Born Then1200–1450
Life during the Rise of Great Zimbabwe
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 about 1200 and 1450 a Shona state centred on Great Zimbabwe built large dry-stone walls and grew rich on cattle and on gold traded to the Swahili coast. Chinese porcelain and Persian glass found at the site show how far the trade reached. The city was abandoned in the 1400s.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from archaeology.
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
- Great Famine of 1315–1317 1315–1317
- Hundred Years' War 1337–1453
- Black Death 1346–1353
- Return of the plague 1360–1400
- Conquests of Timur 1381–1405
- Timur's sack of Delhi 1398–1399
- Fall of Constantinople 1453
- Sengoku period 1467–1590