The World in 1190

10 June — the drowning that broke a crusade

Frederick I Barbarossa — King of Germany, Italy and Burgundy, Holy Roman Emperor since 1155 — drowned crossing or bathing in the Göksu near Silifke, aged 67. He had already beaten the Seljuks at Iconium three weeks earlier; his army, weakened by heat and hunger, dissolved. Some nobles went home, others pressed on to Antioch with the body in a vinegar barrel.

He had also been the only figure able to arbitrate between Richard and Philip. With him gone, the crusade became Richard's war — and Richard's war did not retake Jerusalem.

Acre — the siege that ate itself

Begun in 1189 and not finished until 1191, the siege consumed 1190 entirely. Siege engines burned by Greek fire in May; the besiegers starving and diseased in their own camp; inside the walls, the garrison resorted to cannibalism. An Egyptian flotilla kept slipping past the Pisan blockade to feed the city.

In November the succession was settled at the siege lines: the 18-year-old Isabella I of Jerusalem married Conrad of Montferrat, who thereby became de facto king — against the claims of Guy of Lusignan, who was outside the walls fighting for the same crown.

A new order of knights is founded at Acre

German knights and merchants from Lübeck and Bremen found the Teutonic Order at Acre, to run hospitals and protect German pilgrims. The date is commonly given as 1190; papal recognition of the order as a military order came later, in 1198 — which is why its founding is dated 1190 in some accounts and 1198 in others.

Byzantium loses its treasure in a mountain pass

Emperor Isaac II Angelos — having failed to stop the Germans and signed away free passage — turned on the Bulgarians, who had declared independence under Ivan Asen I and Tsar Peter. He besieged Tarnovo, believed a rumour that a Cuman relief army was coming, and retreated into the Battle of Tryavna, where his army was ambushed in a mountain pass and broke.

Isaac escaped only because his Varangian Guard cut a path through his own fleeing soldiers. The Bulgarians took the imperial treasure, his golden helmet, his crown, and the Imperial Cross containing a fragment of the True Cross.

4 July — Vézelay, and the deal before the journey

Richard I of England and Philip II of France met at Vézelay in Burgundy and agreed to divide the spoils of the crusade equally between them, then marched to the coast and sailed by different routes: Richard with some 17,000 men and about 100 ships via Marseille, Philip with some 15,000 via Genoa.

By October they were quarrelling in Sicily — Richard had sacked Messina and raised his own banner over it — and they wintered there together, rivals waiting for spring.

16 March — the massacre at York

Debt to Jewish moneylenders, crusading fervour and a disputed royal succession combined. York's Jewish community took refuge in the royal castle's wooden tower; besieged, they were offered baptism or death. Between 150 and 500 died — many by their own hand — and the mob burned the records of their debts in the cathedral. Killings followed at Bury St Edmunds on 18 March.

London takes the Cross of St George

London adopts the red cross on white as its flag. So did the fleet of Genoa — and that is the point: flying a flag the Genoese navy was understood to protect granted safe passage to London ships trading into the Mediterranean. The story of origin is neat; the exact year is a convention.

Averroes publishes the argument for philosophy

Ibn Rushd — Averroes, qadi of Córdoba and physician to the Almohad court — writes Kitab fasl al-maqal, On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy, arguing that demonstrative philosophy and revealed law cannot truly conflict. It entered Latin Europe as Destructio Destructionum and shaped scholasticism; the decade-by-decade dating of his works is scholarly, not documentary.

Deaths, titles and foundations

Died: Isabella of Hainault, queen of France, on 15 March; Floris III, Count of Holland, at Antioch on crusade, on 1 August; Godfrey III, Duke of Brabant, on 21 August.

Granted: Henry VI gave his nephew the title Duke of Brabant — a promotion that immediately quarrelled with the Count of Hainaut. Founded: Cartmel Priory in England by William Marshal, and the Studenica Monastery in Serbia by Stefan Nemanja, both conventionally dated to 1190.

Oxford's first recorded student

Emo of Friesland, a Frisian scholar who would end as abbot of Bloemhof, begins study at what becomes the University of Oxford — the earliest named person known to have studied there. The year is conventional, and the man is remembered mainly for being first on the list.

The Almohads, fighting on two fronts

Caliph Yaqub al-Mansur (r. 1184–99) ruled an empire from Marrakesh across the Maghreb into al-Andalus. His reign was consumed by the Sanhaja Berber Banu Ghaniya, who had seized Bougie and Algiers in 1185 out of the Balearics; he retook the Algerian coast in 1186 and Ifriqiya in 1187–88, but the insurgency resumed in the east each time he turned his back.

