1255
Hulagu's army crosses the Oxus
The grandson of Genghis set out from Mongolia at the head of the best equipped army the empire ever fielded, including a thousand Chinese engineers. His orders were simple: subdue every Muslim power between the Amu Darya and the Mediterranean. He took his time. The army's size was so vast that its passage stripped the countryside bare, and advance parties were sent ahead to lay in provisions.
Swahili cities prosper along East Africa
Mogadishu, Kilwa, and Mombasa continued their rise as cosmopolitan stone towns where Arab dhows met Bantu caravans. Gold, ivory, ambergris, and slaves flowed out; cotton, ceramics, and Islam flowed in. Swahili, a Bantu language infused with Arabic, crystallized as the trade tongue. The coral-stone mosques and multi-story merchant houses of these ports rivaled anything built along the Arabian coast.
Mosaic pavements laid at Westminster Abbey
Henry III commissioned Italian Cosmati craftsmen to lay an elaborate geometric mosaic pavement before the high altar of his new Westminster Abbey. The porphyry and serpentine design, preserved beneath a carpet for centuries, still baffles archaeologists with its numerological intent. The precious stones were imported from Rome itself, and the pavement's Latin inscription predicted the end of the world in a cryptic calculation.
Mongols capture Hasan-i Sabbah's library
Among the booty at Alamut the Mongols found the grand master's famous library, which the Persian historian Juvaini was granted permission to inspect before the rest was burned. He rescued what he could of the Nizari chronicles and then watched the remainder feed a Mongol bonfire. The loss of the Ismaili library was one of the great intellectual catastrophes of the era, erasing centuries of heterodox scholarship.