Dark Ages
Danelaw
Danelaw encompassed the areas of northeast England where Danish customs had a strong political and cultural influence throughout much of the early Middle Ages. The area included Yorkshire (southern Northumbria), East Anglia, and the Five Boroughs, named for its main centers of settlement: Lincoln, Stamford, Nottingham, Leicester, and Derby. All these territories bore influence of Scandinavian culture from Viking invaders…
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DARK AGES?
With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the latter fifth century A.D. the rule of empire vanished in northern Europe, and with it for a time an integrated market economy in the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Asia. The absence of the legions to provide security in the countryside…
Second Arab Siege of Constantinople in 717–718
Date: August 717–15 August 718. Location: on the Sea of Marmara, modern Istanbul. Forces Engaged: Byzantine: unknown. Commander: Emperor Leo the Isaurian. Muslim: 210,000. Commander: Maslama. Importance: Defeat of Muslim forces in their first serious attempt to overpower the Byzantine Empire led to another seven centuries of Christian power in…
Danelaw
Danelaw encompassed the areas of northeast England where Danish customs had a strong political and cultural influence throughout much of the early Middle Ages. The area included Yorkshire (southern Northumbria), East Anglia, and the Five Boroughs, named for its main centers of settlement: Lincoln, Stamford, Nottingham, Leicester, and Derby. All…
Theodoric the Great (c. 451 or 453/454–526)
Theodoric entering Rome. Theoderic’s empire at the height of its power in 523, with territory marked in pink ruled directly by Theoderic and stippled areas under his hegemony. One of the greatest of the barbarian kings and the greatest of the Gothic kings, Theodoric the Great, or the Amal as…
Wessex and her first Christian kings
Two Saxon warriors – realistic portrayal of the sort of warrior farmers who entered the former Roman province of Britannia in numbers, in the fifth century AD. “Saxon warriors, southern England, 6th century CE”, Angus McBride It is obvious that the sequence pagan England–Augustine of Canterbury–Christian England is hardly an…
Edgar pacificus
A contemporary portrayal of King Edgar in the New Minster Charter. The events of 1006 were typical of the calamity that befell England between 980 and 1016: a generation of escalating misery during which time Viking armies roamed practically unopposed across the rolling hills of southern England, looting and burning…