143 Fun Facts About Middle Ages

Which event is commonly taken to mark the beginning of the Middle Ages in Europe?

The Fall of the Western Roman Empire is dated to 476, when the general Odoacer deposed the young emperor Romulus Augustulus, named no successor and ruled Italy as its king.

What system of reciprocal obligations bound medieval Europe's lords and vassals?

Feudalism was sealed in person: the vassal knelt, placed his joined hands between his lord's and swore homage, promising military service in return for land and protection.

The 14th-century Black Death was a pandemic of which disease?

Bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, killed so many workers that labour ran short, and in 1351 England's Statute of Labourers tried to hold wages at pre-plague levels.

Which Frankish king was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III in 800 CE?

Charlemagne was crowned in St Peter's on Christmas Day 800; his biographer Einhard claimed he would never have entered the church had he known what the pope planned.

Which English king fought Saladin on crusade and agreed a three-year truce with him in 1192?

Richard I, the Lionheart, was seized in Austria on his way home and handed to Emperor Henry VI, who freed him only for a ransom of 150,000 marks raised by heavy taxes at home.

Which architectural style of pointed arches, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses rose in the High Middle Ages?

Gothic architecture, with its distinctive elements like pointed arches and flying buttresses, allowed for taller, more expansive structures and larger stained-glass windows in cathedrals.

Which English king was forced by rebel barons to seal Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215?

King John sealed Magna Carta under duress, then had Pope Innocent III declare it void within months; civil war followed, and only the reissues under his son made it lasting law.

The Hundred Years' War was a long conflict primarily fought between which two kingdoms?

France and England were not at war for all 116 years: the conflict that began in 1337 was a string of campaigns broken by long truces and by the Black Death.

Which historical figure led the French army to several important victories during the Hundred Years' War?

Joan of Arc, a peasant girl of about seventeen, rode with the relief army that lifted the siege of Orléans in May 1429, then pressed for Charles VII's coronation at Reims that July.

What medieval university method sought to reconcile Christian theology with classical philosophy?

Scholasticism grew from textbooks like the 12th-century Sic et Non, which set out 158 questions with clashing Church authorities on each side and left students to reconcile them by argument.

Which influential theologian and philosopher authored the 'Summa Theologica'?

Thomas Aquinas left his Summa unfinished: after an experience at Mass in December 1273 he stopped writing, saying that all he had written seemed like straw.

Which English king was killed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066?

Harold Godwinson died at Hastings on 14 October 1066, less than three weeks after he had crushed Harald Hardrada's invasion at Stamford Bridge and marched his army south.

What name is given to the centuries of war in which Christian kingdoms took Iberia from Muslim rulers?

The Reconquista ended on 2 January 1492, when Granada's last emir, Boabdil, surrendered the city to Ferdinand and Isabella.

What associations of craftsmen and merchants regulated trade in medieval towns?

Guilds made a craftsman earn his rank: after years as an apprentice and then a journeyman, he had to submit a 'masterpiece' to prove he deserved the title of master.

What was rural medieval Europe's economic system of self-sufficient agricultural estates?

Manorialism made each estate a small world of its own: the peasants worked the lord's land as well as their own strips, and his manor court settled their disputes.

Which Ottoman sultan captured Constantinople in 1453, an event often taken as the end of the Middle Ages?

Mehmed II was only 21 when his cannon battered a way through the city's ancient walls after a 53-day siege; he then made it the capital of his empire.

The invention of what device in the mid-15th century revolutionized the spread of knowledge in Europe?

The printing press that Johannes Gutenberg built around 1440 borrowed its screw mechanism from the presses long used to crush grapes and olives.

What richly decorated books, often made in monasteries, were a major medieval art form?

Illuminated manuscripts are named for the gold and silver that lit up their pages; by the 14th century most were made in commercial town workshops, not by monks.

What code of conduct for knights emphasized virtues like bravery, honor, and courtesy?

Chivalry comes from the Old French chevalerie, from chevalier, 'knight', a word built on cheval, 'horse': it began as the code of mounted warriors, never one fixed rulebook.

