Early medieval Italy: Lombard shield boss (to make spears slide off it) (Metropolitan Museum, New York) Northern Italy and France In 774 AD, Charlemagne conquered northern Italy from the Lombards. Soon after that [...]
Who was Charlemagne? This is Charlemagne, or possibly his grandson (now in the Louvre Museum) What's Charlemagne's real name? Charlemagne's name is really Charles le Magne, or Charles the Great. [...]
Empress Theodora on a gold coin, with her son and daughter on the other side. With Theophilus dead, in 842 AD the Empire again had a woman in charge. The empress Theodora, [...]
Maybe the skull cup was something like this? Nicephorus deposed the Empress Irene in 802 AD and made himself emperor. He refused to pay tribute to the Islamic caliph, and therefore lost still more Roman [...]
Mu'awiya on a Sassanian-style coin When was Constantine IV? Constantine IV took over as Roman Emperor when his father Constans II died, in 668 AD. It wasn't a great time to be emperor. Constans [...]
Basil starts the Armenian Dynasty In 867 AD, Basil killed Bardas and took over as Roman Emperor. That started the Armenian Dynasty. People call it that because of Basil's Armenian ancestors. (Sometimes people call it the Macedonian [...]
A manuscript copy of Al Razi's writing (from 1094 AD) Where was al Razi from? Al Razi was born in Iran, in the Samanid kingdom, in 865 AD. That was when Iran [...]
Tomb of Ali, the first Imam and the fourth caliph, in Iraq (it was rebuilt about 1500 AD by the Safavids) Mohammed died in 632 AD. His second wife's father, a rich [...]
The Seljuks defeat the Persians (1040 AD) The Seljuks were Turkic nomads from Turkmenistan. They were related to the Uighurs. They entered the Abbasid empire around 950 AD and gradually converted to Sunni Islam. By 1030 AD the Seljuks [...]
Islamic History: the Dome of the Rock mosque, Jerusalem Before the Islamic Empire In 600 AD, West Asia had been divided for centuries between two big empires, the Romans and the Sassanians. People [...]
