Daily Medieval

The population of Syria is currently about 60% Sunni and 13% Shia Muslim. 'Twas not always thus. Map of ancient Syria, 1683 [ sourc...

The Shrine of the Three Kings The Three Kings, or Magi, appear suddenly in the Gospel of Matthew and just as quickly disappear. That pa...

Duncan I was king of Scotland from 1034 until he was killed on 14 August 1040 by Macbeth. Peter O'Toole as Duncan, portrayed as an ...

[ source ] We have heard the phrase "since time immemorial" to refer to an origin of some practice or belief embedded so far...

Parchment from 1303 showing the three-part, Final Concord. [ source ] The word "fine" has many meanings, several of them der...

The War of Breton Succession (see immediately previous entries) included an interesting military interlude. A new book on the subject!...

[Click here for the start, here for part two.] The Battle of Auray, from an edition of Froissart's Chronicles Things were not l...

When John of Montfort was captured by France during the War of Breton Succession and imprisoned in the Louvre, his wife took up arms to def...

Between 1341 and 1364, while the Hundred Years War was contesting the right of the English king to rule France (or, at least, parts of it...

Medieval wives were not always the stay-at-home type, and some of them acted in ways that were far from the mold of what we think of as a...

Available 2015(?) In honor of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), DailyMedieval is going on hiatus for the month of November so ...

Władysław III of Poland was born on 31 October 1424. He was named King of Poland when he was 10 years old and King of Hungary at the age ...

Henry challenging the power of the church Little is known of the figure called Bruno the Saxon, except that he was a monk attached to t...

The ruins of Kaiserswerth in Dusseldorf In 1062, Archbishop Anno II of Cologne and several princes decided that the 11-year-old Henry I...

We have mentioned more than a few Holy Roman Emperors, but not any Holy Roman Empresses. Carving of Agnes Agnes of Poitou was born ab...

The Ulugh Beg Observatory Museum, built in 1970 Ulugh Beg is the more familiar name of Mīrzā Muhammad Tāraghay bin Shāhrukh (22 March 1...

A 12th-century depiction of the Wheel of Fortune from the "Garden of Delights" book by Herrad of Landsberg The Wheel of Fortu...

Boethius (left, with numbers from India) debating Pythagoras (right, with an abacus) while Arithmetic looks on Boethius has been mentio...

Ferdinand I, son of Pedro the Cruel Inheritance is never more complicated than when a throne is involved. The stakes are too high for a...

Bohemia, the home of  Wenceslaus  and where Jan Hus found support, was named from a Roman account. The names of both Bohemia and its nei...

Edmund Ironside meets King Canute (Matthew Paris) Fifty years before the Norman Invasion changed the culture of Britain, the island (or...

Late medieval woodcut representing destruction in Basel Earthquakes have been in the news lately, but one of the biggest earthquakes k...

There were many Khans in the Mongol Empire, but none quite like Tëmur. Tëmur was a grandson of Kublai Khan, born on 15 October, 1265; his...

Popes Formosus & Stephen VII, by Jean Paul Laurens, 1870 The Synod of Whitby was just mentioned a few days ago, and right now in 20...

Best guess arrangement of opposing troops The Battle of Hastings gets remembered on 14 October; that's when the forces of William o...

The Synod of Whitby is a familiar name to fans of medieval history (and this blog ). What is not widely known is that it was first manage...

Afonso III looked like the savior for Portugal after his brother's kingship, but Afonso fell afoul of the pope himself and was remov...

Afonso (1210 - 1279) was the second son of Afonso II of Portugal, and so never expected to inherit the throne. It was supposed to go to h...

Saint Hugo persuades Bruno of Cologne to found the Carthusian Order (cathedral window in Grenoble, France) The Carthusians have been me...

A page at work Lionel, the son of King Edward III of England and Queen Philippa, was born in Antwerp in Flanders in 1338 during the s...

Ermentrude and Charles Let us call this the story of a marriage, and a coincidence. Charles the Bald (823 - 877), a grandson of Charlem...

Statues of the two Ewalds, in the church at Cologne. Although the Saxons were not converted to Christianity until Charlemagne did it by...

One of the re-creations of the Battle of Largs [ source ] King Haakon Haakonsson of Norway refused to sell islands off the Scottish coa...

If you look at the top of the globe, you realize how seafarers from Norway could easily dip south to Scotland on their way to colonize Ic...

Excerpt from the Taxatio; see the word "Census" upper-right Today is the birthday of  Pope Nicholas IV; you can read a brief ...