What were the medieval courtly-love poet-musicians of southern France called?

Troubadours composed and performed Occitan lyric poetry in southern France during the High Middle Ages; their songs of courtly love inspired the German Minnesang tradition.

Which university, teaching by the 12th century, is the oldest in the English-speaking world?

Oxford lost scholars in 1209, when a violent quarrel with its townsmen drove some to settle at Cambridge, where their school grew into England's second university.

The 11th-12th century Investiture Controversy was a conflict between which two powers?

Church and State fought over who appointed bishops; the 1122 Concordat of Worms split the role, with the Church investing them by ring and staff and the emperor granting their lands by sceptre.

Which numeral system, popularized in Europe by Fibonacci, greatly simplified arithmetic?

Arabic numerals were devised in India; Fibonacci learned them as a boy in Béjaïa, Algeria, where his father represented Pisan merchants, and spread them through his 1202 book Liber Abaci.

What was land granted by a medieval lord to a vassal in return for homage and service called?

A fief could also be a right or an income rather than land, held 'in fee' from an overlord in return for fealty, usually military service.

Which Central Asian nomads built an empire reaching Eastern Europe in the 13th century?

The Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors built an empire that by the 1270s stretched from the Sea of Japan to the Carpathians, the largest contiguous empire in history.

The Domesday Book, a detailed survey of land and resources in England, was commissioned by which king?

William the Conqueror ordered the survey in 1085; within a century the English were calling it Domesday because, a royal treasurer wrote, its verdicts were as final as the Last Judgement.

What is the strong central tower of a medieval castle called?

The keep was called a donjon in French; English turned that word into 'dungeon', a name that once meant the great tower itself rather than the cell beneath it.

What medieval siege engine used a falling counterweight and sling to hurl heavy stones?

The trebuchet's counterweight version swings its arm with a heavy falling weight; it remained the dominant siege engine until gunpowder artillery replaced it in the 15th century.

The Great Schism of 1054 primarily involved the split between which two branches of Christianity?

Catholicism and Orthodoxy split openly in 1054, when papal legates laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia; the two churches withdrew those condemnations only in 1965.

Which tapestry depicts the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings?

The Bayeux Tapestry is not a tapestry at all but wool embroidery on linen, nearly 70 metres long, and was most likely stitched in England within about a decade of the battle.

In medieval Europe, what were peasants bound to the land and subject to their lord called?

Serfs were bound to the land; unlike slaves they could not be sold individually, but in some regions they changed hands along with the land they worked.

What was the primary language of scholarship and the Church in medieval Western Europe?

Latin outlived the empire that spoke it: no longer anyone's mother tongue, it remained the language of schools and of the Roman Catholic Mass, the latter until the 1960s.

Which Italian city-state, the home of Marco Polo, grew rich on medieval trade between Europe and the East?

Venice marked its mastery of the sea each Ascension Day, when the doge sailed out and cast a gold ring into the Adriatic to 'marry' it.

What is the judge-made law that originated in the King's courts of medieval England called?

Common law grew from the rulings of Henry II's travelling royal judges in the 12th century, who applied rules common to all England; the system later spread across the British Empire.

The Wars of the Roses were a dynastic struggle for the English throne between which two houses?

Lancaster and York were rival branches of the Plantagenets; the roses were little-used badges at the time, and the wars got their flowery name only centuries later.

What monophonic, unaccompanied sacred song was central to medieval Western Christian liturgy?

Gregorian chant is named for Pope Gregory I, long credited with collecting it; in the 8th century Frankish kings imposed it on their realm, where it largely replaced the local Gallican chant.

The Alhambra, a landmark of medieval Islamic architecture, is in which modern country?

The Alhambra stands above Granada in Spain; its name comes from the Arabic al-Hamra, 'the red', after the reddish colour of its rammed-earth walls.

Which Frankish leader defeated the Umayyads at the Battle of Tours in 732?

Charles Martel was never king: he ruled the Franks as mayor of the palace, and at Tours his army killed the Umayyad commander Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi.

What medieval crop rotation added a spring sowing of oats or legumes to the farming year?

