Daily Medieval

Along the Mediterranean coast of Northern Africa was an area controlled by the Roman Empire called the Africa Proconsularis. When the Empire...

One of the medical texts composed by Isaac Israeli ben Solomon was translated from Arabic to Latin and called De Urinis  ("Concerning U...

Some of the works translated at Toledo by our old friend Gerard of Cremona were the Book of Definitions  and the Book of Elements  into Lat...

The Royal Frankish Annals cover the era from Charlemagne's grandfather to his son. In it we find that Caliph Harun al-Rashid gave an ele...

Collections of animals for private amusement or public display have existed for a long time. There is a current trend toward calling them ...

We're talking about Villard de Honnecourt, who traveled Europe and Hungary between 1225 and 1235 (at least), sketching along the way. As...

Who was Villard de Honnecourt? He mentions in his sketches that he had been to many lands, including spending several days in Hungary. He do...

I've mentioned  Villard de Honecourt  back in 2012; he is  so  worth another look. Anything we know about him is entirely incidental. Ar...

There is a 20th century art historian who has appeared in two posts because of his eye-opening contributions to the field in the 1940s: here...

Scholasticism (from the Latin word scholasticus , which is from the Greek σχολαστικός, "pertaining to schools") was a method for a...

Around 1100CE, monastic schools started to discover the works of Aristotle, thanks to Judea-Islamic translations. Just as scholarly study wa...

(Note: Most of this is from the previous post "The Commentator" on 11 December 2012) Averroes (1126-1198) was born in Córdoba into...

We do not know very many details about Aristotle's life: he was born in northern Greece about 384BCE; at the age of 19 he joined Plato...

I suppose if we wanted to find a Christian parallel to Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas would be an obvious choice. Born into the aristocracy, not...

Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed  is available now in paper, digital, and audio form; in case you don't get around to ordering a ...

Moses ben Maimon (1138 - 1204) was a rabbi, a philosopher, an astronomer, and the personal physician of Saladin. (Saladin was most recently ...

Sar Shalom ben Moses got too big for his britches. Born into a distinguished family of royal physicians in the Fatimid court in Egypt, he he...

Let me start by saying that "tax farming" and a "tax farmer" are not really about agriculture, except in a tangential se...

Toregene (pictured here, with her name in Mongolian) has been called one of the most powerful women in history. Born into the Naiman tribe (...

Möngke Khan (11 January 1209 - 11 August 1259) was the son of Tolui (c.1190 - c.1232), the youngest son of Genghis Khan. Möngke had been suc...

After Hassan i-Sabbah took over Alamut Castle from the Justanids, he went about making it a place that his followers would be willing to die...

Modern gamers (of which I am not one) are familiar with "Assassin's Creed"; they may even know it was based on a 1938 novel, A...

We cannot talk about the Order of Assassins without talking about the word "assassin" and its origin, and you may be surprised to ...

I wrote a post about Benjamin of Tudela (1130-1173) back in 2012 , but there is a lot more to him. His Masa'ot Binyamin (Travels of Ben...

You are no doubt aware of three major religions that started in the Middle East: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. There is, however, another re...

The previous post post discussed a hospital site in the Christian section of Jerusalem called Muristan. I say a hospital "site" be...

The Hospitallers were nicknamed thus because they were founded by members of the First Crusade who joined together to protect a hospital bui...

  Pope Clement V, who approved the order to arrest all the Templars, had earlier told them to merge with the Hospitallers, since it didn...

After the Knights Templar were dissolved in 1312, Pope Clement V wanted all their property turned over to the Knights Hospitallers. King Edw...