38 stories from this century.
In 1324-25 Mansa Musa, emperor of Mali, crossed the Sahara to Mecca with a caravan of legendary size, spending and gifting gold so freely in Cairo that Egyptian chroniclers said its value there stayed depressed for years. The journey put Mali on Europe's maps — literally, holding a gold nugget on the Catalan Atlas — and seeded Timbuktu's golden age.
Read the story →In 1327 Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq of Delhi ordered his capital — officials, scholars, and by hostile account the whole population — transferred some 1,100 km south to Daulatabad. Thousands died on the road; within a decade the court trudged back. Paired with his token-currency fiasco, it fixed his reputation as the sultan of brilliant ideas that ended in catastrophe.
Read the story →The Peasants' Revolt began in Essex on 30 May 1381 in response to the third Poll Tax in four years. About 60,000 rebels marched on London by mid-June. They beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury on Tower Hill. The Lord Mayor William Walworth stabbed the rebel leader Wat Tyler in the throat at Smithfield on 15 June while Tyler was negotiating face-to-face with the 14-year-old King Richard II.
Read the story →Giovanni Boccaccio's *Decameron* (composed 1348–1353) frames its hundred tales as the entertainment of ten young Florentines — seven women, three men — who flee plague-stricken Florence for a country villa and tell each other ten stories a day for ten days. The frame story is the most substantial direct literary witness to the 1348 Florentine plague.
Read the story →Catherine of Siena was an unschooled Dominican tertiary from a substantial Sienese dyer's family who became one of the most influential European Catholic figures of the 14th century. Her substantial 1376 personal mission to Avignon helped persuade Pope Gregory XI to end the seventy-year Avignon papacy. She was 29.
Read the story →Clement VI had spent the worst weeks of the 1348 Avignon plague seated continuously between two large fires on the medical advice of his personal physician Guy de Chauliac. The fires worked, probably by the convection currents they generated keeping plague-carrying air away from the papal chair. Clement died of natural causes in December 1352, aged about 61.
Read the story →Matteo Giovannetti of Viterbo was the principal painter at the Palais des Papes at Avignon from 1343 to 1367. His surviving frescoes — in the Saint-Martial chapel, the Saint-Jean chapel, and the audience hall — are the best-preserved examples of mid-14th-century Italian fresco work anywhere in Europe.
Read the story →Walram von Jülich, Archbishop of Cologne from 1332 to 1349, was the senior Catholic ecclesiastical authority for the entire lower Rhineland during the Black Death. He had personal authority sufficient to prevent the 1349 anti-Jewish massacres in his archdiocese. He chose not to use it.
Read the story →The Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton of March 1328 ended the First War of Scottish Independence. The English regency under Isabella of France and Roger Mortimer recognised Robert the Bruce as legitimate king of Scotland. The treaty was substantively reversed by Edward III within five years of taking personal control.
Read the story →Guy de Chauliac served as personal physician to Popes Clement VI, Innocent VI, and Urban V at Avignon between 1342 and 1370. His *Chirurgia Magna* (1363) was the dominant European surgical textbook from the 14th century to the 17th — and contained the most detailed eyewitness account of the 1348 Black Death by a doctor who survived it.
Read the story →The Franciscan Greyfriars Church on Newgate Street was the burial site of four major English royal women — Isabella of France, Margaret of France, Eleanor of Provence's heart, and Joan of the Tower. The church was dissolved in 1538, destroyed in the 1666 Great Fire, and the modern street pattern was laid out over the unrecovered burials.
Read the story →The Palais des Papes at Avignon was the residence of the seven Avignon popes between 1335 and 1377. It is the largest Gothic palace in Europe — about 15,000 square metres of floor area, with walls up to 50 metres tall. The French Revolution turned it into a barracks. Most of the original interior was lost.
Read the story →William Montagu was Edward III's closest personal friend from boyhood. He was 29 in October 1330 when he led the small group of armed knights who climbed through the secret tunnel into Nottingham Castle, seized Roger Mortimer in the queen's bedchamber, and gave Edward III sole control of the English crown. Montagu was rewarded with the earldom of Salisbury.
Read the story →The Great Western Schism (1378–1417) followed directly from the seventy-year Avignon papacy. Rival lines of popes at Rome and Avignon (and later at Pisa) excommunicated each other and divided the Catholic Christian world along approximately Anglo-French political lines for a generation.
Read the story →Giovanni Boccaccio opened the *Decameron* with one of the most famous descriptions of a medieval plague pit ever written. Modern Florentine osteoarchaeology has identified a 14th-century mass-burial site beneath the Santa Maria Novella complex that matches the *Decameron*'s description in unsettling detail.
Read the story →While the [Great Famine of 1315–1322](/articles/great-famine-1315-1322) was reducing the European wheat supply, a rinderpest-like cattle disease was simultaneously killing 60–80% of the European cattle population. The two crises compounded each other. The 1318 bovine pestilence is one of the largest livestock mortality events in European history.
