Medieval Europe

To the medieval Latin West, he was simply The Commentator, the intellectual bridge that spanned the dark chasm left by the fall of Rome.

The transformation of Portugal from a semi-autonomous county of the Kingdom of León into a global maritime powerhouse began on the battlefield.

In the damp meadow of Runnymede on 15 June 1215, an unpopular English monarch met a group of rebellious barons to seal a document born of desperation.

In the early thirteenth century, the fragmented kingdoms of Europe woke to a threat that bypassed their traditional rivalries and forced a temporary, panicked peace.

The world that the young Venetian merchant entered in 1271 was one of vast, unmapped distances, but by the time Marco Polo returned to his native lagoon twenty-four years later, he had shrunk those distances forever.

In 1255, during the Baltic Crusades, the Teutonic Knights established a fortress over the Old Prussian settlement of Twangste, naming it Königsberg—King's Mountain—to honor King Ottokar II of Bohemia.

Sometime around 1300 CE, a subtle but persistent chill began to settle over the Northern Hemisphere, initiating a centuries-long epoch of erratic cooling known as the Little Ice Age.

Five generations of kings and two rival dynasties fought for 116 years over the wealthiest and most populous kingdom in Western Europe, producing a conflict that reshaped the nature of medieval power.

Sometime in 1347, during the siege of the Genoese trading port of Caffa in Crimea, the army of the Golden Horde under Jani Beg reportedly introduced a lethal pathogen to their European adversaries.

In the spring of 1429, a seventeen-year-old peasant girl from Domrémy arrived at the besieged city of Orléans, carrying a banner and a conviction that would reshape the map of Europe.

When Queen Dorothea of Brandenburg journeyed to Rome in 1475, she secured a papal bull from Pope Sixtus IV that would reshape the intellectual landscape of the North.