27 BC

After a century of bitter civil war, the Roman Republic ends with the naming of Augustus Caesar as the first Roman Emperor.  Rome’s citizens cease having representation in government. 

4 BC

From Astrological Evidence we can presume Jesus was born in April 4BC.  Much of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and surrounding regions are deforested by Rome, eventually turning it into desert.  In the Caribbean, agricultural Arawakan peoples begin migrating along the archipelago from South America, eventually displacing/absorbing the hunter-gatherer peoples there.  They populate the Greater Antilles in the millions by 1492, and are loosely known as the Taino.  At this time, and perhaps a few centuries earlier, Polynesians begin colonizing the Hawaiian Islands.  The Chinese probably invented paper around this time, though tradition gives the date as 105 AD.

World population: 170 million.

C. 30 AD

Roman writer Celsus translates works of Hippocrates, writes a mammoth series of books, and the eight devoted to medicine have survived. 

Roman Empire’s population: 50 million

66 AD

First Jewish revolt against Roman rule.  Rome responds with typical brutality, the revolt ending with the mass suicide at Masada in 73 AD.  Jews begin their dispersal from Palestine. 

122 AD

Hadrian’s Wall built by Rome in northern England, which marked the northern extent of its empire. 

132 AD

Jews revolt against Roman rule again.  Rome responds in standard fashion, completely destroying the Jewish state in 135 AD and laying waste to the entire region.  Hundreds of thousands of Jews die; the survivors are sold into slavery and dispersed across the Roman Empire and beyond. 

165 AD

The Antonine plague, probably smallpox, sweeps through the Roman Empire, brought back by returning soldiers from Syria.  It rages for 15 years, killing about five million people, or about a quarter to a third of all of those exposed to the disease, including Emperor Marcus Aurelius in 180, as it did his predecessor in 169. 

c. 169 AD

Marcus Aurelius appoints Galen to be personal physician to his heir, Commodus.  Galen writes prodigiously, his work guiding Western medicine until the 1500s. 

c. 200 AD

200 million

251 AD

An epidemic again sweeps through the Roman Empire until 270, killing 5000 of Rome’s citizens each day during the epidemic’s peak, including the Emperor Claudius in 270.  Rome was forced by the population loss to recruit barbarian troops.  The first mass conversions to Christianity were apparently a consequence of the epidemic.  Centuries of Roman games have rendered the elephant, rhinoceros and other animals extinct in Northern Africa.  Tiger is extinct in Persia and Mesopotamia. 

c. 276 AD

Mani dies in captivity.  Unlike Jesus or Buddha, Mani attempts to create a religion, and he succeeds.  It is a syncretic religion that incorporated elements of Christianity, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism.  Though the Roman Empire and others heavily persecute Manicheans, Manichaeism becomes one of the world’s great religions, and lasts for a thousand years before it is finally wiped out. 

300 AD

Babylonia becomes the center of the Jewish culture.

324 AD

Roman Emperor Constantine convenes the Council of Nicea, his gambit to hold the fragmenting empire together through a state religion.  There were 20 different versions of Jesus’ crucifixion circulating among the numerous Christian sects of the day.  The council was charged with creating a state-approved institution and version of Jesus’ life for mass consumption.  The other 19 versions were suppressed, as well as rival Christian sects, such as the Arians.  Roman Catholicism became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 325 AD.  The Council of Nicea may have something to do with the fact that more than half of Jesus’ life is missing from the New Testament.  Feminine imagery is almost completely missing from Christian religious mythology.  Constantine also establishes Constantinople in 324 AD at the site of the ancient city of Byzantium, and it becomes the center of the Eastern Roman Empire and the repository of Hellenistic (Greek) culture and learning. 

410 AD

Visigoths invade Rome, for the first invasion of the city in eight centuries. 

451 AD

Hun invasion of Roman Empire stopped by a great battle in France.  Hundreds of thousands die in battle. 

476 AD

Western Roman Empire falls.  Germanic peoples invade the Roman Empire’s lands in Europe during the late 400s, including the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain.  The Eastern Roman Empire lasts nearly continually for the next 1000 years, with Constantinople (earlier named Byzantium and later Istanbul) as its capital city.  Europe, though, fell into its Dark Ages.  Ancient Greek texts were burned as pagan, including Hippocrates’ works.  The Roman Catholic Church largely took over medicine, and Galen’s work became dogmatized by the Church.  That situation would dominate Western medicine for more than 1000 years.  By this time, whales are extinct in the Mediterranean. 

c. 500

Polynesian explorers discover Easter Island, and soon colonize it.  

541

First recorded instance of bubonic plague, beginning in Egypt and racing to Constantinople, where it killed off as many as 10,000 people per day and 40% of the population.  Epidemic diseases would periodically sweep Europe and Asia, with cites such as Rome suffering greatly. 

562

32-year drought begins to afflict the Moche culture in South America.  El Niño cycles regularly affect South American civilization, and elaborate food production and storage systems are designed to cope with them, as well as other environmental challenges.  That region’s people become the world’s greatest agricultural experimenters. 

250 million

c. 570

Muhammad born, founder of Islam. 

