Façade of Amiens cathedral in France Why did Amiens build a big cathedral? Amiens is not far from Reims, in northern France, and when the bishop of Reims began building a big new cathedral in [...]
The Romanesque Abbaye aux Hommes, in Caen (about 1050 AD) Vikings settle in Caen Caen is a port town in north-western France, on the Atlantic Ocean. When the Vikings invaded France in the 700s AD, [...]
Caen - Abbaye aux Dames What is the Abbaye aux Dames? Matilda of Flanders ordered her architects to build this Christian church about 1050 AD in her capital at Caen. (Find out why.) The Abbaye [...]
Aachen cathedral (begun 792 AD) One of the first ambitious buildings in Western Europe after the fall of Rome was Charlemagne's chapel at his capital of Aachen (now in northern Germany) about 792 [...]
Maimonides studied in this Cordoba synagogue in Spain (1315 AD, rebuilt from Maimonides' time) What did Maimonides study? When Maimonides was a child, in the 1100s AD, he studied Jewish religious law in the Cordoba synagogue, [...]
Court of the Lions, Alhambra (1200s AD) By 1250 AD, the Christian kings of Spain had pushed the Almohads south so that they only ruled just the city of Granada, far in the south [...]
Women swimming in the Seljuk kingdom (1494 AD) The fall of the Roman Empire and the Sassanian Empire in the 500s AD doesn't seem to have made much difference to [...]
Silk Road trade: Chinese coin of the Han Empress Kuo Empires and the Silk Road Starting in the 500s BC, governments started to come together into empires. Travel got safer. [...]
A suit of medieval plate armor In the Middle Ages men and women who fought in battles generally wore chain mail, which was both lighter and cheaper (because it was [...]
Two women raking straw in a field (Tres Belles Heures du duc de Berry) If you're a teacher, parent, or day camp counselor thinking of spending a week or so [...]
