Daily Medieval

After the Rhineland Massacres, the People's Crusade continued from Cologne toward the Holy Land. Some took boats down the Danube. Some m...

In Parts One and Two we get the feeling that forgeries were quite common, and used to "alter history" to the benefit of an insti...

While Bishop Adhemar was traveling through Slavonia with the First Crusade , he was accosted by a group of Pechenegs. They were described i...

The reign of Pope Urban II was barely more than a decade, but he made some decisions with profound effects for centuries. He was born Odo of...

The rise of John Axouch from captive Turk to Byzantine megas domestikos  and sebastor  can be found here . Although he was treated well by o...

In June of 1097, the First Crusade captured Nicaea, at that time under the control of the Seljuk Turks. An attempt at defense by Kilij Arsl...

When Emperor John II Comnenos chose his younger son Manuel over the older Isaac as his heir, some eyebrows were raised. One explanation offe...

Anna Comnena (1083 - 1153) has had her own blog posts before ( here and here ). The daughter of Alexios I Comnenos and Irene Doukaina, she...

The Unified Kingdom of Georgia in the Middle Ages stretched from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. When it was conquered by the Byzantine Em...

Alexios I Comnenos might not have made it to the position of Byzantine emperor if not for the behind-the-scene actions of his mother, Anna D...

"Behind every great man is a woman" was never more apt than in the case of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Comnenos  and his mothe...

Alexios I Comnenos (1057 - 1118) was the Byzantine emperor during the start of the Crusades. Since the Byzantines were a part of the old Rom...

Kilij Arslan I (1079 - 1107) was the Sultan of Rum; it was he who had to deal with the Europeans of the First Crusade when they attempted t...

Because the First Crusade was successful, in 1100-1101 several of those who had avoided going on the First (or started and turned back beca...

[I am on a brief vacation, so here is a post from the past. This post first appeared 2 December 2012.] When Anna Comnena was born in 10...