1336
Ashikaga Takauji enters Kyoto and ends the Kenmu Restoration
Spurned by Go-Daigo, the powerful warrior reversed sides and marched on the capital with a formidable army of eastern samurai. He installed a rival emperor of the Northern Court and would establish his own shogunate at Muromachi. Go-Daigo fled south to Yoshino, beginning Japan's six-decade Nanboku-cho civil war between two imperial lines.
Vijayanagara Empire founded in the Deccan
Two brothers, Harihara and Bukka, formerly captives at Delhi who had converted to Islam, returned home, embraced Hinduism again under the guidance of the sage Vidyaranya, and established a new capital on the Tungabhadra River. Vijayanagara would become South India's bulwark against Muslim expansion and host one of the world's wealthiest courts for two centuries.
Petrarch climbs Mont Ventoux
On a clear April morning, Petrarch and his brother walked up the windswept Provencal mountain for no purpose but the view. From the summit he opened Augustine's Confessions to a passage rebuking those who admire mountains while ignoring their own souls. The tension between worldly beauty and spiritual introspection would define humanism itself. He climbed back down chastened, modern.
Jean Buridan publishes on impetus
The rector of the University of Paris proposed that a projectile moves not because air pushes it but because an 'impetus' impressed by the thrower is gradually consumed by resistance and gravity. It was the clearest challenge yet to Aristotelian physics and would feed through Galileo into classical mechanics and Newton's first law of motion.
Edward III forbids the export of raw wool to Flanders
In retaliation for French interference in Flanders, Edward embargoed English wool exports, hoping to force Flemish weavers to relocate to England where they would process English fleece into finished cloth. The move backfired economically in the short term but showed how wool, the backbone of northern European cloth manufacturing, had become a geopolitical weapon. Flemish weavers eventually rebelled against their pro-French count.