Daily Medieval

The Archbishop of Mainz and the Bishop of Hildesheim. each wanted jurisdiction over the wealthy Gandersheim Abbey . This conflict reached a ...

A significant controversy during the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Otto III while he was still under the regency of his mother, Theophanu , wa...

Otto III (980 - 23 January 1002) became King of Germany at the age of three on the death of his father, Otto II. He was in line to be Holy R...

Odilo of Cluny (c.962 - 1049) wrote a life of Holy Roman Empress Adelaide of Italy (to whom he was supposedly related). It is from Odilo th...

Yesterday I mentioned the need to explain Adelaide of Italy to understand how she affected the marriage of her son. Adelaide was born to Kin...

Holy Roman Emperor Otto I was looking for a suitable bride for his son, Otto, and thought the daughter of a Byzantine Emperor was a good ch...

When Liudprand of Cremona went to Constantinople a second time, it was specifically to arrange a marriage between the son of Holy Roman Emp...

We are grateful that some people in the past chose to record what they saw and heard, or what they were told by others. Surviving histories ...

The daughter of Theophylact I and Theodora , Marozia, was wedded to Alberic I of Spoleto in 909. Alberic's link to the counts of Tusculu...

In  The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , Edward Gibbon (1737 - 1794) wrote of two "sister prostitutues" whose...

The House of Theophylact (the counts of Tusculum) ruled Rome for four generations. A grandson of the founding Theophylact I was Alberic II o...

In 946, Rome was an independent republic ruled by Alberic II of Spoleto (and we'll be taking a closer look at his whole family soon), wh...

In 931, Archbishop Rudgar of Trier died, and by the end of the year his successor, Rotbert, was in place. If we assume the usual age of 30 w...

A mistranslation of the word "Israel" in a record from the court of King Æthelstan made it sound that there was a Jew working in ...

The popularity in the Middle Ages of tafl , a type of table game, led someone to develop a version of it that could be used as a teaching to...

Yesterday's post mentioned two people playing tafl.  This was one of several versions of Northern European board games that emphasized ...

When Sigurd was three years old, two half-brothers were killed by the Swedish King Eysteinn Beli. His mother asked Sigurd's older brothe...

Son of the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok and leader of the Great Heathen Army , Halfdan Ragnarsson went on to become King of Jorvik, of Dublin, ...

There was an invasion in England in 865 by a coalition of Scandinavian warriors referred to in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as the Great Heath...

Lately the name Oda has come up as the Archbishop of Canterbury during the time of Dunstan , Æthelwold , and Oswald .  According to Oswald...

We now come to Oswald of Worcester who, along with the recently explored  Æthelwold and Dunstan , was considered one of the "Three Eng...

Unfortunately, St. Dunstan could never stop himself from speaking truth to power, even when power was more, um power ful than he. (I suppos...

Now brought back to England by Edgar the Peaceable after the demise of Eadwig , Dunstan was made Bishop of Worcester and Bishop of London....

When King Eadred died, Dunstan was ready to serve his successor, the teenaged Eadwig (pictured to the left). Eadwig, however, was not inter...

St. Dunstan's life had its ups and downs, as the Wheel of Fortune predicts. Driven from one king's court because of the jealousy of...

There were three men in the 10th century in England who were called the "Three English Holy Hierarchs" for their work in reviving ...

When Æthelwold was made Bishop of Winchester in 963, the discipline of the priests there had suffered. Records say that priests there did n...