1314
Bannockburn: Bruce shatters the English host
Robert Bruce's schiltrons of spearmen, anchored on marshy ground south of Stirling, chewed up Edward II's cavalry over two June days. The English army, perhaps twenty thousand strong, broke and fled southward in chaos. Bruce's victory secured Scottish independence in fact if not yet in treaty, and broke Edward II's prestige beyond repair.
Jacques de Molay burned on the Seine
The last Templar Grand Master was roasted on a slow fire on an island in the Seine, facing Notre Dame. From the flames, legend says, he summoned both Clement V and Philip IV to answer before God within a year. Both were indeed dead within eight months, lending the curse an uncanny posthumous authority that haunted the French crown for generations.
Philip IV the Fair dies hunting
Thrown from his horse chasing a stag in the Forest of Halatte, the iron king of France suffered a stroke and died at forty-six. He left a realm expanded, a bureaucracy strengthened, a church intimidated, Jews and Templars plundered, and three sons who would all die young and childless within fourteen years, triggering a succession crisis that ignited the Hundred Years' War.
Gran Tavola of Siena collapses
The Bonsignori company, Siena's greatest bank and once the pope's principal financier, failed after overextension in royal loans across Europe. Siena's financial primacy passed to Florentine houses - the Bardi, Peruzzi, and Acciaiuoli - who had learned from Sienese mistakes but would repeat them. The Bonsignori failure was an early case of a theme that would recur: kings' wars destroying the banks that funded them.