In 1190 his energy went to Iberia, where the Almohads failed to retake Silves from Portugal — a campaign that ran through 1191. His building programme was monumental: the Kutubiyya in Marrakesh, and the Hassan Tower in Rabat, left unfinished when he died in 1199.

Qaraqush and his private fief in Tripoli

Sharaf al-Din Qaraqush — an Ayyubid mamluk of Armenian origin, in the service of Saladin's nephew al-Muzaffar — campaigned across Tripolitania and Ifriqiya from 1172 onwards, took Tripoli, and by the 1190s was operating less for Saladin than for himself: fighting the advancing Almohads, at times allied with the Banu Ghaniya.

His career traces the seam where two empires met. He fell out with the Ghaniyas and was defeated and executed by Yahya ibn Ghaniya at Waddan in 1212.

Egypt paid for Acre

Saladin was in Palestine for the whole campaigning year, so Egypt was run by his brother al-Adil — "Saphadin" to the Crusaders — who governed the country on Saladin's behalf, mobilising its revenues for the Syrian and Palestinian wars. The Nile valley funded the defence of the Levant.

Coins of Saladin struck in 587 AH (1190–91) carry his titles; the machinery of Ayyubid finance, not the sultan's presence, is what held Egypt that year.

Ethiopia: the churches of Lalibela

King Gebre Meskel Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty (r. c. 1181–1221) is credited by Ethiopian tradition with carving eleven monolithic churches out of the rock at Roha — a second Jerusalem, built, the story goes, on divine instruction. 1190 falls in the middle of his reign.

Archaeology and radiocarbon work suggest much of the construction is later, into the 13th century, so the churches are best dated to a reign rather than a year.

West Africa: Ghana under new masters

The Ghana empire — a Soninke state trading gold and salt from its capital Koumbi Saleh — had been declining since the 11th century, its monopoly broken by Saharan trade shifts and a rising Mandinka east. Later tradition has Diara Kanté of Sosso take Koumbi Saleh around 1180 and establish the Diarisso dynasty, with his son Soumaoro Kanté succeeding around 1203.

So 1190 falls in the period of Sosso overlordship, before Mali. The chronology rests on much later accounts, and the standard dates were assigned by a French colonial scholar in the early 1900s — treat them as convention, not record.

The Swahili coast: a new sultan at Kilwa

The Kilwa Chronicle — compiled around 1550 — lists the sultans of Kilwa in order. For 1190 it gives Talut ibn Suleiman, who ruled one year between his brother Dawud (1189) and Hussein (1191). Kilwa was already a major Indian Ocean port, moving gold and ivory from the interior to Arabia and India.

Its Great Mosque, the oldest standing mosque in sub-Saharan Africa, was in its early phase: a compact northern prayer hall built in the 11th–12th centuries, long before the 14th-century enlargement.

Southern Africa: Mapungubwe at its height

At the confluence of the Limpopo and Shashe, the kingdom of Mapungubwe (c. 1075–1220) was the largest polity in the region, its elite on the hill, its wealth in ivory and gold bound for the east coast through sites that traded with Kilwa and Sofala. Its capital reached roughly 5,000 people and its state some 30,000 km².

Climate change and a northward shift in trade routes undid it around 1300; Great Zimbabwe then took up the role. All of this is dated by archaeology, so "1190" means a stratum, not an event.

Toghrul III is captured, and the Seljuk state ends its slide

The last Great Seljuk sultan, Toghrul III, invaded Azerbaijan in 1190 and was defeated and captured by the Eldiguzid atabeg Qizil Arslan, who imprisoned him and his son Malik Shah in Kuhran fortress near Tabriz. Encouraged by the Abbasid caliph al-Nasir, Qizil Arslan then declared himself sultan outright — and was poisoned by his own wife Inanj Khatun in September 1191.

Toghrul was restored, then killed in battle against the Khwarezm-shah Tekish near Rayy in March 1194. The office of Great Seljuk sultan ended with him; only the Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia survived.

The Ghurids split their war in two

Mu'izz al-Din Muhammad of Ghor and his elder brother Ghiyath al-Din ruled a dyarchy from the mountains of central Afghanistan. Ghiyath held the western front against Khwarezm; Mu'izz took the east and India, having consolidated in Sindh and the western Punjab before pushing into Bathinda in 1190.

It is one of the great pivots of the period: the same year the Ghurids probe India, their eastern neighbour the Khwarezmian empire is swallowing the last Seljuk lands.