The three-field system left only a third of the land fallow each year instead of half, and its spring-sown peas and beans put nitrogen back into the soil.

Which English assembly first included representatives of the towns in 1265?

Parliament takes its name from the French parler, 'to talk'; in 1265 Simon de Montfort, short of support among the barons, summoned burgesses from the major towns alongside knights of the shires.

Which early medieval epic poem tells of a hero's battle with the monster Grendel?

Beowulf survives in a single manuscript, copied around the year 1000; though the poem is in Old English, its story is set in Denmark and Sweden.

Which league of north German merchant towns, led by Lübeck, dominated Baltic trade in the later Middle Ages?

The Hanseatic League ran its own trading posts abroad, such as London's Steelyard, and even went to war: in 1370 it beat Denmark and dictated free-trade terms in the Treaty of Stralsund.

What medieval practice judged guilt by hot iron, boiling water or cold water?

Trial by ordeal depended on priests to bless the iron or water, so it faded after a church council in 1215 barred the clergy from taking part.

Whose 'Rule' established the foundations of Western monasticism?

Saint Benedict of Nursia was no soft touch: by Pope Gregory I's account, the first monks he led found his regime so strict that they tried to poison him.

What was the main writing material for books in medieval Europe before paper became common?

Vellum or Parchment, made from the skins of calves, sheep and goats, was so costly that scribes scraped old pages clean to reuse them, leaving the ghost texts known as palimpsests.

Which Byzantine emperor built the Hagia Sophia and codified the 'Corpus Juris Civilis'?

Justinian I rebuilt Hagia Sophia after rioters burned the old church in the Nika riots of 532, which nearly cost him his throne; the new one was finished in under six years.

At which 1415 battle did Henry V's longbowmen rout a far larger French army?

Agincourt was won in the mud: French men-at-arms slogged across a rain-soaked ploughed field under arrow fire and arrived too tired and tightly packed to fight well.

Which archbishop was murdered in his own cathedral in 1170 by followers of Henry II?

Thomas Becket was cut down in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 and declared a saint within three years; in 1174 Henry II himself did public penance at the tomb.

From 1309 to 1376, seven successive popes resided in which city instead of Rome?

Avignon was not French soil at the time: Pope Clement VI bought the city outright from Queen Joanna of Naples in 1348, and it stayed papal property until the French Revolution.

Who led the Kentish rebels, inspired by preacher John Ball, who marched on London in the 1381 Peasants' Revolt?

Wat Tyler met the 14-year-old Richard II at Smithfield, where London's mayor William Walworth struck him down in front of the rebel host.

The Golden Bull of 1356 fixed the seven electors of which realm?

The Holy Roman Empire's seven electors were three archbishops and four lay princes; the bull let a simple majority decide, so three holdouts could no longer block a choice.

Which mounted raiders, later the founders of Hungary, were crushed by a German army at the Lechfeld in 955?

The Magyars' horse archers had long raided Germany and Italy; after the Lechfeld they settled down, and by 1001 their prince Stephen was crowned Hungary's first Christian king.

Which ruler of Kievan Rus' converted to Christianity in 988?

Vladimir the Great accepted baptism in 988 and reportedly sealed the deal by marrying Anna, sister of the Byzantine emperor, after seizing Chersonesus in Crimea.

Which Turkish power crushed a Byzantine army at Manzikert in 1071?

The Seljuks under Alp Arslan routed the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071 and took Emperor Romanos IV prisoner, opening Anatolia to Turkish settlement.

Which Crusade ended with the sack of Constantinople in 1204?

The Fourth Crusade was meant to strike Egypt; instead the crusaders sacked the greatest Christian city for three days in April 1204 and set up an empire of their own there.

On Friday 13 October 1307, the French king had members of which order arrested en masse?

The Knights Templar's Grand Master Jacques de Molay was seized at dawn; Pope Clement V dissolved the order in 1312 and handed its assets to the Hospitallers.

Poland and Lithuania crushed which knightly brotherhood at Grunwald in 1410?

The Teutonic Order's Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen died on the field, yet the order held Malbork Castle and lost little land at the First Peace of Thorn in 1411.

