Long before the First Crusade, merchants from Amalfi had founded a pilgrim hospital in Jerusalem, knowing full well that pilgrims to the holy cities represent an important economic factor (which is still true today),

In the first part of our article “The Hospitallers – from the pilgrim hospital in Jerusalem to the conquest of Rhodes” we described their origins as an aid organization for pilgrims until the loss of the “holy land”.

We often encountered Roman "road maps" as sections or copies belonging to the respective region in Roman museums, we had been able to connect the name Konrad Peutinger from the respected merchant family of the imperial city of Augsburg with these maps.

A term that appears in some of our articles and should now finally be clarified, because Levante comes from the Italian meaning "sunrise" and is therefore roughly equivalent to the term "morning land".

Pandemic times can also have something good in the end, because when else would we have ever learned anything about Saint Brun, probably the best-known representative of the noble family of the Noble Lords of Querfurt.

Visiting the Kyffhäuser monument and the ruins of the Reichsburg Kyffhausen in the Thuringian Kyffhäuser district south-east of the Harz brought us to the tragic story of Emperor Friedrich I, known as Barbarossa.

The term "golden apple" appears again and again in some mythological tales of antiquity, including Greek mythology as a fruit that gives eternal youth.

Baldwin of Boulogne was the second youngest son of Eustace II, Count of Boulogne and his wife Ida of Lorraine. He was born in 1058, the exact date is unclear. Balduin worked as a canon in the city of Reims until 1086, a loyal cleric of the cathedral chapter, which he only left because the church reform no longer permitted accumulation of benefices.

The son of Dervis Mehmed Zilli Efendi and his wife, a lady-in-waiting from the Caucasus, Evliya Çelebi was born on March 25, 1611 in the Unkapanı district of İstanbul.

Our tour from the Roman amphitheatre to the so-called pagan gate through the ancient Roman city of Carnuntum was (almost) finished, so we wanted to explore the surrounding area as well.

We were again in the East of Germany and thus on the way very close along the Kyffhäuser ridge and so we once again had been drawn to the monumental memorial of the Hohenstaufer Friedrich Barbarossa I, after all, nicknamed King Rotbart, is considered one of the greatest emperors of the Middle Ages.

When there are wars and conflicts at home, when there is no work even in agriculture for self-sufficiency due to destruction or epidemics, people are desperate, seeking about ways out and away from misery, not to be killed or even starve because of hunger.

Piri Reis, who was born around 1470 in Karaman / Konya in Turkey, was an admiral of the Ottoman fleet and at the same time a down-to-the-minute, renowned cartographer and author.

The Kyffhäuser, a low mountain range south-east of the Harz mountains stretching from the Thuringian Kyffhäuser district to the Saxony-Anhalt district of Mansfeld-Südharz, is the central point of a saga of the mountain rift.

Ertugrul Osman - the would-be sultan known in Turkey as the "last Ottoman" - has died in Istanbul at the age of 97. Osman would have been sultan of the Ottoman Empire had Turkey's modern republic not been created in the 1920s. 

Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian painter, sculptor, architect, anatomist, mechanic, engineer and natural philosopher, born on April 15, 1452 in Vinci, which explains the second part of his name. He is considered one of the most famous polymath of all time.

Without doubt, Caravanserai are included amongst the most magnificent and impressive monuments of Seljuk architecture ever. Also known as “domes of the roads”, the Caravanserai have begun to flourish within the first half of 13th Century and were spread about all along the ancient trade routes all over Anatolia and to the places in Northern and Southern borders.

The Turkish mystic Mevlana was the founder of the brotherhood of the dancing dervish. With the help of their dances they tried to get into contact with God. As a symbol of neatness, the dervish wear white capes while dancing and, while spinning round, they always point to the sky with one hand and to the centre of the earth with the other.

The first settlement was established about 7000 B.C. Near the town of Konya historians found the first traces of houses, holy places and different sculptures.