THE NINTH CENTURY
Century of Change
800 AD Charlemagne crowned.
Jabir ibn Hayyan improves the still
802 Byzantine Empress Irene deposed.
805 Tea introduced to Japan
809 Famine in Charlemagne's kingdom
810 Algebra invented by Muhammad ibn
Musa al Chwarazmi
814 Charlemagne dies
817 Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious
divides the Empire. Lothar (Louis II's father), is made
co-regent and receives Burgundy. Louis the German gets Bavaria.
Pepin (Pippin) gets
Aquitane.
820 Byzantine Emperor Leo V is
assassinated in the mosque of Santa Sophia.
822 Louis II, known as the Stammerer is
believed to have been born
826 Islamic pirates conquer Crete
827 North African Arabs invade Sicily
and introduce spinach
832 Byzantine Emperor Theophilus
persecutes idolatry
837 Arabs from Sicily attack Naples
unsuccessfully
838 Pippin dies
840 Emperor Louis the Pious dies.
Lothar becomes Emperor and tries to unite the empire by
stealing his brothers' land.
842 Byzantine Emperor Theophilus dies
and is succeeded by his son Michael III,
the Drunkard.
844 Louis II is crowned King of Italy by
his father the Emperor Lothar.
846 Muslim forces attack Rome.
850 Astrolabe perfected by Arab
astrologers.
An Arab goatherd, Kaidi, notices that his goats
become more active after chewing
certain berries. COFFEE IS DISCOVERED!
Church mode is invented, the first step in the
development of major and minor scales.
851 Danes sack Canterbury Cathedral
852 Coal first mentioned in Europe as a
fuel
853 Charles the Bald and Louis the
German (Louis II's uncles) fight each other
857 Ergot poisoning breaks out in the
Rhine valley. Ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus that grows on
grain, is baked into bread, causing mass hysteria.
860 Hiragana phonetic script becomes
popular among the ladies of the Japanese court, leading
to the development of the novel
861 Norsemen attack Cologne, Worms,
Paris and Toulouse. Libera nos a furore
Normanorum. Deliver us from the fury of the Norsemen.
863 St. Cyril invents the Cyrillic
alphabet. Pope Nicholas I excommunicates Photius, the
Patriarch of Constantinople, leading, eventually, to the Catholic/Orthodox
schism.
865 Norsemen attack Constantinople
866 Emperor Louis II, at the suggestion
of Landulf of Capua, drives Moslem
forces into southern Italy
868 The Chinese produce the first
printed book, The Diamond Sutra
871 With aid from the Byzantine Navy,
Louis II conquers the Arab's stronghold at Bari
874 Norsemen discover Iceland
875 Emperor Louis II dies without a male
heir. Landalf of Capua is excommunicated by Pope
John VIII.
878 Alfred the Great defeats the Danes
and converts them to Christianity
880 Hucbald's De Harmonica Institutione,
the earliest known book showing a system of
musical theory, is published
882 Pope John VIII is believed to have
been poisoned
884 Moslem forces are driven from the
Italian peninsula.
886 Norsemen besiege Paris
894 Life of Alfred the Great written
899 Alfred the Great dies
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