1260
Mamluks defeat Mongols at Ain Jalut
At the Spring of Goliath in Galilee, the Mamluk sultan Qutuz and his general Baibars ambushed a Mongol detachment under Kitbuqa and broke it. It was the first major field defeat the Mongols had suffered. The myth of invincibility cracked on Palestinian ground. The victory preserved Egypt and the western Islamic world from Mongol conquest and established the Mamluks as the dominant military power of the region.
Kublai Khan proclaimed at Kaiping
Kublai, fighting his brother Ariq Boke for control of the Mongol succession, had himself acclaimed Great Khan by his supporters at Kaiping in Inner Mongolia. The empire was effectively split. Kublai would win the civil war and shift its center east to a Chinese model. His claim was contested by the western khanates, and the universal empire Genghis had dreamed of was fracturing along cultural and geographic lines.
Chartres Cathedral consecrated
After decades of work following a devastating fire, the rebuilt cathedral of Chartres was dedicated in the presence of Louis IX. Its stained glass flooded the nave with deep blues; its sculptures offered a stone encyclopedia of creation. Pilgrims came for the relic of Mary's tunic. The cathedral's windows, over one hundred and fifty in number, contain the most complete medieval glazing program to survive intact.
Polynesian navigators settle the Chatham Islands
Polynesian voyagers from New Zealand, themselves recent arrivals, sailed east and discovered the remote Chatham Islands in the cold waters of the Pacific. The Moriori, as their descendants became known, adapted to a colder climate by developing a unique pacifist culture and marine-based diet distinct from their Maori cousins. Their renunciation of warfare, formalized in a covenant attributed to the chief Nunuku, would prove tragically insufficient when Maori raiders arrived in the nineteenth century.
Christian Nubia pressured by Mamluk Egypt
The Nubian Christian kingdom of Makuria came under increasing pressure from Mamluk sultans, who raided into the Nile valley and imposed tribute on the Christian rulers of Dongola. The centuries-old compact between Muslim Egypt and Christian Nubia was beginning to fray. Within a generation Mamluk-backed Muslim claimants would seize the Nubian throne, ending a thousand years of Christian rule along the upper Nile.
Baibars seizes the Mamluk sultanate
Two months after Ain Jalut, the Bahri Mamluk commander Baibars murdered Sultan Qutuz on a hunting trip and took the throne himself. A former Turkish slave of the Crimea, he would prove the ablest Muslim warrior of the century and the terror of the Frankish states. His seventeen-year reign saw the systematic dismantling of Crusader castles and the construction of a postal system rivaling the Mongols'.
Nicola Pisano finishes Pisa baptistery pulpit
A Tuscan sculptor trained on antique sarcophagi carved a hexagonal marble pulpit in the baptistery of Pisa, covered with classical nudes and dense narrative reliefs. The work announced a new sculptural language, borrowing Roman form for Christian stories, that would quicken into the Renaissance. His son Giovanni would push the style further, carving figures of such emotional intensity that they seem to strain against the stone.