A fifteenth-century Venetian memorandum estimated how many horsemen and how much revenue dozens of European, North African and Asian states commanded. Its figures are often unreliable or exaggerated, and its dating is uncertain, but it shows how Venice judged rival powers, with Hungary rated highest among Christian kingdoms.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
At the Battle of Ane in 1227, Bishop Otto II of Utrecht gathered a very large army from knights, hired men at arms, the general levy and allied princes, yet it was defeated. A contemporary cleric blamed untrained, arms-unaccustomed troops, showing size did not guarantee strength, while Drenthe's rural levies fought well.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
In 1366, the average Swedish peasant owed the crown the equivalent of 162 kilograms of butter, up from about 16 kilograms earlier in the century. Records show the spike followed the 1363 German invasion, and heavy taxes persisted after Queen Margaret took over in 1389.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
A €40,000 grant will pay for a new slate roof on the chapel tower at Falkenstein Castle, a privately owned ruin above the River Our on the German-Luxembourg border. The money comes from the German Foundation for Monument Protection, funded by private donations and the GlücksSpirale lottery, and the castle's first written mention dates to 1192.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
Archaeologists still can't agree whether Roman Britain ended in a sudden collapse in the early fifth century or faded slowly, with Roman culture lingering into the sixth. A new book on western Britain uses archaeology and the writings of Gildas to trace its forgotten kingdoms, their trading networks and Tintagel's role as a royal stronghold.
— via Medievalists.net, New Medieval Books
A single Old English word in Beowulf's fight with Grendel, inwitþancum, literally says the hero seized his foe "with malicious intentions," and translators from Tolkien to Heaney have softened it into anger or presence of mind. A new study argues the poet may have meant it, briefly adopting the monsters' point of view.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
Radiocarbon dating of 47 oaks in Italy shows many of the trees took root between roughly 1400 and 1650, the centuries after the Black Death emptied the countryside. The researchers say the pandemic is the most plausible cause, since the same pulse of growth appears on a Tuscan island and in the Calabrian mountains.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
Tooth enamel from medieval Peak District children shows lead levels sometimes matching or exceeding those of people in heavily industrialised British cities between about 1750 and 1850. Of 15 medieval individuals tested, 14 topped 10 parts per million, and the data give the first securely dated evidence that lead production had resumed there by the mid-seventh century.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
Native Hawaiians share more Polynesian ancestry with people on Easter Island than with the much closer Marquesas, a genetic study in Science finds. It points to related voyagers who settled both, though it doesn't show anyone sailed directly between them.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
Dante tells us Mordred sits in Caina, the ice-lake of Hell reserved for betrayers of kin, but he never says where King Arthur ended up. A fourteenth-century Dante commentator filled the gap with a gloss on Arthur's death, borrowing from Boccaccio and Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle, and it's newly translated here.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
A 14th-century Baghdad manuscript holds full-page paintings of demons and djinn that come with no text at all, only a title in large letters, so readers must already know the iconography to decode them. They sit alongside al-Qazwini's 13th-century guide to monsters, the King of Thursday and the Ghul.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
The French word for candle, bougie, comes from Béjaïa, a medieval Algerian port that supplied beeswax. Fibonacci also picked up the Hindu-Arabic numerals behind his 1202 Liber Abaci there, as a boy living in the city.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
A short inscription at the end of the 868 Diamond Sutra names a sponsor, Wang Jie, and says the scroll was made for free distribution on behalf of his two parents. It doesn't say who carved the blocks, why he commissioned it, or whether the parents were alive.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
A new study argues that the swollen eyes and squint in Botticelli's paintings of Simonetta Vespucci point to a pituitary tumour, not the tuberculosis historians have generally blamed for her death at 23. The researchers read the features as signs of a large tumour pressing on nerves that control eye movement.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
This extensive collection of translated texts explores the emperors of Byzantium from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries. Drawing on chronicles, letters and other historical sources, it offers a…
— via Medievalists.net, New Medieval Books
£41 million is heading to England's crumbling heritage, with Hastings Castle pocketing nearly £300,000 and Dover Castle's inner bailey next in line for repairs. A Norfolk church is getting over £732,000 to save a collapsing well and a Plantagenet-era painted ceiling.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
A 14th-century scholar who buried family lost to plague and a shipwreck built a theory of why empires collapse, centered on "asabiyyah," or group solidarity. A new 16-chapter volume argues his framework still explains taxation, leadership and social decay today.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
A sixth-century Byzantine doctor once wrote a Frankish king a letter telling him what to eat. That letter survives, and now it's translated in full, skipping Galen's theory for blunt, practical dietary orders fit for a royal table.
— via Medievalists.net, New Medieval Books
A hilltop in Burgundy just gave up a 27.5-metre church, Roman-style underfloor heating, and 500 glass fragments belonging to someone rich enough to afford all three. The complex near Dijon stayed in use for roughly three centuries, from the 400s to the early 700s, with barely a renovation.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
DNA from 7,700 early medieval graves is rewriting the Avar era: one Austrian cemetery turns out to be mostly East Asian in ancestry, a neighboring one European, yet both buried their dead the same way. The new Vienna exhibition says culture, not biology, made the difference.
— via Medievalists.net, Medievalists.net
