The 1300s in Ten Events
9 min read
If the 1200s were the Mongol century, the 1300s were the century of catastrophe and reinvention. The Black Death killed a staggering share of Eurasia's population, the papacy decamped to Avignon and then split in two, and long, grinding wars redrew the map from France to the Balkans. Yet the same century produced Dante's Divine Comedy, the founding of the Ming dynasty, and a West African emperor whose pilgrimage became legendary for its gold.
Saeculum holds hundreds of events from the 1300s. This guide selects ten of the highest-significance turning points and arranges them in order, so you can trace how disaster and renewal ran side by side through one of history's most turbulent centuries.
A century that opened in crisis and glory
The fourteenth century began with the Ottoman state taking shape in Anatolia and a poet beginning the work that would define Italian literature. Osman consolidated his beylik in Bithynia around 1300, and in 1307 Dante, exiled from Florence, began the Divine Comedy — a reminder that even a century remembered for plague and war produced enduring art.
Then, in the 1320s, the century's connectedness announced itself from an unexpected direction: West Africa.
The consolidation of the small Turkish state that would grow into the Ottoman Empire.
One of the founding works of European literature, written by a man expelled from his own city.
The emperor of Mali's pilgrimage displayed such wealth that his gold reportedly disrupted Egyptian markets for years — a vivid sign of a connected medieval world.
New capitals and the longbow
Across the Atlantic, entirely outside the Old World's networks, the Mexica founded Tenochtitlán in Lake Texcoco in 1325 — the city that would become the heart of the Aztec Empire two centuries before Europeans arrived.
In Europe, the Hundred Years' War between England and France opened one of its defining battles. At Crécy in 1346, English longbowmen destroyed the flower of French chivalry, signaling that massed archery could break the mounted knight and hinting at the slow end of the feudal military order.
The founding of the future Aztec capital — a major civilization developing entirely apart from Eurasian history.
An English victory in the Hundred Years' War that showed massed archery could defeat armored cavalry.
The Black Death
The defining catastrophe of the century — arguably of the whole millennium — arrived in 1347, when plague reached Sicily aboard trading ships and then spread across Europe with terrifying speed. Within a few years it killed a huge fraction of the population, upended the economy, shook the church, and reordered the relationship between labor and land.
The plague's speed is itself a lesson: it could only travel so fast because the medieval world was so tightly linked by trade. The same routes that had carried silk and silver now carried death from Central Asia to the British Isles in under four years.
The arrival of the plague in Europe, beginning a demographic collapse that reshaped society, labor, and faith.
The map redrawn: Ming, Kosovo, and Timur
Out of upheaval came new powers. In China, Zhu Yuanzhang expelled the Mongol Yuan and proclaimed the Ming dynasty in 1368, restoring native rule and founding a dynasty that would last nearly three centuries. In the Balkans, the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389 became a defining moment in Serbian memory and marked the deepening Ottoman advance into Europe.
The century closed with a warning of how fragile order remained. In 1398 the conqueror Timur sacked Delhi, devastating the city and demonstrating that the age of world-shaking steppe conquerors was not yet over. The 1300s ended much as they began — with new empires rising from the wreckage of old ones.
The end of Mongol rule in China and the founding of a dynasty that would last until 1644.
A pivotal clash marking the Ottoman advance into the Balkans, remembered for centuries afterward.
A devastating raid that showed the age of steppe conquerors had not ended with the Mongols.
How to read the century as a whole
The ten events tell a story of destruction and renewal running in parallel. Plague and war tore through populations and dynasties, but the same decades founded the Ming, raised Tenochtitlán, and produced Dante's masterpiece. Nothing about the century was static.
To see how the 1300s grew out of the Mongol century before it, read the 1200s; to see where its crises led, follow the timeline into the Renaissance. The fourteenth century is the hinge between the medieval world and the early modern one.
Frequently asked
What was the most important event of the 1300s?
The Black Death, which reached Europe in 1347, is the century's defining event. It killed a large share of Eurasia's population and reshaped economy, society, and the church. The founding of the Ming dynasty in 1368 is the most consequential political change of the century.
Why did the Black Death spread so quickly?
Because the fourteenth-century world was densely connected by trade. The plague followed the same routes that carried silk and silver, traveling from Central Asia to the British Isles in under four years — proof of how interconnected the medieval world already was.
What was happening outside Europe and Asia in the 1300s?
In West Africa, the Mali Empire reached its height, dramatized by Mansa Musa's famously lavish hajj in 1324. In the Americas, the Mexica founded Tenochtitlán in 1325, seeding the Aztec Empire entirely apart from Old World history.
How did the fourteenth century end?
With new powers rising from upheaval: the Ming dynasty in China, the Ottoman advance into the Balkans after Kosovo Polje in 1389, and Timur's devastating sack of Delhi in 1398.