The Prayer Book That Was a Math Textbook
In 1906 a Danish scholar in Istanbul opened a medieval Greek prayer book and noticed faint mathematics underneath the prayers. It was Archimedes.
Read the story →An era
Medieval
500 – 1500
The European Middle Ages, the Islamic Golden Age, and the parallel histories of Asia and the Americas.
91 stories in this era.
The Centuries Europe Froze
From around 1300 to 1850 the northern hemisphere ran a few degrees colder. Glaciers advanced, harvests failed, Norse Greenland died, and the Thames repeatedly froze.
Read the story →The Antioch Earthquake of May 526, Which Killed a Reported Quarter of a Million People in One of Rome's Greatest Cities
In late May 526, during the crowds of Ascension week, an earthquake levelled Antioch — then among the greatest cities of the Roman East — and the fire that followed burned most of what stood. The chroniclers' toll of 250,000 is likely inflated but marks a catastrophe of extraordinary scale. The patriarch died; his successor was chosen from the rubble.
Read the story →The Only Woman in 2,000 Years of Chinese Imperial History to Rule as Emperor in Her Own Name and Found Her Own Dynasty
Wu Zetian (624-705) entered the Tang court at age 14 as a concubine, became empress consort to Emperor Gaozong in 655, ruled as effective regent for 23 years through her sons, and declared herself Emperor of the new Zhou dynasty in 690 at age 66. She is the only woman in 2,000 years of Chinese imperial history to hold the title of Emperor (huangdi) in her own name.
Read the story →The An Lushan Rebellion of 755-763, the Revolt That Broke Tang China at Its Height
In December 755 the frontier general An Lushan turned his armies on the Tang empire at the very peak of its golden age. Eight years of war followed — the sack of both capitals, the flight of the emperor, the forced strangling of his beloved consort Yang Guifei, and a census collapse of some 36 million people.
Read the story →The Frankish Army Under Charles Martel That Stopped the Umayyad Northward Advance at Poitiers in October 732 Without Pursuing the Defeated Force
Charles Martel's Frankish army stopped the Umayyad Caliphate's northward raid into Gaul at a battle south of Tours on a date in October 732 CE. The Umayyad general Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi was killed. The Umayyad force withdrew south overnight; Martel chose not to pursue. The battle ended Umayyad ambitions of further northward expansion. The strategic significance has been disputed since the 19th century.
Read the story →The Eighth-Century Forgery That Gave the Pope Temporal Rule Over Western Europe and Was Exposed in 1440 by Linguistic Analysis
The Donation of Constantine purported to be a fourth-century imperial decree granting Pope Sylvester I sovereignty over Rome, Italy, and the Western provinces of the Roman Empire. It was forged in the papal chancery around 750-800 CE. The Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla proved it a forgery in 1440 by analysing its Latin vocabulary, which contained terms that did not exist in the fourth century.
Read the story →The 9th-Century Baghdad Mathematician Whose Name Became the Word 'Algorithm' and Whose Book Title Became 'Algebra'
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi worked at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad under Caliph al-Ma'mun in the 820s. His *al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa-l-muqābala* gave Europe the word algebra. The Latinised version of his name — algoritmi — gave Europe the word algorithm. He introduced the Hindu decimal numeral system to the Arabic-speaking world and from there to Europe.
Read the story →The Cadaver Synod of January 897, in Which Pope Stephen VI Put the Corpse of Pope Formosus on Trial
In January 897 Pope Stephen VI had the nine-month-old corpse of his predecessor Pope Formosus exhumed, dressed in papal vestments, propped on a throne in the Lateran, and formally tried for perjury and coveting the papacy. The corpse was convicted, mutilated, and thrown into the Tiber.
Read the story →The Christmas Day Coronation in 800 CE at Which Pope Leo III Crowned the Frankish King Charlemagne Emperor of the Romans in Saint Peter's Basilica
Pope Leo III placed an imperial crown on Charlemagne's head during Christmas Day mass in Old Saint Peter's Basilica on 25 December 800 CE. The Roman congregation acclaimed Charlemagne as emperor. The act revived a Western Roman imperial title that had been vacant since 476 CE. The political relationship between the Catholic papacy and the European emperors that followed substantially structured the next thousand years of European politics.
