1315
Great Famine begins in Northern Europe
Cold wet springs and rotting harvests drove wheat prices to eight times normal. Peasants ate acorns, dogs, and finally each other. In Flanders, people dropped dead in the streets of Ypres. The famine lasted seven years, killed perhaps a tenth of the northern population, and ended the medieval warm period.
Swiss Confederates win at Morgarten
Habsburg knights trying to discipline the forest cantons rode into a defile beside Lake Aegeri and were crushed by cowherds hurling logs and rocks from above. The Austrian column had no room to deploy its cavalry on the narrow lakeside path. The three cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden renewed their league at Brunnen and discovered that mountaineers could humiliate European nobility.
Grand Famine reaches Russia
The same cold wet weather that devastated western European harvests crippled Russian grain fields. Novgorod chronicles record bark-bread, infanticide, and cannibalism among desperate peasants. Entire villages starved. The coincidence of famine and Mongol tribute demands - the khans cared nothing for failed harvests - would feed the resentments that eventually loosened the Horde's grip on the Russian princes.
Cangrande della Scala shelters Dante at Verona
The young lord of Verona opened his court to the exiled Florentine poet, who was drafting the Paradiso. Dante dedicated the final canticle to Cangrande and set him among the blessed in heaven. It was the finest patron-poet bond of the age, forged in an Italian city-state at its cultural peak.