Sviatoslav, in the spring of 972 returning with a small retinue from his successful campaign against the Bulgarian Empire to Kievan Rus, is ambushed and killed by the Pechenegs (a Turkic people) near the cataracts of the Dnieper River.

According to the Primary Chronicle, the Pecheneg Khan Kurya makes a chalice from his skull, a traditional steppe nomad custom.

The greatest of the Varangian princes of early Russo-Ukrainian history, Sviatoslav is to be the last non-Christian ruler of the Kievan state.

His three heirs will in 976 initiate a civil war for their father’s vacant throne.

Otto I, German king from 936 and Holy Roman emperor from 962, has consolidated the German Reich by his suppression of rebellious vassals and his decisive victory over the Hungarians.

His use of the church as a stabilizing influence has created a secure empire and stimulated a cultural renaissance.

As in France under the Carolingian monarchs, German Jews are generally under the Emperor's protection and, although favorably treated, are regarded as possessions of the Emperor.

The burghers or feudal barons are generally hostile to Jews, but in Germany the Emperor, for the most part, controls the situation, and German Jews are neither expelled nor forcibly converted.

Because Jews are prohibited from owning land, commerce is the only occupation open to them.

In the individual towns, the Jews are offered privileges, usually through a contract whereby they will be protected by the crown in return for financial fealty.

Boleslav's daughter Dobrawa had in 965 married the pagan Piast prince Mieszko I to strengthen the Bohemian-Polish alliance, and has helped bring Christianity to Poland.

Boleslav's wife may have been Biagota.

He is succeeded in 972 by his oldest son Boleslaus the Pious.

Much of Mieszko’s military activity is along the Baltic coast, in the territory later called Pomerania, fighting with the tribes of Wieletes and Volinians south of the Baltic Sea, and their ally, the Saxon count Wichman.

He defeats Dietrich of Haldensleben, the first Margrave of the Northern March, at Cedynia in 972.

Dietrich, a harsh overlord, had helped Adalbert, Archbishop of Magdeburg, plot the downfall of Count Gero of Alselben.

Leo, after another failed attempt at rebellion in 971, is banished to the island of Prote and blinded.

The date of his death is unknown.

John, imprisoning Bulgarian Tsar Basil II, annexes the Bulgarian Empire and terminates the Bulgarian Patriarchate.

To preserve Constantinople’s position in the West and protect imperial territories in southern Italy from a northern invasion, the Emperor arranges a marriage on April 14, 972 between one of his relatives, Theophanu, and Otto II, crowned co-regent king of Italy and Germany with his father and co-regent of the German emprire.

The arrangement implies no recognition of a Western claim to the empire, however.

Otto, in his attempt to consolidate his authority over the papacy, has unsuccessfully campaigned in southern Italy on several occasions from 966 to 972.

His son by Adelaide of Italy, Otto the Red, at first only co-reigning with his father, had been chosen German king at Worms in 961 and crowned at Aachen Cathedral on May 26, 961, and on December 25, 967 had been crowned joint emperor at Rome by Pope John XIII.

Earlier in 967, Otto had given the duchy of Spoleto to Pandulf Ironhead, prince of Benevento and Capua, a powerful ally in the Mezzogiorno.

In the next year, Otto had left the siege of Bari in the charge of Pandulf, but the allied duke had been captured in the Battle of Bovino by imperial Greek troops.

The emperor John I Tzimiskes recognizes Otto's imperial title in 972 and agrees to a marriage between Otto's son and heir and his twelve-year-old niece Theophanu, thus establishing dynastic ties between Constantinople and the West.

Pandulf is released from captivity, and the marriage ceremony takes place on April 14, performed by Pope John XIII.

(Though Otto had requested an imperial princess, it is unlikely that Theophanu was the daughter of any emperor: the current theory is that her father was Konstantinos Skleros, brother of the pretender Bardas Skleros, and her mother was Sophia Phokaina, niece of Emperor Nikephoros II, and sister of Maria Skleraina, Tzimiskes' first wife.

Accordingly she was of Armenian descent.

Theophanu is credited with introducing the fork to Western Europe; chroniclers mention the astonishment she caused when she "used a golden double prong to bring food to her mouth" instead of using her hands as was the norm.)

Denmark’s King Harald “Bluetooth” Gormson, baptized in 965, is the first Scandinavian monarch to actively promote Christianity.

Although Harald's predecessors had adopted Christianity at the instigation of the Frankish Carolingian kings in 826, paganism would remain predominant among Danes and northerners for centuries.

However, the prominent part the Germans had in these achievements as well as the lofty idea of the Roman Empire currently prevailing had led Otto I “the Great,” to require Harald to recognize him as advocatus, or lord protector of the Danish church, and even as "Lord Paramount".

The king of the Danes had replied to this demand with a declaration of war, and the emperor seeks to force his "vassal" into subjection.

The devastating expeditions, which are pushed as far as the Limfjord, enable the emperor to beat down all opposition by 972 and to compel Harald not only to conclude peace but to accept baptism.

Henceforth paganism will steadily lose ground.

Emperor Otto, known as Otto the Great, has consolidated the German Reich by his suppression of rebellious vassals and his decisive victory over the Magyars, and provided his regime with a firm base by bringing the church tightly under his control.

His use of the church as a stabilizing influence has created a secure empire and stimulated a cultural renaissance.

In his appointment of abbots and bishops, he has bestowed the archbishoprics of Cologne and Mainz to his brothers Bruno and William respectively, rewarded churchmen lavishly, and exacted administrative and military service, thereby keeping the church out of the hands of the nobility.

Because Otto has personally appointed the bishops and abbots, these reforms strengthened his central authority, and the upper ranks of the German church function in some respect as an arm of the imperial bureaucracy.

Conflict over these powerful bishoprics between Otto's successors and the growing power of the Papacy during the Gregorian Reforms would eventually lead in the eleventh century to the Investiture Conflict and the undoing of central authority in Germany.

Having returned to Germany, the Emperor holds a great assembly of his court at Quedlinburg on March 23, 973.

After his death at Memleben on May 7, 973 he is buried next to his first wife Edith of Wessex in the Cathedral of Magdeburg, whose archbishopric he had established in 968.

His eighteen-year-old son by Adelaide of Italy, Otto the Red, succeeds him without challenge to become Roman Emperor Otto II.

A fire devastates much of Baghdad in 973, killing some seventeen thousand people, many of them Jews.

This disaster contributes to the decline in Baghdad's Jewish population and its importance in the Jewish world.

Jawhar had ruled Egypt until 972 as viceroy, when he had fallen from favor.

Just to the north of the city of al-Fustat, the old administrative center of Muslim Egypt, the Fatimids have built the new city of Cairo, and in it a new cathedral mosque and seminary, called al-Azhar, after Fatimah az-Zahra' (the Resplendent), the ancestress of the dynasty.

Cairo has been built as the royal enclosure for the Fatimid caliphs, while the actual economic and administrative capital remains in nearby Fustat. (After Fustat’s destruction in 1168/1169 to prevent its capture by the Crusaders, the administrative capital of Egypt will move to Cairo, where it has remained ever since. Now the sixteenth most populous metropolitan area in the world, it is also the most populous metropolitan area in Africa.)

Al-Mu'izz enters Cairo in 972 or 973, transferring the center of Fatimid power to Egypt.