Read the story →The Largest Buddhist Monument in the World Was Buried for a Millennium and Rediscovered by Stamford Raffles
Borobudur is a 9th-century Mahayana Buddhist temple complex in central Java with about 2,672 narrative relief panels and 504 Buddha statues. It was abandoned in the 14th century, progressively buried by jungle and volcanic ash, and rediscovered in 1814 on orders of the British lieutenant-governor Sir Stamford Raffles.
Read the story →The Saxon Abbey That Housed the Relics That Drew the Dancing Pilgrims From Aachen and Strasbourg
Saint Vitus was a 4th-century Sicilian Christian martyr whose relics were translated to the Saxon abbey of Corvey on the upper Weser in 836 AD. The Corvey shrine became the principal medieval European pilgrimage site for sufferers of involuntary collective dancing afflictions — including the Aachen mania of 1374 and the Strasbourg plague of 1518.
Read the story →The Viking Earl Killed by a Severed Head Tied to His Saddle
Sigurd Eysteinsson — known as Sigurd the Mighty, the second Norse Earl of Orkney — defeated the Scottish chieftain Máel Brigte in 892 AD, beheaded him, and tied the head to his saddle as a trophy. The dead man's tooth scratched Sigurd's calf during the ride home. The wound became infected. Sigurd died of sepsis approximately three weeks later.
Read the story →The Viking Earl Killed by the Severed Head of His Defeated Enemy in 892
Sigurd the Mighty was the first Norse Earl of Orkney. He defeated and beheaded the Pictish ruler Máel Brigte in 892, tied the severed head to his saddle as a trophy, and died on the ride home when one of Máel Brigte's protruding teeth scratched his leg and infected the wound. The story comes from the 13th-century *Orkneyinga Saga*.
Read the story →The Norse Outlaw Who Founded Greenland Because He'd Been Banished From Iceland
Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland in 982 for killing two men. He spent three years exploring the next island to the west. He returned, organised a settler expedition of 25 ships, and gave the new territory the most successful real-estate name in medieval European history.
Read the story →The Battle of Kleidion in 1014 and the Blinding That Gave Basil II His Name
On 29 July 1014 the Byzantine emperor Basil II crushed the Bulgarian army in the Kleidion pass. Tradition holds he blinded his thousands of prisoners, leaving every hundredth man one eye to lead the rest home — and that Tsar Samuel collapsed and died at the sight. The story made Basil "the Bulgar-Slayer"; historians debate how much of it is true.
Read the story →The 70-Metre Embroidered Cloth That Tells the Story of the 1066 Norman Conquest of England in 58 Scenes Stitched in the Decade After the Battle
The Bayeux Tapestry is a 70-metre embroidered cloth strip, approximately 50 cm tall, depicting the 1066 Norman conquest of England in 58 narrative scenes. It was almost certainly produced in southern England in the 1070s for the Norman bishop Odo of Bayeux. It has been displayed at Bayeux Cathedral or its successor museum since at least 1476. It is one of the most important surviving 11th-century European narrative artworks.
Read the story →The Holy Roman Emperor Who Walked Through Three Days of Snow Barefoot in a Hairshirt to Beg Pope Gregory VII's Forgiveness in January 1077
Emperor Henry IV stood outside the gates of Canossa Castle in the northern Italian Apennines in a hairshirt, barefoot, in deep snow, for three days from 25 to 27 January 1077. He was begging Pope Gregory VII to lift the excommunication that had threatened his control of the Holy Roman Empire. The Pope eventually admitted him and lifted the ban. The political conflict — the Investiture Controversy — continued for another 45 years.
Read the story →The German Crusading Lord Whose Army Murdered Thousands of Rhineland Jews and Was Destroyed in Hungary Before It Ever Reached the Holy Land
Count Emicho of Flonheim led the unofficial 'German Crusade' of 1096 — the substantial armed band that conducted the Mainz, Worms, and Cologne massacres of Rhineland Jews. The army never reached Constantinople. King Coloman of Hungary destroyed it in a series of military engagements in late summer 1096. Emicho himself survived and returned home in disgrace.
Read the story →The Rhineland Massacres That Came Before the Crusade
In the spring of 1096, before the First Crusade reached Asia, an army of pilgrims spent six weeks killing the Jewish communities of the Rhine.
