1281
year
Year 1281 (MCCLXXXI) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Julian calendar.
Events
By place
Byzantine Empire
Spring – Siege of Berat: A Byzantine relief force under Michael Tarchaneiotes arrives at the strategically important citadel of Berat. Tarchaneiotes avoids a confrontation with the Angevines and relies on ambushes and raids instead. He manages to capture the Angevin commander, Hugh of Sully. A few of Sully's guards escape and reach their camp, where they report his capture. Panic spreads among the Angevin troops at this news and they begin to flee towards Avlon. The Byzantines take advantage of their disordered flight and attack, joined by the troops in the besieged citadel. Tarchaneiotes takes an enormous booty while a small remnant of the Angevin army manages to cross the Vjosa River and reach the safety of Kanina.
October 18 – Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos is excommunicated by Pope Martin IV without any warning or provocation. Martin authorizes Charles I, king of Sicily, to make a Crusade against Michael, who has re-established his rule in Constantinople.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1281” is year. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through year, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “year” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5537. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1281.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “1281” 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.