Magna Carta (Latin for "Great Charter", literally "Great Paper"), also called Magna Carta Libertatum, was an English charter originally issued in 1215. Magna Carta is the most significant early influence on the long historical process that...

Kublai Khan was the fifth Khagan (Great Khan) of the Ikh Mongol Uls (Mongol Empire), reigning from 1260 to 1294, and the founder of the Yuan Dynasty, a division of the Mongol Empire. Kublai was the fourth son of Tolui and a grandson of G...

Hulagu Khan was a Mongol ruler who conquered much of Southwest Asia. Son of Tolui and the Kerait princess Sorghaghtani Beki, he was a grandson of Genghis Khan, and the brother of Arik Boke, Möngke Khan and Kublai Khan. Hulagu's army greatly...

Rudolf I, First German king (1273 – 91) of the Habsburg dynasty. He inherited lands in Alsace, the Aargau, and Breisgau and extended his territory by marriage and through negotiation. Crowned king in 1273, he was recognized by Pope Gregory...

William of Rubruck was a Flemish Franciscan missionary and explorer. His account is one of the masterpieces of medieval geographical literature comparable to that of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. Born in Rubrouck, Flanders, he is known also a...

Saint Bonaventure was the eighth Minister General of the Order of Friars Minor, commonly called the Franciscans. He was a scholastic theologian and medieval philosopher, a contemporary of Thomas Aquinas, and a Cardinal Bishop of Albano. He...

Alfonso X, called the Wise (Spanish: el Sabio), was the King of Castile, León and Galicia from 30 May 1252 until his death. During the Imperial election of 1257, a dissident faction chose him to be King of the Romans (Latin: Rex Romanorum;...

Parzival is a major medieval German epic poem attributed to the poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, written in the Middle High German language. The poem is commonly dated circa the first quarter of the 13th century. The poem is, in part, an adapta...

Villard de Honnecourt was a 13th-century artist from Picardy in northern France. He is known to history only through a surviving portfolio or "sketchbook" containing about 250 drawings and designs of a wide variety of subjects. The so-ca...

Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis. He was the...

Charles I, commonly called Charles of Anjou, was the King of Sicily by conquest from 1266 (though he had received it as a papal grant in 1262), though he was expelled from the island in the aftermath of the Sicilian Vespers of 1282. Thereaf...

The Codex Gigas is the largest extant medieval manuscript in the world. It was created in the early 13th century in the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice in Bohemia, and is now preserved at the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm. It i...

Jacob van Maerlant (or Merlant) is known as the greatest Flemish poet of the Middle Ages. He was born about 1235 and died sometime after 1291. Of his life little is known. In his first work, Merlijns Boeck, the author calls himself "Jacob d...

Pope Boniface VIII was Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 1294 to 1303. Boniface VIII put forward some of the strongest claims to temporal, as well as spiritual, supremacy of any Pope and constantly involved himself with foreign affairs...

Peter the Great was the King of Aragon (as Peter III) and Valencia (as Peter I) and Count of Barcelona (as Peter II) from 1276 to his death. He conquered Sicily and became its king in 1282. He was one of the greatest of medieval Aragonese m...