Which prince beat crusading knights on the frozen Lake Peipus in 1242?

Alexander Nevsky led Novgorod against the Livonian Order in the Battle on the Ice of 5 April 1242; Eisenstein's 1938 film later made it a Soviet patriotic legend.

What was Genghis Khan's birth name?

Temüjin was named, by the earliest accounts, after a Tatar captive his father Yesügei had just brought home; the title Genghis Khan came only in 1206, when the steppe tribes acclaimed him.

Marco Polo dictated his travels to a cellmate while a prisoner of which republic?

Polo was captured in a sea fight with Genoa in the 1290s and, in a Genoese prison, dictated his travels to the romance writer Rustichello da Pisa, who worked in tales of his own.

Which Persian polymath wrote 'The Canon of Medicine'?

Avicenna, known in Persian as Ibn Sina, finished the Canon around 1025; in translation it was still being taught in European medical schools some six centuries later.

Which Castilian warlord ruled Valencia from 1094 until his death in 1099?

El Cid, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, fought for Christian and Muslim masters alike before taking Valencia in his own right in 1094.

Which 12th-century abbess, a composer and visionary, also invented her own language, the Lingua Ignota?

Hildegard of Bingen left a glossary of about a thousand invented words; in her sixties she also left her convent on preaching tours across Germany.

Which woman was queen of France and later of England, as wife of Louis VII and then Henry II?

Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry II within weeks of her annulment in 1152; when she later backed their sons' revolt against him, he kept her confined for some sixteen years.

Robert the Bruce routed an English army at which battle in June 1314?

Bannockburn, fought over 23–24 June 1314, began after a Scottish siege of Stirling Castle, which the English had pledged to relieve by midsummer.

Louis IX of France died on crusade in 1270 outside which North African city?

Louis IX died of dysentery outside Tunis on 25 August 1270; the canonised king gives his name to St. Louis, Missouri, and to a cathedral at Carthage near where he died.

A 793 Viking raid on which monastery is often taken as the start of the Viking Age?

Lindisfarne's monks eventually fled with St Cuthbert's body, which came to rest at Durham in 995, about two centuries after the 793 raid.

Besides Denmark and the English crown, Cnut also ruled which kingdom from 1028?

Cnut took Norway in 1028 after driving out Olaf Haraldsson; the North Sea union died with his sons within a decade, and the tale of him commanding the tide was meant to show his piety, not his vanity.

Which institution has held the Book of Kells since 1661?

Trinity College Dublin was given the book by Bishop Henry Jones; back in 1007 thieves had stolen it from Kells for its gold cover, and it turned up months later under a sod of turf.

Which Byzantine emperor was nicknamed 'the Bulgar Slayer'?

Basil II crushed the First Bulgarian Empire by 1018; after Kleidion in 1014 he is said to have blinded thousands of prisoners, leaving one eye to every hundredth man to lead the rest home.

The Byzantine weapon Greek fire was most feared in what kind of fighting?

Greek fire was most feared in naval battles: sprayed through siphons from Byzantine dromons, it kept burning on water and helped break the Arab sieges of Constantinople in the 670s and 717–718.

Which Bohemian reformer was burned at the stake for heresy on 6 July 1415?

Jan Hus was burned at Constance on 6 July 1415 despite an imperial safe-conduct; his death sparked the Hussite Wars, and his followers are counted among the forerunners of the Protestant Reformation.

The Albigensian Crusade of 1209–1229 aimed to wipe out which religious movement?

Launched by Innocent III in 1209 against the Cathars of Languedoc, it ended with the County of Toulouse drawn firmly into the French crown's orbit by the Treaty of Paris in 1229.

Which Franciscan friar's name is attached to the 'razor' principle of parsimony?

William of Ockham's razor says not to multiply entities beyond necessity; the friar himself spent his last years in Munich after fleeing the papal court.

Which English friar was the first in Europe to record a formula for gunpowder?

Roger Bacon's Opus Majus of 1267 describes the saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal mixture; gunpowder itself had been invented in China centuries earlier, by the 9th century.

