Daily Medieval

The first marriage of James I of Aragon was to Eleanor of Castile. She was the daughter of King Alfonso VIII of Castile and Eleanor of Engl...

Despite Hubert de Burgh's support of Henry III at the start of his minority reign, the two had fallen out and Hubert was in danger. Ul...

Things seemed to be going well for Ralph Neville , the Bishop of Chichester and Lord Chancellor for life. He had a nice new manor on New Str...

Ralph Neville is an example of a powerful figure in Medieval English administration whose personal details are little known. He was ordained...

Yesterday we talked about medieval parents having large families. Today we're going to talk about preventing large families. Although Ca...

St. Francis of Assisi insisted on personal poverty for members of the order he founded, the idea that one should have no possessions and li...

Isabella II was the daughter of John of Brienne and Maria of Montferrat. Maria (1192 - 1212) was the daughter of Isabella I, Queen of Jerusa...

When Pope Gregory IX started what came to be called the War of the Keys , he thought he was secure because his target was the Holy Roman Em...

The War of the Keys was called that because of the image of crossed keys (keys to the Kingdom of Heaven) on the papal flag. The war was betw...

The first thing we should establish is that "anti-semitism" is the wrong term for what happened to Jews in Western Europe and else...

Ugolino di Conti's birth year is suggested as somewhere between 1145 and 1170, but there are suggestions that he was in his 90s at his d...

Inspired by Francis of Assisi , Clare of Assisi  (16 July 1194 - 11 August 1253) founded a new order for women, the "Order of Poor Ladi...

In the same decades that Batu Khan (c. 1207–1255) and another grandson of Genghis Khan, Kadan, were establishing the Golden Horde and conso...

There are a number of families in the 21st century who have become wealthy through commerce and use that wealth to exert their influence on ...

Ramon Llull's system of philosophy was officially condemned by an Inquisitor General of the Roman Catholic Church, Nicholas Eymerich, a ...

Innocent IV (born Sinibaldo Fieschi) had a busy decade. He lived longer than that, of course, and was consequential, but there is a lot of u...

It seems unfair that I mention Jacques de Vitry here and here and here , and don't really tell much more than he was a cardinal. He wa...

This blog made a reference to the Disputation of Paris years  ago , but never got around to any details. The Disputation was a debate betwee...

I mentioned yesterday that Orleans University had its start in 1230 with teachers and students who fled from turmoil at the University of Pa...

The Smithfield Decretals have been mentioned recently. They are a book of decrees drawn from 1,971 letters from Pope Gregory IX, with glos...