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Notre-Dame, Palace of the Virgin, with its clusters of columns, its soaring arches, its superb stone carvings and its matchless stained-glass windows, the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Chartres, is perhaps the finest achievement of the Gothic movement that swept Europe,…

Southern France, the cult of courtly love, takes root and flourishes. In the glories of its new cathedral, the town of Chartres provided the fullest single expression of vigour and inspiration of twelfth-century Europe. The school of Chartres itself had…

Abelard, Peter – a renowned teacher from Paris, surrounded by a group of questioning students – formed the nucleus of the new universities. Through the early Middle Ages, such teaching and studying, as existed in Europe, was centered on monasteries…

Toledo falls and this marks the beginning of the end of Islam in Spain. A triumph for orthodoxy The events at Canossa and the condemnation of Peter Abelard under the auspices of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, were signal triumphs for…

Henry IV stood barefoot in the snow, for three days in January, 1077, outside Canossa castle, waiting to see Pope Gregory VIl and to beg him to lift the dreaded sentence of excommunication. Henry’s action was the culmination of a…

Galilee Chapel in Durham Cathedral. Durham was the greatest of the Norman ecclesiastical border fortress in the north of England.

William of Normandy, the conqueror, was also descended from English kings and was convinced that King Edward had promised him the succession. The disputed succession following the death of King Edward the Confessor, brought new invasions and new wars to…

Hugh Capet was coronated in 987 and with that, began the French dominance of Europe. During the eleventh century, a view of world history is dominated by the splendours of the Sung empire in China. Founded in the last decades…

Norsemen or Vikings – Danes, Norwegians and Swedes — were terrorizing the greater part of Europe, over a thousand years ago. Their earliest activities were chiefly limited to raiding and destroying; occupations for which their mastery of the sea admirably…