History

Imagine standing at the heart of the world’s most powerful medieval empire — a city of gleaming marble, gilded domes, and labyrinthine court intrigue — and discovering that the emperor’s …

Imagine a religion that spread from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the South China Sea, converted a Central Asian empire, attracted one of history’s greatest philosophers, and offered …

Picture this: a hillside in Calabria, sometime around 1815. A group of men gather in a charcoal-burner’s hut, exchanging coded handshakes and speaking in a vocabulary borrowed from the timber …

On the morning of May 6, 1527, 189 men stood between 20,000 mutinous imperial soldiers and the leader of the Catholic world. Armed with halberds and swords, they held their …

At the height of his infamy, the pirate Blackbeard commanded four ships and roughly 300 men. In the same century, a former sex worker from Canton commanded 1,800 warships and …

A religion founded on ahimsa — the sacred principle of non-violence — produced some of history’s most feared armies. The Shaolin monks of Tang-Dynasty China and Japan’s sōhei warrior monks …

September 1848. A hired servant crouches over a man on a rocking boat outside Shanghai, shaving his head with all the confidence of someone who has never done this before. …

On the morning of July 22, 1209, the soldiers of a papal army stood outside the walls of Béziers in southern France. They held a list of 222 names — …

The world’s most influential strategy book was written before the Roman Empire existed—and its chapter on spies reads like a modern intelligence agency’s field manual. Around 500 BCE, Chinese military …

Around 1721, a Welsh pirate captain named Bartholomew Roberts composed a document aboard his ship that opened with a startling declaration: “Every man shall have an equal vote in the …

Somewhere in the western suburbs of Sydney, a small group of people wades into an indoor swimming pool on a Sunday morning and re-enacts one of the oldest continuous religious …

Imagine a word so charged with fear that enemies of a medieval sect invented it as a slur — and it stuck so well it became a permanent fixture of …