Pepin the Short: Did you mean...?

The Battle of Poitiers aka the Battle of Tours took place over roughly a week in early October of 732. The opposing sides consisted of a Frankish army led by Charles Martel (r. 718-741) against an invading Muslim army under the nominal sovereignty...

"The Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire," wrote Voltaire, and this interpretation still dominates the popular imagination, so the Holy Roman Empire is treated as a bad joke, a pale parody of the glory of Rome...

The first page of the manuscript of Jeanne de Jussie's Short Chronicle. Library of Geneva

The Merovingian Dynasty was the ruling family of the Franks from roughly 481 when Clovis I ascended the throne of the Salian Franks until 751 when Childeric III was deposed and the Merovingians were supplanted by the Carolingian Dynasty as...

The Merovingians were the ruling family of the Franks from roughly 481 CE, when Clovis I rose to power, until 751, when the last Merovingian king was overthrown and supplanted by the Carolingian Dynasty. They established the largest, most...

The Franks were a Germanic people who originated along the lower Rhine River. They moved into Gaul during the Migration Age, where they established one of the largest and most powerful kingdoms in Europe after the fall of the Western Roman...

Illuminated manuscripts are handwritten books that are highly decorated in precious materials like gold or silver. The use of metallic materials like gold and silver is what gives these texts their name ‘illuminated’, as they reflect the...

The Sumerians flourished in Mesopotamia between c. 4100 – 1750 BCE in the region of Sumer which was not a country, but a region made up of a number of walled city-states, each with its own king. The Sumerian civilization developed the first...

Mesopotamia is an ancient region in the Middle East, east of the Mediterranean by the Zagros mountains, between the two rivers Tigris and Euphrates. The name ‘Mesopotamia’ comes from the Greek meaning ‘between two rivers’. The region is now...

You'll notice that many ex-British Colonies, like Australia, Canada and New Zealand don't use pounds like their former British overlords but instead use dollars. Why? What caused these nations to switch currencies and why did they prefer...