Daily Medieval

I've touched on the Malleus Maleficarum  ("Hammer of Witches") briefly before . It was written by a Dominican who was frustrat...

Giovanni Gualberto (c. 985 – 12 July 1073) was not the sort of person you would expect to found a monastic order. A nobleman born in a castl...

Ubertino de Casale felt so strongly that the proper spiritual life for a Franciscan and other prelates required a life of strict poverty th...

The controversy between King Henry II and his best friend, Thomas Becket, was far from the only clash between temporal and ecclesiastical p...

When Byzantine Emperor Alexios I sent his general Boutoumites to secretly negotiate with the city of Nicaea in order to have them surrender...

The Plague, also called the Black Death, spread across Sicily shortly after the arrival of a fleet of a dozen Genoese galleys bringing go...

Here is a description of a medieval cult: At length, when the novice has come forward, [he] is met by a man of wondrous pallor, who has b...

Excerpt from the Taxatio; see the word "Census" upper-right Today is the birthday of  Pope Nicholas IV; you can read a brief ...

Sancho in a contemporary manuscript King Sancho IV of Castile (1258 - 1295), also known as Sancho the Brave, ruled the combined Iberian...

We've talked about torture before, regarding the Templars , and the "ultimate" torture of being hanged, drawn and quartered...

Wedding portrait of Isabella and Ferdinand (1469) Everyone knows about Isabella of Castile and how she financed Columbus' excursion ...

Christopher Columbus is about as late as a "medieval" blog should deal with, but to me it seems appropriate. The world that Colu...

One Latin form of Augustine was "Austinus" Augustine of Hippo (354-430), pious man and brilliant theologian, has been mention...

Today picks up from the previous post . Although canon law did not apply to non-Christian populations, that attitude changed when Europe...

Yesterday we looked at some of the history of political philosophy analyzing the proper relationship between the spiritual institution of th...

Augustine of Hippo (354-430) had very strong feelings about the difference between spiritual and temporal authority and structures. In his...

While other history sites were celebrating the anniversary of the coronation of King Henry II yesterday, I was thinking about the anniversar...

When Pope Boniface VIII wasn't excommunicating people for treating corpses in unapproved ways , he was very busy doing lots of other t...

When Philip IV of France convinced Pope Clement V that his campaign against the corruption of the Templars needed to be extended to all Te...