1329
Robert the Bruce dies at Cardross
Worn out by a lifetime of war and possibly leprosy, the Scottish king died on the Clyde at fifty-four. He asked Sir James Douglas to carry his heart on crusade against the Moors of Granada, a final gesture of chivalric piety. Douglas obliged and died fighting in Andalusia, the embalmed heart in a casket around his neck.
Muhammad bin Tughlaq moves the capital to Daulatabad
The sultan of Delhi ordered his entire capital - courtiers, scholars, merchants, even the blind - to march seven hundred miles south to the Deccan fortress of Daulatabad. Thousands perished on the road. The experiment lasted two years before Tughlaq admitted failure and marched everyone back. Ibn Battuta called it madness.
Battle of Pelekanon: Ottomans defeat Byzantium in the field
Emperor Andronikos III marched out to relieve Nicaea and met Orhan's forces at Pelekanon. The Byzantine army was routed, the emperor wounded, and Nicaea fell shortly after. It was the last time a Byzantine emperor would take the field against the Ottomans. Henceforth Constantinople could only watch its Anatolian provinces shrink.
Friar Odoric of Pordenone returns from China
The Franciscan friar arrived back in Padua after fourteen years wandering the Mongol world, dictating an account of Khanbaliq's postal relays, Hangzhou's canals, and the pepper gardens of Malabar. He described foot-binding, fishing with cormorants, and cities larger than any in Europe. His Relatio fed European fantasies of the East and supplied details that would reappear in Mandeville's fictional travels.
Pope John XXII condemns Eckhart's propositions
The bull In agro dominico listed twenty-eight propositions drawn from Meister Eckhart's sermons and commentaries and found fifteen heretical, eleven ill-sounding. The German Dominican was two years dead and could not answer. The condemnation dampened German Dominican mysticism but could not suppress Tauler and Suso, who continued Eckhart's interior turn toward a mysticism of the soul's union with God.