Daily Medieval

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...

[ source ] On 28 April in 1192, Conrad of Montferrat was assassinated. Conrad was an interesting character, a well-born European caugh...

In England there are still many "Commons" that are accessible by locals for grazing their animals. Their origin can be summed up...

St. Mellitus, converter of Anglo-Saxons We have the story, handed down from Bede, that Pope Gregory I sent a mission to England in 597 t...

Queen Isabella of Castile had a reputation for harshness when it came to crime and corruption. A Spanish writer and contemporary, Hernando...

First page of the Textus Roffensis. The water damage is from the early 1700s. The Textus de Ecclesia Roffensi per Ernulphum episcopum  ...

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

A memorial in Lisbon* We touched on the Lisbon Massacre, in which between 1000 and 2000 (and maybe more) Jews were slaughtered, in the p...

Cannabis sativa from the 6th-century De Materia Medica of Dioscorides I was contemplating a post about Easter, which takes place this Su...

When April, with her showers sweet, The drought of March has pierced to the roots... A poster for sale of Chaucer reading On this day...

As best we can determine, Symposius was a 4th- or 5th-century author of the Ænigmata , a collection of 100 Latin riddles. The oldest known...

The Vercelli Book, opened to "The Dream of the Rood" The post on The Exeter Book mentioned that it was one of four sources of...

"The Wanderer" in the Exeter Book The Exeter Book was mentioned as the source of two poems about St. Guthlac . It holds much m...

Want to own a speaker that plugs into your laptop and depicts the ordination of Guthlac? You can! Today is the feast day of an English...

Halley's Comet on the Bayeaux Tapestry The nice thing about astronomy is that some celestial events are so predictably cyclical that...

A representation of the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields We mentioned here that the Huns under Bleda and Attila negotiated a treaty wit...

A 6th century Roman politician named Jordanes turned to writing history in his retirement. He wrote Romana , about Rome, and Getica , abou...

Today is the anniversary of Attila the Hun's attack on the town of Metz in Gaul. In the 1st century CE, the Roman historian Tacitus ...

Despite the Magi including a Black king, the Middle Ages did not accept Blacks automatically. [detail from an "Adoration of the Magi...

The other day I mentioned that King Alfonso of Portugal in the 15th century had a Jewish treasurer. He was a statesman and scholar as well,...

A secret seder [ source ] Yesterday I alluded to a third option available to persecuted Jews in the Middle Ages who were forced into t...

The Inquisition in Portigal [ source ] When the Alhambra Decree gave Jews the choice of converting to Christianity or leaving the kingd...

[ source ] There is an ethnic subdivision of Jews called Sephardic Jews. "Sephardic" comes from the Hebrew  Sepharad , which r...

A new TV show started in 2013 and has proven popular enough that it has been renewed for a couple more seasons. It is called "The Vikin...

Medieval Occupations [ source ] In the Middle Ages, the lack of machinery meant any job that needed doing required someone to "get ...

A medieval market [ source ] The post on the laws of Maldon mentioned this: 10. On market day no man shall regrate, nor sell meat, fi...

Control your pig! [ source ] The town of Maldon was mentioned recently as the site of a disastrous (for the Anglo-Saxons) battle. Maldo...

[ source ] In the Middle Ages, birthdays were not usually marked by the common people. They didn't keep calendars on the kitchen wal...

Kiev is in the news a lot lately, and it makes me think of Anne of Kiev, whose name at birth was Anna Yaroslavna, an 11th century queen of F...