middle ages

News Stories

“Beyond the Volok”: The Medieval Frontier and Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016-1471 (Part Two)

Established as a republic in 1136, much of the history of Novgorod was written in the Old Russian Chronicle of Novgorod.

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The Viking King Harald Hardrada: Eastern Exile and Mercenary Life, 1030-1042 (Part I)

Harald Sigurdsson (1015-1066), also known as Harald Hardrada (“hard”) was one of the most fabled kings in Norwegian history. Harald and his half-brother Olaf Haraldsson – who later became Saint Olaf – fought together in 1030 while trying to reclaim the throne from the Danish king Cnut the Great – who made an alliance with the jarls of Lade in the Trondheim region.

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Medieval Dresses: The Mirror of Medieval Society

There are many ads on the internet offering medieval dresses for sale. That means they are quite popular and have their fans that like to buy them and wear them on certain occasions. What are the reasons for such a fascination with medieval dresses? Well, everyone has their motives, but it’s definitely interesting to immerse in the medieval era and see that medieval dresses weren’t just clothes. Wearing a certain dress meant much more. A dress was a status symbol that defined a woman and who she was. Wearing a certain dress meant showing within which class you belong and how rich and powerful your family was. But, “medieval fashion” was also a reflection of the whole political and social situation during the Middle Ages.

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Norway’s King Sigurd the Crusader, 1089-1130AD

There were numerous Christian crusades to the Holy Land but one of the more fabled was the Norwegian Crusade. Led by King Sigurd I Magnussen (Sigurd the Crusader) in 1107, the three-year crusade was the first led personally by a European king.

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