1191

Events

• April 14—Pope Celestine III succeeds Pope Clement III as the 175th pope.
• April 17—Tusculum is destroyed by the Commune of Rome's army.
• May 12—Richard I of England marries Berengaria of Navarre.
• July 12—Saladin's garrison surrenders, ending the two-year siege of Acre. Conrad of Montferrat, who has negotiated the surrender, raises the banners of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and of the Third Crusade leaders Richard I of England, Philip II of France, and Leopold V of Austria on the city's walls and towers. Richard stays to push on to Jerusalem, but Philip returns to France to take possession of a part of Flanders whose count had died at the siege of Acre. Back in France, Philip also schemes with Richard's brother, John of England, to dispossess Richard of his French lands while he is still away, but the intervention of John's (and Richard's) mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, foils the plan.^[1]
• September 7—Richard I of England defeats Saladin at the Battle of Arsuf during the Third Crusade.
• November 27—Reginald fitz Jocelin is elected Archbishop of Canterbury.
• Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor is crowned by Pope Celestine III.
• The monks of Glastonbury Abbey announce that they have found the burial sites of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere.
• Duke Berthold V of Zähringen founds the city of Bern (present-day Switzerland).
• Khmer King Jayavarman VII sacks the capital of Champa.
• Eisai founds the Rinzai Zen sect in Japan.
• The first reference to the windmill in Europe is made by a Dean Herbert of East Anglia, whose mills are supposedly in competition with the abbey of Bury St Edmunds. This is probably an invention imported from interaction with the Muslim world, since the first windmills were most likely innovated from the Bana Musa brothers in the Islamic Middle East during the middle 9th century. The windmill will spread in the other direction, to be introduced to China by as early as 1219.

Births

• February 8—Yaroslav II of Russia (d. 1246)

Deaths

• March 20—Frederick VI, Duke of Swabia (b. 1167)
• March 27—Pope Clement III
• December 26—Reginald fitz Jocelin, Archbishop-elect of Canterbury
• William V, Marquess of Montferrat, Burgundian crusader (b. c. 1115)
• Walter of the Mill, archdeacon of Cefalù, dean of Agrigento and archbishop of Palermo

In popular culture

• The video game Assassin's Creed is set in this year.

References