independence from his nominal overlord, the Seljuk Turks, upon the collapse of their empire. In that year his name began to be read aloud during the Friday prayer service, signalling the beginning of his independence (discussion in Singh p. 68). See 1299-1300.
Aided by an influx of Muslim warriors, Osman will - from about 1300 - expand his state in NW Asia Minor at the expense of the petty Christian lords (Byzantine magnates) who are his neighbours. By 1308 Ottoman rule will extend NW to the Sea of Marmara. See 1290-93 below.
2. 1290-91: The Egyptian Sultan Qalawun dies en route to capture Christian Acre on 10 November 1290; but his son al-Kalil conquers it the following year. Acre, the last Latin/Crusader foothold in Palestine, falls (1291) to Islam in the shape of Mamluk Egypt (Bradbury 2004). End of 'Frankish’/Christian rule in the Holy Land. The Knights of St John (‘Hospitallers’) transfer to Cyprus. 3. fl. Theodora Kantakuzaina Raoulina (c.1240-1300), nun and scholar.
In 1256 she married the high official George Mouzalon, a commoner who in 1258 (see there) momentarily became regent before being assassinated by the aristocracy and the military, among them her uncle Michael Palaiaolos, who took the throne as Michael VIII. She was then married to John Raoul, one of Michael’s allies, who now became chamberlain. She was exiled for her opposition to the emperor’s policy of uniting the Eastern and Western churches. After her uncle’s death, by now a nun, she embarked on a life of scholarship (1285: aged about 45). In her works she quotes from many of the ancient Greek texts such as Homer and Euripides (Nicol, Lady, chapter 3).
1290: First successful French gold coin, the petit royal assis.
c. 1290: Eye-glasses or ‘spectacles’ seem to have been invented in Florence in 1285 or a few years later. These were convex lenses, of help only to the far-sighted. Concave lenses of use to the near-sighted were not developed until the 16th century (Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution, 1994, p.145).
Asia Minor: fl. Yunus Emre, Turkish poet and mystic (sufi). He almost certainly lived in east-central Anatolia in the Karaman (Larende) area and belonged to a family who had emigrated from Khorasan (NW Persia) to the village of Seyh Haci Ismail. He was a contemporary of Rumi, who lived in the same region. Rumi composed his collection of stories and songs for a well-educated urban circle of Sufis, writing primarily in the literary
among the rural poor, singing his songs in the common tongue of Turkish. 1290-93:
Emperor Andronicus spent the years from 1290 to 1293 in Anatolia arranging defences (Lindner, in Sinor 1996).
He went to Bithynia and examined the fortified keeps near the Sakarya River, east of Nicaea. He then turned south-west to Nicaea and Lopadion which is modern Ulubad, west of Prusa-Bursa. After lengthy stays in these two towns, he moved (1291) south to Nymphaeum (inland from Smyrna), where he passed two years in the former Lascarid capital. (See under 1291.) He concerned himself with the towns and their security, if not with their provisioning. He made no sorties into the countryside, and the chroniclers do not record any encounters with Turkish forces (as Lindner remarks). Cf 1291, 1294.
— This would mean only that the emperor did not go up into the highlands. For Halil Inalcik states, in “Osman Ghazi’s siege”, that despite claims to the contrary by Pachymeres, it was not until after 1300 that Osman raided down as far as the lower Sakarya/Sangarius River [i.e. east of Nicomedia]. See below: “defection” of Paphlagonia.
— In the SW, the middle Meander valley, including Tralles/Aydin, had been lost in the early 1280s. Thus in the 1290s the borderline between Greek and Turk must have run along the hills (watershed) between the Hermus Valley (including Smyrna and Nymphaeum) and the Meander Valley (including Tralles/Aydin). Cf 1293 and 1294: the struggle for Miletus; and 1297: Philadelphia as a Byzantine border stronghold.
From c.1290:
Candar or Jandar Dynasty: also called Isfendiyar, a Turkmen dynasty (c. 1290- 1461) that ruled in the Kastamonu-Sinop region of northern Anatolia.
