Category Classical World B.C. 1000 – 500 A.D.

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…

The birth of Hungary The battle of the Lechfeld, which was so important to Western Europe, had an equally profound influence on events in Central and Eastern Europe. The almost total annihilation of their army compelled the Magyars to settle…

Lechfeld, the battleground outside Augsburg on St. Lawrence’s day, 10 August 955 A. D., was highly significant for the whole of Europe. On a battlefield littered with corpses and discarded weapons, the victorious Otto I, had his cheering troops proclaim…

Cluny, the Greatest Benedictine Abbey in Europe, was founded in 910. After the reign of the great Abd al-Rahman III, Islamic Spain was increasingly subject to internal division and the overthrow of the Cordovan Caliphate in 1013, allowed the Christians…

Caliph of Cordova’s library, raised Cordova to its great eminence. It was Europe’s most glittering capital: a place where Moslems, Christians and Jews lived, worked, studied and thought. Tenth-century Cordova was as preoccupied with philosophy, poetry and medicine, as Paris…

Baghdad founded and became the centre of Islamic learning and culture. England in the tenth century As a soldier, Alfred, rightly called the Great, saved his nation; as a legislator, he established the concept of a nationwide law for all…

Alfred “The Great”, alone amongst the English kings, has been awarded this title. Earlier invaders of the British Isles had been assimilated, but the thin veneer of English civilzation in the Dark Ages could not withstand the impact of Danish…

Charlemagne’s empire destroyed and dissolved in the ninth century, but the idea of “Europe” survived. By the late tenth century, the eastern and western parts of the Frankish kingdom had coalesced into the dim outlines of the future kingdoms of…