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| - SE Asia: The Khmer ruler Suryavarman II annexes the Champa kingdom, which refused to help in the invasion of Annam; soon the Chams rebel and regain their independence. Western Europe: Unification of Leòn and Gallastria under John II Ramiro of the Gallastrian Mabinardo dynasty. Western Europe, North Africa: A 20,000 strong Crusader army of Greater Norman, Aquitanian, Septimanian and Spanish warriors descends Spain and is later ferried by the navies of Pisa, Marseille, Barcelona and Valencia to Mauretania (*OTL Morocco). The northern coastal cities are quickly taken, their inhabitants often exterminated at swordpoint or en masse burnings at the stake :eek: as heretics. As the Maurian Catholic party rises against Gadirote (*Cathar) domination, the tribal Maurians of the Rawel (*OTL Rif) mountains inflict heavy casualties upon the anti-Cathar Crusaders. The aged Stephen of Gadir, the Maurian “heresiarch” and king, retires to the Atlas mountains as the Crusaders desolate coastal Mauretania; a new harsh epoch of guerrilla begins. Inside the very Crusader army many peasant soldiers from Aquitaine and Septimania reveal themselves Cathars, passing to the Gadirotes :D. Central-Eastern Europe: King Wladislaw II of Poland is exiled by his brothers and replace by Boleslaw IV the Curly. Middle East: Zengi of Mosul and Aleppo is murdered by an eunuch of Frankish origin, Yaranqash; the news is greeted with enthusiasm by the Crusaders, whose remaining forces manage to recapture a desolate Edessa. Zengi's domains are divided between his sons, Saif ad-Din Ghazi I inheriting Mosul and the northern Iraqi holdings, Nur ad-Din northern Syria and overlordship over Damascus. Central Asia: Malik Qutbuddin, the exiled ruler of Ghor (a province of central Afghanistan), is poisoned :mad: by his host, the Ghaznavid sultan Bahram Shah. Qutbuddin brothers, who had forced him to flee, now take the offense as an excuse to wage war on their Ghaznavid overlords. Northern Europe: Erik II Lam, king of Denmark, abdicates and retires to die as a monk. A civil war explodes between the distant cousins Sven III (son of the late Erik II) and Knut/Canute V (a grandson of the late king Niels through Magnus the Strong), who control respectively the islands and Jutland. A third claimant to the throne, young Valdemar I, the last son of the late Knut Lavard, controls southern Jutland/Schleswig 1147 Northern Europe: Danish “Crusaders” raid western Pomerania (Mecklenburg); Albert the Bear with his Bohemian allies grinds Greater Wendia into destruction, burning its main center, Branibor/Brandenburg. Conrad von Hohenstaufen, younger brother of duke Frederick of Saxony (*OTL Barbarossa), inherits the duchy of Swabia from their father Frederick II. Southern Europe: Seeing civil war ripping apart both Germany and Lombardy, their traditional candidates for overlordship, the Romancians (*inhabitants of OTL eastern Switzerland plus Valtellina and Vorarlberg) declare independence, their lands divided between the bishopric of Coira in the south and the powerful Abbey of St. Gall (*OTL St. Gallen) in the north. Amedeo II of Lombardy dies, leving the throne to his third son, Arrigo/Enrico I, who is obviously ;) refused coronation in Milan. The new king imposes a blockade of the Lombard city, while his rival cousin Umberto, son of Guidone of Turin, Susa and Ivrea, vainly tries to counter his moves from Piedmont. Byzantine Empire: Helped by the powerful Pisan navy, the Normans of southern Italy sack Thebes, Corinth and Euboea; the Pisans conquer Rhodes, the Normans the Ionian islands, wresting also Corfu from Venice. They also try to set up again Belisarius Diogenes as rival emperor, but the Peloponnesian ruler, afraid of being deprived of his lands by the Venetian-Byzantine alliance, refuses. 