Read the story →The 1025 CE Persian Medical Textbook That Was the Standard Reference in European Universities From 1180 to Roughly 1650
Ibn Sina's *Canon of Medicine*, compiled at Isfahan around 1025, synthesised Greek, Roman, Persian, and Arabic medical traditions into a five-volume systematic treatise. Translated into Latin in Toledo by Gerard of Cremona around 1180, it became the standard medical-school textbook at Paris, Padua, Montpellier, and Bologna for almost five centuries. The first English translation appeared in 1930.
Read the story →The First Crusade Army That Took Jerusalem on 15 July 1099 and Killed Most of the City's Population in Two Days
The First Crusade reached Jerusalem on 7 June 1099 with approximately 12,000-15,000 surviving soldiers. The city of approximately 20,000-30,000 mostly Muslim and Jewish residents fell on 15 July 1099 after a five-week siege. The two-day massacre that followed killed an estimated 10,000-30,000 inhabitants. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was established within the month and lasted until 1187.
Read the story →The German Synagogue That Was Destroyed Three Times in a Thousand Years and Always Rebuilt
The Worms synagogue was first built in 1034. It was destroyed by Count Emicho's army in 1096, by the Black Death mob in 1349, and by the Nazis on Kristallnacht in 1938. It was rebuilt each time, most recently in 1961. It is the longest continuously rebuilt religious building in central Europe.
Read the story →The Pope Whose 1120 Protective Bull for the Jews Was Reissued by Every Pope for the Following Three Centuries
Pope Calixtus II issued the original *Sicut Judaeis* protective bull in 1120 in direct response to the 1096 First Crusade massacres of Rhineland Jews. The bull prohibited Christian violence against Jewish communities and was reissued by approximately twenty-five subsequent popes through the next three centuries.
Read the story →The Twelfth-Century Mikveh Discovered Under the Cologne Town Hall Square in 1956
The medieval Cologne Jewish ritual bath — a 13.5-metre-deep stone shaft sunk to reach groundwater — was rediscovered during 1956 building works in the cathedral-square excavations. It is substantially the only substantially intact 12th-century mikveh north of the Alps and substantively defines the standing archaeology of the medieval Cologne Jewish community.
Read the story →The Erfurt Latrine Disaster of 1184, When the Floor Gave Way Beneath an Assembly of Nobles
In July 1184 King Henry VI convened an assembly at Erfurt to settle a feud. The packed upper floor collapsed, dropping dozens of nobles through the storey below and into the cesspit beneath the building. Around 60 died, most drowned in the latrine. The king survived by sitting in a stone window alcove.
Read the story →The Jewish Doctor in Saladin's Court
Moses Maimonides was expelled from Córdoba as a teenager, fled across the Mediterranean, and ended up as court physician to Saladin and Saladin's son in Cairo. In between he wrote the most important medieval Jewish work of philosophy.
Read the story →The Tomb of Saladin in Damascus Was a Wooden Box Until Kaiser Wilhelm Visited in 1898
Saladin died at Damascus in 1193 and was buried in a simple wooden sarcophagus inside a small mausoleum north of the Umayyad Mosque. The substantial wooden tomb remained unchanged for seven centuries. Kaiser Wilhelm II visited in November 1898, was substantially moved, and paid for the marble tomb that now sits next to the original.
Read the story →The Battle of Hattin on 4 July 1187 That Destroyed the Crusader Army in One Day and Returned Jerusalem to Islamic Control
Saladin's Ayyubid army of approximately 30,000 destroyed the combined Crusader army of approximately 20,000 under King Guy of Lusignan at the Horns of Hattin in Galilee on 4 July 1187. The Crusaders had marched in dry summer heat without adequate water. Saladin captured Jerusalem on 2 October 1187. The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem effectively ended.
Read the story →The Papal Bull That Protected Medieval Jews and Was Reissued by Every Pope for Three Hundred Years
After the Rhineland massacres of 1096, the papacy issued a formal bull that prohibited the killing or forced conversion of Jews. Every subsequent medieval pope reissued it. The bull was widely violated. It nonetheless established the legal framework on which medieval Jewish communities could appeal.
Read the story →The Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, Where the Mamluks Stopped the Mongols for Good
Two years after Baghdad's destruction, a Mongol army stood poised to take Egypt — the last great power of the Islamic world. At Ain Jalut in Galilee on 3 September 1260, the Mamluk sultan Qutuz and his general Baibars destroyed it: the first major Mongol defeat that was never avenged. Weeks later, Baibars murdered Qutuz and took the throne.
