23 Things You Didn’t Know About The 1100s

In the 12th century, Bologna [Italy] had up to 180 towers as high as 97 meters [318 feet] which made it look like a medieval manhattan.

In 1123, the people of Greenland asked King Sigurd of Norway to send them a bishop along with a polar bear as a gift to accompany their request.

In 1102, Baldwin I was defeated in battle by an Egyptian army, was besieged at Ramla, escaped with 5 companions, was taken to Jaffa by an English pirate, and then returned to battle to defeat the Egyptians.

In 1162, in revenge for insulting his wife (Beatrice), Frederick I, the Holy Roman Emperor forced every resident of Milan who wished to live to pluck a fig placed into the genitals of a female mule.

In 1183, while sultan Saladin was laying siege to a crusader Castle in modern Jordan, he instructed his catapults to avoid the tower of the newlyweds after receiving food from their feast.

Frederick I Barbarossa (1122 – 1190) was a German Holy Roman Emperor who gathered 100,000 men for a crusade to fight the Saracens, marched to Constantinople then rode his horse out of its depth in the Saleph River and drowned on the morning of the battle.

Roland the Farter was a 12th-century minstrel who was gifted a manor house in Hemingstone, Suffolk, and more than 100 acres of land for performing a dance that ended with “one jump, one whistle, and one fart,” basically for farting on cue.

Martim Moniz was a knight who in 1147, during the Reconquista, sacrificed himself by lodging himself in the doorway of the castle in Lisbon, preventing the moors from fully closing the door. His sacrifice allowed the castle to be conquered.

The pood was a 12th century unit of mass equivalent to 40 funt (or 16.38 kg/36.11 lbs). While abolished for use by the USSR in 1924, the term remains in situational cases, and an old Russian proverb reads, “You know a man when you have eaten a pood of salt with him.”

In 1138, Lý Anh Tông was named emperor of Lý Dynasty in Vietnam at the age of 2.