Medieval

The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in 25 years than the Romans did in 400....

The 14th century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry; and on the other, a time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world of chaos and the plague....

The first Plantagenet king inherited a blood-soaked kingdom from the Normans and transformed it into an empire stretched at its peak from Scotland to Jerusalem. In this epic history, Dan Jones vividly resurrects this fierce and seductive royal dynasty and its mythic world....

This is the story of a thousand years, a must-listen narrative history of ambitious aristocrats, family dysfunction, treachery, savage battles, luxury, and madness....

When the once-mighty city of Rome was sacked by barbarians in 410 and lay in ruins, it signaled the end of an era—and the beginning of a thousand years of profound transformation....

As Peter Heather shows in this compelling new history, there was nothing inevitable about Christendom's rise to Europe-wide dominance....

Imagine you could travel back to the 14th century. What would you see? What would you smell? More to the point, where are you going to stay? And what are you going to eat....

A major new history of the Crusades with an unprecedented wide scope, told in a tableau of portraits of people on all sides of the wars, from the New York Times best-selling author of The Templars....

We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a dark, backward, and unchanging time characterized by violence, ignorance, and superstition. We couldn't be more wrong.

Using previously untranslated contemporaneous documents from a colorful range of travelers, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages is a witty and unforgettable exploration of how Europeans understood—and often misunderstood—the larger world.

Historian Chris Wickham defies the conventional view of the Dark Ages in European history with a work of remarkable scope and rigorous yet accessible scholarship. The Inheritance of Rome presents a fresh understanding of the crucible in which Europe would ultimately be created....

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 signaled a shift in history and the end of the Byzantium Empire. Roger Crowley's listenable and comprehensive account of the battle between Mehmed II....

From a leading expert in Japanese history, this is one of the first full histories of the art and culture of the Samurai warrior....

The remarkable, little-known story of two trailblazing women in the Early Middle Ages who wielded immense power, only to be vilified for daring to rule....

Tom Holland describes how the Arabs emerged to carve out a stupefyingly vast dominion in a matter of decades, overcoming seemingly insuperable odds....

A vibrant and illuminating exploration of medieval thinking on women's beauty, sexuality, and behavior....

A young pretender raises an army to take the throne. Learning of his father’s death, the adolescent, dashing and charismatic and descended from the old kings of the North, vows to avenge him....

The Great Plague is one of the most compelling events in human history—even more so now, when the notion of plague has never loomed larger as a contemporary public concern....

In Search of the Dark Ages is an unrivalled exploration of the origins of English identity, and the best-selling book that established Michael Wood as one of Britain's leading historians....

Professor Jennifer McNabb and a panel of experts in medieval history and literature will take you back to the period between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Renaissance to explore the ideals and realities of sex and sexuality....

From the New York Times best-selling author of Crusaders and a top authority on the historical events that inspired Game of Thrones comes a vivid, blood-soaked account of one of the most famous rebellions in history....

Drawing from both Christian and Islamic sources, this book recounts the clash of arms between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian peninsula that began in the early eighth century....

This tenth anniversary revised edition of the authoritative text on Christianity's first thousand years of history features a new preface and an updated bibliography....

This history by Charles Oman is a catalog of good, bad, and indifferent emperors who either pushed Byzantine Civilization to new heights or savagely drove it to defeat and dissolution....

Lost Enlightenment chronicles this forgotten age of achievement, seeks to explain its rise, and explores the competing theories about the cause of its eventual demise....

In historian Tabitha Stanmore’s beguiling account, we meet lovelorn widows, dissolute nobles, selfless healers, and renegade monks. We listen in on Queen Elizabeth I’s astrology readings and track treasure hunters trying to unearth buried gold without upsetting the fairies that guard it. Much like us, premodern people lived in a bewildering world, buffeted by forces beyond their control. As Stanmore reveals, their faith in magic has much to teach about how to accommodate the irrational in our allegedly enlightened lives today.

Ever wonder what makes Europe so special? Imagine stepping into a time machine to explore both ancient cities and modern marvels. This book is your golden ticket to do just that!

