Hamelin has a street where music is forbidden.

1284

The Pied Piper is said to have led the children down the Bungelosenstraße in 1284, and ever since no instruments are played and no one dances there.

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The event

• Pied Piper of Hamelin1284 · Hamelin. According to old records, on 26 June 1284 a piper led 130 children out of Hamelin. The rats only entered the story in the 16th century; what really happened is unknown, with theories ranging from disease to emigration east.

13th century

More amazing facts

• 1275 · 1797 Xanadu was real: Kublai Khan's summer capital, Shangdu.
• 1281 · 1944 The word kamikaze is over 660 years older than Japan's suicide pilots. "Divine wind" was the name given to the typhoons that scattered Kublai Khan's fleets off Japan in 1274 and 1281.
• 1286 · 1306 Eyeglasses are over 700 years old, and we know it from a sermon.
• 1288 · 1326 The oldest surviving gun is Chinese, made no later than 1288, and weighs 3.5 kg. Europe's first picture of a cannon appears only in Walter de Milemete's English manuscript of 1326.
• 1291 Murano glass exists because of fear of fire.
• 1293 The founder of Majapahit won with the help of Kublai Khan's army, then drove it out. In 1293 Raden Wijaya got the Mongol force on Java to crush his rival, then turned on the Mongols themselves.

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