The 1321 Well-Poisoning Accusation and the Final…

Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos has unwisely taken sides in the war between the Italian city-states of Venice and Genoa, favoring Genoa; Constantinople has suffered the wrath of the greatly superior Venetian navy.

Internally, Andronikos' reign is marked by a steady disintegration of centralized authority and increasing economic difficulties, but he has sponsored a revival of Greek art and culture and championed the independence of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

During his reign, the great monastery complex at Mt.

Athos in Greece enjoys its golden age.

Andronikos Palaiologos is the grandson of the emperor Andronikos, but his youthful excesses had cost him the favor of his grandfather, and, after he accidentally caused the death of his brother in 1320, the Emperor had excluded him from the succession, purely for family reasons.

In 1321, the twenty-five-year-old Andronikos rebels with the support of powerful Greek nobles chafing under high taxes.

The rebels assembly an army and successfully battle imperial forces.

The extensive mosaic and fresco decoration of the Church of Saint Savior in the Chora in Constantinople—begun in the eleventh century and rebuilt in the twelfth—has been extensively reconstructed from 1315 to 1321 under the sponsorship of Theodore Metochites, a scholar, poet, and high official in the imperial court.

These works, which are of the highest quality, represent the largest (surviving) program of Late Byzantine painting.

The mosaic schemes also feature brilliant color, graceful forms, and decorative richness.

Yunus Emre composes hymns and verses about mystical love, humanitarian and ecumenical values, the brotherhood of nations, and the ethics and ecstasies of Islamic mysticism.

After his death around 1321, Emre is revered as a saint; his best-known poems begin to be sung or recited, using indigenous Turkish prosody and stanzaic forms, throughout Anatolia.

He exercises immense influence on Turkish literature, from his own day until the present.

Because Yunus Emre is, after Ahmet Yesevi and Sultan Walad, one of the first known poets to have composed works in the spoken Turkish of his own age and region rather than in Persian or Arabic, his diction remains very close to the popular speech of his contemporaries in Central and Western Anatolia.

Italian missionary Odoric of Pordenone, a member of the Franciscan order for more than a decade, was born at Villanova, a hamlet now belonging to the town of Pordenone in Friuli (Italy), in or about 1286.

He comes from a Czech family named Mattiussi.

According to the ecclesiastical biographers, in early years he took the vows of the Franciscan order and joined their convent at Udine, the capital of Friuli.

In 1296 Odoric went as a missionary to the Balkans, and then to the Mongols in southern Russia.

Dispatched to the East in April 1318, Friar Odoric started from Padua, had gone to Constantinople via Venice, then crossed the Black Sea to Trebizond.

From there he had traveled and preached in Armenia, Media, and Persia, all countries in which the Franciscans had founded mission centers.

From Sultanieh he proceeded by Kashan and Yazd, and turning thence followed a somewhat indirect route by Persepolis and the Shiraz and Baghdad regions, to the Persian Gulf.

With an Irish confrere, Friar James, he sailed from Ormus to India, landing at Thana, near Bombay.

At this city four brethren of his order, three of them Italians and the fourth a Georgian, had shortly before suffered martyrdom at the hands of the Muslim governor.

The bones of the martyred friars had been collected by Friar Jordanus Catalani, a Dominican (first bishop in India, Diocese of Quilon) who carried them to Supera—the Suppara of the ancient geographers, near the modern Vasai, about twenty-six miles north of Bombay, and buried them there.

Odoric tells that he disinterred these relics and carried them with him on his further travels.

He also visited Puri, giving one of the earliest accounts of the Chariot Festival of the Hindu God Jagannath to the western world.

In his own account of 1321, Odoric reports how the people put the "idols" on chariots, and the King and Queen and all the people drew them from the "church" with song and music.

The Studium Generale, established by the Florentine Republic in 1321, is the first university in Florence.

Dante completes his poetic masterpiece, La Divina Commedia, (“The Divine Comedy”)—originally entitled simply Commedia—shortly before his death on September 14, 1321.

A an epic poem composed in “terza rima” (Dante's invention, a three-line stanza form: aba, bcb, cdc,...) and divided into three parts, the “Comedy” helps establish his native Tuscan dialect as the literary language of Italy.

Divided into one hundred cantos (more than fourteen thousand lines), the vivid scenes and sharply drawn characters of the surface narrative conceals a subtle allegorical compendium of the prevailing moral and scientific world view, with the pilgrim poet as a figure of Everyman.

The narrative’s three main sections follows the poet's imaginative journey from the "dark wood" in which he finds himself in middle age; through the nine circles of the damned in the Inferno and the rim of the mountainous wasteland of the Purgatorio, with the poet Vergil—a tribute to Italy's classical past—as his guide; to his final brief comprehension of God’s plan of justice in the heavenly Paradiso, aided by his beloved lady Beatrice.

Dante draws on a wealth of scriptural, patristic, classical, and medieval sources, as well as his own experiences, employing rich imagery and flexible vernacular language to infuse the work with the emotional and intellectual ardor of medieval Catholicism.

The city of Bochum dates from the ninth century, when Charlemagne set up a royal court at the junction of two important trade routes.

It was first officially mentioned in 1041 as Cofbuokheim in a document of the archbishops of Cologne.

Count Engelbert II von der Marck grants Bochum a town charter in 1321, but the town will remain insignificant until the nineteenth century, when the coal mining and steel industries emerge in the Ruhr area, leading to the growth of the entire region.

With a population of nearly three hundred and sixty-five thousand, it is today the sixteenth most populous city in Germany.

Louis finally wins the long, bitter German civil war with a decisive victory in the Battle of Mühldorf in 1322.

Frederick is captured there and imprisoned, but Pope John XXII, living in Avignon, intervenes, claiming the right to veto Louis’s election.

When Louis denies this right, John excommunicates him.

Stephen Kotroman, a vassal of the Hungarian king, had from 1287 to 1316 ruled a portion of Bosnia.

His son Stephen (Stjepan) Kotromanic in 1322 becomes the independent lord of all Bosnia.

Guido II da Polenta, the nephew of Lamberto I da Polenta, had acquired the lordship of Ravenna after the latter's death.

In 1316–1321 he was host of Dante Alighieri.

In 1322 he is named capitano del popolo of Bologna and leaves the government of Ravenna to his brother Rinaldo, who was archbishop of the city though without the Papal confirmation.

Ostasio I da Polenta, from the family line of Cervia, profited of the situation to kill Rinaldo and seize the power for himself.

Thomas, Earl of Lancaster—the son of Edmund Crouchback and Blanche of Artois— having led the baronial opposition to his cousin Edward II, had become England’s effective ruler by the time of Edward's decisive defeat at Bannockburn.

Edward recovers power, however, with the help of a new favorite, his chamberlain Hugh le Despenser.

Despenser, who has married a Clare and thereby gained control of Glamorgan on the Welsh border, becomes a target of the Marcher lords’ ire.

The Earl of Lancaster unites opposition against Despenser and maneuvers his exile.

Edward, furious, sends royal troops against the Marcher lords at Boroughbridge in 1322, defeating the rebel cavalry with dismounted men-at-arms and archers and afterwards executing Lancaster—whose title passes to his brother, Henry—and several of his associates.

Despenser returns to Edward’s side, and his allies help him to repeal the 1311 laws on the basis that they had been passed only by the nobles.