, became a byword for religious fury. The sack of Beziers was the opening atrocity of a twenty-year campaign that would shatter Occitan civilization beyond repair.
Cambridge scholars flee Oxford to found a university
After a townsman killed a student in Oxford and two scholars were hanged in reprisal, masters fled up the fen road to a small market town. At Cambridge they opened their schools among the willows and began tutoring boys in Latin grammar and logic. The rivalry between the two universities, born in violence, would become the defining intellectual axis of English-speaking civilization.