At which 1389 battle did the Ottoman sultan Murad I and the Serbian prince Lazar both lose their lives?

Kosovo cost both leaders their lives: tradition says the Serbian knight Miloš Obilić killed Murad I, and the battle became the central legend of Serbian national memory.

Which Central Asian conqueror defeated and captured the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I at Ankara in 1402?

Timur, known in Europe as Tamerlane ('Timur the Lame'), held Bayezid I until the sultan died in captivity in 1403, and the sultan's sons then fought over the throne for a decade.

Which Egyptian dynasty halted the Mongol advance at Ain Jalut in 1260?

The Mamluks under Sultan Qutuz and the general Baibars used a feigned retreat; the Mongol commander Kitbuqa died, and the Mongols never held Syria permanently.

What is Iceland's national assembly, founded at Þingvellir in 930, called?

The Althing met in the open air each summer at Þingvellir, where the Lawspeaker presided from the Law Rock; in the year 1000 it voted to make Iceland Christian.

Saladin's victory at Hattin in 1187 led directly to the Muslim recapture of which city?

Saladin took Jerusalem on 2 October 1187, three months after Hattin; the battle also cost the Crusaders their relic of the True Cross and prompted the Third Crusade.

In 1077, Henry IV waited three days in the snow at Canossa to beg pardon from which pope?

Pope Gregory VII lifted Henry's excommunication after the 'Walk to Canossa', which became a German byword for humiliating submission; Bismarck later vowed 'we will not go to Canossa'.

Which English king commissioned the first great church at Westminster Abbey in the 1040s?

Edward the Confessor was too ill to attend his abbey's consecration on 28 December 1065; he died a week later and was buried there, and two centuries on Henry III rebuilt the church around his shrine.

According to the sagas, Leif Erikson founded a Norse settlement in which land?

Vinland is usually placed on the coast of North America; the L'Anse aux Meadows site in Newfoundland, dated to about 1021, shows the Norse really got there.

Erik the Red, exiled from Iceland around 982, founded the first European settlement on which island?

Greenland got its cheerful name, reputedly, because Erik wanted to attract settlers; he had explored it during a three-year exile from Iceland around 982.

The Viking Rollo became the first ruler of which region of northern France?

Normandy means 'land of the Northmen': the Frankish king Charles the Simple granted it to the Viking Rollo in 911, and Rollo accepted baptism as part of the bargain.

Which Heian-era lady-in-waiting wrote The Tale of Genji, often called the world's first novel?

Murasaki Shikibu is a court nickname, perhaps borrowed from her own tale's heroine; her real name is unknown, though her diary shows courtiers already discussing the story in 1008.

Which temple complex did the Khmer king Suryavarman II build in the 12th century and dedicate to Vishnu?

Angkor Wat faces west, unlike most Khmer temples, probably because Suryavarman II meant it as his own tomb; it later became Buddhist and now appears on Cambodia's flag.

The Council of Constance ended the Western Schism in 1417 by electing which pope?

Martin V, born Oddone Colonna, took his name from St Martin of Tours, on whose feast day, 11 November 1417, he was elected; the rival claimants had by then resigned or been deposed.

In Dante's Divine Comedy, which Roman poet guides him through Hell and Purgatory before Beatrice takes over?

Virgil hands over to Beatrice for Paradise; Dante wrote the whole poem in exile from Florence, a city he never returned to.

The Camino pilgrimage across northern Spain ends at the shrine of which apostle?

Santiago de Compostela, whose name means Saint James, grew around a tomb identified as the apostle's in the 9th century; the scallop shell is the pilgrims' badge.

Alfred the Great's daughter Æthelflæd ruled which kingdom as its 'Lady' from 911?

Mercia's 'Lady' Æthelflæd built a chain of fortified burhs, captured Derby from the Danes in 917 and took the surrender of Leicester the year she died, 918.

Which 14th-century English poet, a royal civil servant, was the first writer buried in what became Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey?

Geoffrey Chaucer earned his grave as a royal official and abbey tenant, not as a poet; the marble tomb that draws visitors was added only in 1556.

Which German king was crowned emperor by the pope in Rome in 962?

