1317
Salic Law bars French princesses from throne
When Louis X's widow gave birth to a boy who died within days, Philip V seized the crown over his niece Jeanne. French jurists dusted off an obscure Salian custom to justify barring women from the royal succession, arguing that the crown of France could never pass through a female line. The principle would trigger a continental war within twenty years.
Tughlaq dynasty rises in Delhi
Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq, a frontier general of mixed Turkic and Hindu parentage, overthrew the last Khalji sultan and founded the dynasty that would rule northern India for nearly a century. His military roads and postal relays stitched the subcontinent together with a ruthless efficiency that awed even Ibn Battuta.
First White Lotus uprisings flicker in Yuan China
In the rice paddies south of the Yangtze, White Lotus devotees and discontented peasants mounted the first significant revolts against Mongol taxation. The risings were crushed, but the network of Buddhist millenarian cells survived underground, waiting for the floods and famines that would give them a mass following in the 1340s.
Venetian galleys establish the Flanders route
Venice inaugurated its state-organized galley convoys to Bruges and London, threading the Strait of Gibraltar to link Mediterranean spice with Atlantic wool. The muda fleets sailed on fixed schedules, armed against pirates, each galley a floating warehouse. It was the first regular commercial sea route between southern and northern Europe.
John XXII's bull Extravagantes on heresy trials
The Avignon pope streamlined inquisitorial procedure across Languedoc, empowering Dominicans to prosecute Cathar remnants and Waldensian cells with greater efficiency and fewer procedural obstacles. Jacques Fournier, the future Benedict XII, used the new procedures to produce the famously detailed Montaillou register, an extraordinary record of Cathar village life in the Pyrenean foothills that has captivated modern historians.