In 1370 King Casimir III of Poland died without a direct heir and passed on the throne to his nephew Louis I of Hungary. This brought the two countries together in a union until Louis died in 1382 and passed the Polish throne to his youngest daughter Jadwiga, whilst his... More
The impetus for the westward expansion of Stuart London came from grandees seeking easy access to the royal palaces of St James and Whitehall, and to the parliament at Westminster. The architect Inigo Jones was commissioned to create the suburb of Covent Garden in the 1630s; Bloomsbury, St James’s and... More
Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, or ‘Pompey’, belonged to the senatorial nobility and was a well-established general and politician. He was employed in the east, resettling pirates as peaceful farmers, when, in 66 BCE, Gaius Manilius, a Tribune of People, carried through a bill appointing Pompey to command the troops of the... More
The Roman Republic’s successful war against the Achaean League marked the end of Greek political independence, and the beginning of the end of the Hellenistic era. The Kingdom of Pergamon, the only significant remaining power in the Aegean, was generally pro-Roman, and its last king, Attalus III, bequeathed his kingdom... More
The death of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566 marked the end of the Ottoman Empire’s classical age, in which it achieved its greatest territorial expansion and social stability, and ushered in the era of transformation. The victory of the Knights Hospitaller after the Great Siege of Malta in 1565 demonstrated... More
The Roman Republic first became involved in the affairs of Greece and Asia Minor in 214 BCE, during The First Macedonian War and again in 200 BCE during the Second Macedonian War, when two of Rome’s allies, Pergamon and Rhodes, appealed for help in their struggle with Macedonia. A Roman... More
Pierre de Chauvin de Tonnetuit, a French naval and military captain, built the oldest surviving French settlement in North America at Tadoussac (1600). In 1604 French settlers established the colony of Arcadia on the land surrounding the Gulf of St Lawrence. On Ste Croix Island the French explorer Pierre Dugua,... More
The 1560s were marked by Ivan IV’s descent into paranoia. The catalysts were the death of his wife in 1560, suspected to be by poisoning, and the desertion in 1564 of one of his closest confidantes, Prince Andrei Kurbsky, to his Lithuanian enemies. That same year, he holed up in... More
Trotsky abandoned peace talks with Germany in 1918, because he believed his counterparties would soon be swept from power by a Communist revolution sweeping the globe. In fact, the Communists briefly threatened to take power in Germany in January 1919, but were ruthlessly suppressed: an isolated ‘Bavarian Soviet Republic’ lingered... More
Croesus, the king of Lydia from 585 BCE, had a truly gilded inheritance. His father Alyattes extended Lydian dominion over the whole of western Asia Minor (bar the Psidians, corralled in their central mountain fastness), a region rich in produce, prosperous ports and cities and even the River Pactolus from... More
In 1143 the deaths of both the Byzantine Emperor John and King Fulk of Jerusalem created a power vacuum in the Christian Middle East. Hemmed in by hostile Muslim states, Joscelin II, Count of Edessa, needed a Muslim ally; he chose the Artuqids, a Turkmen dynasty, and marched his army... More
After the evacuation at Dunkirk and success in northern France, the Germans focused on moving south, with divisions crossing the Seine as well as turning eastward to isolate the remaining French forces at the Maginot Line. They continued to Paris, with German forces sweeping through eastern and western France, and... More