Daily Medieval

At the end of yesterday's post on the Auld Alliance I mentioned that France (or the Franks) had formed earlier alliances, some of them ...

During the reign of the Abbasid caliph  al-Mutawakkil  (822 - 861), he commissioned several building projects. Up to 20 palaces are listed ...

The 10th Abbasid caliph was not intended to rise to that position. Ja'far ibn Muhammad ibn Harun was born in 822 to an Abbasid prince a...

The modern Italian word for a notebook is taccuino . It comes from the medieval (and later) popularity of the Tacuinum Sanitatis . That name...

The previous post mentioned the man who discovered the combination of chemicals that dissolved gold. He could not have done that haphazardl...

I have mentioned before the disagreements, after the death of Muhammad, over which direction the faith should go. The Rashidun Caliphate wa...

[ source ] The Mongols were expanding westward. Under Genghis Khan they had taken a huge chunk out of Asia, from what is now the Koreas...

Mamluk going to war, from a 14th century History of the Tatars The short answer to the question posed in the title is "slaves....

The red pin is Kufa, the purple pin is Baghdad, about 170 km north. The Abbasids had taken over from the Umayyads, and in order to make...

The Abbasid Caliphate has only been mentioned so far as a target of the Assassins , but deserves more attention. Descended from Muhammad...