Read the story →Angkor, the Largest City of the Pre-Industrial World, and Why Its Kings Walked Away
At its height around 1200, Greater Angkor covered some 1,000 km² and may have held close to a million people, sustained by a vast engineered water network. By the mid-15th century the court was gone to the south. Not 'lost' — Angkor Wat never ceased to be a shrine — the city was undone, modern research suggests, by its own infrastructure meeting megadroughts and floods.
Read the story →The Crusader Army That Was Supposed to Invade Egypt in 1202 and Instead Sacked Constantinople in 1204 to Pay Off Its Venetian Debt
The Fourth Crusade was contracted in 1201 to invade Egypt. By 1202 the crusaders could not pay for the Venetian fleet they had ordered. They diverted to attack the Christian Byzantine capital at Constantinople, where they installed an Angelid pretender. When he could not pay either, they sacked the city on 12-15 April 1204. The Eastern Orthodox-Catholic schism became permanent.
Read the story →Great Zimbabwe, the Stone City Whose African Builders Colonial Rhodesia Spent Decades Denying
Between the 11th and 15th centuries a Shona state built Great Zimbabwe: granite walls up to 11 metres high, laid without mortar, at the hub of a gold trade reaching the Indian Ocean. Colonial Rhodesia officially attributed it to Phoenicians, Arabs — anyone but Africans — and censored archaeologists who reported the truth. The country took its name from the ruins at independence.
Read the story →The London Mercer Who Donated the Land That Became Medieval England's Most Important Franciscan Foundation
John Iwyn was a 13th-century London mercer who donated a small property on the southern edge of Newgate Street to the newly-arrived English Franciscans in 1224. The donation became the foundation site of the Greyfriars church and friary — the most important Franciscan foundation in medieval England and the eventual burial site of four major English queens.
Read the story →The Storms That Stopped the Mongols Twice
In 1274 and again in 1281, Kublai Khan sent invasion fleets against Japan. Both times — once after a single battle and once after seven weeks of fighting — typhoons destroyed the Mongol ships. The Japanese called the wind divine.
Read the story →The Charter the English Barons Made King John Sign in a Surrey Meadow on 15 June 1215 That Was Annulled by the Pope Ten Weeks Later
The English barons forced King John to seal Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June 1215, accepting limits on royal arbitrary action. Pope Innocent III annulled it on 24 August 1215. John repudiated it. The First Barons' War followed within weeks. The charter was reissued — with modifications — in 1216, 1217, and 1225, and the 1225 version became the canonical text that survives in English common law to the present.
Read the story →The 12-Day Mongol Siege and Sack of Baghdad in February 1258 That Ended the Five-Century Abbasid Caliphate and Killed Approximately 200,000 to 800,000 People
Hulagu Khan's Mongol army of approximately 150,000 besieged Baghdad on 29 January 1258. The Abbasid Caliph al-Musta'sim surrendered on 10 February. The Mongol sack ran from 13 to 20 February 1258. Casualty estimates range from 200,000 to 800,000 dead. The Tigris reportedly ran black with ink from the destroyed libraries and red with blood from the killed. The Abbasid Caliphate of 750-1258 ended.
Read the story →The Bridge That Was a Street and a Dam
Old London Bridge stood for six hundred years, carried houses and shops on its back, and dammed the river so completely that the Thames froze upstream. When they tore it down in 1831 the river never froze again.
Read the story →The Female Pope Who Reigned for Two Years and Five Months in the Ninth Century and Almost Certainly Did Not Exist
According to a 13th-century Dominican chronicle, an English-born woman called Joan reigned as Pope John VIII from about 855 to 858 CE, gave birth during a Lateran procession, and was killed by the crowd. No 9th- or 10th-century source mentions her. The story is almost certainly a 13th-century fabrication. It was treated as historical fact for 400 years.
Read the story →The Moai of Rapa Nui, and What Actually Destroyed Easter Island's Society
Between roughly 1250 and 1500, the people of Rapa Nui — the most remote inhabited island on Earth — carved nearly a thousand moai and moved statues of many tonnes kilometres without wheels or draft animals. The famous 'ecocide' parable of a society that destroyed itself has been heavily revised: the catastrophic collapse came after European contact — slave raids and smallpox reduced the population to 111 by 1877.
