The Merovingians have a reputation for long hair and barbarity. Instead, the dynasty, born out of the chaos of civil war, was ...

Zaga Christ died on 22 April 1638 leaving Europe no wiser as to the authenticity of the self-proclaimed Ethiopian prince who ...

Bolesław Chrobry was finally crowned king of Poland on 18 April 1025. It was an elevation two decades in the making. W hen ...

The Roman Empire had two main populations: gods and humans. By its end, there was only one god left. How, and why, did he ...

Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World by Edith Hall sees the signs of environmental ...

Teodoro Castro or Iosif Grigulevich? Costa Rica’s ambassador to Yugoslavia was a Soviet spy sent to kill Tito. O n the ...

The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw himself as a puppet-master, engineering British politics from afar in his feud ...

Renaissance Florence had a problem: it wanted female sex workers, but it also needed to offer them a way out. The solution was a new brothel district – and a nunnery for former prostitutes ...

The discovery of Brazil was an episode in the creation of a Portuguese commercial empire which in less than a hundred years extended to four continents. The Portuguese established West African coastal ...