1353
Boccaccio finishes the Decameron
After five years of intermittent writing, Boccaccio completed his cycle of a hundred tales told over ten days by ten young Florentines hiding from the plague in a country villa. Lewd, witty, secular, and sympathetic to women's desires, the collection was an act of literary recovery from collective trauma and the founding text of European prose fiction.
Fa Ngum founds the Kingdom of Lan Xang in Laos
A Lao prince raised in the Khmer court returned with a Cambodian army and Theravada monks to unify the Mekong valley's fractured muang into a single kingdom, the Land of a Million Elephants. He brought with him the Phra Bang, a golden Buddha image that became the kingdom's sacred palladium. Lan Xang would endure for three centuries, its kings balancing between Siam, Vietnam, and Burma.
Firuz Shah Tughlaq stabilizes the Delhi Sultanate
After the chaos of Muhammad bin Tughlaq's reign, his cousin Firuz took the throne and governed with a gentleness unusual in Delhi. He built canals, hospitals, and gardens, freed slaves by the tens of thousands, and refused to torture. The sultanate breathed. It would not last, but for a generation India exhaled.
Lithuanian Algirdas pushes into Kievan lands
The pagan grand duke Algirdas of Lithuania exploited the Golden Horde's weakness to absorb Kiev, Chernihiv, and much of modern Belarus and Ukraine into his polyglot realm. Lithuania quietly became the largest state in Europe by area, its Orthodox and Catholic subjects outnumbering its pagan rulers by a wide margin, creating a pluralistic empire unlike any other in Christendom.