Category: Medieval
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Edward Longshanks Sent His Heart and Bones to War?
The deathbed image of English King Edward I (r. 1272-1307) refusing to show mercy to William Wallace is a modern one, but also completely false. Edward had Wallace executed nearly 2 years before he himself died. The king was far from his deathbed at that point. Thanks, Braveheart. Remarkably, this is not the most fantastical…
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Battle of the Bastards is Straight from Medieval Chronicles
The “Battle of the Bastards” episode of Game of Thrones has provided remarkable depictions of warfare that come straight from medieval chroniclers. Here is a look at some of those depictions and their medieval equivalent. SPOILER WARNING The wall of the dead One of the most striking features of the Battle of the Bastards is the…
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The Heart of Robert the Bruce
The ruins of the Melrose Abbey in the Scottish Borders are as eerie as they are beautiful. Built in the 12th-century, it was used as a monastery and later a church well into the 1800s. While Scotland has plenty of church ruins, these are notable as they purportedly house the heart of Robert the Bruce.…
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Pope Boniface VIII’s bull against dismembering bodies
If you want to encourage nobles to do more of something, ban it. That’s what Pope Boniface VIII would have learned had he lived to see sustained popularity of dismembering and boiling corpses. His efforts to stop it only ensured it continued with greater vigor, creating a medieval Streisand Effect. From the 9th to the 13th…
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The Case Against the Medieval Ball and Chain
Paul B. Sturtevant recently published an article at the Public Medievalist that argues the use of the ball and chain, technically called a one-handed military flail, is greatly exaggerated. More to the point, “they never existed.” This has caused heartache for some of my friends, such as Daniel Wallace, who have a romanticized vision of…
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William Wallace and Andrew Murray are getting a Stirling monument
A new monument is in the works for Stirling. When complete, visitors will see a massive depiction of William Wallace and his lesser-known counterpart Andrew Murray, the victors of Stirling Bridge. The steel artwork will measure over 26 ft high and cost roughly £150,000. The sculptor is Malcolm Robertson, an award-winning artist who beat out a half…
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The Real Location of Stirling Bridge
Unlike the depiction in Braveheart (1995), the Battle of Stirling Bridge was fought near a wooden bridge, and not in an open field. Before the English could finish crossing, the Scots attacked. In the frenzy to retreat back over the bridge, the whole thing collapse in the River Forth. Many of the English drowned while those trapped…
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The Urquhart Trebuchet
On an elevated position off the shore of Loch Ness is Urquhart, a medieval castle that has been the site of plenty of history. Ness is a skinny lake placed diagonally on a map running roughly 23 miles from northeast to southwest in the Scottish Highlands. [huge_it_maps id=”5″] Urquhart rests in the middle on…
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Slaughtering 3,000 people was normal in 1370
One of the most difficult aspects of reading military history is the brutality of it all. Some accounts are so detached, so transactional that it hardly makes a blip on the humanity scale. When Arrian described Alexander’s troops massacring Greek mercenaries within the Persian army at Issus, he simply described them as “cut off” and “decimated by…
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Medieval Version of a Do-Nothing Leader
In the ninth-century, the Frankish historian Einhard provided a medieval depiction of what many modern-day managers and would-be managers think their job might look like. Describing the last of the Merovingian kings, his “sole command function was to sit back on his throne with flowing hair, his beard uncut, satisfied with the name of king…
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‘Agincourt’: A battle made famous by Shakespeare
No other medieval engagement has a “greater cultural legacy” than the Battle of Agincourt, according to Anne Curry, professor of medieval history at the University of Southampton. Shakespeare’s Henry V, and popular lore before and after, has portrayed it as the miraculous victory of outnumbered, God-favored English underdogs against the overwhelming superiority of the French,…
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Genghis Khan at the Franklin Institute
The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia has a Genghis Khan exhibit through the rest of 2015. Here is what you can expect. The exhibit focuses on the rise, dissemination, and fall of the Mongolian empire, paying particular attention to the amalgamation of cultures—Mongolian, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and European. For example, there is one fourteenth-century sword sporting…