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Contents: political eventsreligion literature |
Scotland's Robert I returns to Ayrshire in February, defeats an English force at Loudon Hill in May, and obtains the support of Norway's Haakon V Magnusson in his rebellion against English rule (see 1306; 1309).
England's Edward I (Edward Longshanks) dies at Burgh by Sands, near Carlisle, Cumberland, July 7 at age 68 while preparing to take the field against Scotland's Robert I. Edward has subdued Wales and brought administrative efficiency and legal reform to the realm, introducing statutes that have strengthened the crown in England's feudal hierarchy. The "English Justinian's" fourth and only surviving son assumes the throne at age 23 and will reign until 1327 as Edward II. The new king immediately recalls his homosexual lover Piers Gaveston from exile, abandons the campaign against Scotland's Robert I, and devotes himself to frivolity.
France's Philippe IV seizes the property of the Order of the Knights Templar. The rich but decadent order has become the king's creditor as well as the pope's and has made itself virtually a state within the state, but Philippe launches a propaganda campaign to stir the people against the Knights (see 1308).
The Chinese emperor Temür dies at age 40 (approximate) after a 12-year reign in which he has staved off potential usurpers on the northwest border, suppressed rebellions in Korea, but never exercised real power over Mongol territories in Russia or the Middle East. He has fought the corruption that is so widespread in the empire, and the power of the Mongol (Yuan) dynasty will now begin to crumble (see 1355; Ming dynasty, 1368).
Pope Clement V creates Franciscan missionary Giovanni da Montecorvino archbishop of Khanbelig (later Beijing [Peking]) and patriarch of the Orient.
Constantinople's patriarch Athanasius I orders the expulsion of the Latin Church's Franciscan monks.
Poetry: The Commedia that will become immortal as The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) is begun by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, now 42, as a philosophical-political poem recounting an imaginary journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradise). Dante's work of 100 cantos begins with the "Inferno," whose first lines are, "In the middle of the road of life/ I found myself in a dark wood, / Having strayed from the straight path" and includes the line, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." His nine circles of Hell comprise Limbo (the Virtuous Heathens), the Lustful, the Gluttons, the Avaricious and the Prodigal, the Wrathful and the Sullen, the Heretics, the Violent, the Fraudulent, and the Treacherous. Immortalized in Dante's work are characterizations of his Florentine friends and enemies, including the late noblewoman Beatrice Portinari de' Bardi, who died in 1290 when she was 24 and Dante 25. In his Vita Nuova, Dante tells of how he first saw Beatrice in 1274 when he was 9 and began to worship her although he never spoke a word to her, made no efforts to meet her, and saw her only at rare intervals. She knew nothing of his feelings toward her. In the poem when the narrator asks the character Dante calls Beatrice about the mysteries of the moon, she replies that "the opinion of mortals errs where the key of sense does not unlock." Admirers of Dante will for generations accept his disembodied courtly love of Beatrice as a romantic ideal of the male-female relationship, but the cultural elite takes offense at Dante's use of the Italian vernacular, in which "even little women communicate," he observes, rather than in Latin.
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