1386
Jagiellon dynasty unites Poland and Lithuania
The pagan grand duke Jogaila of Lithuania accepted baptism, the name Wladyslaw, the hand of the eleven-year-old Queen Jadwiga, and the throne of Poland. With one ceremony the largest country in Europe was created and the conversion of Lithuania, paganism's last European stronghold, became official policy that would reshape the Baltic for centuries.
Chaucer begins the Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer, a London customs official with continental literary tastes, started writing a frame-story of pilgrims riding from Southwark to Becket's shrine at Canterbury. He let each character speak in his or her own voice in iambic pentameter Middle English, from the noble Knight to the bawdy Wife of Bath. The vernacular found a poet equal to Boccaccio.
Battle of Sempach: Swiss pikemen kill Leopold III
Habsburg Duke Leopold III led another invasion of the Swiss cantons and met them in a narrow Alpine plain. Confederate halberdiers tore through dismounted knights in close combat. Leopold himself was killed. The legend of Arnold Winkelried throwing himself onto Habsburg pikes was attached to this battle. The cantons survived and expanded their confederation.
Milan Cathedral begun
Archbishop Antonio da Saluzzo laid the foundation stone of a new cathedral in pink Candoglia marble. The Gothic structure, overseen by a succession of Lombard and imported northern European masters who argued bitterly over proportions, would take nearly six centuries to complete and become the largest Italian church and the fifth largest in the world.