When you think of democracy, what comes to mind? Comparing democracy to monarchy, are you thankful to be living free rather than suffering oppression under a medieval tyrant? What if you could be evidentially shown that the democracy you hold so dear is not only less ideal than you’ve been taught, but is actually inferior to the kingdoms of the Middle Ages?Get ready for a real history lesson you won’t soon forget. In Jeb Smith’s latest work Missing Monarchy, he uncovers eye-opening facts about the Medieval period, kingship, democracy, and more. When you learn how societies of our past...

Trafficking with Demons explores how magic was perceived, practiced, and prohibited in western Europe during the first millennium CE. Through the overlapping frameworks of religion, ritual, and gender, Martha Rampton connects early Christian reckonings with pagan magic to later doctrines and dogmas. Challenging established views on the role of women in ritual magic during this period, Rampton provides a new narrative of the ways in which magic was embedded within the foundational assumptions of western European society.

One of the great epics of Europe's history, the story of the rise and rise of the Capetian dynasty, dominates the Middle Ages. Starting in the tenth century from an insecure foothold around Paris, the Capetians built a nation that stretched from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and from the Rhône to the Pyrenees. They founded practices and institutions that endured until the Revolution, transformed Paris from a muddy backwater to a splendid metropole, and popularized the fleur-de-lys, the lily, as the emblem of France.

A brief history of Khazaria.

We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a dark, backward, and unchanging time characterized by violence, ignorance, and superstition. By contrast, we believe progress arose from science and technological innovation, and that inventions of recent centuries created the modern world. We couldn't be more wrong.

In this vivid and alluring history, medievalist Anthony Bale invites listeners on an odyssey across the medieval world. Journeying alongside scholars, spies, and saints, from Western Europe to the Far East, the Antipodes and the ends of the earth, Bale provides indispensable information on the exchange rate between Bohemian ducats and Venetian groats, medieval cures for seasickness, and how to avoid extortionist tour guides and singing sirens.

Are you intrigued by the monumental path Christianity carved through history? This masterful narrative weaves through 1,600 years of history, from Christianity’s origins in the 1st century AD to the transformative Counter-Reformation in 1700.

In AD 843, the three surviving grandsons of the great Emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited what became France, another Germany and the third Lotharingia: the chunk that initially divided the other two. The dynamic between these three great zones has dictated much of our subsequent fate.

While music has always been an integral part of the lives of the people of the British Isles and the diaspora around the world, an exploration of why this is so has seldom been explored. Celtic Song will take listeners on a journey to the past through a medium that uplifts the spirit and speaks to the heart.

With hindsight, the victory of Parliamentarian forces over the Royalists in the English Civil War may seem inevitable, but this outcome was not a foregone conclusion. Timothy Venning explores many of the turning points and discusses how they might so easily have played out differently.

The subject of this book is centered around the ancient and medieval history of Armenia with its up-to-date modern development from the singular perspective of a dynastic story of different branches of a particular family. The book touches on the histories of the ancient kingdom of Armenia under the Artashesids, Arshakids, Mamikonians, Bagratids, and Artsrunids, the crusading kingdom of Cilicia under the Rubenids, Hethumids, and Lusignans, the principalities of Artaz, Aragatsotn-Oshakan, Hamshen, and Siunik under the Amatunis, Vachutians, and Melik-Parsadanians, and the illustrious houses ...

Timothy Venning's series of alternative histories explores the pathways of British events from the Anglo-Saxon Age to the English Civil War. In this volume, he presents an in-depth analysis of the Tudor period. Venning discusses the fateful moments at which history could easily have taken a different turn. In a fascinating series of "what if" scenarios, Venning presents a detailed look at the possible and likely results. While speculative, the scenarios are all plausible and rooted in a firm understanding of actually events and their context.

This book is a comprehensive guide to the Orsini family from its origins in the 1st century and into the 21st century. Two thousand years is far too much time to cover in two volumes, or even ten. However, this two-volume bookset manages to highlight most of the major events that surrounded the family during this period. Brief historical exposés parallel the Orsini legend to add a sense of perspective as to how their history meshed with that of the Roman world. Hundreds of sources, including books, websites, and Italian church and state archives were researched over a period of five years ...