Daily Medieval

Yesterday's post on Mesih Pasha mentions the Siege of Rhodes in 1480, when a small garrison of Knights Hospitallers at Rhodes withstood...

Mesih Pasha was chosen from obscurity—we don't even know his original name before Mehmed II forced him to convert to Islam and made him...

After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II , he took two young male potential Byzantine heirs, converted them to Islam, and ...

Once Mehmed II had taken Constantinople  in 1453, absorbing it into the Ottoman Empire , he declared himself Roman Caesar. His thinking was...

In 1451, Mehmed II , sultan of the Ottoman Empire , chose as his first self-imposed task that he would conquer Constantinople. To prepare, h...

Mehmed II, also called Mehmed the Conqueror, accomplished one of the most damaging counters to Christianity and Europe and conquered an enor...

The Ottoman Empire , begun by Osman Ghazi , lasted until the 19th century, but we will confine ourselves to an earlier century or two. The i...

Although Alaeddin's idea to create a group ready to be called up to military service at a moment's notice failed due to their lack ...

Well, not the "real" Aladdin in the sense that he was a man with a magic lamp, but a man who did perform "wonders" in th...

Begun by (and named for) Osman Ghazi  (c.1254 - 1323/4), and inspired (perhaps) by a dream , the Ottoman Empire grew to encompass an enormou...

Osman I (c.1254 - 1323), emir of his Turkish clan, married Rabia Bala Hatun (died 1324), daughter of Sheikh Edebali, a religious leader. Ac...

Osman Ghazi is one of those many figures in history whose impact was large but whose life's details are not well known. We are not even ...

The Trebizond Empire  (the orange slice on the southern shore of the Black Sea illustration), founded in 1204 on the shores of the Black Sea...

Some Byzantine rulers invaded lands far enough from Constantinople that it made sense to establish the territories as separate empires. One ...

After King David VI Narin of Georgia took the western half of the kingdom and seceded from Georgia , he became King David I of Imereti (West...

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 ...

Pope Honorius III (fl.1216 - 1227), in a letter dated 20 June 1221, referred to "forces coming from the Far East to rescue the Holy Lan...

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 ...

France and Scotland were two very different countries: different climates, languages, cuisines, cultures. They had one important thing in co...

The Clan Buchanan, one of the oldest Highland clans, can date their start to 1016 on the banks of Loch Lomond . Their origin story says that...

There is more to Loch Lomond than just being jealous of the notoriety of Loch Ness. In an 11th-century version of the Historia Brittonum , i...

In Part One we read about items in the Historia Brittonum  that concerned King Arthur and the city of Bath. The first one listed of the Mir...

Two later versions of the 9th century  Historia Brittonum  contained a section that is referred to as Mirabilia , "marvels" or ...

In a previous post I mentioned the old idea that Britain was founded by people who fled the Fall of Troy . This idea came from the Historia ...

Taliesin (6th century) came a legendary figure of whom many stories are told and to whom many poems are ascribed—(almost) all of it fiction....

The 9th-century Historia Brittonum  mentions five especially renowned British poets, one of whom is Taliesin. In the 12th century he was con...

The Classical Era sources we have for druid culture agree that druids were important in Celtic society. Julius Caesar wrote that the druids...

One of the earliest recorded descriptions of druids comes from Julius Caesar, who encountered them in the conquest of Gaul in the 1st centur...