Read the story →The Indonesian Volcano Nobody Remembered That Started the Little Ice Age
In 1257 an Indonesian volcano called Samalas erupted with the largest eruption of the last seven thousand years. The sulphate signal appears in polar ice cores from both Greenland and Antarctica. Medieval European chronicles record the cold summer of 1258. It took until 2013 to identify the source.
Read the story →The London Gallows That Stood for Six Hundred Years and Killed About Sixty Thousand People
The Tyburn gallows at the western edge of medieval London were the main public execution site for the English crown from 1196 to 1783. About sixty thousand people died there. The site is now a traffic junction at Marble Arch, with a plaque almost nobody reads.
Read the story →The Larger Dancing Plague Nobody Remembers
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 →The Cologne Archbishop Who Stood Aside and Let the Mob Kill His City's Jewish Community in 1349
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 Forty-Year Period When Europe Had Two and Sometimes Three Popes at the Same Time
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 → The Coroner’s Report June 10, 2026 · Island on the Rhine, Basel, Bishopric of Basel (modern Switzerland)
The Pogrom That Came Before Strasbourg
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 →The Great Mortality
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 →The Florentine Plague Pit Boccaccio Described Has Been Found Under Santa Maria Novella
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 →The Hundred Tales Ten Florentines Told Each Other in a Country Villa to Wait Out the Black Death
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 →The Cattle Plague That Killed Most of Europe's Cows During the Great Famine
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 →The Mongol Catapult That Threw Plague Corpses Into the Genoese Garrison Probably Did Not Actually Happen
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 →The French Succession Crisis of 1328 That Started the Hundred Years' War Twelve Years Later
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 →The Twenty-Nine-Year-Old Sienese Mystic Who Travelled to Avignon to Tell the Pope to Go Back to Rome
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 →The Pope Who Survived the Black Death by Sitting Between Two Fires Died in His Sleep Five Years Later
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 →The Pope Who Sat Between Two Fires
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 Coroner’s Report June 11, 2026 · Old Jewish quarter, Cologne, Holy Roman Empire (modern Germany)
The Night Cologne Killed Its Jewish Quarter
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 →The 1328 Treaty That Recognised Scottish Independence and Was Reversed Within Five Years
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 →The King Murdered in a Castle Basement (Maybe)
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 →The Italian Letter That Claimed Edward II Did Not Die in Berkeley Castle But Reached Lombardy Disguised as a Pilgrim
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 Men Who Whipped Themselves Across Europe
In the summer of 1349 thousands of penitents marched through plague-stricken Europe flogging themselves twice a day. The Pope banned them within months.
Read the story →The Seven Years Europe Ate Its Own
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 →The Personal Physician of Three Avignon Popes Who Wrote the Standard European Surgical Textbook for Three Centuries
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 Bridge Gateway Where English Traitors' Heads Were Displayed on Pikes for Three Centuries
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 →The Favourite Whose Hanging at Hereford in 1326 Lasted Four Hours and Was Watched by the Queen
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 Queen Who Invaded Her Own Country
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 →The Crusader Order That Held the Aegean Island of Rhodes for Two Hundred and Thirteen Years
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 →The German Cleric Who Wrote a Medical Defence of the Jews During the Black Death Pogroms
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 →The Flagellant Prophet Who Burned in Thuringia Eighteen Years After the Black Death
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 →The 14th-Century German Cleric Who Argued the Black Death Was Not the Jews' Fault
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 →The Demolished London Church Where Four Medieval English Queens Were Buried Under Whose Bones Modern Newgate Street Now Runs
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 Hajj of Mansa Musa in 1324, When the Emperor of Mali Gave Away So Much Gold He Broke Cairo's Economy
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 →The Medical Diagnosis That Connects the Strasbourg Dancers and a Tanganyikan Boarding School
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 →The Italian Master Who Painted the Avignon Papal Palace and Whose Surviving Frescoes Are the Best of the Period
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 →The Largest Gothic Palace in Europe That the French Revolution Almost Destroyed
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 →The Italian Poet Who Spent Forty Years Calling the Avignon Papacy a Babylonian Captivity
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 →The Earl Who Ruled England From the Queen's Bedchamber
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 →The Strasbourg Pogrom of Saint Valentine's Day, 1349
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 →Muhammad bin Tughluq's Order of 1327 That Marched the Capital of India 1,100 Kilometres South
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 English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 That Briefly Captured London, Beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Was Ended When the Lord Mayor Stabbed Wat Tyler in Front of the King
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 →The Teenage Friend Who Helped Edward III Storm Nottingham Castle and Overthrow Roger Mortimer in 1330
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 Hospitaller Castle Built on the Bones of the Mausoleum
When the Knights Hospitaller built the Castle of Saint Peter at Bodrum in the early 15th century, they used the marble of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World — as quarry stone. The Mausoleum had stood for 1,700 years. The castle stands today.
