Daily Medieval

St. Nivard was one of those early medieval saints of whom we know next to nothing. He was archbishop of Reims from before 657 CE until 673. ...

Vellum—fine parchment made from the skin of a calf—is more durable than paper. Even so, manuscripts that survived for centuries are precious...

Hautvillers is a commune in northeastern France. In 650 the Benedictine Abbey of St. Peter (in French it was the Abbaye Saint-Pierre d'...

I believe and confess that omnipotent and unchangeable God foreknew and predestined saint angels and elect men to eternal life gratis and th...

Ephesians 1:11 says "In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all thin...

There were two Councils of Orange. The first was held 8 November 441, presided over by Hilary of Arles.  He and 17 bishops established rules...

Cæsarius of Arles meant well. He was a major figure in his generation to preach asceticism in daily life, and as a bishop urged the necessit...

Tertullian in 220 CE wrote De Pallio  ("Concerning the Pallium"), in which he talks about clothing fashion in different countries....

If you search online for "Sigeric of Canterbury" the top entries returned are about his itinerary, as mentioned previously. He did...

The Middle Ages did not have maps the way we think of them. Or rather they had maps, but not for the purpose we  would think of them. There ...

I never gave roads much thought before. References to "The Silk Road" did not refer to a "road"; instead, it was a serie...

One of the oldest roadways in Northern Europe is the Sweet Track, of crossed wooden poles driven into waterlogged ground to support oak plan...

In Part 1 we learned that the first mention of the grail was as a miraculous serving dish. The day before we learned that Robert de Boron ...

When it comes to stories about the Middle Ages, the story of the Holy Grail is, you might say, the Holy Grail of stories. The first mention ...

Robert de Boron was a French poet of the late 12th/early 13th centuries. There are two texts in Old French that are definitively attributed ...

Galgano Guidotti (1148 - 3 December 1181) was born at Chiusdino in Tuscany. He became a knight with a reputation for cruelty and arrogance. ...

John Hawkwood (c.1323 - 1394) was an English soldier who became famous as a mercenary leader. Many Italian city-states hired foreign mercena...

On the 28th of May in 1378, a small expedition of 16 men set out from the City of London. In the financial records that manage their pay, on...

Poor Bernabò Visconti. Lord of Milan, not well-liked by his people, deposed and imprisoned (then likely poisoned) by his nephew. Of course, ...

Italy was not unified as a country until 1861; before then, the separate regions/cities saw themselves as unique sovereign entities. This le...

Kyiv is one of the oldest cities in eastern Europe. Humans lived there since the Stone Age, and from the Iron Age there is evidence of anima...

To be fair, I have mentioned one  Ostrogoth before: King Theodoric was talked about here and here . The larger culture of the Goths has be...

In 286CE, the Emperor Diocletian decided that the capital of the Western Roman Empire should be Mediolanum (Milan) instead of Rome, leaving ...

The following tale, like much of early history, cannot be confirmed, but it has come down to us as an actual event with actual consequences....

Although Constantine had called the 1st Council of Nicaea to make sure there was an established orthodoxy for Christianity throughout the em...

The winds of change blew quickly for christians in the Mediterranean in the early 4th century. Emperor Diocletian had persecuted christians ...

No religious group has ever stayed uniform in its beliefs and practices, and in the first few centuries of the Common Era, the burgeoning Ch...

Although Donatus Magnus ' appeal at the Council of Arles failed, and  he was exiled to Gaul until his death, Donatism did not die out. A...

In Northern Africa, specifically the area we now call Algeria, a Berber Christian bishop created one of the first schisms in the Catholic Ch...

They call themselves the Amazigh, but history knows them as Berbers, who inhabited northwestern Africa since at least 10,000BCE. The etymolo...