Daily Medieval

When Queen Rusudan of Georgia died in 1245, Georgia looked for a new ruler. Her son, David, had been sent to Karakoram to be recognized as ...

Yesterday's post on the hoped-for Mongol alliance with the West mentioned a Georgian queen who saved her people from the Mongols. That ...

Although little is known of his personal life, and he was not famous in his own lifetime, the Sufi poet known as Attar of Nishapur (c.1145 –...

Marco Polo is known for traveling to the Far East from Europe and observing things unknown to Europeans, but there were many travelers from ...

Henry II the Pious was born in Poland to Henry the Bearded and Hedwig of Andechs . Henry the Bearded had worked hard to unite several differ...

In the same decades that Batu Khan (c. 1207–1255) and another grandson of Genghis Khan, Kadan, were establishing the Golden Horde and conso...

The name "Golden Horde" for the northwestern section of the Mongolian Empire is the English translation of a borrowed phrase from ...

The death of Möngke Khan in 1259 led to the Toluid Civil War, a fight between two of the remaining sons of Toluid over who would succeed Mön...

The House of Wisdom was a marvelous repository of knowledge from all over the world. It also functioned as an informal university long befo...

In 1271, Edward, Duke of Gascony, went on a continuation of the Eighth Crusade that is sometimes called the Ninth Crusade and sometimes Lord...

Möngke Khan (11 January 1209 - 11 August 1259) was the son of Tolui (c.1190 - c.1232), the youngest son of Genghis Khan. Möngke had been suc...

After Hassan i-Sabbah took over Alamut Castle from the Justanids, he went about making it a place that his followers would be willing to die...

King Louis IX of France could not convince any of the rulers of Europe to accompany him on a Crusade to free Jerusalem, which had been reca...

In 1244, allies of the Egyptian Mamluks, retreating westward from the advancing Mongols, stopped at Jerusalem long enough to recapture it f...

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

Among the western Europeans who traveled eastward and wrote of the wonders of "The Orient," we have mentioned William Rubruck  ...

Marco Polo was not the only, or the first, western European to travel to the East. When Pope Innocent IV wanted to send a letter to the G...

Ögedei Khan, who never got the letter Relations between the East and West have always been strained, generally because of radically dif...

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

The scholar Steven Runciman tells us of the founding of the group now known as the Assassins. A Persian called Hasan as-Sabah (1050s - 11...