1343

Political Events

Roberto of Anjou, king of Naples, dies at Naples January 19 at age 64 after a 24-year reign in which he has made himself respected as Robert the Wise (Roberto Il Saggio), but his failure to regain Sicily after the death of Friedrich III in 1337 has weakened Angevin power in the region. He is succeeded by his beautiful and intelligent 16-year-old granddaughter Joanna after she is married to her cousin András, brother of Hungary's Lajos (Louis) I, who antagonizes many Angevin Neapolitans, including Joanna herself, by filling the court with Hungarians (see 1345).

Sweden's Magnus II Eriksson places his 3-year-old son Haakon on the throne of Norway, which Magnus will abdicate in 1355.

Poland's king Casimir repeats his earlier relinquishment of Pomerania and Pomerellen in the Peace of Kalisch negotiated July 8 by the new pope Clement VI (see 1337). The worldly wealth of Poland guarantees the forfeiture, and all the princes (woiwoden), castle wardens, and tribal elders (starosten) pledge themselves July 23 to abide by the treaty.

Smyrna falls to Venetian forces that take advantage of the civil war in the Byzantine Empire to capture the valuable commercial port of Ionia. The self-styled emperor John VI Cantacuzenus busies himself with making Turkish alliances and will marry his daughter to the Ottoman sultan Orkhan (see 1342; 1345).

Commerce

Florence's Peruzzi banking house fails as England's Edward III repudiates his debts and the bankers are unable to collect, despite measures that they have taken to protect themselves from default (see 1340; 1341; Bardi, 1344). Parliament in this decade will reform England's currency by introducing gold coinage to supplement the traditional silver pennies.

Medicine

The Black Death that began in China 10 years ago strikes marauding Tatars, who attack some Genoese merchants returning from Cathay with silks and furs (see 1340). Called bubonic because of its characteristic bubes, or enlarged lymph glands, the plague is transmitted by fleas, carried by rats, and harbored perhaps in the merchants' baggage. The Tatars besiege the merchants at the Crimean trading post of Caffa and, before withdrawing, catapult their corpses over the walls into the town, infecting the merchants, some of whom die on the road home while others will carry the plague far and wide in their caravans (see 1345).

Inventorius sive Collectorium Partis Chirurgicalis Medicinae by French surgeon Guy de Chauliac, 43, will serve physicians as a manual for 3 centuries. De Chauliac has developed the treatment of fractures by slings and extension weights, he operates on hernias and cataracts, exorcises superficial growths, and he believes that pus from wounds serves to release the materia peccans.

Literature

Nonfiction: Dialogues by logician William of Ockham lays the foundations of modern theory of independence of church and state. Now 63, Ockam was excommunicated and imprisoned after defending evangelical poverty against Pope John XXII in 1330, but he has escaped and is living in Munich, where he has sided with the Holy Roman Emperor Ludwig IV in contesting the temporal power of the pope. Called "doctor invincibilis" by his fellow monks, Ockham writes on the character of knowledge, distinguishing between the name of a thing and the thing itself; he will be remembered as a father of epistemology.

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