History Trivia - Paris sacked by Viking raiders

March 28

845 Paris was sacked by Viking raiders, probably under Ragnar Lodbrok, who collected a huge ransom in exchange for leaving.
 

History Trivia - Battle of Vincy

March 21

717 Battle of Vincy between Charles Martel and Ragenfrid who returned defeated to Neustria.  Instead of following the army immediately,  Charles again used tactics he would use all his remaining life, in a career of absolute success. He took time to rally more men and prepare, before descending in full force. He chose where to provoke them to battle, and, at a place and time of his choosing, in Spring 717, Charles eventually followed them and dealt them a serious blow at Vincy on 21 March. He chased the fleeing king and mayor to Paris.

History Trivia - Henry VI of England crowned King of France

December 16

 1431 Henry VI of England was crowned King of France at Notre Dame in Paris. Though young Henry had been proclaimed king at age ten months, it was not until he was ten years old that he was officially crowned at Notre Dame Cathedral. 

1485 Catherine of Aragon, Spanish princess and first wife of Henry VIII was born. 

1631 Mount Vesuvius, Italy erupted, destroying 6 villages & killing 4,000.

History Trivia - Julius Caesar invades Great Britain

August 26

 55 BC Julius Caesar and his Roman Legions invaded Great Britain.

 1429 Joan of Arc made a triumphant entry into Paris.

1498 Michelangelo was commissioned to carve the Pietà.

History Trivia - storming of the Bastille

July 14

 664 Deusdedit of Canterbury, the first native-born holder of the see of Canterbury died. An Anglo-Saxon, he became archbishop in 655 and held the office until his death, probably from the plague.

1430 Joan of Arc, taken prisoner by the Burgundians in May, was handed over to Pierre Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais.

1789 The Bastille, a fortress in Paris used to hold political prisoners, was stormed by a mob, beginning of the French Revolution.

History Trivia - city of Paris, France founded by the Parisii

July 8

49 BC, the city of Paris, France was founded by the Parisii, a Celtic tribe of fishermen.

810 Pepin, son of Charlemagne, King of Italy, died.

975 Edgar, considered the first King of a united England, reigning over Mercia, Northumbria and Wessex, died.

 

Archaeologists piece together final moments of hundreds of Medieval Parisians

Ancient Origins

The skeletons of more than 200 medieval Parisians have been moved for further study to a warehouse of the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research in a suburb north of Paris, in order to unravel the mystery of their deaths.
A team from Inrap, as the institute is called, recently excavated the bodies after workers found them under the basement of a Monoprix supermarket in March. It is believed that the remains date from the 13th or 14th century AD.
“There are babies, there are young children, there are teenagers, there are adults, men, women, elderly people,” Isabelle Abadie, the lead archaeologist and anthropologist on the job, told The New York Times in an article of May 11, 2015.  “This was a mortality crisis, that much is clear.”
The remains were excavated from the store's basement area near the medieval Hôpital de la Trinité, which closed during the French Revolution and then demolished in 1812. The Hôpital de la Trinité had once served as a shelter for the poor, a place for pilgrims and religious teachings, an infectious disease center and even a vocational school for children.
The skeletons are now in crates that contain hundreds of numbered plastic bags. Some of the bones have been washed with toothbrushes and water.

Two of the bodies before exhumation

The team worked from March until early May exhuming the bodies from eight graves that covered more than 1,000 square feet (93 square meters). Some of the bodies were stacked five deep. In the main burial pit there were 175 bodies set head to toe. The bodies in the other graves were jumbled, possibly an indication of a rush to bury victims of an intensifying epidemic, The New York Times said.
Scientists still have not done DNA and radiocarbon date testing. That may take months. But Abadie told the Times she knows they weren't victims of violence. “It could be the plague, it could be a famine, it can be many things at this stage — but there are no traces of trauma, so these aren’t deaths linked to an act of violence or war,” she said.
The burial site was the cemetery of the hospital from the 12th to the 17th centuries. Authorities thought the bodies had been moved in the 18th century to the Paris Catacombs. The catacombs house the bones of 6 million people transferred from Paris cemeteries 200 years ago.