1148 Northern Europe, Central-Eastern Europe: After enforcing the Treaty of Pilsen, Bohemia is master of Central Europe. The marches of Meissen and Austria and the brand new one of Brandenburg (formerly Greater Wendia, now under Albert the Bear von Ballenstedt) are made into semi-independent vassals of Bohemia, while Lusatia is annexed to Bohemia as a dependent duchy. Western Pomerania/Mecklemburg remains in the hands of the mostly heathen Slavic Obodrite tribe, led by their Christian duke Nicholas I of the Niklotowicz dynasty. Margrave Henry Jasomirgott of Austria is stripped of the Palatinate which is bestowed upon Welf VI of Memmingen from the Welf family, former regent of Bavaria for his young nephew Henry and current nominal margrave of Bernmark (*mainland Veneto). Western Europe: Marquis Ferdinand II and his mother-in-law, Grand Duchess Manella of Castile, defend Toledo against a Gallastrian besieging force, which is routed. North Africa: A Norman-Pisan army, officially hedead for Mauretania (*OTL Morocco) to fight the Gadirote Cathars, is instead hijacked :rolleyes: to Ifrigia (*later Punia, OTL Tunisia), where an independentist revolt against the Western emperor of Sicily, John IV Ghiffiotto, has exploded. The Norman army supports the birth of an independent kingdom of Ifrigia under the rebel leader Peter IV, duke of Thermeli (*OTL Hammamet), whose imprisonment and escape had started the revolt. A Genoese fleet led astray by a storm while trasporting anti-Cathar Crusaders “discovers” the Canary islands (already known to the Romans, but almost forgotten in the Middle Ages and only seldom touched by European or Maurian sailors) meeting their fierce non-seafaring inhabitants, the Guanches. Despite being often tall and blond, they are found to speak a language distantly related to Maurian (*OTL Moroccan) Berber. Western Europe: The king of Brittany, Conan III the Great, dies after disinheriting his only male son, Hoël III count of Nantes, for reasons of illegitimacy. Brittany should go to Eudes of Porhoët, Conan's son-in-law, but Hoël asserts his own rights to the throne. When he dies childless after escaping from an uprising, the throne of Brittany finally passes to Eudes, founder of the Rohan dynasty. Western Europe: The new duke of Valencia, Llorente I the Hardy, crushes in battle at Teruel the army of his brother-in-law, Enzacòn/Aintza Jaun (lord) of Sobrarbre, the Navarrese pretender to the ducal throne and a grandson of Sancho III the Great, despite the pretender's force was bolstered by a thousand Norman knights from France. Southern Europe: The King of Lombardy Arrigo I, the Communal militias from Cremona, Lodi and Como and the counts of Seprio raze Milan to the ground:eek: :eek: :eek: , save for the churches, after its surrender by hunger following the two-year-long siege. The king formally prohibits to dwell in the town and its immediate surroundings except for clerics and their peasant serfs, and the Milanese archbishopric is transferred in nearby Monza with most of the vanquished populace. The consuls and former consuls of the Milanese Comune (the so-called Forty Martyrs of Lombardy) are later beheaded as felons amidst the ruins of the destroyed city. Pope Dominic I (St.Bernard of Clairvaux), shocked by such violence against good Christians, excommunicates the king. North Africa: The Pisan fleet forces the capitulation of Bardapolis (*OTL Tunis) to the Norman-Ifrigian army: Peter I is enthroned as king of Ifrigia by the Primate of Africa, Gregory VI of Byzastes, with Papal approval (under Lesser Norman duress). The Pisans then conquer St. James of Ikhuzi (*OTL Algiers) from its Genoese overlords. Byzantine Empire: The Byzantines, helped by Venice, expel the Normans and Pisans from the Ionian islands and the Aegean Sea; Venice recovers Corfu. Middle East: Nur ad-Din, the strong son of Zengi, crushes the Antiochene Crusaders and the Assassins of Syria at the siege of Inab, where prince Tancredi of Antioch and the Assassin leader, Alì ibn Wafa, are killed; then Nur ad-Din ceremonially rides to the shores of the Mediterranean in sign of victory. In Antioch a regency under the Norse-Byzantine princess Theodora, daughter of the late duke Sigurd of Pamphilia, manages to defend the city. Atabeg Unur of Damascus raids Palestine up to the walls of Jerusalem but is repulsed, then dies on his return in the Syrian capital. Central Asia: The Shansabani rulers of Ghor (central Afghanistan), a group of brothers, raze Ghazni and wrest Kabul from the Ghaznavids, ousting them (and the Sunni Waliate) from the country. They also take Herat from the Seljuk sultan Sanjar of Khorassan, founding the Afghan Ghorid kingdom. 