Medieval World Culture & Conflict Magazine

Medieval Warfare picks up where its sister magazine, Ancient Warfare, leaves off. Starting around 500 AD, Medieval Warfare examines the world during the Middle Ages up through the early years of the Renaissance (the magazine generally leaves off in the 16th century). While popular topics such as the Crusades and the Vikings are given regular coverage, Medieval Warfare also tackles more complex and obscure topics, ranging from the Umayyad Caliphate versus the Byzantine Empire to horse trading in 14th-century England.

Medieval World Culture & Conflict Magazine

Editorial

Beowulf was connected to King Cnut

Fragment of Christian gospel discovered hidden in medieval manuscript

THE ABBEY CHURCH OF SAINT-DENIS • Few places in medieval France are as closely con- nected with the monarchy as Saint-Denis. Since the Merovingian age, the church housed the royal buri- als and the regalia of the crown of France. The church experienced great moments of renewal during the times of King Dagobert and emperor Charles the Bald, and later under the leadership of Ab- bot Suger, who oversaw an extensive reno- vation of the architecture. In Suger's time, Saint-Denis became the cradle of Gothic art.

KNIGHTLY MARKERS • Everyone knows that knights used heraldry so that, with their faces covered by their great helms, friend could be distinguished from foe. How did that work in practical terms?

THE BATTLE OF SVOLDER • After the Battle of Hjörungavágr in AD 986, peace lasted in Norway for nine years until the population became unhappy with the increasingly unjust rule of Haakon Sigurdsson, the Earl of Lade. The return of Olaf Tryggvason to Norway in the same year caused him to lose all support, and he was killed soon afterward by his servant Tormod Kark, in hope of a reward. An alliance was then formed between Haakon's son Eric Haakonson, Sweyn Forkbeard the King of Denmark, and Olaf Skötkonung the king of Sweden, with the intention of defeating Tryggvason and each claiming a part of Norway for themselves.

THE MYSTERIOUS MIDDLE AGES • “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” The famous line from L.P. Hartley's The Go- Between speaks to the enormous distance that exists between us in the present and those who inhabited the past. That distance is anywhere from 500-1500 years and is magnified by differences in language, culture, and thought. They did things differently in the Middle Ages. And that difference and that distance make everything in the medieval world a bit of a mystery.

Richard III's mysterious body

Mysterious archives

THE WORLD'S MOST MYSTERIOUS MANUSCRIPT • An issue devoted to medieval mysteries would not be complete without an introduction to the World's Most Mysterious Manuscript, a.k.a. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Li- brary (Yale University) MS 408. Among friends, this is the Voynich Manuscript, named for its early twentieth-century owner, New York city bookdealer Wilfrid Voynich (1865–1930).

THE SHROUD OF TURIN • The Shroud of Turin, the supposed burial cloth of Jesus, is Christianity's most famous and controversial relic. Where- as debates over the authenticity of the bloodstained im- ages of Christ's dead body dominate current discourse on the Shroud, suspicions about its origins go back to the 1300s. But by the 1500s and 1600s, other relics of Christ, which formerly thrived as objects of medieval devotion, underwent fluctuating fortunes that allowed the Shroud to emerge as one of Europe's preeminent Christian artifacts.

Pilgrimage, replicas, and devotion

A MEDIEVAL COLD CASE • When king-elect Conrad of Montferrat – who was to be crowned king of Jerusalem – was as- sassinated in the city of Tyre in 1192, there were many suspects. The assassination itself was carried out by the infamous Ismaili Assassins. But to this day, it is not...