Otto the Great was crowned by Pope John XII on 2 February 962; when the pope then turned against him, Otto came back and had a synod depose him the following year.

Which wireless technology is named after a 10th-century king who united the tribes of Denmark?

Bluetooth honours King Harald Bluetooth, and its logo is a bind rune merging his initials, H and B. An Intel engineer proposed the name in 1997 after seeing a picture of Harald's runestone in a history book.

Which Anglo-Saxon noblewoman is said to have ridden naked through Coventry to win tax relief?

Lady Godiva was a real 11th-century patron of churches, but her naked ride is a legend first recorded in the 13th century. 'Peeping Tom' was added in later versions of the tale.

Which king, slain at Bosworth Field in 1485, was found buried beneath a Leicester car park in 2012?

Richard III was the last English king to die in battle. DNA from descendants of his sister Anne helped identify the skeleton, and he was reburied in Leicester Cathedral in 2015.

Unlike in Shakespeare's Macbeth, how did the real King Duncan I of Scotland meet his death in 1040?

Killed in battle while attacking Macbeth's home province of Moray, Duncan I was the aggressor. The real Macbeth then reigned for 17 mostly peaceful years.

Medieval Europeans prized 'unicorn horns' that were really the tusks of which Arctic animal?

Narwhal tusks passed for unicorn horn so well that apothecaries sold chips and dust from them as a universal antidote. The 'horn' is really a long, spiralled canine tooth.

Which ball game did London's Lord Mayor ban in 1314, blaming it for 'great noise in the city'?

Football was banned by more than 30 royal and local laws between 1314 and 1667. The 1314 decree, the earliest known reference to the game by name, threatened players with prison.

Which German town dates the loss of 130 children, led away by a piper, to a June day in 1284?

Hamelin's earliest known record of the event was a stained-glass window placed in its church around 1300, which historians think commemorated a real tragedy for the town.

Which Wallachian ruler, son of a prince nicknamed 'the Dragon', was called Dracula in his lifetime?

Vlad the Impaler was called Dracula, 'son of Dracul', because his father belonged to the Order of the Dragon, a knightly league sworn to halt the Ottoman advance into Europe.

The French king Louis X died in 1316 after drinking cooled wine following a tiring game of what?

Tennis was Louis X's passion: he built the first indoor courts in the modern style, and the accounts of his death make him history's first tennis player known by name.

Which Italian city's bell tower began to sink in 1178, when work had only reached the second floor?

Pisa's tower was leaning long before it was finished. Wars then halted work for most of a century, which gave the soft soil time to settle and kept the tower from toppling.

Which legendary outlaw's 'rhymes' are first clearly mentioned in the 1370s poem Piers Plowman?

Robin Hood was a byword by the early 1400s, when one religious tract complained that people would rather listen to his tales and songs than attend Mass.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's pseudo-historical chronicle of the 1130s made which legendary warrior famous?

Arthur owes his fame to Geoffrey of Monmouth, who also shaped the wizard Merlin. Later chroniclers copied the book as real history, embedding its fictions in popular memory.

Which emperor of Mali gave away so much gold in Cairo in 1324 that its value reportedly fell?

Mansa Musa was crossing Egypt on his pilgrimage to Mecca with a vast supply of gold. An estimated two thirds of the gold circulating in the medieval Mediterranean came from West Africa.

Which duke of Bohemia, killed in a plot by his brother, is the 'Good King' of a Christmas carol?

Wenceslas was never a king in life: the title was conferred after his death, when he became patron saint of the Czech state. His brother's companions stabbed him after inviting him to a feast.

Which aid to 'good vision' did a friar praise in 1306 as an art not yet twenty years old?

Eyeglasses appeared in Italy by about 1290, yet the temple arms that hook over a wearer's ears were not invented until the 1700s.

Which chess piece was a weak 'counsellor', moving one square diagonally, until the 15th century?

The queen was originally the vizier or counsellor at the king's side. In the 15th century it gained its modern move, combining the rook's with the bishop's, and became the strongest piece.

Which victor of Stirling Bridge in 1297 was later hanged, drawn and quartered in London?

