Aachen
(town, palace) West central German town, known for its hot springs. Aachen’s significance is linked to Charlemagne, who created a Carolingian palace complex there, where he was buried. Successive ...
Aaronios
(᾽Ααρώνιος, ᾽Ααρών), Byz. noble family descended from the last Bulgarian tsar, John Vladislav, whose wife Maria was granted the title zoste patrikia soon after 1018 and settled in Constantinople. Her ...
Abbasid
A member of a dynasty of caliphs who ruled in Baghdad from 750 to 1258, named after Abbas (566–652), the prophet Muhammad's uncle and founder of the dynasty.
abbess
The head of certain autonomous houses of nuns. The title is used among Benedictines, Cistercians, Trappists, Poor Clares, and some canonesses. The earliest known instance is in 514. In the Middle ...
Abbey of Savigny
In Normandy. In 1093 Vitalis of Mortain established a hermitage in the Forest of Savigny. Some of the hermits felt a call to follow the Rule of St Benedict in its primitive strictness, and the abbey ...
Abbo of Saint-Germain
(9th c.)A strange war correspondent, Abbo, a monk of the monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, described the siege of Paris by the Vikings in 885–886. Having come from the west (Neustria) ...
abbot of Reichenau Bern(o) Augiensis
(r. 1008–48) Music theorist and liturgist.His Prologus in tonarium (also called ‘Musica Bernonis’), compiled between 1021 and 1036, was a popular textbook, widely distributed throughout the 11th and ...
Abchasia
(᾽Αβασγία), northern portion of ancient Colchis bordering on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. In the 4th C. Abchasia became part of the kingdom of Lazika; it probably developed ...
Abd al- Mumin
(1094–1163)Founder of the Almohad (properly Muwahhad, ‘Unitarian’) dynasty in North Africa. When Ibn Tumart died in 1128, Abd al-Mumin kept his death secret for two years till his own ...
ʿAbd al-Malik
(r. 685–705)Umayyad caliph responsible for standardizing imperial coinage and collecting a corpus of hadith to be interpreted by appointed faqihs (Muslim jurists), causing hadith to emerge as a ...
