1357
Ottoman capture of Gallipoli opens Europe
An earthquake shattered the walls of the Byzantine fortress on the Dardanelles, and Ottoman forces under Süleyman Pasha simply walked in. Gallipoli became the first permanent Ottoman foothold on European soil. The narrow strait that had separated Asia from Europe for millennia was now a bridge for Turkish armies heading west.
Krakow becomes the capital of Casimir the Great's Poland
Casimir III completed his renovation of Krakow with a new university charter, stone fortifications, and a legal code that earned him his epithet. He found Poland built of wood and left it built of stone, the saying went. Under his rule Poland became the refuge of Europe's persecuted Jews and a center of Gothic learning.
Étienne Marcel leads Paris against the dauphin
The provost of merchants, exploiting the crown's prostration after Poitiers, forced the eighteen-year-old dauphin Charles to accept the Great Ordinance: regular meetings of the Estates General, royal accountability to its commissioners, and strict controls on royal spending. Paris briefly looked like a constitutional monarchy. Marcel would be murdered in a year and a half.
Treaty of Berwick frees David II
Eleven years after Neville's Cross, the Scottish king was ransomed for one hundred thousand marks payable in installments that would burden the kingdom for decades. Scotland mortgaged itself to recover its monarch. David returned to a country traumatized by plague, war, and English raids, with a treasury that would never quite catch up with the debt.
Charles V invites humanists to the French court
While still regent for his captive father, Charles began gathering manuscripts and commissioning French translations of Aristotle, Augustine, and Valerius Maximus, determined to make the French language a vehicle for classical learning. The Louvre library, assembled over the next two decades, would contain almost a thousand volumes, the largest lay library of the century.