St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, Italy (about 1100 AD) The Seljuks destabilize Europe's neighbors In 1071 AD, the Byzantine Empire lost most of Anatolia (modern Turkey) to the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert. [...]
Cathedral of Pisa (the Duomo) This is the cathedral of medieval Pisa, in Italy. The architects built the cathedral in the Romanesque style around 1064 AD. The rounded arches are typical of the Romanesque style. So is the [...]
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 [...]
Medieval Islamic science: Al Tusi's diagram of linear motion from circular motion Indian and African science In the Early Middle Ages, before the formation of the Islamic Empire, Buddhists ran the world's biggest [...]
Ibn Rushd prayed and studied in this Cordoba mosque Can science and religion work together? Since the time of Socrates - or before - many people have tried to figure out [...]
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, [...]
Cordoba mosque, Spain By the late 600s AD, the Moors, people from North Africa who had converted to Islam, were regularly attacking Visigothic Spain. At first these raids were not very serious, and the Spanish [...]
Minaret at Samarra, 847 AD The first Abbasid caliphs In 750 AD, the Abbasid caliphs murdered all of the surviving Umayyad men but one. Who were the Umayyads? All our medieval Islam articles [...]
Dome of the Rock mosque, Jerusalem People didn't build a lot of new buildings during the Umayyad period. They were busy getting organized after the Islamic conquests, and the Umayyad dynasty didn't [...]
Mosque history - Al-Azhar Mosque, Cairo (Egypt, 900s AD) What is a mosque? A mosque (MAH-SK) is a kind of building where people who follow the Islamic faith pray to God. Mosque [...]