632

Muhammad dies, after an amazing life that founds one of the world’s great religions.  Islam sweeps throughout the Arab world, spreading widely. 

c. 650

Mesoamerican empire centered in city of Teotihuacan begins its collapse, to be replaced in power by the militaristic Toltecs, similar to the way empires rose and fell in the Fertile Crescent. 

711

Islamic armies invade the Iberian Peninsula.  Jews live under Moorish rule in Iberia, and it is their golden age in Europe, lasting for 300 years.  Learning was an Islamic ideal, and Islamic scholars kept the teachings of the ancient Greeks alive in the West.  Influential doctors such as Abu’l Qasim (936-1013) and Maimonides (1135-1204) came from Moorish Iberia.  China is undergoing urbanization and population explosion.

C. 800

Mayan civilization begins its collapse.  It attained a peak population of several million, before its overtaxed environment failed to support the population.  Famine, war and disease accompanied the collapse of the Mayan population to perhaps a million before 1000 AD, similar to Fertile Crescent dynamics.  The forest recovers and covers the Mayan ruins.  Charlemagne tries to create a new Western Roman Empire, with a unity of church and state.  The Holy Roman Empire lasted until Napoleon.  Vikings begin raiding the British Isles, and some settle in France and become the Normans.  Others go inland and become the Russians. 

c. 900

Brown bear nearing extinction in the British Isles. 

c. 1000

Polynesian explorers discover New Zealand.  Invaders, probably from Tahiti, come to the Hawaiian islands and conquer the inhabitants, setting themselves up as the ruling class, and a slave class was created.  Leif Ericson extends Viking colonization past Greenland settlements to North America, probably in today’s Newfoundland.  They may have driven Irish monks from Iceland before them to North America.  The Vikings’ violent ways quickly create resistance from the local Algonquin people, and their colonization is not permanent.  In Iceland, the Vikings are unable to easily plunder neighboring lands and quickly become a peaceful people, engaging in trade. 

1012

Jews expelled from the Rhineland, in one of Europe’s earliest expulsions of Jews.

1036

Umayyad dynasty ends in Moorish Iberia, and fractures into mutually hostile, petty kingdoms. 

c. 1050

Northern and central Europe, especially the Germanic lands, engage in great age of deforestation, making way for civilization, clearing about a third of the forest in a couple of centuries, and up to 75% deforestation by the end of the medieval era.  This is the beginning of the High Middle Ages.  In 1900, about 25% of the forest remains.

1056

Ferdinand I, who proclaimed himself the Emperor of Spain, undertakes “Reconquest” of the Iberian peninsula.

1066

William the Conqueror leads the Norman invasion of Britain.  Islamic preachers incite anti-Jew riot in Granada, which kills about 5000 Jews.

1096

Christian Europe makes its first united act: the first Crusade to Palestine.  The first wide-scaled Jew slaughters in Europe take place as a warm-up for the first Crusade, in France and Germany.  Jews would no longer be safe in Europe, and warfare would be the European way of life until World War II ended. 

1144

In England, the rumor begins that Jews murder babies in their religious rites, which the Europe’s first such rumor. 

1145

Bernard of Clairvaux (Saint Bernard), who may have established the Order of the Knights Templar, visits southern France, Europe’s most cosmopolitan region.  He finds it ripe for heretical sects to flourish, and his Cistercian monks begin to try countering the nascent Cathar influence in the region.  Their efforts are ineffectual. 

1158

Munich founded.

1163

Notre Dame cathedral in Paris begins construction.

c. 1170

Mesoamerican Toltec city of Tula is destroyed, probably due to major drought and population migrations that led to war.

1175

Peter Waldo tries reforming Catholic Church corruption, and eventually forms the Waldensian sect. 

1182

Jews expelled from France. 

1184

Peter Waldo is excommunicated from the Church and a papal bull orders bishops to “direct inquisitions” on heresy.

1195

Council of Evreux tries stemming Catholic Church corruption, such as bishops selling relics. 

c. 1200

Polynesian people begin colonizing New Zealand.  The Islamic culture attains the world’s highest standard of living.  Incan people conquer the land around Lake Titicaca, the first step in their empire building. Human hunters render large mammals on Madagascar extinct. 

1204

Fourth Crusade ends up sacking its “ally” Constantinople.  Pope Innocent III tries getting the Cistercian order to preach against the Cathars, an attempt that fails.

1209

After a decade of attempting to curb the Church’s corruption, and after gentle methods to try bringing the Languedoc region back to the Church’s fold, Pope Innocent III calls for a Crusade on France to eliminate Catharism.  The resulting Albigensian Crusade kills about one million people.  Innocent also authorizes the formation of the Franciscan sect, which copies Cathar austerity.

1212

In a great battle near Toledo, Christian armies defeat the Islamic forces in the decisive conflict of the “Reconquest” of the Iberian Peninsula. 

1214

The Dominican order is founded, which also copies Cathar austerity.

1215

Magna Carta sealed by England’s King John I.  Pope Innocent III convenes the Fourth Lateran Council. 

1221

Genghis Khan’s Mongol armies conquer Islamic armies in Indus valley.  Islamic peoples are devastated by the Mongol invasion, and Islam begins its decline as a social force. 

1244

Massacre at Montségur, the last stronghold of the Cathars.  The Catholic Church eliminates the greatest threat to its religious monopoly, until Martin Luther posts his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517.

360 million

1254

Jews expelled from France.