William Wallace shared the victory with Andrew Moray and was made Guardian of Scotland, but he lost at Falkirk the next year and was handed over to Edward I in 1305.

Which legendary object first appears in Chrétien de Troyes's romance Perceval, around 1190?

The Holy Grail was a wide serving dish in that first telling, holding a single Communion wafer. Robert de Boron soon recast it as the vessel of the Last Supper.

Scholars who fled Oxford in 1209 after townsfolk hanged two students founded which university?

Cambridge grew from that exodus, which makes it the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world. Other scholars who left Oxford headed for Paris and Reading.

Which legendary discovery was Nicolas Flamel, a real Paris scribe, later credited with?

Philosopher's stone legends attached to Flamel only in the 17th century. Alchemists believed the stone turned base metals into gold and could yield an elixir of life.

Which relic, first shown at Lirey in the 1350s, was radiocarbon-dated in 1988 to 1260–1390?

The Shroud of Turin was denounced as a forgery within decades of its first showing, when the Bishop of Troyes wrote that one of his predecessors had identified the artist who made it.

Typhoons hailed as a 'divine wind' are said to have wrecked two Mongol invasion fleets off which country?

Japan was attacked by sea in 1274 and again in 1281, and storms are said to have saved it both times. The Japanese word for divine wind, kamikaze, was reused for the suicide pilots of World War II.

Which cathedral did Bishop Maurice de Sully begin in 1163 on an island in the Seine?

Notre-Dame de Paris had its cornerstone laid in the presence of King Louis VII and Pope Alexander III, and the building was largely complete by 1260.

Which grandson of Genghis Khan founded China's Yuan dynasty and employed Marco Polo as an envoy?

Kublai Khan proclaimed the Yuan dynasty in 1271 and came to rule most of present-day China and Korea. Marco Polo lived in his lands for 17 years.

Horned helmets, wrongly linked with Vikings, were popularised by the Norse operas of which composer?

Richard Wagner's stage Vikings wore horns and wings on their helmets. Texts from the Viking Age itself mention helmets regularly but never horned headgear.

Which company of knights, founded by Edward III in 1348, has the motto 'Honi soit qui mal y pense'?

Order of the Garter legend says a countess's garter slipped off at a court ball in Calais, and the king silenced the sniggering courtiers with the words that became the motto.

Which Holy Roman Emperor drowned in a river in 1190 while leading an army to the Holy Land?

Frederick Barbarossa's death sent most of his army home. German legend says he is not dead but asleep in a cave in the Kyffhäuser mountains, his beard grown through the table.

Medieval physicians traced melancholy to black bile, a humour they linked to which organ?

The spleen was tied to black bile, one of four humours whose balance was thought to set a person's temperament. Doctors went on blaming it for low moods until the 18th century.

Reynard, the trickster hero of a medieval cycle of beast fables, is which kind of animal?

A fox so popular that 'renard' became the standard French word for the animal, replacing 'goupil'. His usual victim in the tales is his uncle Isengrim, the wolf.

What job does a true gargoyle do on a medieval cathedral that a decorative grotesque does not?

A gargoyle drains rainwater through a spout, throwing it clear of the walls so it cannot erode the mortar. A carved monster with no spout is technically a grotesque.

'Algorithm' comes from the name of which 9th-century author of the algebra treatise Al-Jabr?

Al-Khwarizmi also wrote the textbook on Indian arithmetic that, once translated in the 12th century, introduced the decimal positional number system to the Western world.

Which traveller from Tangier covered about 117,000 km, roughly five times Marco Polo's distance?

Ibn Battuta left home at 21 for a pilgrimage to Mecca that should have taken sixteen months, then kept travelling for about 30 years across Africa, Asia and Iberia.

Which pope's sermon at Clermont in 1095 sent armies of knights marching towards the Holy Land?

Urban II never heard how the expedition ended: he died on 29 July 1099, fourteen days after it captured its target city and before the news had reached Italy.

Which rival of King Stephen escaped besieged Oxford across the frozen Thames during the Anarchy?

