Daily Medieval

The Waldensians are a Christian protestant group that originated in the Middle Ages and still exists, having survived—sometimes through seve...

Sociology, the study of the development, structure, and functioning of human society, is probably best done when the sociologist can observe...

Ibn Khaldun ( alias Abū Zayd ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn Khaldūn al-Ḥaḍramī) was born 27 May 1332 in Tunis. He was a Muslim Arab from a...

Current estimates of the richest people living today show Elon Musk topping the chart at 200+ billion dollars, but I'm going to tell you...

It all started when a knight, Ritter Ramm, was sent by Emperor Otto I to find game while visiting Harzburg. It was winter, with snow everyw...

The Roman Empire was a far-reaching entity that gave the northern Mediterranean and Western Europe access to resources from the East and Afr...

The franc was coined by King John the Good in 1360 to help stabilize the currency in France and try to generate the millions he needed to pa...

King John the Good of France was captured during the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 and taken to England as a hostage, hosted by King Edward. He...

Probably the easiest way to sum up the medieval view of hostages is a line from Adam Costa's Hostages in the Middle Ages : In medieval E...

This is the story of Philip of Courtenay (1243 - 15 December 1283). He was one of the Latin Emperors of Constantinople—the empire was establ...

"Mortgage" is a Late Middle English word from Old French, and literally means "dead pledge"; folk etymology will say the...

I've talked about different jobs here and here . What could you earn in different professions? First, we need to know the currency: 1 ...

When I taught high school English Literature, students were aghast at the small sums (a few hundred pounds) that a successful poet might hav...

Let us talk about coinage, specifically the solidus . Its plural was solidi ; also known as the bezant  (named for Byzantium, the earlier na...

Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum (Latin: "Deeds of the Franks and the other pilgrims to Jerusalem"), also known simp...

Guibert of Nogent, a Benedictine  was not remarkable in his time, but his extensive writings and autobiography have more recently provided i...

How do we know what happened hundreds of years ago? Sometimes we have an archaeological finds that are subject to interpretation. Sometimes ...

Godfrey (c.1060 - 18 July, 1100) was the second son of Eustace II, Count of Boulogne, and therefore was not in line for much inheritance. Hi...

It can be argued that the First Crusade, announced in 1095, could not or would not feasibly have been undertaken much earlier than the end o...

Christianity in the Middle Ages did not approve of Islam and its swift growth. It was not many years after the death of Muhammad in 632 CE t...

The figure to the left is a horseshoe; or rather, it is a hipposandal . This was the Classical Roman method of "shoeing" a horse. ...

The idea that quoits—a game in which players toss rings at a stake, hoping to encircle it—originated with the " Greek or Roman discus ...

The Statutes of Kilkenny, established in 1366 by Prince Lionel of Antwerp, were designed to keep Irish and English peoples and cultures so d...

  When King Edward III sent his son Lionel as viceroy of Ireland, there were issues on the agenda regarding the presence of the English in I...

Lionel of Antwerp, like many royal children, was obligated to be a political tool as well as a person. Born 29 November, 1338 in Antwerp (hi...

Large empires such as the Roman Empire needed ways to communicate quickly and efficiently with their far-flung domains. For the Romans, it w...

When the oak gall wasp lands on a species of oak, it secretes a chemical that interferes with the tree's normal growth, producing a bulb...

You see it everywhere, yet we never give it a moment's thought. Almost everything printed uses ink. (There are heat-sensitive labels/rec...