1196
year
Year 1196 (MCXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Julian calendar.
Events
By place
Byzantine Empire
December – Emperor Alexios III Angelos is threatened by Emperor Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, who demands 5,000 pounds of gold or the Byzantines will face an invasion, this due to a convoluted system of dynastic claims of Henry gaining control of Alexios' daughter Irene Doukaina. The amount is negotiated down to 1,600 pounds of gold – with Alexios plundering the imperial tombs within the Church of the Holy Apostles – as well as levying a heavy and unpopular tax, known as the Alamanikon (or German Tax).
Europe
Spring – Henry VI persuades a diet at Würzburg. He manages to convince the majority of the German nobles and clergy to recognize his 2-year-old son, Frederick II, as king of the Romans and heir to the imperial throne. However, Archbishop Adolf of Cologne thwarts the will of the diet and arouses the resistance of several Saxon and Thuringian nobles against Henry, who realizes that he is unable to establish a hereditary monarchy (his Erbreichsplan) in the Holy Roman Empire without resistance.
April 23 – Béla III of Hungary dies after a 23-year reign in which he has supported the former Byzantine emperor Isaac II Angelos against the invading Bulgarians. Having made the Hungarian court one of the most brilliant in Europe and made his hereditary monarchy. Béla is succeeded by his 22-year-old son Emeric as ruler of Hungary, Croatia and Dalmatia (until 1204).
April 25 – King Alfonso II of Aragon ("the Chaste") dies after a 32-year reign at Perpignan.
“1196” enters the record as year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“1196” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, year provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19747. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1196 and 1204.
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This entry incorporates text from “1196” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.