Empress Matilda and her companions reportedly wore white to hide against the snow. She was never crowned, but her eldest son went on to take the throne as Henry II.

Whose Decameron has ten young people telling tales while sheltering from plague outside Florence?

Giovanni Boccaccio drew on the epidemic that struck his own city. The title joins the Greek words for 'ten' and 'day', the span over which its narrators tell their tales.

Which 14th-century Italian poet originated the idea of a 'Dark Age' following classical antiquity?

Petrarch, writing in the 1330s, called the post-Roman centuries 'dark' beside the 'light' of antiquity. His put-down still colours the popular picture of the period as violent and backward.

Which legendary Christian king, famed from a 1160s letter, was sought in Asia and later Ethiopia?

Prester John was first imagined in India, then in Central Asia, until Portuguese explorers decided he must rule Ethiopia. The letter describing his rich lands was probably forged.

Which bawdy medieval poems, found in a Bavarian monastery in 1803, did Carl Orff set to music?

Carmina Burana means 'Songs from Benediktbeuern', after the monastery where it turned up. Most of its 254 pieces seem to be by Goliards, clergy and students who mocked the Church.

In Falaise in 1386, which kind of animal was formally tried and hanged for killing a child?

A pig was a frequent defendant in medieval animal trials. The Falaise one was given the same wounds it had inflicted on the child's face and arms before it was hanged.

Which undeciphered codex, carbon-dated to the early 1400s, is named after a book dealer?

Voynich manuscript theories abound, but none has been independently verified. Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer, bought it in 1912, and its pages date to 1404–1438.

Which order founded by Hassan-i Sabbah ran a network of mountain fortresses from Alamut in Persia?

The Assassins seized Alamut by subterfuge in 1090 and held strongholds across Persia and Syria. Their Persian network fell to the Mongols in 1256, though some castles in Syria held out longer.

Which Byzantine unit of Norse and later Anglo-Saxon recruits served as the emperors' bodyguard?

Varangian Guard recruits were wanted because outsiders had no local political loyalties. They fought with the broad-bladed Dane axe, so writers called them 'axe-bearing barbarians'.

Which Paris philosopher was castrated on the orders of his pupil Héloïse's uncle after their affair?

Peter Abelard had been a popular lecturer; after the attack he withdrew to the Abbey of Saint-Denis as a monk, while Héloïse went on to head a community of nuns.

At the 'Cadaver Synod' of 897, the exhumed corpse of which pope was put on trial in Rome?

Formosus had been dead about nine months. Pope Stephen VI had the body stripped of its vestments and three blessing fingers, then thrown into the Tiber; a later synod cleared him.

Which Italian town removed the roof over the cardinals to hurry the papal election of 1268–1271?

Viterbo's officials also locked the cardinals in and cut their rations to bread and water. The election was the longest in Church history and inspired the rules of the papal conclave.

Free to leave besieged Weinsberg in 1140 with what they could carry, the women reportedly took what?

Their husbands, in a chronicle compiled in the 1170s: the women left their household goods and came down carrying the men on their shoulders, a tale known as the 'Loyal Wives of Weinsberg'.

The 1302 rout of French knights by Flemish militias near Kortrijk is named after which trophies?

Golden spurs, 500 pairs of them, were taken from the fallen horsemen and presented to the nearby Church of Our Lady. Militia infantry with pikes had stopped charging men-at-arms.

Which 11th-century monk is credited with staff notation and the ut-re-mi syllables behind do-re-mi?

Guido of Arezzo took the syllables from the half-lines of the hymn 'Ut queant laxis', each sung one step higher than the last. His quick teaching methods were resented by fellow monks.

Byzantine heirs 'born in the purple' arrived in a palace chamber lined with which purple stone?

Porphyry covered the walls, floor and ceiling of the room where reigning empresses gave birth. Like the purple dye for cloth, the stone was at times reserved for imperial use only.

Which wooden trophy, carried home by Modena's troops, gave a 1325 Italian war its name?

A bucket, though legend wrongly says its theft began the war. Modena had already seized a rival fortress, and accounts have the bucket taken from a well as a trophy after the one battle.