The steppe: Temüjin's lost decade

In 1190 Temüjin was not yet Genghis Khan. He had been elected khan of the Mongols around 1186, then decisively beaten by his sworn brother Jamukha at the battle of Dalan Balzhut on the Onon — where Jamukha boiled 70 prisoners in cauldrons, alienating his own followers.

After that defeat, roughly the next ten years of Temüjin's life are barely documented; 1190 falls inside that gap. Sources date Dalan Balzhut to c. 1187, with some giving 1190 — the ambiguity is a good reminder of how thin steppe chronology is.

Two Chinese courts, two new eras

In the Jurchen Jin dynasty, Emperor Zhangzong — who had succeeded his grandfather Shizong in January 1189 — proclaimed the Mingchang era, which ran 1190–1195. In the Southern Song, Emperor Guangzong's reign saw the Shaoxi era, 1190–1194.

Jin household registers for the first year of Mingchang record about 6,939,000 households and 45,447,900 people — one of the few population figures in the world for this year. Zhangzong's Jin was wealthy, sinicised, and losing its grip on the steppe.

Japan: Kenkyū 1, and Yoritomo in the capital

The era name changed from Bunji to Kenkyū in 1190, the year numbering that would cover most of Minamoto no Yoritomo's shogunate (1190–1199).

In December 1190 Yoritomo took up residence in his Rokuhara mansion in Kyoto — the former headquarters of the Taira clan he had destroyed at Dannoura. A warlord from the eastern provinces was now lodged in the capital's own defeated-regime compound while the court still ruled in name. He took the title of shōgun in 1192, the spring after Emperor Go-Shirakawa's death removed the last obstacle.

Korea and Tibet: a blank in the record

Goryeo in 1190 was under King Myeongjong (r. 1170–97) in the generation of military rule that followed the 1170 coup; the decisive change — Ch'oe Ch'ung-hŏn's military regime — comes in 1196, not this year. For Tibet I found no event that can be pinned to 1190 at all.

Stated plainly because it matters: an empty year in the sources is not an empty year in the world. It is an empty year in the surviving record.

Bathinda, 1190 — the first move of the conquest of north India

Mu'izz al-Din Muhammad of Ghor's generals captured the fortress of Bathinda in present-day Punjab, on the northwestern frontier of Prithviraj Chauhan's Chahamana kingdom, leaving a governor with about 1,200 horsemen.

Prithviraj's army — led by his vassal prince Govind Rai — marched to besiege it. The two forces met at Tarain in 1191, where Muhammad was wounded and his army broke; he returned in 1192 and destroyed Prithviraj's coalition at the Second Battle of Tarain. That opened the Ganges plain to the Ghurids and set the road to the Delhi Sultanate in 1206. So 1190 is the quiet year before the hinge.

Sri Lanka: Nissanka Malla's monuments and boasts

Polonnaruwa was ruled by Nissanka Malla (r. 1187–96), the most inscription-happy of Sinhalese kings, who built the Nissanka Lata Mandapaya, the Hatadage and the Rankot Vihara, restored temples and irrigation tanks, and claimed descent from Kalinga.

His inscriptions claim conquests of Pandya and Chola territory in South India that the campaigns did not deliver — he did renovate a temple at Rameswaram and rename it for himself. 1190 sits mid-reign: a year of building and self-praise, not of events.

Jayavarman VII conquers Champa, 1190–91

In 1177 the Chams had sailed up the Mekong and sacked Angkor itself. In 1190 Jayavarman VII answered it: he gave command to Vidyanandana, a Cham prince who had defected to him in 1182 and been raised at Angkor, who defeated the Chams, occupied the capital Vijaya, and sent King Jaya Indravarman IV back to Angkor as a prisoner.

Vidyanandana took the title Suryavarman and ruled Panduranga as a Khmer vassal; Champa stayed a Khmer dependency for about thirty years, with further Khmer invasions in 1192, 1195 and 1198–99 before it was finally absorbed in 1203. Meanwhile Angkor's building boom continued — Preah Khan in 1191, the Bayon after it.

Java: Kediri, and the poem of the god of love

East Java under Kameshwara of Kediri (r. c. 1182–94), whose queen Sri Kirana was celebrated for her beauty. The court poet Mpu Dharmaja wrote the kakawin Smaradahana for the king, casting him as the incarnation of the god of love — and the royal couple grew into the Panji cycle of romances that spread as far as Siam.

The poem's date is placed by scholars, not by a colophon, so it belongs to the reign rather than to a year. A Chinese account written around 1200 named Kediri and Srivijaya as the two richest states of the archipelago.