1339
Hundred Years' War opens with raids in Picardy
Edward III crossed from Brabant and burned villages along the Somme, hoping to draw Philip VI into open battle. The French king refused to engage and the campaign sputtered. The English king ran out of money and pawned his crown to Flemish bankers as collateral. War would be expensive and inconclusive for decades before the decisive clash at Crecy.
Samarkand flourishes under Chagatai revival
The oasis city on the Silk Road, recovering from Mongol internecine wars, regained its role as a crossroads of Persian scholarship and Turkic military power. Madrasas reopened, caravans resumed, and the city's blue-tiled architecture began to take the form that Timur would later magnify into imperial splendor. Persian poets and mathematicians returned to a city that once again rewarded learning.
Moscow's Kremlin rebuilt in oak by Ivan I
Ivan Kalita, the Money-Bag prince who had purchased the metropolitan's favor and the khan's yarlyk, enclosed the Moscow citadel in new oak walls and filled it with stone churches. The wooden Kremlin was modest compared to what Ivan III would later build in brick, but it declared Moscow's ambition to be the heart of Russian Christendom.
Venice acquires Treviso: mainland empire begins
The Republic of Saint Mark, long a purely maritime state that had disdained territorial ambitions on the Italian mainland, bought the Veneto city of Treviso. It was Venice's first permanent mainland possession. Within a century the serenissima would control a terraferma stretching to Bergamo, a hedge against Turkish losses in the Aegean.
Jacob van Artevelde rules Ghent
The wealthy Ghent brewer emerged as de facto dictator of the Flemish cities, negotiating with Edward III to keep English wool flowing and Flemish looms humming. His alliance with England crystallized Flanders's role in the opening of the Hundred Years' War, turning the cloth trade into a geopolitical lever. He was murdered by rival weavers in 1345.