Daily Medieval

When Emperor John II Comnenos chose his younger son Manuel over the older Isaac as his heir, some eyebrows were raised. One explanation offe...

As the eldest son of Emperor Alexios I Comnenos , John had the status of Porphyrogenitus , "born to the purple." He had an older a...

Nikephoros Bryennios the Younger (1062 - 1137) was a Byzantine noble. As a general, he defended Constantinople when the army of Godfrey of B...

Anna Comnena (1083 - 1153) has had her own blog posts before ( here and here ). The daughter of Alexios I Comnenos and Irene Doukaina, she...

The Unified Kingdom of Georgia in the Middle Ages stretched from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. When it was conquered by the Byzantine Em...

Alexios I Comnenos might not have made it to the position of Byzantine emperor if not for the behind-the-scene actions of his mother, Anna D...

"Behind every great man is a woman" was never more apt than in the case of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Comnenos  and his mothe...

Alexios I Comnenos (1057 - 1118) was the Byzantine emperor during the start of the Crusades. Since the Byzantines were a part of the old Rom...

Kilij Arslan I (1079 - 1107) was the Sultan of Rum; it was he who had to deal with the Europeans of the First Crusade when they attempted t...

When the First Crusade approached the Holy Land, they were met by the Seljuk Sultan of Rum, Kilij Arslan I. His first encounter with the Eu...

The Crusade of 1101 had high hopes: the First Crusade had already been successful, establishing the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Germans, ...

Because the First Crusade was successful, in 1100-1101 several of those who had avoided going on the First (or started and turned back beca...

William IX, Duke of Aquitaine and Gascony (1071 - 1127), also Count of Poitiers, had a shaky start in life. He was the son of Duke William V...

Troubadours originally referred to their songs as vers , but over time developed a set of several different specific types of composition. T...

The word " troubadour " was masculine, and the feminine form was "trobairitz" (both singular and plural). The term was r...

In the years 1100 - 1350, a type of musical performer arose called a troubadour. They did not call themselves troubadours; that term was fir...

I mentioned that, for all our talk of courtly love  in the Middle Ages, the only use of the actual phrase was in a single Provençal poem. Th...

"Courtly love" is the phrase used to describe a set of "rules" expressed in medieval literature about the relationship o...

The man who first came up with the concepts of the Matter of Rome, the  Matter of Britain , and the  Matter of France , was Jean Bodel (c.11...

Just like the Matter of France , the Matter of Britain is a collection of legends and literature involving kings and heroes. King Arthur was...

This post referred to the Song of Roland  as foundational to of the Matter of France. The Matter of France, also known as "The Carolin...

In 778, Basques ambushed the rearguard of Charlemagne's army as it was going northward through the Ronceveaux Pass in the Pyrenees. They...

Charlemagne thought trying to retake parts of the Iberian Peninsula back from the Moors was a good idea, so he accepted an invitation from S...

I have mentioned before the disagreements, after the death of Muhammad, over which direction the faith should go. The Rashidun Caliphate wa...

Long before the Crusades in the late 11th century decided to take control of the Holy Land, Christians and Muslims were clashing in the west...

Severianus and Theodora were members of well-to-do Hispano-Roman families in the 6th century who bore four children, all of whom became sain...

Severianus and Theodora were members of well-to-do Hispano-Roman families in the 6th century who bore four children, all of whom became sain...

Severianus and Theodora were members of well-to-do Hispano-Roman families in the 6th century who bore four children, all of whom became sain...