A Place in Time: Utah History in Context - 1200-1300 A.D.

Medieval Castles in Utah
Utah, 13th Century A.D.
At an unknown date, sometime between A.D. 1200 and 1300 (according to the National Park Service), during what is called the Pueblo III Period, the Ancestral Pueblo people (also known as "Anasazi") were constructing multi-story stone towers that still stand to this day in the Four Corners area.  Their culture in the area dated back to the around 500 A.D., but around 1100, their communities transitioned from mesa tops to canyons.  One cluster of villages comprising about 2,500 people, now called "Hovenweep" (from a Paiute/Ute word meaning "deserted valley"), is built overlooking the canyons around the Cajon Mesa of the Great Sage Plain near the southern end of Utah's and Colorado's shared border.  The exact purpose of their brick structures is no longer known, whether they were homes, defensive structures, observatories or something else entirely.  Not all that long after, toward the end of the 13th century when the towers were built, the communities that built Hovenweep abandon it for reasons we can only guess at today.

 The Rest of North America, 13th Century A.D.
  •  Other Ancestral Pueblo communities build great stone structures in the Four Corners area, like the 23-kiva, 150-room Cliff Palace in what is now Mesa Verde National Park.  Severe droughts afflict the region and drive competition for resources, and like Hovenweep, many of these structures are soon abandoned.
  • The Grand Village of Natchez is built on the shores of the Mississippi River (now the location of Natchez, Mississippi) by the mound-building Plaquemine culture in the 13th century.  Four centuries later, the site was inhabited by the Natchez people until French settlers drove them out in 1730.
The Rest of the World, 13th Century A.D.
  • Genghis Khan (born Temüjin) founds the 1,500,000-square mile Mongol Empire in 1206 by conquering and uniting rival tribes of the Mongolian Plateau.  By the time of his death in 1227, his empire was twice the size of the Roman Empire at its greatest extent, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Caspian Sea over 13,500,000 square miles.  Under Genghis Khan's son and grandsons, the Mongol Empire became the largest contiguous land empire in history by the end of the 13th century, stretching from the Pacific shores of China and Eurasia to the Eastern Europe, or 9,300,000 square miles.
  • King John of England signs the Magna Carta on June 15, 1215, to make peace with rebel barons by promising legal protections for barons and limitations on the King.
  • Saint Thomas Aquinas writes his Summa Theologiae from 1265 to 1274.
  • The Ninth Crusade, generally considered the last major medieval Crusade to the Holy Land, takes place from 1271-1272 under the command of Edward I of England, also known as Edward Longshanks.  Despite the overall success of their campaign, Crusaders withdraw due to internal conflicts among the Crusader states and at home in Europe.
  • In 1299, Turkish tribal leader Osman I founds the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia by uniting tribal groups and Byzantine renegades.

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