Religion and the Church
This Augustinian canon initiated the Protestant Reformation with his 16th-century writings against the papacy.
Martin Luther
This Frankish ruler was crowned Emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day, 800 CE.
Charlemagne
Launched in 1095, this invasion of the Eastern Mediterranean by Latin Christian armies ended in the conquest of Jerusalem.
The First Crusade
The Eastern Roman Empire, which survived the fifth-century collapse of Roman rule in Western Europe and North Africa, has traditionally been known to historians by this 'complicated' name.
Byzantine Empire
One of the major features of the 'Renaissance' was the emergence of this intellectual movement, named for its central belief that human beings and human dignity are the proper objects of study.
humanism
In Western Europe, this variety of institutional religious practice, in which celibate communities of religious men lived in relative isolation, normally took the form laid out in the sixth-century Benedictine Rule.
Monasticism
This sixth-century emperor, who ruled in Constantinople, launched an ambitious and partially successful campaign to reconquer former Roman territories in North Africa and the Western Mediterranean.
Justinian
In the medieval social theory known as the 'Three Orders', this group was known (in English) as 'those who fight'.
Bellatores
The year 622, now the start of the Islamic calendar, saw the prophet Muhammad flee from Mecca to this city, now regarded as the second most sacred city in the Islamic tradition.
Medina
This Polish astronomer's 1543 publication, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, helped popularize the 'heliocentric' astronomical model and launch the 'Scientific Revolution'.
Nicolaus Copernicus
This form of piety, characterized by direct visions or experiences of the divine, was the particular province of women in the Late Middle Ages.
Mysticism
The conflict known as the Investiture Controversy pitted Pope Gregory VII against this German Emperor over the question of who should have the right to appoint bishops.
Henry IV
The efforts of the Hapsburg Emperor Francis II to reverse the Peace of Augsburg led to this conflict, which eventually incorporated all major powers in the 'Greater West'.
The Thirty Years' War
The fall of Constantinople in this year brought an end to the Eastern Roman Empire and signaled the emergence of the Ottomans as the dominant power in the Eastern Mediterranean.
1453
The varieties of plague which tore through Europe and the Mediterranean beginning in the fourteenth century included the bubonic and this deadlier variety.
pneumonic
The religious orders of 'knight-monks' founded in the wake of the First Crusade included the Knights Templar and this group, not originally serving a military function.
Knights of the Hospital or Knights Hospitaller
This ruler's conflict with Pope Boniface VIII over the question of clerical taxation resulted in the Pope being brutally attacked at Anagni, where he soon died of his injuries.
Philip IV of France
The Battle of Manzikert in 1071 constituted a significant defeat for the Byzantines at the hands of this group.
The Seljuk Turks
The Mongol invasions from East Asia to Eastern Europe were often intensely violent and disrupted to the political order, but they did have the effect of opening European access to this longstanding Asian trading corridor.
The Silk Road
The History of the Kings of Britain, written c.1136, introduced this legendary British figure to the European stage, where he has remained enduringly popular ever since.
King Arthur
This doctrine, which had its heyday in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, held that church councils, rather than papal rulings, were the proper mechanism for establishing church law in Latin Christendom.
conciliarism
This European ruler was responsible for the 1170 murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in Canterbury cathedral.
Henry II of England
The Hundred Years' War, which lasted from 1337-1453, was originally caused by a succession crisis after the end of this French dynasty.
The Capetians
Under this sultan, who ruled from 1520 to 1566, the Ottoman Empire reached its greatest extent, incorporating the modern Balkans, Persia, and North Africa.
Suleiman the Magnificent
In the 1480s and 1490s, the Spanish largely destroyed this indigenous group in the process of conquering the Canary Islands.
Guanches