Through History with The New Monday Quiz: the 1290s

Out with the old and in with the new!  Some parts of our current world came into being in the 1290s, and some aspects of former times were literally wiped off the maps.     

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1. In August of 1291, the rural communes of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden agreed to what’s now called “the Federal Charter of 1291,” and thus created the nucleus of the modern country of ______________.

2. In 1291, Al-Ashraf Khalil captured and razed the city of Acre, and within a few months also conquered the fortresses at Tyre, Sidon, Haifa, Tartus, and Atlit. This was the effective end of _______________.

3. Pietro Cavallini created this mosaic in Rome in 1291. It portrays a subject that would be extremely popular with European artists for several hundred years. What's happening in this picture, and what's the name for this kind of scene?

4. In 1292, King Mangrai the Great of Ngoen Yang conquered and annexed the Mon kingdom of Hariphunchai, creating a political union in the form of the Lanna kingdom. In 1296, he founded a new capital city, Chiang Mai. Where?

5. The Majapahit Empire was a vast archipelagic empire based on the island of Java from 1293 to around 1500. It’s considered a very approximate precursor kingdom to what modern country?

6. Pope Celestine V was essentially drafted into the Papacy in July 1294; five months later, wanting to return to his hermit monasticism, he resigned the office. How long was it before the next time a Pope resigned?

7. La Vita Nuova is an expression of the medieval genre of courtly love in a prosimetrum style, a combination of both prose and verse. Besides its content, it is notable for being written in Italian, rather than Latin; it helped to establish the Tuscan dialect as the standard for the Italian language.  It was published in 1295. Who wrote it?

8. On January 8, 1297, Frencesco "the Cunning" Grimaldi and his cousin dressed up as monks, got themselves invited into a castle, and then captured the place at swordpoint. They were only able to hang onto the captured citadel for four years, but 122 years later the Grimaldi family bought the castle and its neighborhood outright, and continue to run the place today, as constitutional monarchs. Where was that castle?

9. On September 11, 1297, an army led by William Wallace and Andrew Moray won the Battle of Stirling Bridge. This was a great victory for what country against what other country?

10. On July 27, 1299, Osman I declared his Anatolian beylik to be independent of the Seljuq Sultanate of Rum, and thus began what great empire?

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Through History with The New Monday Quiz: the 1280s

1. The last big chunk of land to be infested by humans was New Zealand.
2. Back in 1274, the first attempt by the Mongols to invade Japan was thwarted when their warships and troop transports were destroyed by a typhoon. In spring of 1281, when the Mongols launched 140,000 troops in 4,400 ships for a second invasion of Japan, they were thwarted when their warships and troop transports were destroyed by another typhoon.
3. "...all the foreign friars were dragged out and told to pronounce the word "ciciri," whose sound the French tongue could never accurately reproduce."  That's a Shibboleth.  Here in the City of Roses, we do the same thing with "Willamette" and "Couch."
4. Edward I wiped out the independence of Wales for good.
5. Ramkhamhaeng the Great, according to tradition, cooked up the Thai alphabet.
6. That little clearing in the woods became the nucleus of The Grand Duchy of Moscow, or Muscovy.
7. Genoa and Venice remained powerful naval city-states long after Pisa lost its importance.
8. Sakoura Mansa made Mali the main power in the western Sudan.
9. St. Lucia's Flood killed so many people, and made Amsterdam important, because it created the Zuiderzee.  Rising sea levels had been held back by a coastal ridge before then.  Dozens of villages found themselves unpleasantly underwater, but the river town of Amsterdam woke to find itself a well-situated seaport.
10. That there would be a Cimabue.

And the winner for the third week running -- like Edward I, Ramkhamhaeng the Great, or Skoura Mansa, a powerful force in the late thirteenth century -- it's pfly!