Middle Ages
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This medieval trivia quiz has 143 free questions with answers and covers the whole thousand-year span of the Middle Ages, from the fall of Rome and the coronation of Charlemagne to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It takes in feudalism, fiefs and serfs; knights, chivalry and the trebuchet; the Crusades, the Reconquista and the Hundred Years' War; the Norman Conquest, Domesday Book and Magna Carta; the Black Death, the Great Schism and the Investiture Controversy; Gothic cathedrals, illuminated manuscripts, troubadours and Gregorian chant; and the medieval world beyond Western Europe, including Byzantium, the Alhambra and the Mongols. Easy questions ask what a castle was for and who won at Hastings; harder ones want the year Magna Carta was sealed, the Frankish leader who won at Tours, the monastic order founded at Cîteaux and the emperor who codified Roman law. It suits history students, teachers building a unit on the Middle Ages, and any pub quiz that needs a medieval round. Every answer has been checked against reference sources, and each question shows its citation once you have answered, so you can see exactly where the fact comes from.
30 of 143 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which event is commonly taken to mark the beginning of the Middle Ages in Europe?
The Fall of the Western Roman Empire
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.
Q 02What system of reciprocal obligations bound medieval Europe's lords and vassals?
Feudalism
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.
Q 03The 14th-century Black Death was a pandemic of which disease?
Bubonic plague
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.
Q 04Which Frankish king was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III in 800 CE?
Charlemagne
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.
Q 05Which English king fought Saladin on crusade and agreed a three-year truce with him in 1192?
Richard I
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.
Q 06Which architectural style of pointed arches, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses rose in the High Middle Ages?
Gothic
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.
Q 07Which English king was forced by rebel barons to seal Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215?
King John
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.
Q 08The Hundred Years' War was a long conflict primarily fought between which two kingdoms?
France and England
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.
Q 09Which historical figure led the French army to several important victories during the Hundred Years' War?
Joan of Arc
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.
Q 10What medieval university method sought to reconcile Christian theology with classical philosophy?
Scholasticism
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.
Q 11Which influential theologian and philosopher authored the 'Summa Theologica'?
Thomas Aquinas
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.
Q 12Which English king was killed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066?
Harold Godwinson
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.
Q 13What name is given to the centuries of war in which Christian kingdoms took Iberia from Muslim rulers?
The Reconquista
Q 21Which university, teaching by the 12th century, is the oldest in the English-speaking world?
Oxford
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.
Q 22The 11th-12th century Investiture Controversy was a conflict between which two powers?
Church and State
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.
Q 23Which numeral system, popularized in Europe by Fibonacci, greatly simplified arithmetic?
Arabic numerals
The Reconquista ended on 2 January 1492, when Granada's last emir, Boabdil, surrendered the city to Ferdinand and Isabella.
Q 14What associations of craftsmen and merchants regulated trade in medieval towns?
Guilds
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.
Q 15What was rural medieval Europe's economic system of self-sufficient agricultural estates?
Manorialism
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.
Q 16Which Ottoman sultan captured Constantinople in 1453, an event often taken as the end of the Middle Ages?
Mehmed II
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.
Q 17The invention of what device in the mid-15th century revolutionized the spread of knowledge in Europe?
Printing Press
The printing press that Johannes Gutenberg built around 1440 borrowed its screw mechanism from the presses long used to crush grapes and olives.
Q 18What richly decorated books, often made in monasteries, were a major medieval art form?
Illuminated manuscripts
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.
Q 19What code of conduct for knights emphasized virtues like bravery, honor, and courtesy?
Chivalry
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.
Q 20What were the medieval courtly-love poet-musicians of southern France called?
Troubadours
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.
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.
Q 24What was land granted by a medieval lord to a vassal in return for homage and service called?
Fief
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.
Q 25Which Central Asian nomads built an empire reaching Eastern Europe in the 13th century?
Mongols
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.
Q 26The Domesday Book, a detailed survey of land and resources in England, was commissioned by which king?
William the Conqueror
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.
Q 27What is the strong central tower of a medieval castle called?
Keep
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.
Q 28What medieval siege engine used a falling counterweight and sling to hurl heavy stones?
Trebuchet
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.
Q 29The Great Schism of 1054 primarily involved the split between which two branches of Christianity?
Catholicism and Orthodoxy
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.
Q 30Which tapestry depicts the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings?
Bayeux Tapestry
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.