1324
Mansa Musa reaches Cairo on hajj
The Mali emperor entered Egypt with a caravan reportedly sixty thousand strong, eighty camels bearing gold dust. He distributed alms so lavishly that Cairo's gold price collapsed for a decade, an extraordinary feat of unintentional economic disruption. Arab geographers gaped. Mali suddenly appeared on European mappae mundi as a kingdom rich enough to matter.
Aztec Tenochtitlan founded on Lake Texcoco
The Mexica people, guided by a priestly vision of an eagle devouring a serpent on a cactus, drove stakes into the marshy island and began building the city that would become the largest in the pre-Columbian Americas. Canals, causeways, and chinampas would turn a swamp into an imperial capital whose population would eventually rival contemporary Paris or Constantinople.
Marsilius of Padua publishes Defensor Pacis
The expatriate Italian scholar, writing in Paris, argued that legitimate authority flowed from the people, that clergy should have no coercive power, that the pope was merely a bishop of Rome. It was the century's most radical political treatise, and it got Marsilius excommunicated and a sanctuary with Louis IV.
Mansa Musa crashes the Egyptian gold market
So extravagant were the Malian emperor's gifts to Cairo's merchants and beggars that gold lost a quarter of its value and did not recover for a decade. Musa had to borrow on the return journey. His hajj put West Africa on European maps and made Mali a synonym for unimaginable wealth.