1331
Stefan Dušan crowned king of Serbia
After deposing his father in a bloodless coup, Stefan Dušan took the Serbian crown at twenty-three. Within fifteen years he would rule from the Danube to the Aegean and call himself emperor of Serbs and Greeks. His law code, the Zakonik, blended Byzantine procedure with Slavic custom and Latin marriage rules into the Balkans' most comprehensive medieval legislation.
Black Death stirs in the Yunnan highlands
Chinese chronicles record a devastating epidemic in Hubei and Yunnan, killing perhaps half the population of certain prefectures. The dead were buried in mass graves outside city walls. Modern historians suspect this was the first detectable outbreak of the plague pandemic that would crawl west along caravan routes for sixteen years before reaching the Black Sea.
Yoshida Kenko begins the Tsurezuregusa
A Japanese court poet and sometime Buddhist monk began recording essays and musings in his hermitage near Kyoto. Essays in Idleness would become one of the three great works of medieval Japanese prose, celebrating impermanence, aesthetic restraint, and the pathos of things. The cultured samurai would treasure it for centuries.
Moscow's Dormition Cathedral built in stone
Ivan Kalita commissioned a modest stone church on Kremlin Hill to replace a wooden predecessor. It was Moscow's first stone building and a statement of intent: the Moneybag prince meant his city to become the religious as well as fiscal center of Russian Orthodoxy. The metropolitan would move his seat here shortly.