1346
Crécy: longbows annihilate French chivalry
On a sloping field in Picardy, English archers loosed clouds of arrows into mounted French knights tangled with their own Genoese crossbowmen. Sixteen French charges, sixteen failures. By dusk twelve hundred knights and thousands of footmen lay dead. The Black Prince won his spurs that afternoon. Edward had broken the back of feudal cavalry warfare.
Plague reaches Crimea via Mongol siege
Janibeg of the Golden Horde, besieging the Genoese trading post of Caffa, watched plague erupt in his camp. According to one chronicler, the Mongols catapulted infected corpses over the walls - perhaps history's first instance of biological warfare. Genoese ships fled with the contagion in their holds, carrying it through Constantinople and into the Mediterranean.
Edward III lands at La Hougue with his army
The English king beached at the Cotentin Peninsula with twelve thousand men and his sixteen-year-old son the Black Prince, wading ashore into Normandy's July heat. He intended a chevauchee - a wide-ranging raid burning crops and villages to draw Philip VI into battle. Within six weeks, Philip would oblige him at Crecy with catastrophic results for France.
Neville's Cross: David II captured
Invading Northumberland to relieve French pressure, the king of Scots was wounded by two arrows in the face and taken prisoner near Durham by the English northern levies. He would spend eleven years in English captivity. Scotland, ungoverned, drifted; the Hundred Years' War had spilled across the Tweed in expensive new ways.