Daily Medieval

When Bishop Hildebert returned to Le Mans after his visit to Rome (to ask the pope to let him resign from his position), he faced a situati...

King Louis VI of France (1120 - 1180) had several children with his second wife, Adélaide of Maurienne. Their eldest, Philip (1116 - 1131) w...

Peter of Montboissier was born to a woman who was called "Blessed Raingarde" (she was revered as saintly but not formally canonize...

Alberic started in Beauvais in France but went everywhere once he became a papal legate. Born in 1080, he entered Cluny and became a Benedic...

When Pope Innocent II decided to try to reconcile the Roman Catholic Church with the Armenian Apostolic Church , he wrote to its current he...

Gregorio Papareschi was a Cluniac monk who was made a cardinal deacon in 1116 by Pope Paschal II . After Paschal, Pope Calixtus II sent him...

The Joust was a specific kind of tournament , and was one of the few types of military contests that had to be on horseback and involved on...

In 1134, a man in his 20s entered Rievaulx, a Cistercian abbey in North Yorkshire. A sentence like this has been written many times in this ...

After the Ostrogoths took Rome in 476 under Odoacer , the Senate continued managing affairs; after all, the "barbarians" didn'...

When Pope Innocent II (shown here on the left, hanging out with St. Laurence) finally was able to be  pope—after the rival antipope Anacletu...

When Pope Honorius II died in 1130, two popes were elected by rival factions, first Innocent II by a small contingent of cardinals, and then...

19th century bust of Arnold. For those in the Middle Ages who thought the pope should be solely a spiritual leader and not wield tempor...

Since we brought up Canterbury yesterday, and arguably its most famous archbishop, let us take a look at his predecessor, who was very much...

Sicily, an island of less than 10,000 square miles just off the coast of Italy, would not seem to merit its own king, and for a long time it...