The body belonged to Charles d’Espagne, constable of France and its most powerful figure after the king, Jean II. The man ...

On 25 December 336 Rome’s believers celebrated Christmas Day – the earliest recorded use of that date as it spread across ...

It may not have been the first, argues John Hardiman in The French Revolution: A Political History, but it was the first of ...

Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian, like Stalin, who called him ‘my Himmler’. Involved in revolutionary activities from his teens and head of the secret police in Georgia in his twenties, he ...

The English saint Oswald of Northumbria proved incredibly popular in the medieval German-speaking world. How did he get there ...

The Raj’s control of India’s princely states was never absolute, as the British-appointed tutor to the last maharajah of ...

They have long had a notorious reputation as the raiders and pirates of the medieval world and certainly it is not unjustified: their raids were fearsome and long-running. However, they were also ...

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) is a profoundly – even unsettlingly – historical novel. Granted, it doesn’t look ...

Renaissance Italy was dominated by rich and powerful families whose reputations have been shaped by the many dark and dastardly deeds they committed. In quattrocento Florence, the Medici bought, ...

Suffragette sets out to tell the story of the ‘footsoldiers’ of the women’s suffrage movement. Director Sarah Gavon and writer Abi Morgan have therefore made the refreshing decision to avoid a more ...

In 1563 Elizabeth Flynte, a servant from Haselor, Warwickshire, described the extra-marital activities of her mistress to the church court of the Lichfield diocese: He come in here this night, ...

During the reign of Sultan Mehmet IV (r. 1648-87), the Dîvân-ı Hümâyûn (imperial council) would meet every other morning in a domed chamber of the Topkapi Palace. When the Grand Vizier and his ...