1150 Southern Europe: Arrigo I the City-Razer, king of Lombardy, allies with emperor William III of Greater Normandy to avoid an invasion of Lombardy by Burgundian forces through the lands of his rival, Umberto of Susa-Ivrea-Turin. He also gains the relieve from Papal excommunication by restoring the possessions of the Milanese archbishopric and allowing the archbishop to stay in St. Ambrose cathedral with his following. Venice quashes a Norman-sponsored revolt in western Histria. Byzantine Empire: The Pisans plunder and torch Attalia, the main Byzantine port of southern Anatolia North Africa: The anti-Cathar Crusade in Mauretania (*OTL Morocco) founders after the unsuccessful battle of Gasfr Sifna (*not existing OTL). Middle East: Nur ad-Din of Syria conquers the Crusader fortress of Turbessel but is repulsed under the walls of Edessa. Later on count Wido of Tarantasia, ruler of Edessa dies without heirs leaving his endangered domain to the Knights Templar, now the real masters of Christian Syria SE Asia: The Khmer ruler Suryavarman II dies during a campaign against Annam and his empire of Kambuja weakens amidst succession struggles. Northern, Western, Southern Europe: Throughout Catholic Europe nobility begins to close to lesser social strata and to become a blood caste. Northern Europe: Marked decline of royal authority in Germany under the ineffective rule of Ludwig VI of Thuringia. Amidst the ensuing confusion, a migration of people from Saxony, Thuringia and the Frisian lands begins towards the Slavic lands of the western Baltic and especially Brandeburg, whose margrave Albert the Bear welcomes immigrants and continues his forced Christianization of nearby Wends/Polabians. Bohemia, Brandenburg's overlord, shows little interest in the matter. Southern Europe: Quick decay of the Canossa kingdom, rapidly falling apart in Communal revolts and succession struggles between the various branches of the ruling family. As Bari declines under Norman direct domination, the free Comune of Ancona becomes the most powerful Adriatic rival of Venice. The Normans are de facto masters of wide areas of the theoretically Papal kingdom of Italy/Spoleto. Duklja/Zeta (later Melanoria, *OTL Montenegro) binds herself tightly to Byzantium by dynastical marriages to counter the menaces from Hungary, Raška/Kosovo and the Normans of southern Italy. Central-Eastern Europe: Dynastical chaos is rampant in Kievan Rus', where the various pricipalities fight one another as the Kipchak/Cumans raid almost unopposed from the Dniester to the Volga. The center of Russian power slowly moves away from Kiev towards new centers in White Ruthenia/Belarus, at Novgorod and in the north-eastern principality of Vladimir-Suzdal'. Byzantine Empire: In the Byzantine Empire the pronoia system, a kind of local feudalism, takes root. Black Africa: A secession war rocks the kingdom of Kanem (Chad): some Animist clans resisting Islamization are defeated and migrate west to bolster the nearby kingdom of Bornu. Middle East: Jaffa gains wide reputation as a cross-cultural centre for studies, active in the recovery and analysis of ancient classical texts (*think of OTL's Toledo). Central Asia: The Karakhitai Empire vassalizes the Kimaks and the Kirghizes/Khakassians of southern Siberia. Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity and even Judaism flourish again in Central Asia under the Karakhitai religious toleration; Samarkand again becomes a cosmopolitan city. SE Asia: The first historical Banjar kingdom of southern Kalimantan/Borneo, Negaradipa, is founded.
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