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St. Lucia's flood reshapes the Dutch coastline
A catastrophic North Sea storm surge on December thirteenth broke through the dikes of Frisia and Holland, drowning an estimated fifty thousand people and enlarging the Zuiderzee into an inland sea. The disaster reshaped the geography of the Low Countries and accelerated Dutch hydraulic engineering that would define the nation.
Mongols sack Pagan
A Yuan expedition into Burma drove King Narathihapate from his capital at Pagan. He earned the nickname the king who ran from the Chinese. The vast temple-city, left without royal patronage, slipped toward abandonment as smaller successor states fought over the Irrawaddy plain. Over two thousand temples and pagodas, many of extraordinary refinement, still stand in the dusty landscape as testament to Pagan's vanished grandeur.
Rabban Bar Sauma arrives at the court of France
A Nestorian Christian monk born in China and sent as an envoy by the Mongol Ilkhanate reached Paris, where Philip IV received him, and then Bordeaux, where he gave communion to Edward I. His memoir is an eastern mirror of Marco Polo, too little read. His astonishment at the stained glass of the Sainte-Chapelle and the student riots of Paris offers a uniquely foreign perspective on medieval Europe.
St Lucia's Flood drowns northern Europe
In December, a catastrophic storm surge broke dikes along the North Sea coast of Frisia and the Netherlands. Tens of thousands drowned; the Zuiderzee was enlarged and new islands formed. It was among the deadliest natural disasters of the medieval era. The flood reshaped the coastline permanently and forced the surviving communities to develop the sophisticated water management techniques that would define Dutch civilization.
Pagan kingdom of Burma falls to Mongol invasion
A Yuan army marching south from Yunnan overthrew the kingdom of Pagan, whose king had provoked Kublai Khan by executing Mongol envoys. The vast temple-city of Pagan, with its two thousand brick stupas and pagodas spread across the Irrawaddy plain, was abandoned to monks and cattle within a generation. The kingdom's fall left a power vacuum in mainland Southeast Asia that smaller successor states would contest for centuries.