1393
Tarnovo falls: Bulgarian Empire ends
After a three-month siege, Bayezid I's troops took the Bulgarian capital. Patriarch Evtimiy was exiled, the royal church burned, the last Tsar Ivan Shishman captured and later beheaded on the sultan's orders. Bulgaria disappeared as an independent state and would remain Ottoman territory for nearly five centuries, until the nationalist revival of the nineteenth century.
Tamerlane sacks Baghdad
Timur took the ancient Abbasid city after its Jalayirid sultan fled. Though he spared the scholars, craftsmen were deported to Samarkand, and the population was decimated in a general massacre. Baghdad, still recovering from Hulagu's devastating 1258 sack, took another hammer blow from which it would not fully recover for centuries.
Joseon dynasty begins construction of Gyeongbokgung Palace
Yi Seong-gye, now King Taejo, laid the foundations of the Palace of Shining Happiness in the new capital of Hanyang. Designed according to Confucian geomancy - mountains behind, river before - Gyeongbokgung would serve as the seat of Korean government for five centuries, its elegant pavilions rising and falling with the dynasty's fortunes.
Bal des Ardents: Charles VI nearly burns alive
At a masquerade ball in Paris, the mad king of France and five courtiers dressed in linen costumes soaked with pitch. A torch set four of them ablaze; Charles survived only because the Duchess of Berry smothered his flames with her skirt. The incident became a symbol of the French court's decadence and the king's fragile sanity.
Philippe de Mézières writes the Order of the Passion
The aged French statesman, disillusioned by Western Christendom's failure to unite against the Ottoman advance, drafted proposals for a new ecumenical crusading order combining monastic rigor with diplomatic persuasion. His writings circulated among Burgundian and French courtiers, inspiring much admiration and no concrete expeditions. The age of the crusade was definitively over, surviving only as nostalgic literature.