Bones in the Paris catacombs (Janericloebe/Wikimedia Commons)

If the people did die of the plague, it was a common and grisly way to die at that time. The article titled ‘Black Death’ at Saylor.org says the plague killed an estimated 30 to 60 percent of Europe's population. By 1400 it reduced the world's population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million.
“This has been seen as having created a series of religious, social and economic upheavals, which had profound effects on the course of European history. It took 150 years for Europe's population to recover. The plague returned at various times, killing more people, until it left Europe in the 19th century,” the Saylor.org site reports.
But if these people whose remains were just found this year died of plague, they went more quickly than if they experienced the slow-motion dying of starving to death in the event of famine.
Featured image: The scene at the supermarket, before the bones were removed (Denis Glikman/Inrap)
By Mark Miller

History Trivia - Paris sacked by Viking raiders

March 28

 37 Roman Emperor Caligula accepted the titles of the Principate, entitled to him by the Senate.

845 Paris was sacked by Viking raiders, probably under Ragnar Lodbrok, who collected a huge ransom in exchange for leaving.

1515 St. Teresa of Ávila was born. Teresa was a mystic, a reformer of the Carmelite order, and author of spiritual literature. She was the first woman to be named a doctor of the Church.

Hundreds of Medieval Bodies Found Under Paris Supermarket

by Tia Ghose

Live Science

 

Several mass burials, including a room where 150 bodies were buried in a mass grave, were recently unearthed beneath a Paris supermarket.

Denis Gliksman, Inrap

 

 

More than 200 bodies were recently unearthed in several mass burials beneath a Paris supermarket.
The bodies, which were lined up head to feet, were found at the site of an ancient cemetery attached to the Trinity Hospital, which was founded in the 13th century.
Though it's not clear exactly how these ancient people died, the trove of bodies could reveal insights into how people in the Middle Ages buried their dead during epidemics or famine, the researchers involved said.

7 Weird Things Found in and Under Parking Lots

Supermarket renovations
The burials were discovered during renovations to the basement of the Monoprix Réaumur-Sébastopol supermarket, located in the second-arrondissement neighborhood of Paris. As workers lowered the floor level of the basement, they found a shocking surprise: the bodies of men, women and children, neatly arranged in what looked to be mass graves. [See Images of the Ancient Hospital Burials]
The site was once the location of the Trinity Hospital, which was founded in 1202 by two German noblemen. The hospital was conceived not just as a place to provide care for the sick, but also as one where weary pilgrims and travelers could rest and enjoy themselves, according to a 1983 presentation given at the French Society on the History of Medicine.

But in 1353, during the height of the Black Death, the hospital also opened a cemetery, which provided a lucrative side business for the religious folk who operated the hospital, according to the presentation. During that catastrophic period, hundreds of people a day died in the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, the city's oldest hospital, and burial space was tough to find in the crowded city. Occasionally, the overflow bodies were buried at the Trinity Hospital site, according to the presentation.
Mass death
So far, archaeologists have uncovered about eight mass burial pits on different levels of the site. Seven of those sites hold between five and 20 individuals, while the remaining pit contains more than 150 bodies, according to a statement about the findings.
The bodies were laid down methodically in neat rows, head to feet, with one burial extending beyond the boundaries of the excavation. The pits contain the skeletons of men and women, old and young, none of which show obvious signs of injury or disease.
Given the huge number of skeletons found, it seems likely the bodies were buried during some mass medical crisis, when too many people were dying at once to provide individual burials, the researchers note in the statement.

As a follow-up, the team plans to use radioactive isotopes of carbon (elements of carbon with different numbers of neutrons) to estimate when these people lived. By combining this data with ancient texts and maps of Medieval Paris, researchers hope to reveal how and when these people died.

