King Cnut ordered back the tide not out of arrogance but to expose it. In Henry of Huntingdon's 12th-century tale he sat before the rising sea, got his feet wet and told his courtiers that the power of kings is empty.

1016 · 1035 · apart: 19 years

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11th century

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• 1005 The first known European born in the Americas, Greenland aside, was the Icelander Snorri, in Vinland around 1005.
• 1010 Legend says Sultan Mahmud promised Ferdowsi a gold coin per couplet of the Shahnameh, then paid in silver.
• 1010 Around 1010, at opposite ends of Asia, two summits of world literature appeared almost at once: Ferdowsi's Persian epic, the Shahnameh, and The Tale of Genji by the Japanese court lady Murasaki.
• 1014 · 1016 While Basil II was finishing off Bulgaria at Kleidion (1014), Rus' was getting its first law code, the Russkaya Pravda (1016).
• 1020 Al-Biruni measured the Earth by climbing a hill.
• 1024 · 1661 China had government paper money 637 years before Europe's first banknotes.

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