1267
Giotto born near Florence
In a farmhouse in the Mugello hills, the son of a peasant who would remake the grammar of European painting was born. Before he died he would put living flesh back into Byzantine icons and teach Tuscan frescoes how to weep. Cimabue is said to have found him drawing sheep.
Great Zimbabwe's stone enclosures expanded
On the Zimbabwe Plateau, Shona builders raised the Great Enclosure's outer wall to eleven meters, enclosing a complex of stone towers, grain stores, and ritual spaces without a single drop of mortar. The city controlled the gold and ivory trade flowing to the Swahili coast at Sofala and Kilwa. At its peak Great Zimbabwe housed some eighteen thousand people, the largest medieval settlement in sub-Saharan Africa.
Baibars captures Caesarea and Arsuf from Crusaders
In a swift spring campaign, the Mamluk sultan stormed two of the strongest remaining Crusader fortresses on the Palestinian coast. Caesarea's Herodian walls, reinforced by Louis IX, crumbled under Mamluk siege engines. The Latin kingdom was being dismantled castle by castle, and no relief came from Europe. Baibars ordered both fortifications razed to the ground to deny future crusaders a foothold on the coast.
Roger Bacon writes Opus Majus
Under a commission from Clement IV, the English Franciscan produced a sprawling treatise advocating experimental science, language study, and mathematical astronomy. He wrote it in secret against his order's hostility and sent it to the pope, who died before reading it. Bacon's insistence that observation and experiment outranked textual authority placed him centuries ahead of his time and earned him the suspicion of his superiors.