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On 11 June 980, Vladimir - the illegitimate son of a housekeeper - had his brother murdered under a flag of truce and was proclaimed knyaz of all Kievan Rus'. He united a realm stretching from Ukraine to the Baltic, and a thousand years later two warring capitals still claim him.
In 1396, a Bavarian teenager named Johann Schiltberger was spared execution at Nicopolis because he was sixteen. Over the next thirty-three years he served as a slave to Bayezid I, Tamerlane, and four of Tamerlane's heirs, crossed into Siberia, and walked home.
On 12 April 1204, Crusaders breached the walls of Constantinople. They had set out to free Jerusalem. They ended up sacking the greatest Christian city in the world - and dismantling the one barrier standing between Europe and the Ottoman advance.
On 5 April 1242, a twenty-year-old Prince of Novgorod halted a crusader advance on the ice of Lake Peipus. Russia never forgot. Most of Western history never noticed.
On 4 April 801, Louis the Pious captured Barcelona after a seven-month winter siege. History would remember him as the weeping, penitent emperor who let the Carolingian Empire fall apart. On this morning he was twenty-two, and had just done something his father never managed.
On 2nd April 747, Charlemagne was born. He would build an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Elbe. His heirs would spend thirty years tearing it apart. The pieces became France and Germany.
In July 1324, Mansa Musa — king of Mali and holder of more gold than anyone had ever seen in one place — arrived in Cairo with 12,000 servants, 80 camel-loads of gold dust, and no apparent intention of leaving with any of it.
In 1096, a woman set out for Jerusalem from France with a goose from her farm. Peasant crusaders took it as divine guidance. The goose died in northeastern France and never got close to the Holy Land. The people who followed it left a different kind of trail.
On 12 March 1088, a French monk named Odo was elected pope in a small gathering in Terracina — unable to enter his own city. Seven years later, he launched the First Crusade. He died before he knew it had succeeded.
On 16 February 1471, Krishnadevaraya was born. When Babur surveyed every ruler on the Indian subcontinent, he named one man the most powerful. The emperor who deployed 700,000 soldiers at Raichur also wrote devotional poetry in four languages.