First shogun of Japan: Minamoto Yoritomo (maybe), by Fujiwara Takanobu - Kamakura Japan Who was the first shogun of Japan? The first shogun, Minamoto Yoritomo, established the shogun system in the [...]
Heian Japan: Godai Kokuzo Bodhisattva (Jingo-ji Temple, Kyoto), ca. 800-900 AD Women shut out of power After Empress Koken died in 770 AD, there was a major change in how Japan's government worked. [...]
Edo Period Japan - the Shogun Oda Nobunaga (1500s, painted by Kanō Motohide) Oda Nobunaga At the end of the Muromachi period, Japan was very rich, but divided into small city-states. [...]
Shiite shrine at Karbala (from the 1800s AD): the tomb of Ali's son Hussein: Mawali history What are mawali? Mawali is the Arabic name for people all over the Islamic Empire who [...]
Shirij Madrassa, Fez, Morocco, about 1350 AD Who went to a madrassa? If you had done well at your maktab (elementary school), your parents might decide to send you on to a [...]
Medieval Islamic families: The Birth of Mohammed (Iran, about 1315 AD, now in Edinburgh) Did men have four wives? According to the Quran, Muslim men could have as many as four wives if they were [...]
A page from Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, from Herat, Afghanistan, about 1444 AD. Now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Islamic historians began by translating Greek historians like Herodotus and Thucydides into Arabic. But soon historians wrote in [...]
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 [...]
Sultan Mehmed II (by the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini, 1479 AD) After the old Seljuk kingdom in Anatolia (Turkey) fell apart, one of these Seljuks, a man named Osman, started in 1299 AD to [...]
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 [...]
