Born Then1096–1291
Life during the Crusades
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
Between 1096 and 1291 western Europeans launched a series of armed pilgrimages to take and hold Jerusalem and the Levant. Crusaders massacred Jews in the Rhineland on the way out and Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem in 1099. The crusader states fell one by one, the last at Acre in 1291.
Deaths: estimates range widely, from about one to three million over two centuries.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Indian Ocean slave trade 700–1799
- Song dynasty commercial revolution 960–1270
- Polynesian settlement of Hawaii 1000–1200
- The Crusades 1096–1291
- Thule migration across the Arctic 1200–1300
- Rise of Great Zimbabwe 1200–1450
- Mongol conquest of the Jin 1211–1234
- Mongol invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire 1219–1223
- Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus' 1237–1242
- Polynesian settlement of New Zealand 1250–1300
- Mongol sack of Baghdad 1258
- Mongol conquest of the Song 1268–1279