Paphlagonia: Ian Booth [www.byzantium.ac.uk/frameset_byzlinks] writes that “Candar Bey made …. Eflâni [NE of Karabuk; west of Kastamonu] his capital in 1291, which means that it was still in Byzantine hands until then. However Candar’s attack on Kastamonu in 1309 suggests that it was no longer a Ghazi state by then, which is consistent with Pachymeres’ claim [queried by most historians] that in the 1290s the Ghazi fighters of Paphlagonia joined Osman on the Sangarios frontier.”
Booth proposes that Paphlagonia defected from the empire rather than being conquered: “Andronikos II’s financial and military policies caused the loss of Anatolia, but … people are usually unwilling to change sides unless they can see a very good reason for doing so. … I believe that in 1291 such a reason existed. Mongol control was slipping, so that instead of facing a great power, with its need to support an army and an aristocracy, Byzantium faced the Beyliks. Young, vigorous, more democratic and short of manpower, they offered the Byzantine peasant[s] hope, in return for a change of religion.”
1290-95:
Italy: As noted earlier, the Florentine painter known as “Cimabue”, pron: ‘chee- ma-boo-way’: Bencivieni di Pepo, c. 1240-1302, was the last great Italian artist
in the Byzantine style, which had dominated early medieval painting in Italy. Among his surviving works are the frescoes of New Testament scenes in the upper church of S. Francesco, Assisi; the “Sta. Trinita Madonna” (c. 1290; Uffizi, Florence); and the “Madonna Enthroned with St. Francis” (c.1290–95; lower church of S. Francesco). See 1291 – Cavallini.
The first ‘post-Byzantine’ painter was Cimabue’s pupil Giotto (aged 20 in about 1287), who among many other things painted a portrait of his near coeval Dante. In his Purgatorio Dante (aged about 37 when Cimabue died in 1302) wrote: O vanity of human powers,
how briefly lasts the crowning green of glory, unless an age of darkness follows!
In painting Cimabue thought he held the field but now it's Giotto has the cry,
so that the other's fame is dimmed.
Art historiographers from the 14th century to the present have recognised the art and career of Cimabue as the dividing line between the old and the new traditions in Western European painting. - Source: “Cimabue", Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006. Accessed 2010. <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9082645>. 1291:
1. Asia: As noted, after inspecting the Sangarius frontier, Andronicus proceeded south to the old Nicaean capital of Nymphaeum, which, since the loss of the Meander valley [cf above: 1269 and 1282], had become a border fort.
(Nymphaeum: inland from Smyrna; modern-day Kemalpasha). Cf 1293 – Miletus, and 1294.
2. Epirus: (or 1292:) Following a revolt in Epirus, fomented by the Angevin king Charles of Naples, Andronicus had a Genoese fleet land a small force there, but the Epirote leader Nicephoros called in the Latins of the Peloponnese [where Florent of Hainaut was Prince of Achaea] and they defeated the Byzantines and Genoese. Cf 1294: recapture of Miletus.
--- The Byzantine expedition was made up mainly of Turks and Byzantino- Cuman soldiers; there were no Latin mercenaries enrolled on the imperial side. This is the last occasion on which we hear of Byzantino-Cuman soldiers (the descendants of the Cumans earlier settled in Byzantine Anatolia), presumably because by 1300 they became culturally fully assimilated (LBA p.27).
--- According to the Chronicle of Morea (Lurier p.315), 60 or 40 Genoese galleys were hired; this fleet sailed around to the Adriatic coast off Arta. That number of ships might have carried several thousand troops. Simultaneously a large land army of “14,000” cavalry and “30,000” infantry (sic: 1,400 horse and 3,000 foot would be more credible: total say 3,400?) proceeded through central Greece (“Vlachia”) to Yannina/Ioannina, the fortress-town north of Arta. Hearing that the prince of Achaia was approaching with an army (possibly they did not know he commanded only 400-500 men), the imperial army withdrew. The fleet too withdrew after some inconsequential plundering (LBA p.70).
3. Macedonia: Stephen Milutin of Serbia took from the empire Scopia [Skopje] and the upper Axius (Vardar) valley, the river that runs SE from Skopje. Others say Skopje had been taken in 1282 (Nicol 1993: 119; the chronology is disputed: discussion in Fine 1994: 219). Cf 1297.
4. Emergence of Western art: In his fresco of the Last Judgment (c.1291) in the