William II of Sicily, seeing the turmoil…

Canute IV forces Bogislaw to acknowledge Canute as his overlord in 1185.

From thais time until 1972, the Kings and Queens of Denmark will use the title "King of the Wends" as part of a lengthy list of duchies, counties, and regions ruled by Danish monarchs through the centuries.

Béla makes peace in 1185 with the new emperor, Isaac II Angelos, who marries Béla's daughter Margaret and receives the territories on the Morava River as her dowry.

Saladin agrees in 1185 to a truce with the Latins and leaves for Egypt.

The Syrian branch of the Zengids, reunited with the Iraqi line in 1181, is eventually absorbed into Saladin's new empire.

The Zengids hold on to al-Jazirah and in 1182 and 1185 successfully repulse several attempts made by Saladin to capture Mosul; they are, however, forced to accept his suzerainty.

The Ghaznavid principality of Sialkot (Kashmir) falls in 1185 to Muhammad of Ghur.

Muhammad, advancing into the Punjab, captures Lahore in 1185.

The Ghurids have destroyed the remnants of Ghaznavid power in the northwest by 1186 and are in a favorable military position to move against the North Indian Rajput powers.

After suffering a severe defeat at the hands of the Caulukya army of Gujarat, Muhammad of Ghur turns to the northern route through the Khyber Pass.

Victory in the second battle of Tarain consolidates Muhammad's success, and he leaves his general Qutb-ud-Din Aybak in charge of his Indian possessions.

The Waldensian movement has been characterized from the beginning by lay preaching, voluntary poverty and strict adherence to the Bible.

Between 1175-1185, Peter Waldo has either commissioned a cleric from Lyons to translate the New Testament into the vernacular, the Arpitan (Franco-Provençal) language or has himself been involved in this translation work.

Regardless of the source of translation, he is credited with providing to Europe the first translation of the Bible in a 'modern tongue' outside of Latin.

Waldo and one of his disciples had gone in 117 to Rome, where they were welcomed by Pope Alexander III, and the Roman Curia.

They had had to explain their faith before a panel of three clergymen, including issues which were then debated within the Church, as the universal priesthood, the gospel in the vulgar tongue, and the issue of self-imposed poverty.

The results of the meeting were inconclusive, and Waldo's ideas, but not the movement itself, had been condemned at the Third Lateran Council in the same year, though the leaders of the movement had not been yet excommunicated.

Driven away from Lyons, Waldo and his followers have settled in the high valleys of Piedmont, and in France, in the Luberon.

Finally, Waldo had been excommunicated by Pope Lucius III during the synod held at Verona in 1184.

Lucius, in pursuance of his anti-imperial policy, declines in 1185 to crown Prince Henry, who had married Constance of Sicily, the heiress of the kingdom of Sicily, as Frederick I's destined successor, and the breach between the Empire and the Curia becomes wider on questions of Italian politics.

In 1185, preparations begin for the Third Crusade in answer to the appeals of King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem.

Before they are completed, Lucius dies in Verona on November 25.

Ubaldo Allucingoli had been made cardinal and Archbishop of Milan by Lucius III, whom he succeeds.

He had vigorously taken up his predecessor's quarrels with Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, including the standing dispute about the disposal of the territories of the countess Matilda of Tuscany.

Even after his elevation to the papacy, Urban continues to hold the archbishopric of Milan, and in this capacity refuses to crown Frederick’s son as King of Italy.

William II, the Norman king of Sicily, has become known as William the Good because of his policy of clemency and justice toward the towns and the barons, in contrast with his father, William I the Bad.

After the regency of his mother, Margaret of Navarre, had ended, William II at first continued his father's policy of friendship with Pope Alexander III and with Constantinople’s emperor, Manuel I Comnenus.

In 1172, however, the emperor thwarted the proposed marriage of William to Manuel's daughter Maria, and William immediately turned against the Greeks.

In 1177 he concluded a truce with his father's old enemy, the German king Frederick I Barbarossa, who had been defeated by the Lombard League at Legnano in 1176 and no longer seemed dangerous to Sicily.

Also in 1177, on February 13, William had married Joan, daughter of King Henry II of England.

After the death of Pope Alexander III in 1181, William had felt freer to exploit disorders in Constantinople’s empire, and had sought even closer relations with German emperor Frederick I Barbarossa.

William agreed that his aunt Constance should marry Frederick's son, the future Henry VI; because William's own marriage is childless, this betrothal, formally arranged on October 29, 1184, gives Henry a strong claim to the Sicilian succession, an arrangement disliked by the Norman national party.

In June 1185, William commences a great campaign against the Eastern Roman Empire.

In the same year, construction begins on the cathedral at Palermo, erected in 1185 by Walter Ophamil (or Walter of the Mill), the Anglo-Norman archbishop of Palermo and King William II's minister, on the area of an earlier Byzantine basilica.