...Douai, and Orchies, which were economic powerhouses…

The unlucky prince Konstantin of Ryazan had been captured by Yury's father in 1302 and had ever since been incarcerated in Moscow.

Yury now arranges his murder.

While Ryazan is shocked by such a barbarity, …

…Yury annexes the key Ryazanian fortress of Kolomna to his Moscow principlaity.

Yury also captures Mozhaisk, which had formerly belonged to the princes of Smolensk.

Wenceslaus II is planning to invade Austria when he dies in 1305.

He is succeeded by his son, Wenceslaus III (Václav III), who is destined to be the last of the Přemyslid kings in the male line.

The majority of the Hungarian magnates do not accept Charles' rule.

In August 1305, his opponent, Wenceslaus, who has inherited Bohemia from his father, renounces his claim to Hungary on behalf of Otto III, Duke of Bavaria, who is a grandson of King Béla IV of Hungary.

Otto arrives in Hungary is crowned with the Holy Crown in Székesfehérvár by the Bishops of Veszprém and Csanád on December 6.

The Order of the Teutonic Knights of St. Mary's Hospital in Jerusalem, formed at the end of the twelfth century in Acre, in the Levant, had played an important role in Outremer, controlling the port tolls of Acre.

After Christian forces were defeated in the Middle East, the Order had moved to Transylvania in 1211 to help defend Hungary against the Cumans.

They had been expelled in 1225 after allegedly attempting to place themselves under Papal instead of Hungarian sovereignty.

Following the Golden Bull of Rimini, Grand Master Hermann von Salza and Duke Konrad I of Masovia had made a joint invasion of Prussia in 1230 to Christianize the Baltic Old Prussians in the Northern Crusades.

The knights were then accused of cheating Polish rule and creating an independent monastic state.

Once established in Prussia, the Order had become involved in campaigns against its Christian neighbors, the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Novgorod Republic (after assimilating the Livonian Order in 1237).

The neighboring country of Lithuania having accepted Christianity in the second half of the thirteenth century, the Order’s main purpose in Europe is lost.

The Teutonic Knights have a strong economic base.

Hiring mercenaries from throughout Europe to augment their feudal levies, they have become a naval power in the Baltic Sea.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Pomerania, a neighboring region to the Ordensstaat, or Monastic state of the Teutonic Knights, had plunged into war with Poland and Brandenburg to the west.

Brandenburg's rulers, who had ruled Pomerelia (Eastern Pomerania) in the 1250s, enter into a treaty on August 8, 1305 with Wenceslaus III of Bohemia, promising the March of Meissen to the Bohemian crown in exchange for Pomerelia.

Wenceslas' forces, having rolled back the invaders, had been poised to invade Austria when Wenceslas died at thirty-six on June 21, 1305; his fifteen-year-old son had succeeded him as Wenceslas III.

Bohemia's new king, unable to assert his authority in Hungary because of dissension, gives up his throne to Duke Otto.

The Bulgarian tsar’s uncle Aldimir appears to have entered into negotiations with Constantinople in 1305; therefore, Theodore Svetoslav annexes his uncle's lands.

Alauddin Khilji’s subjugation of Rajasthan continues with the capture of Mandu in 1305.

Giotto frescoes almost the entire inner surface of the Arena Chapel of Padua for the wealthy Enrico Scrovegni, whom Giotto portrays at the bottom of a depiction of the Last Judgment covering the entrance wall, showing the donor presenting the chapel, in the form of a model, to the Virgin.

Completed round 1305, three ranges of paintings on the other walls dramatically narrate the life of the Virgin and of Christ.

Giotto arranges his subjects across the surface of each scene and within a shallow stage-like space to attain a climactic visual focus.

In his famous scene of the “Lamentation,” somber, block-like figures surround the body of Christ within the space while all the painting’s secondary elements—glances and gestures and even the diagonal line of the hill—direct the viewers’ gaze to Mary’s embrace of the dead Jesus.

In these frescoes, Giotto introduces a psychology of relationships in his representation of human facial and body movements, returning the pictorial depth and narrative interest of classical art to the painting of murals.