500AD-1400AD

In the centre of Coventry, a midlands city in England, there is a statue of a woman astride a horse, her head bowed, unclothed except for her long hair. Across the road, at the top of a slate grey brick clock tower every hour, on the hour,…

Jeanne de Clisson was born in the French town of Belleville-sur-Vie in 1300. She was the one of the de Belleville family, who had ruled in the area for hundreds of years. In fact, she wound up being the last of the de Belleville family, as…

Some people regard history as a matter of memorizing facts and dates, but I’ve always thought of that as a decidedly narrow view. Narrow and often misguided, in fact, as those years are often a controversial matter in and of themselves.…

The future Queen Isabella of England was born in France some time in 1295, as best we can tell. As the only daughter after three sons, she didn't really account for much in her father’s scheme of things. Her father was Philip IV, King of…

The death of Emperor Nero in 68 AD marked a turning point in the history of the Roman Empire. For the 95 years prior to that, the freshly minted Empire, born from the ashes of the Roman Republic, had been ruled by a single family. The…

The story of Egil, the son of bald (”skalla”) Grimr, blurs the line between fact and legend. While we know he was a real person, the details of his life come to us from saga and song. Historians generally distrust oral traditions, as…

Those looking for an enjoyable scare for the Halloween season are unlikely to seek one out in a European medieval manuscript. Those things are stuffy and deeply religious, right? It would just be silly to look for anything creepy…

Wu Zetian is unique in Chinese history. Had she merely been a powerful Empress, that would have been normal. Had she even been an Empress who ruled in truth through a puppet Emperor, that would have been rare, but not unprecedented. But…