Kublai Khan’s Failed Invasions
26. Kublai Khan attacked Japan in 1274 with 33,000 troops, but the effort failed because of bad weather. He attacked Japan again in 1279 with 140,000 troops and reached a point 15 km away from Fukuoka, but that attempt also failed because of a typhoon. It was then that the term kamikaze (divine wind) was born.
27. The earliest recorded use of Forensic Entomology was by a Chinese detective in 1200s AD. During a murder inquiry in a village, detective Song Ci had every scythe in the village inspected and identified the culprit when flies, attracted to trace amounts of blood, kept landing on his scythe.
28. In 1224, the Knight Gaspard de Stérimberg came back from battle wounded, and with permission from the Queen of France, he constructed a hillside sanctuary for his recovery, known as Hermitage Hill. Today, that hill is where Hermitage wine is produced.
29. In 1222 A.D., a physician named Najabuddin Unhammad described the delusion of love as one of the seven mental disorders.
30. In 1251, Henry III was given a polar bear by the king of Norway. He kept it in the Tower of London on a long chain so that it could swim in the Thames.
31. ““Ivan the Cabbage”” gathered an army of peasants in 1277, took over Bulgaria in 1278, became emperor in 1279, was removed by the nobles in 1280, and escaped to the Mongols, who then executed him.
32. In his 1225 essay on the nature of color (Du Luce/On Light), the English Bishop Robert Grosseteste described the Universe’s beginning as an explosion and the hardening of matter into stars and planets arranged in nested spheres around Earth. This was seven centuries before the Big Bang theory was put forth.
33. The Children’s Crusade of 1212 was an unofficial crusade in which Nicholas of Cologne tried to lead approximately 30,000 children to the holy land. They later found a fleet of boats willing to offer them free passage to the Levant. The sailors ended up selling the children as slaves in Africa.
34. In 1285, a Buddhist nun named Kakusan-ni founded the Shōkozan Tōkei-Ji temple as a sanctuary for battered wives. Women were regarded as divorced after residing there for 2 years. Temple records show that, during the Tokugawa period alone, an estimated 2,000 women sought shelter there. The temple lost its right to concede divorce in 1873 when a new law was approved and the Court of Justice started to handle the cases.
35. The setting for the videogame Ghost of Tsushima is based on an actual Mongol/Yuan invasion of Japan, beginning at Tsushima Island in 1274. The invaders landed on Komoda beach, were held there until evening, where the battle ended in a final cavalry charge that ended with all of the defenders being slain.
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