Hugues de Payens, also de Payns, a French knight from the Champagne region, was the co-founder and first Grand Master of the Knights Templar. With Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, he created the Latin Rule, the code of behavior for the Order....

Peter Abelard (Latin: Petrus Abaelardus or Abailardus; French: Pierre Abélard) was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician. His love for, and affair with, Héloïse d'Argenteuil have become legendary. The...

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was a French abbot and the primary builder of the reforming Cistercian monastic order. "The voice of conscience, the dominating figure in the Catholic Church from 1125 to 1153", his authority helped to end the sch...

Empress Matilda, also known as Matilda of England or Maude, was the daughter and heir of King Henry I of England. Matilda and her younger brother, William Adelin, were the only legitimate children of King Henry to survive to adulthood. Will...

Eleanor of Aquitaine was one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in western Europe during the High Middle Ages, a member of the Ramnulfid dynasty of rulers in southwestern France. She became Duchess of Aquitaine in her own right while...

Henry II ruled as King of England (1154–1189), Count of Anjou, Count of Maine, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Duke of Gascony, Count of Nantes, Lord of Ireland and, at various times, controlled parts of Wales, Scotland and western Fra...

Sir William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke, also called William the Marshal (Norman French: Guillaume le maréchal), was an English (or Anglo-Norman) soldier and statesman. Stephen Langton eulogized him as the "best knight that ever lived." H...

Guy of Lusignan was a Poitevin knight, son of Hugh VIII of the prominent Lusignan dynasty. He was king of the crusader state of Jerusalem from 1186 to 1192 by right of marriage to Sibylla of Jerusalem, and of Cyprus from 1192 to 1194. Havin...

Philip II, known as Philip Augustus, was King of France from 1180 to 1223, a member of the House of Capet. Philip's predecessors had been known as kings of the Franks, but from 1190 onward, Philip became the first French monarch to style hi...

Baldwin I, the first emperor of the Latin Empire of Constantinople, as Baldwin IX Count of Flanders and as Baldwin VI Count of Hainaut, was one of the most prominent leaders of the Fourth Crusade, which resulted in the capture of Constantin...

Louis VIII the Lion reigned as King of France from 1223 to 1226. He was a member of the House of Capet. Louis VIII was born in Paris, France, the son of Philip II Augustus and Isabelle of Hainaut. He was also Count of Artois, inheriting the...

Pope Clement IV, was elected Pope February 5, 1265, in a conclave held at Perugia that took four months, while cardinals argued over whether to call in Charles of Anjou, the youngest brother of Louis IX of France (1226–70), to carry on the...

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...

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...

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...