Posts Tagged ‘Middle Ages’
The First Common Market?
My Own True Love and I leave next week for Belgium and my thoughts are turning toward Waterloo, Flanders Field, and the Hanseatic League.* Especially the Hanseatic League. I’m fascinated by traveling merchants, from the Silk Road caravans that brought luxury goods from China and India to the Muslim peddlers who sold dry goods…
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Sylvester II: Scientist, Pope, Wizard, –Vampire?
Gerbert of Aurilac (ca. 940-1003), later Pope Sylvester II, has been tracking me down for months. I first met up with the “scientist-pope” when I was working on Islamic Spain’s influence on medieval Europe. Gerbert was one of the first of the European scholars who traveled to Spain to study the lost quadrivium of the…
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