In the 1500s, the Trinity Hospital converted to a site where little boys and girls trained as apprentices. By the 1700s, the site fell into disrepair. During the French Revolution, the hospital was destroyed and the remaining structures were turned into stables for animals, according to the presentation.

History Trivia - Oliver Cromwell becomes lord protector of England, Scotland and Ireland.

December 16

882 Marinus I was elected Roman Catholic pope, replacing the murdered John VIII.

955 Ottaviano (age 18), the only son of Duke Alberic II of Spoleto, who ruled Rome, became Pope John XII when his father ordered his election. John's pontificate lasted nine years. 1

431 Henry VI of England was crowned King of France at Notre Dame in Paris. Though young Henry had been proclaimed king at age ten months, it was not until he was ten years old that he was officially crowned at Notre Dame Cathedral.

1485 Catherine of Aragon, Spanish princess and first wife of Henry VIII was born.

1631 Mount Vesuvius, Italy erupted, destroying 6 villages & killing 4,000.

1653 Parliamentarian general Oliver Cromwell became lord protector of England, Scotland and Ireland.

History Trivia - Danish Vikings attack Paris

November 26

579 Pelagius II became Pope.  When assistance from Emperor Tiberius II of Byzantium was not forthcoming, Pelagius convinced the Christian Franks to defend Rome from encroaching Lombards. He attempted to end a schism in the Church over the Three Chapters Controversy and began a controversy of his own when St. John IV the Faster, Bishop of Constantinople, assumed the title of "ecumenical patriarch" (a position that made him the equal of Pelagius, if not his superior). Pelagius was also responsible for building projects in Rome and turned his home into a hospital that was of great assistance when the city was struck by a disastrous flood. He himself died of the plague. 7

885 Danish Vikings attacked Paris and were paid by the Frankish emperor Charles the Fat not to destroy the city as they had in 845 and 856.

1703 Hurricane-force winds killed as many as 8,000 people as the Great Storm swept southern England. Bristol incurred heavy damage and the Royal Navy lost 15 warships.

 

History Trivia - city of Paris, France was founded by the Parisii

July 8

49 BC, the city of Paris, France was founded by the Parisii, a Celtic tribe of fishermen.

810 Pepin, son of Charlemagne, King of Italy, died.

975 Edgar, considered the first King of a united England, reigning over Mercia, Northumbria and Wessex, died.

1099 First Crusade: 15,000 starving Christian soldiers marched in a religious procession around Jerusalem as its Muslim defenders watched. The Crusaders were ultimately victorious in taking the city.

1249 Alexander II, King of Scotland died.

History Trivia - Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, opens - the world's first university museum.

June 6

1242  Twenty four wagonloads of Talmudic (Hebrew instruction)books were burned in Paris.  

1513 Italian Wars: Battle of Novara. Swiss troops defeated the French under Louis de la Tremoille, forcing the French to abandon Milan. Duke Massimiliano Sforza was restored.

1523 Gustav Vasa was elected King of Sweden, marking the end of the Kalmar Union, which had united the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway (with Iceland, Greenland, Faroe Islands, Shetland, and Orkney),and Sweden.

1683 The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, opened as the world's first university museum.

History Trivia - Paris sacked by Viking raiders, probably under Ragnar Lodbrok,

March 28

37 Roman Emperor Caligula accepted the titles of the Principate, entitled to him by the Senate.

 

Didius Julianus

 

193 Roman Emperor Pertinax was assassinated by Praetorian Guards, who then sold the throne in an auction to Didius Julianus.

364 Roman Emperor Valentinian I appointed his brother Flavius Valens co-emperor.

845 Paris was sacked by Viking raiders, probably under Ragnar Lodbrok, who collected a huge ransom in exchange for leaving.

1515 St. Teresa of Ávila was born. Teresa was a mystic, a reformer of the Carmelite order, and author of spiritual literature. She was the first woman to be named a doctor of the Church.