Mary window at Chartres Cathedral People think of the Middle Ages as a very religious period, when the Christian Church was the most important institution and everybody prayed all the time. Certainly [...]
Francis of Assisi gives his father back his clothes (Giotto, in Assisi) Who was Francis of Assisi? By 1200 AD, the Catholic Church was very powerful. Bishops and popes were often rich men. They cared more about [...]
Albigensians were also called Cathars This story starts about 1050 AD, not long after the Capetians took power in northern France. Some Christian people in the south of France began to think differently about God from the [...]
Church of Yuriev-Polsky (1200s) By the 1200s AD, Russia was weak from civil wars. So the Mongols attacked Russia and forced the eastern part into the Mongol empire. The Mongol empire made it [...]
Roland blows his horn for help and tries to break his sword on a rock (Chartres Cathedral) As soon as the Moors had conquered Spain in 711 AD, the descendants of the Visigoths and the Romans [...]
A Viking ship like the ones that sailed on the First Crusade Before the First Crusade Throughout the 1000s AD, Viking mercenary soldiers, some coming down the Volga river through Russia, and others sailing around [...]
Early Slavic history: Where did the Slavs come from? A Slavic furnace from Novae, in Bulgaria (300s AD) - maybe a pottery kiln? The Slavs were Indo-Europeans The Slavs, who [...]
Simple equations on a graph Algebra is the way Islamic mathematicians figured out to connect our ideas about geometry with our ideas about numbers. You can use equations to represent geometric shapes. You can [...]
Saladin's castle in Cairo, where Maimonides worked Maimonides and health care In the 1100s AD, when Maimonides wrote his book about medicine, doctors didn't have very many medicines or medical treatments that worked. The Guide [...]
Islamic medicine: From an Ottoman manuscript, two doctors telling the pharmacist how to make different medicines Writing medical encyclopedias Doctors made big scientific advances in medicine during the Islamic empire. The [...]
