The siege of Damietta: Fifth Crusade Europeans attack Jerusalem In 1216 AD, Pope Honorius III succeeded in getting some more Europeans to agree to try again to conquer Jerusalem from the Ayyubids. The Fourth [...]
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. [...]
Castle of Edessa After the First Crusade After the First Crusade in 1096 AD set up Christian kingdoms all along the coast of Israel and Lebanon, of course the Fatimid caliphs who had ruled that area before [...]
A Viking ship. Viking trade took the Vikings all over the world. Who were the Vikings? The Vikings were Indo-European people from Scandinavia (modern Denmark, Norway and Sweden). Around the 400s AD the Vikings started to [...]
The Empress Zoe (from the church of Hagia Irene) Zoe and Romanus III Although he lived a long time and ruled nearly fifty years, Basil II never had any sons. When he [...]
Alexios I Comneni, the Byzantine emperor (1081 AD) The Battle of Manzikert The Battle of Manzikert in 1071 was the end of Basil's Armenian Dynasty. The Byzantines had lost Armenia to Alp Arslan [...]
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. [...]
Illustration in Ibn al-Nafis Who was ibn al Nafis? Ibn al Nafis was born in Syria in the early 1200s AD, just as the power of the Seljuks was collapsing. He studied [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
