Pope Nicholas III, a Roman named Giovanni Gaetano Orsini; successor of John XXI. As a cardinal he made a great reputation in diplomacy, and he was a close confidant of popes for 30 years. He was elected pope after a six-month delay. Nichola...

Louis IX, commonly Saint Louis, was King of France from 1226 until his death. He inherited the throne at age 12. His mother served as regent until 1234, helping to subdue rebellious barons and Albigensian heretics (Cathari). Louis led a Cru...

Roger Bacon was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods. He is sometimes credited (mainly since the nineteenth century) as one of the earliest European ad...

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...