The Mongol court (1200s AD) After the warming trend of 1000 AD came a colder period around 1300 AD called the Little Ice Age. Again, people felt the effects around the world. In Central Asia, the Mongols rose to power in the late 1200s AD. They conquered China, Russia, northern India, and most of the Islamic Empire and united them into one huge [...]
Jewish money-lenders in medieval France The Middle Ages in Europe were a difficult time for the Jews. Many Jews lived in Western Europe between about 1000 and 1500 AD, but all the rulers were Christians, and almost all the people who had any power were Christians. These Christians thought Jews were different and strange. They suspected Jews of [...]
Pope Gregory the Great writing, carved near Strasbourg, about 875 AD. That's under Charlemagne's grandchildren. The Holy Spirit (in the form of a dove) sits on his shoulder and dictates to him. The elephant ivory is probably from Kenya. (Now in Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum) Gregory was Pope in Rome beginning in 590 AD. That's just after [...]
Charles II of England Oliver Cromwell tried to leave his job as Lord Protector to his son Richard when he died in 1658, but Richard was so useless that two years later Parliament invited Charles I's son, Charles II, to come be king in England after all: historians call this the Restoration, because it restored the [...]
Cahokia mound in Illinois, where a Mississippian city was After 800 AD the Mississippian culture developed all along the Mississippi and the Missouri valleys, replacing the earlier Woodland culture. Now many people lived in towns. They built temples and palaces on top of big earth mounds. They had wooden fortification walls around their towns, with [...]
Copernicus, a Renaissance astronomer Starting in the 1200s AD, as Europe got richer, great universities got started there. In the later Middle Ages, West Asia and India suffered from the Mongol invasions. West Asian people were too poor to send their children to the old university at Baghdad. In the 1300s, the Black Death killed so many people in Egypt that the old university at Cairo also didn't have [...]
Sick children from medieval Europe During the Middle Ages, most people were sick with something for most of their lives. Newborns were often born small because their mothers had not had enough to eat when they were pregnant. Babies caught dysentery and typhoid from drinking water with sewage mixed in it. About a quarter of all babies died before they were [...]
A portrait of Petrarch Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca in Italian) was born in 1304 AD in Arezzo, in northern Italy. His father was a lawyer, and when Petrarch was a teenager his father made him study law too. But Petrarch hated law. He just wanted to write poetry and read Latin books. Another young Italian writer who [...]
Florence, Italy Most of the people who knew how to write in the early Middle Ages were monks. So most of them wrote about serious things like God and Heaven and Hell. Even writers who weren't monks, like Dante, usually wrote about Christian ideas. But Boccaccio was different. Boccaccio wrote about real people and their real lives. Some [...]
Burying people who died of plague In the Late Middle Ages, the Mongol Empire brought peace to most of Asia, and encouraged trade along the Silk Road. Poland, Russia, and Italy profited from this trade. Europe was making more and more stuff to sell on the Silk Road, especially wool cloth. By the early 1300s, however, the Mongol Empire was collapsing, and [...]
