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Contents: political eventsexploration, colonization religion education |
Ireland's former king of Leinster Dermot Macmurrough (Diarmaid Macmurchada) returns to Leinster with an adance party that includes the 37-year-old Richard de Clare (Richard Fitzgilbert), 2nd earl of Pembroke. He establishes a base of operations (see 1170).
Sweden's king Karl VII Sverkersson is assassinated at Visingsö, Jönköping, April 12 at age 32 after a 6-year reign and succeeded by Knut (Canute), who will reign until 1196.
The papacy and the towns of northern Italy organize a Lombard League to thwart the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich I Barbarossa, but Friedrich takes Rome by storm on a fourth expedition into the region. He enters the city in August, has the antipope Paschal III enthroned, is crowned for a second time, and has his wife, Beatrix, crowned, but a sudden outbreak of pestilence destroys his army and he will return to Germany in the spring of next year, taking the antipope Paschal III along with him.
The widow of the former German emperor Heinrich V and former claimant to the English throne, Matilda, dies outside Rouen September 10 at age 65, having retired to Normandy in 1148.
Copenhagen is founded by the Danish soldier Absalon (or Axel), 39, archbishop of Lund, who has delivered Denmark from Wendish pirates and conquered much of slavonic Mecklenburg and Estonia for Valdemar the Great and his son Canute.
The largest challenge thus far to Roman Catholicism attracts a crowd in May to Toulouse, where "Perfect Christians" assemble in what later will be called a Catharist "heresy" to denounce the Church's materialism, veneration of the cross, and papal claims to spiritual and temporal preeminence. A German monk in the Rhineland gave them the name Cathar in 1153 and they follow Gnostic doctrine, refusing to swear oaths; believing that Eve was not at fault in the fall of Eden, being merely Satan's tool; that Mary Magdalene was the wife or concubine of Jesus; and that in heaven all creatures will be angels without class or gender differentiation. They reject marriage for those of their number who attain perfection and refuse to consume meat or milk, regarding both as the fruits of copulation. The sect flourishes in France's Languedoc and will soon spread into Italy and the Low Countries (see 1208).
Oxford University (the University of Oxford) has its beginnings (see Cambridge, 1209; University College, 1249).
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