1325
Mexica found Tenochtitlán in Lake Texcoco
According to legend the wandering Nahuatl speakers saw an eagle perched on a cactus devouring a serpent and knew their promised city lay on the swampy island before them. They drained marsh, built chinampas, and planted a settlement that within two centuries would dominate central Mexico as the Aztec capital.
Ibn Battuta sets out from Tangier
A twenty-one-year-old Moroccan scholar left home intending to make the hajj to Mecca. He would not return for twenty-four years. He would cross three continents, serve sultans in Delhi and Sumatra, survive shipwrecks and brigands, and leave a Rihla that became the greatest travelogue of the medieval world, covering some seventy-five thousand miles of the inhabited earth.
Muhammad bin Tughluq takes the throne of Delhi
After the suspicious collapse of a wooden pavilion on his father, Ghiyath al-Din, the learned and tyrannical prince became sultan. He would extend the Delhi Sultanate to its greatest territorial reach, move his capital south to Daulatabad on a disastrous forced march, mint token copper currency that collapsed within two years, and ultimately watch half his empire secede.
Solomonic Ethiopia under Amda Seyon
The Ethiopian negusa nagast pushed his Christian highland kingdom outward, campaigning against Muslim Ifat sultanate in the Red Sea lowlands with an army of battle-hardened mountaineers. His wars were chronicled by court scribes in Ge'ez verse, preserving one of Africa's oldest documented royal chronicles and a vivid portrait of medieval Ethiopian warfare. Solomonic Ethiopia entered its expansionist phase.