Daily Medieval

Ögedei Khan, who never got the letter Relations between the East and West have always been strained, generally because of radically dif...

The red pin is Kufa, the purple pin is Baghdad, about 170 km north. The Abbasids had taken over from the Umayyads, and in order to make...

The Abbasid Caliphate has only been mentioned so far as a target of the Assassins , but deserves more attention. Descended from Muhammad...

Gebhard, the Count of Calw, was born about 1018 into an illustrious family. Holy Roman Emperor Henry III (1017 - 1056) recognized him as ...

Alexios Comnenos Strategopoulos Recently, DailyMedieval covered the 4th Crusade and its misguided conquest of Constantinople. ( This po...

Scotland was not always a unified country. Like most countries, it was a collection of tribes with their own loyalties and mutual enmity....

King Henry II of England had problems. The period known as The Anarchy was over, but the mercenaries employed during it were causing tro...

An "eyre" (Middle English, from Old French eire from Latin iter , "journey") was "a circuit court held in medie...

I have always been impressed by the work of Marsilius Ficino (1433 - 1499), but was not sure how to tackle him in a short blog post. Whet...

Sebinkarahisar, possible burial site of Ewastatewos [ link ] The word "sabbath" has a long history. Our word is from the Old ...

Serpukhov Kremlin (picture by  Nikolay Burdykina ) We think of "The Kremlin" as the major government building of Russia, as w...

St. Bonaventure has been mentioned before, writing a biography of Francis of Assisi  and disagreeing with Averroes' definition of the...

A 1552 map depicting the Bastille Yesterday was Bastille Day, the anniversary of French peasants storming the Bastille to release priso...

A 17th century depiction of Chelles Abbey The 7th century saw a great trend in France and Britain of women entering religious houses. O...

We touched on the Christianization of Kievan Rus when talking about the Varangian Guard . This Christianization did not happen all at onc...

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...

Hugh of Jabala tells Pope Eugene about Prester John Many of you know about the decades when the papacy was headquartered in Avignon (fi...

Eastern façade of the Boukoleon Palace, facing the Sea. "Born to the purple." You may have heard the phrase before; it denote...

An 11th-century depiction of Varangian Guards. In recent posts on the 4th Crusade and the Siege of Constantinople, I mentioned the Vara...

This is the 500th post on the Daily Medieval blog. In its honor, let us look at the year 500 CE and how it overlaps some of the previous ...

The post on the siege of Zara mentioned using a mangonel  being used to attack the walls with stones. As you can imagine, a mangonel wa...

[see Part 1 here and Part 2 here , the intermezzo , and Part 3 here ] With former Emperor Isaac II Angelos dead at the end of January ...

[see Part 1 here and Part 2 here , and the preface to today's here ] So the Crusade left in spring of 1203 to sail to Constanbti...

[see Part 1 here and Part 2 here ] [Meanwhile, In Constantinople...] Alexios IV Emperor Alexios III Angelos (c.1153-1211) over...

[see Part 1 here ] From Venice to Zara, and later to Constantinople Those members of the 4th Crusade who went to Venice were lodged ...

The Kingdom of Jerusalem, established after the First Crusade by Europeans, had been re-conquered by Saladin in 1187. Much of that was rec...

Plaque on the site of Montfort's death Simon de Montfort has been mentioned before, opposing Henry III , but that was the 6th Earl ...

This past Saturday, the 21st of June, was the anniversary of the death of Enrico Dandolo, the 42nd Doge of Venice. His tenure as Doge had...

Doxe de Venexia. Doge di Venezia. The Doge of Venice. The title is based on the Latin dux ["military leader"], from which ...