Pope Leo X: Did you mean...?

In medieval and Renaissance Europe, dogs were considered little more than 'machines' which performed certain tasks, such as guarding a home or tracking game, but this view changed significantly during the Age of Enlightenment (also known...

The Magna Carta or 'Great Charter' was an agreement imposed on King John of England (r. 1199-1216) on 15 June 1215 by rebellious barons in order to limit his power and prevent arbitrary royal acts like land confiscation and unreasonable taxes...

Christianity is the world's largest religion, with 2.8 billion adherents. It is categorized as one of the three Abrahamic or monotheistic religions of the Western tradition along with Judaism and Islam. 'Christian' is derived from the Greek...

Jan Hus (also John Huss, l. c. 1369-1415) was a Czech philosopher, priest, and theologian who, inspired by the work of John Wycliffe (l. 1330-1384) challenged the policies and practices of the medieval Church and so launched the Bohemian...

The Crusades were a series of military campaigns organised by Christian powers in order to retake Jerusalem and the Holy Land back from Muslim control. There would be eight officially sanctioned crusades between 1095 CE and 1270 CE and many...

Cardinal Thomas Cajetan (l.c. 1468-1534) was a Catholic theologian and philosopher best known for his disputations with Martin Luther (l. 1483-1546) beginning in 1518. Cajetan, a philosophical Humanist, was thought to have had the best chance...

The Vandals were a Germanic tribe who are first mentioned in Roman history in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder (77 CE). The Roman historian Tacitus also mentions them in his Germania (c. 98 CE), though he also refers to them as the...

Empress Irene was the wife of Leo IV and, on her husband's death, she reigned as regent for her son Constantine VI from 780 to 790 CE. From 797 to 802 CE she ruled as emperor in her own right, the first woman to do so in Byzantine history...

The Coronation of Napoleon I as Emperor of the French took place on Sunday 2 December 1804, in the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral. A sacred ceremony held to legitimize Napoleon's reign, the coronation signaled the birth of the First French...

In response to Martin Luther's 95 Theses, as well as his other works, Pope Leo X sent a papal bull threatening him with excommunication in June 1520. Luther publicly burned the bull at Wittenberg on 10 December 1520 and was officially excommunicated...