1356
Poitiers: the Black Prince captures John II of France
Edward of Woodstock, with maybe seven thousand men, lured the French royal army onto a constricted vineyard slope south of Poitiers. Longbows did the rest. King John was taken alive along with his youngest son Philip. The ransom would crush French royal finance and trigger years of peasant revolt and political collapse.
Golden Bull regulates imperial elections
Charles IV's diet at Nuremberg fixed the seven prince-electors of the Holy Roman Empire and the procedure for choosing future emperors. The papacy got no role in the process. Frankfurt would host elections, Aachen coronations, and the bull would govern German constitutional life until the Empire's dissolution four and a half centuries later in 1806.
Hanseatic Diet at Lübeck formalizes cooperation
Representatives of more than fifty northern German cities met at Lubeck and agreed to coordinate naval defense, customs tariffs, and commercial privileges. The meeting is conventionally considered the formal founding of the Hansa as an organized league rather than a loose network of merchants, giving the trading association a political structure to match its economic reach.
Earthquake destroys Basel
An autumn quake estimated above magnitude six leveled much of the Swiss city. Fires sparked by overturned hearths burned what had not collapsed. Three hundred died, a small number for the era, but the tremor remains the most destructive earthquake in Swiss recorded history. Basel's wealthy bishops would spend decades rebuilding the cathedral and ramparts in pink sandstone.