The Lombards (Latin Langobardi, Longobards found in older English texts), were Germanic people who migrated southwards to occupy the Hungarian plains during the 6th century and entered the late Roman Empire. Pressure from the Avars caus...

Isaac of Nineveh also remembered as Isaac the Syrian and Isaac Cyrus was a Seventh century bishop and theologian best remembered for his written work. He is also regarded as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, which the feast day of Jan...

The Leshan Giant Buddha is a 71-metre (233 ft) tall stone statue, built during the Tang Dynasty. It is carved out of a cliff face that lies at the confluence of the Minjiang, Dadu and Qingyi rivers in the southern part of Sichuan province i...

Pepin the Short (or Pepin the Younger or Pepin III), was the King of the Franks from 751 to 768 and is best known for being the father of Charlemagne, or Charles the Great. He was born in 714 in Jupille, close to the city of Liège, in what...

Al-Mansur was the second Abbasid Caliph from 136 AH to 158 AH (754 AD – 775 AD). He is generally regarded as the real founder of the Abbasid Caliphate. In 762 he founded as new imperial residence and palace city Madinat as-Salam (the cit...

Empress Koken, also known as Empress Shotoku, was the 46th (with Empress Koken name) and the 48th monarch of Japan (with Empress Shotoku name), according to the traditional order of succession. Empress Koken first reigned from 749 to 758, t...

Abd al-Rahman I was the founder of a Muslim dynasty that ruled the greater part of Iberia for nearly three centuries (including the succeeding Caliphate of Córdoba). The Muslims called the regions of Iberia under their dominion al-Andalus....

The Battle of Tours, often called Battle of Poitiers, was fought near the city of Tours, close to the border between the Frankish realm and the independent region of Aquitaine. The battle pitted Frankish and Burgundian forces under Austrasi...

Charlemagne, meaning Charles the Great, was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans (Imperator Romanorum) from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Cent...

Padmasambhava, The Lotus Born, was a sage guru from Oddiyana na who is said to have transmitted Vajrayana Buddhism to Bhutan and Tibet and neighbouring countries in the 8th century. In those lands he is better known as Guru Rinpoche ("Preci...

Irene of Athens, Byzantine empress (797-802). She served (780-90) as regent for her son, Constantine VI, and later was made (792) joint ruler. Devoted to the Orthodox Church, she bent most of her efforts to suppressing iconoclasm. In 797 Ir...

Jayavarman II, a 9th century king of Cambodia, is widely recognized as the founder of the Khmer Empire, which ruled much of the Southeast Asian mainland for more than six hundred years. Historians formerly dated his reign as running from 80...

Al-Khwarizmi was a Persian scholar who produced works in mathematics, astronomy, and geography. Around 820 AD he was appointed as the astronomer and head of the library of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Al-Khwarizmi's popularizing treat...

The Viking Age is the period from 793 AD to 1066 AD in European history, especially Northern European and Scandinavian history, following the Germanic Iron Age. It is the period of history when Scandinavian Norsemen explored Europe by its s...

The Dresden Codex is a pre-Columbian Maya book of the eleventh or twelfth century of the Yucatecan Maya in Chichén Itzá. The Maya codex is believed to be a copy of an original text of some three or four hundred years earlier. Historians sa...