Daily Medieval

[ source ] Eclipses were a mystery for awhile, but eventually enough took place that astronomers could spot the patterns. European astr...

"A Grete Pye" should look like this  [ source ] What will you do with all that turkey on Friday? Why not a "Great Pie...

I like to link items in each post to previous posts that offer more info on those items. I have frequently referred to the time when the po...

The Glory of the Roman Empire was seen by the Middle Ages as a Golden Age. Petrarch lamented the loss of learning and art between the peak...

In the post on short-lived reigns, I mentioned John I of France, sone of Louis X and Clémence of Hungary, who reigned five days because he ...

Queen Elizabeth II of England recently passed a milestone, becoming the longest-reigning monarch of England. I am not certain of the "...

The posts called The Marrying Kind (Parts 1 , 2 , and 3 ) mentioned Zoe Porphyrogenita's nephew Michael confining her to "the wome...

One of the things that "everyone knows" about the Middle Ages is that there was no clean water to be had, and so they drank bee...

Off the coast of Mystic, Connecticut is Enders Island. Only 11 acres in size, it is named for Dr. Thomas B. Enders, who purchased it in 191...

Part 1 tells how Zoe Porphyrogenita had one fiancee die, how she rejected another, and how her first husband died. Part 2 tells how her...

[continued from Part 1 ] After Emperor Romanos III Argyros was found dead in his bath, suspicion fell on Michael the Paphlagonian. Michae...

Even if women were not allowed to ascend to the  throne, they were often the link to a throne for someone else. The rulership might not be...

Source Ah, numbers. We use them every day. We also know that there are different sets of numbers. We have Arabic numerals for everyday ...

Julian of Norwich was a Christian mystic who lived (based on internal references in her writings) from about 1342 to 1415. We know little a...

Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm—let's just call him Ibn Hazm—was a prime example of how medieval scholars could be very ...

The year was 1324. King Edward II of England was making a mess of things with his apathetic and arbitrary approach to ruling the kingdom. H...

Rushes. There are about 400 species of the Family Juncus , a round-stemmed grass-like mostly perennial plant that grows in wetlands. On...

From a site that sells reproductions. Consider the candle. Today it is a quaint device used for "mood" lighting, romance, or...

The European Middle Ages did not like bland food, and used spices extensively—often in combinations we would find odd or downright unappeal...

Saint Albert of Jerusalem was born Albert Avogadro in 1149 in Italy. He became one of the Canons Regular (Dominicans) after studying theo...

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...