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The Prince of Wales Llywelyn ap Gruffudd signs a treaty recognizing the overlordship of England's Henry III, who authorizes him to receive homage from the other Welsh princes (see 1262; but see also1276).
Pope Clement IV excommunicates the German king Conradin in November for claiming sovereignty over Sicily, but Conradin's fleet gains a victory over that of Charles d'Anjou (see 1266; 1268).
Beijing (Peking) has its beginnings in the town of Khanbelig (or Khanbaliq) constructed by Kublai Khan (see 1260; 1271).
Cambridge, England, is chartered by Henry III (see education, 1231).
Members of London's goldsmith and tailor guilds fight each other in fierce street battles.
Roger Bacon describes principles of a camera obscura that can project pictures. He bases his optics (and other ideas) on what he has learned from writings by the early 11th century Arab philosopher Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, who said that no mathematical theory or conjecture was necessary to realize that light starts outside the eye and reflects into it and that looking directly at the sun or some other bright object will burn the eye (see Porta, 1553).
Nonfiction: Opus Majus by Roger Bacon, who describes the magnetic needle of a compass and reading glasses (see 1249). "Argument . . . does not remove doubt," he writes, "so that the mind may rest in the sure knowledge of the truth, unless it finds it by the method of experiment . . . For if any man who never saw fire proved by satisfactory arguments that fire burns . . . his hearer's mind would never be satisfied, nor would he avoid the fire until he put his hand in it . . . that he might learn by experiment what argument taught." The first truly modern scientist (he is known as "Dr. Mirabilis"), Bacon predicts radiology and predicts also the discovery of the Western Hemisphere, the steamship, the airplane, and television (see 1277; portolan chart, 1311).
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