Medieval

Desmond Seward describes the abrupt end of a European military and financial institution.

Anthony Bryer takes a visit to Nicaea; The seat of early Church Councils and, for a while, of the Byzantine Emperors, it has a history stretching from the reign of Alexander the Great to the present day.

Peter Heidtmann introduces the charismatic leader of a reforming heretical sect at the end of the fourteenth century.

David Jones describes how romanized Gothic and Vandal leaders overran the capital of a declining Empire in the fifth century.

If the world were ruled by a single Christian monarch, peace and justice would prevail: such was Dante’s vision in the early fourteenth century, writes Robert F. Murphy.

Michael Paffard opens for the visitor Thomas Tusser’s books on husbandry, which expounded the practical virtues of ‘thrift’ to Tudor farmers.

For Serbs the 1389 Battle of Kosovo was a physical defeat against the Ottoman Turks, but a moral victory that formed the backbone of Serbian national identity.

Four years after William I's conquest of England, writes J.J.N. McGurk, a Lincolnshire thegn named Hereward led a fierce resistance movement against Norman rule.

This cultured but energetic ruler left behind him ‘a governmental machine that was the wonder and envy of Europe’.

Colin Davies describes how, in the sixth century B.C., two philosophers emerged upon the Asian shore of the Aegean Sea to develop the ideas of Thales.