Read the story →The Twenty-One-Year-Old Sultan Who Took Constantinople With Cannon So Large They Had to Be Cast on Site
Mehmed II besieged Constantinople from 6 April to 29 May 1453 with a substantial Ottoman army of approximately 80,000 and a previously unknown size of bronze siege cannon — including the 8.2-metre Orban bombard cast specifically for the siege. The walls held for 53 days. They had held for 1,123 years.
Read the story →The Failed 1409 Church Council That Tried to End the Western Schism by Electing a Third Pope
The Council of Pisa met from March to August 1409 to resolve the thirty-year-old Western Schism. It deposed both the Roman and the Avignon claimants and elected a new pope, Alexander V. Neither of the previous popes accepted the deposition. The result was three simultaneous popes instead of two.
Read the story →The Fourteen Years Henry Tudor Spent Hiding in Brittany
Before he killed Richard III at Bosworth and founded the Tudor dynasty, Henry Tudor was a 14-year-old Welsh nobleman fleeing England after the Yorkist victory of 1471. He spent the next fourteen years as a guest, prisoner, and pawn at the Breton court.
Read the story →The Outnumbered English Army That Defeated a Substantially Larger French Force at Agincourt on Saint Crispin's Day in 1415 With the Help of the Longbow and Heavy Mud
Henry V's English army of approximately 8,000 men defeated a French army of approximately 25,000 at Agincourt on 25 October 1415. The English longbow inflicted heavy casualties on the French heavy cavalry crossing a narrow, deeply muddy field. Henry ordered the killing of approximately 1,500 French prisoners during the battle. The conventional French casualty estimate is 6,000-10,000 dead against fewer than 500 English.
Read the story →The 19-Year-Old Peasant Girl Tried for Heresy by the Bishop of Beauvais and Burned at the Stake at Rouen on 30 May 1431
Joan of Arc was tried for heresy at Rouen between 9 January and 30 May 1431 by a Church court under the Bishop of Beauvais Pierre Cauchon, who was on the English military payroll. Seventy specific articles were reduced to twelve and then to one — relapse into men's clothing. She was burned at the stake in the Vieux-Marché on 30 May 1431. The verdict was overturned in 1456 by the same Church.
Read the story →The Roman Cardinal Whose 1417 Election at Constance Finally Ended the Forty-Year Western Schism
Oddone Colonna was elected pope on 11 November 1417 at the Council of Constance after the council had deposed two rival papal claimants and accepted the third's voluntary abdication. He took the regnal name Martin V. His election ended the Western Schism that had divided Catholic Europe for thirty-nine years.
Read the story →The Last English King to Die in Battle Was Killed at Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485 and His Skeleton Was Found Under a Leicester Car Park in 2012
Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485 by Henry Tudor's forces. He was the last English king to die in combat and the last Plantagenet. His body was buried at Greyfriars Priory at Leicester, lost after the Reformation dissolution. The skeleton was located under a Leicester car park in September 2012 by University of Leicester archaeologists, identified by DNA, and reburied at Leicester Cathedral in March 2015.
Read the story →The Early 15th-Century Manuscript Written in a Script That No One Has Read in Six Hundred Years
The Voynich Manuscript is a 240-page illuminated codex written in an unknown script and an unknown language, with botanical, astronomical, balneological, and pharmaceutical illustrations. Radiocarbon dating of the vellum places production between 1404 and 1438. No one has produced a generally accepted translation in the six centuries since.
Read the story →The Treasure Fleets of Zheng He, Which Sailed to Africa and Back — and Were Then Deliberately Forgotten
Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming admiral Zheng He led seven expeditions of up to 300 ships and 27,000 men across the Indian Ocean — to India, Arabia, and the Swahili coast, returning once with a giraffe for the emperor. Then China turned inward: the voyages stopped, and the records were left to rot or worse. Europe's small ships entered an ocean the treasure fleets had vacated.
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