1321
Dante Alighieri dies in Ravenna
Returning from a diplomatic mission to Venice, Dante caught marsh fever in the Po delta and died on the night of Holy Cross. He was fifty-six, still in exile, still writing. Boccaccio would deliver the first public lectures on the Commedia in Florence forty years later, weeping as he read.
Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq builds Tughlaqabad Fort
The new sultan raised a massive stone fortress south of Delhi, its cyclopean walls and sloping bastions visible for miles across the plain. An underground passage linked the citadel to his tomb. The fort was Delhi's fourth city, built to withstand Mongol siege - and abandoned within five years by his own son.
Lepers' Plot panic grips France
Rumors swirled that lepers were poisoning wells on orders from Muslim kings and French Jews. Philip V authorized burnings and confiscations. Hundreds of lepers were roasted alive, Jewish communities were expelled and taxed. The panic reveals a pre-plague European mind already primed to hunt minorities in times of fear and social disruption.
Pope John XXII declares poverty heresy formally
In the bull Cum inter nonnullos, the Avignon pope condemned the Franciscan Spiritual position that Christ had owned nothing, overturning decades of papal tolerance for the radical poverty movement. The ruling split the Franciscan order and drove Michael of Cesena, William of Ockham, and Marsilius of Padua into the protection of the heretical emperor Louis IV.