Read the story →Gabriele de' Mussis's *Historia de Morbo* (c. 1348) is the source of the famous story that the Mongol khan Jani Beg ended the 1346 siege of Caffa by catapulting plague-infected corpses over the walls. De' Mussis was not at Caffa. The corpse-catapult story may be a literary invention. The Black Death still arrived in Italy from Caffa.
Read the story →A letter discovered in the Montpellier archives in 1878 — addressed to Edward III from the papal notary Manuel Fieschi around 1336 — claimed that Edward II had escaped his Berkeley Castle imprisonment, walked across Europe in disguise, and was living as a hermit at the Lombard hermitage of Sant'Alberto di Butrio. Modern historians remain divided.
Read the story →The Stone Gate at the southern end of Old London Bridge displayed the severed heads of executed traitors on iron-tipped pikes from approximately 1305 to 1660. William Wallace's head went up first. By the 1660 closure the gate had displayed the heads of several hundred traitors, regicides, and political enemies of the Crown.
Read the story →Hugh Despenser the Younger was Edward II's principal favourite from about 1318 until the king's deposition in 1326. His public execution at Hereford was one of the most elaborately brutal of the English medieval period — and the man who had ruled England with him died in a Berkeley castle basement nine months later.
Read the story →The Knights Hospitaller of Saint John captured Rhodes in 1309 and held it as a sovereign crusader state until Suleiman the Magnificent's siege of 1522. They built the fortifications that still define the Old Town. They lost the island after a six-month siege that the rest of Christian Europe declined to relieve.
Read the story →Konrad of Megenberg was a Regensburg canon and natural-philosophy writer who composed a tract in 1350 explicitly refuting the claim that Jews had caused the Black Death by poisoning wells. He used Aristotelian-medical argument against the popular conspiracy theory that had been justifying the Rhineland pogroms.
Read the story →Konrad of Megenberg was a Bavarian cleric and natural philosopher who wrote a Latin treatise during the 1349 Black Death arguing on medical and theological grounds that the well-poisoning accusations against European Jews were factually false. The treatise circulated in fewer than two dozen manuscript copies and had substantially no documented effect on the simultaneous massacres.
Read the story →Francesco Petrarca grew up in Avignon when his exiled Florentine father followed the papal court there in 1311. He spent four decades in and out of the city while writing the most famous polemical attacks on the Avignon papacy ever produced — coining the phrase "Babylonian captivity" that has defined the period since.
Read the story →When the French king Charles IV died in February 1328 without a male heir, the French throne passed to his cousin Philip of Valois under a specific reading of the medieval Frankish *Salic Law*. The reading excluded the rival English claim of Edward III through his French-princess mother Isabella. Edward eventually decided he disagreed.
Read the story →Konrad Schmid led a flagellant heretical movement in central Germany through the 1360s, predicting that the world would end in 1369. Approximately 168 of his followers were burned at the stake. The exact date and place of Schmid's own death are uncertain. Some of his followers continued to predict the end of the world into the 15th century.
Read the story →Mass psychogenic illness — the modern medical term for what older eras called collective madness — has been documented continuously across Europe and the rest of the world for at least seven hundred years. The clinical pattern is the same. The cultural framing changes.
Read the story →Between 1347 and 1351 a pandemic killed somewhere between a third and half of everyone in Europe. Contemporaries called it the Great Mortality. It was the largest single demographic event in recorded human history.
Read the story →Pope Clement VI spent the Black Death sitting in a heated room in Avignon, protected by a wall of fire on the advice of his physician. He issued the bulls that tried to stop the massacres of Jews. They did not stop.
Read the story →The rain started in May 1315 and did not stop. Across northern Europe the harvest failed for three years running. By 1317 cities were locking up their own children.
Read the story →Isabella of France crossed the Channel with fifteen hundred soldiers in 1326, deposed her husband, and ruled England with her lover. Her son removed her at seventeen.
Read the story →In July 1374, after a major Rhine flood, hundreds of people in Aachen began to dance in the streets and could not stop. The plague moved with them up the river.
Read the story →Cologne's Jewish community had stood since the fourth century. On the night of Saint Bartholomew, August 1349, a mob ended it in a few hours.
Read the story →Roger Mortimer escaped the Tower, invaded England, deposed a king, and ran the country for three years. His own teenage king-by-grace overthrew him in a midnight coup.
Read the story →Five weeks before the Strasbourg massacre, Basel built a wooden house on an island in the Rhine, locked roughly six hundred of its Jews inside, and burned it.
Read the story →Edward II of England was forced to abdicate, locked in a Gloucestershire castle, and died there in September 1327. Or did he escape and live another fourteen years?
Read the story →Six weeks before the plague reached the city, the council of Strasbourg deposed its mayors, replaced them, and burned the city's Jewish community alive.
Read the story →In the summer of 1349 thousands of penitents marched through plague-stricken Europe flogging themselves twice a day. The Pope banned them within months.
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