The siege of the Catharist stronghold of Montségur ends when 200 heretics are herded into a wooden stockade and are burnt

France becomes the first kingdom to establish a permanent parliament when Louis IX reserves a chamber in his palace for quarterly sessions

Pope Urban IV offers Sicily to a French prince, Charles of Anjou, who marches south in 1266 to fight for the kingdom

The Jews in England are driven out of the country, soon to be followed by those in France

The estates-general of France gather for the first time, in Notre Dame, to consider the king's relationship with the pope

Clement V moves the papacy to Avignon, in a move which is expected to be temporary but which lasts for nearly seventy years

Fifty-four Knights Templars are burned at the stake, during the campaign of the French king to destroy the order

Philippe de Vitry, in his Ars Nova ('New Art'), lays out the basis of musical notation

When Charles IV dies, for the first time in more than 400 years of the Capetian dynasty there is no son or brother to inherit the French crown

A French cousin, Philip of Valois, is selected to succeed Charles IV - in preference to an English cousin, Edward III

Philip VI of France confiscates Guienne, a fief belonging to Edward III of England - whose response begins the Hundred Years' War

Edward III, in Ghent, publicly assumes the title and the arms of the king of France

The more mobile English force, of longbows and infantry, defeats at Crécy the unwieldy crossbows and heavy cavalry of the French

The English siege of Calais ends when six burghers of the town, with ropes around their necks, offer their lives to save their fellow citizens

Massacres of Jews, rumoured to have caused the Black Death by poisoning wells, begin in southern France and spread through much of Europe

The battle of Poitiers ends, on the third day, with victory for the English and the capture of the French king, John II

After four years of captivity in Bordeaux and London, the French king John II is released for a promised ransom of 3 million gold crowns

The marriage of the duke of Burgundy to the heiress of Flanders lays the foundation for the great territorial expansion of Burgundy

The papal curia returns to Rome in what would seem a conclusive move if there were not, two years later, two popes - one of them elected back in Avignon

The French cardinals, objecting to the new Italian pope, elect their own man as Clement VII - and thus inaugurate the Great Schism of the papacy

Charles VI, king of France, suffers the first of many violent fits of madness

Philip II of Burgundy commissions from Netherlands sculptor Claus Sluter a work, the Well of Moses, which launches the northern Renaissance

Rivalry between factions of the French royal family results in the murder in Paris of the king's brother, Louis duke of Orléans, and the onset of civil war

The three Limburg brothers illustrate for the duke of Berry the Très Riches Heures, one of the masterpieces of International Gothic

Henry V captures the French stronghold of Harfleur - where, in Shakespeare, he urges his dear friends 'once more unto the breach'