De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae is a work written in Latin in the late fifth or sixth century by the British religious polemicist Gildas. It is a sermon in three parts condemning the acts of Gildas
A ninth-century manuscript containing De Excidio, displayed at the Reims Municipal Library
Britain.circa.540
Vortigern
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Vortigern, also spelt Vortiger, Vortigan, Voertigern and Vortigen, was a 5th-century warlord in Britain, known perhaps as a king of the Britons or at least connoted as such in the writings of Bede. Hi
De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae
…Battle of Mons Badonicus. It is a matter of dispute whether Gildas named the "proud tyrant" (superbus tyrannus) who invited the Saxons to Britain as Vortigern, as not all manuscripts contain the name. Theodor Mommsen believed that Gildas did not use the name Vortigern, and that in those manuscripts where it…
Meeting of Vortigern and Rowena painted by William Hamilton
Vortigern's Tower in a 14th century illuminated manuscript of Wace's Roman de Brut
Merlin reads his prophecies to King Vortigern. British Library MS Cotton Claudius B VII f.224, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Prophetiae Merlini.
Illustration in a fifteenth-century manuscript of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136). Vortigern and Merlin watch two dragons fighting. The red dragon represents the British and the white one the Saxons.