Originally, "Arabs" were synonymous with Arabians (inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula), until the Arabisation of people with no Arabian ancestry, mostly during the Abbasid Caliphate. Therefore all u ...
In the 11th century, the Seljuk Turks took over much of the Middle East, occupying Persia during the 1040s, Armenia in the 1060s, and Jerusalem in 1070. In 1071, the Turkish army defeated the Byzantin ...
Charlemagne's court in Aachen was the centre of the cultural revival sometimes referred to as the "Carolingian Renaissance". The period saw an increase in literacy, developments in the arts, architect ...
Etymology and periodisation See also: PeriodisationThe Middle Ages is one of the three major periods in the most enduring scheme for analysing European history: classical civilisation, or Antiquity, t ...
The term Mediterranean derives from the Latin word mediterraneus, meaning "in the middle of earth" or "between lands" (medi-; adj. medius, -um -a "middle, between" + terra f., "land, earth"): as it is ...
The Mediterranean Basin was shaped by the ancient collision of the northward-moving African-Arabian continent with the stable Eurasian continent. As Africa-Arabia moved north, it closed the former Tet ...
According to tradition, the Umayyad family (also known as the Banu Abd-Shams) and Muhammad both descended from a common ancestor, Abd Manaf ibn Qusai, and they are originally from the city of Mecca. M ...
The name Franci was originally socio-political. To the Romans, Celts, and Suebi, the Franks must have seemed alike: they looked the same and spoke the same language, so that Franci became the name by ...
The Battle of Tours followed 21 years of Umayyad conquests in Europe which had begun with the invasion of the Visigothic Christian Kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula in 711. These were followed by mili ...
Precisely what happened in Iberia in the early 8th century is subject to much uncertainty. There is one contemporary Christian source, the Chronicle of 754 (which ends on that date), regarded as relia ...
Sources for the history of the invasion The earliest Arab accounts that have come down to us are those of Ibn Abd-el-Hakem, Al-Baladhuri and Ibn Khayyat, all of which were written in the 9th century s ...
Syria had been under Roman rule for seven centuries prior to the Arab Muslim conquest and had been invaded by the Sassanid Persians on a number of occasions during the 3rd, 6th and 7th centuries; it h ...
The First Bulgarian Empire became known simply as Bulgaria since its recognition by the Byzantine Empire in 681. Some historians use the terms Danube Bulgaria, First Bulgarian State, or First Bulgaria ...
Following the First Arab siege of Constantinople (674–678), the Arabs and Byzantines enjoyed a period of peace. After 680, the Umayyad Caliphate was in the throes of the Second Muslim Civil War and t ...
The Anatolian peninsula, also called Asia Minor, is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Aegean Sea to the west, and the Sea of Marmara to the northwest, whic ...
