The Middle Ages

He walked away from the most prestigious teaching post in the Islamic world at the height of his career, and only then wrote the work that made him a renewer of the faith.

The words algebra and algorithm both trace to one Baghdad scholar, yet almost nothing about his personal life survives beyond a bibliographer's secondhand book list.

Dante wrote his epic in everyday Tuscan rather than Latin, and that single choice did more to shape Italian than centuries of the political career his exile had just destroyed.

A caliph whose real diplomacy and administration are well documented is still known worldwide chiefly as the fictional ruler of a story collection assembled after his death.

Whether he marched to Kufa out of ambition, principle, or a deliberate wish for martyrdom is a question the evidence supports three ways and settles none.

Some of his most important writing was produced while fleeing suspicious rulers or hiding from arrest, in an unusually direct autobiography rare for a medieval scholar.

1096

-800

680

732

Four states built by a permanent minority of settlers, which lasted nearly two centuries only because their Muslim neighbours were often more interested in fighting each other.

1358

800

661

1150

Aquinas stopped writing after a single Mass in 1273, calling everything he had produced straw, and historians still cannot agree whether that was revelation or the effects of a head injury weeks earlier.