Middle East

The capture of the Holy City by the forces of the First Crusade was a victory against the odds, but its legacy has borne bitter fruit.

Robert Irwin on how Islam saw the Christian invaders.

Outremer, the crusader kingdom, and its capital Jerusalem entered a golden age during the 1130s. Simon Sebag Montefiore portrays its extraordinary cast of kings, queens, conquerors and criminals.

A solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine seems as far away as ever. But, says Martin Gilbert, past relations between Muslims and Jews have often been harmonious and can be so again.

At the height of the Roman Empire, hundreds of merchant ships left Egypt every year to voyage through the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean, exchanging the produce of the Mediterranean for exotic eastern commodities. Raoul McLaughlin traces their pioneering journeys. 

Disillusionment with Iran’s secular king brought the Islamists to power in 1979. Will the population now oust the ruling theocracy, asks Baqer Moin?

Christians have long relied on scribes’ copies of Biblical texts; J. K. Elliot describes how the Codex Sinaiticus, discovered in 1844, dates from the fourth century.

On the eve of the Second World War, the navies of Italy, France and Britain plotted for supremacy in the Mediterranean. Their actions resulted in the fracturing of the sea’s age-old unity, with consequences that persist to this day. Simon Ball explains how the ‘Middle Sea’ became the Middle East.

With a solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as far away as ever, James Barker looks back to Britain’s occupation of the region and the efforts made by the future Viscount Montgomery to impose peace on its warring peoples.

Richard Cavendish remembers Israel's own Iron Lady, who became Prime Minister on March 17th 1969