Medieval

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

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....

These 24 lectures trace a journey from Scandinavia across central Europe to the farthest reaches of the Byzantine and Islamic empires, providing insight to this one-lost era....

A riveting and authoritative history of the single most important event in English history: The Norman Conquest....

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....

This erudite book tells the fascinating, often violent story of kings, generals, and the peoples they ruled....

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

A lively and magisterial popular history that refutes common misperceptions of the European Middle Ages, The Bright Ages shows the beauty and communion that flourished alongside the dark brutality - a brilliant reflection of humanity itself....

The Mongol queens of the thirteenth century ruled the greatest empire the world has ever known. Yet sometime near the end of the century, censors cut a section from The Secret History of the Mongols, leaving a single tantalizing quote from Genghis Khan: “Let us reward our female offspring”....

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 The Normans, Lars Brownworth follows their story, from the first shock of a Viking raid on an Irish monastery to the exile of the last Norman Prince of Antioch....

A respected and controversial scholar argues that the Crusades were a justified war waged against Muslim terror and aggression.

Byzantium. The name evokes grandeur and exoticism—gold, cunning, and complexity. In this unique book, Judith Herrin unveils the riches of a quite different civilization....

The formation of England happened against the odds - the division of the country into rival kingdoms, the assaults of the Vikings, the precarious position of the island on the edge of the known world....

Our capital city has always been a thriving and colorful place, full of diverse and determined individuals developing trade and finance, exchanging gossip and doing business....

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....

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 remarkable story of Margaret Paston, whose letters form the most extensive collection of personal writings by a medieval English woman.

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

Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness provides a rare and valuable glimpse of Viking customs, dress, table manners, religion, and sexual practices, including the only eyewitness account ever written of a Viking ship cremation.

In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Robert Irwin provides the definitive account of the life and thought of the medieval Arab genius who wrote the Muqaddima....

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) - one of the most prominent Catholic authors of his time - gives a common-sense explanation of why the Crusades were necessary and why they ultimately failed....

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

Life and times of the 14th-century German spiritual leader Meister Eckhart, whose theory of a personal path to the divine-inspired thinkers from Jean Paul Sartre to Thomas Merton, and most recently, Eckhart Tolle....

N. J. Higham and M. J. Ryan reexamine Anglo-Saxon England in the light of new research in disciplines as wide ranging as historical genetics, paleobotany, archaeology, literary studies, art history, and numismatics....

A respected and controversial scholar argues that the Crusades were a justified war waged against Muslim terror and aggression. This book takes on the current vogue in liberal thinking to argue that, in fact, the Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The Crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. They sincerely believed that they served in God’s Battalions.

"Инквизиция"… Слово, окутанное мрачными легендами. Ей приписывают многочисленные казни, жуткие пытки и тысячи невинных жертв. Но все ли так однозначно? В своей книге Сергей Нечаев объективно рассматривает это явление и подробно описывает историю инквизиции, начиная с ее возникновения. Автор опирается на сочинения историков, документы эпохи Средневековья и свидетельства современников. Он рассказывает о громких судебных процессах над Жанной д'Арк и Жилем де Рэ и об испанской инквизиции, которая традиционно (и справедливо ли?) считается самой жестокой.

Эта книга рассказывает о том, о чем обычно молчат исторические источники, — о частной жизни людей эпохи Средневековья и раннего Нового времени, об их личных переживаниях, о супружеской любви и об изменах, о неразделенных чувствах, о дружбе, обидах, попытках решить семейные проблемы самостоятельно или прибегая к помощи официальных инстанций. Героями историй, собранных здесь, стали самые простые обыватели, о которых почти никогда не упоминалось в хрониках, в теологических сочинениях, дидактических трактатах или художественных произведениях.

Léonard de Vinci est l’une des figures les plus emblématiques de la Renaissance. Fils illégitime privé de formation universitaire, son approche autodidacte dans quantités de domaines garantit l’originalité de cet esprit universel qui fut bien plus que l’auteur de La Joconde ou l’inventeur de machines volantes. Il fut également un anatomiste de renom, un ingénieur, un philosophe, un architecte et un inventeur.

Slavery was widespread all over Europe during the early Middle Ages and Scandinavians, as Stefan Brink illustrates in this book, became a major player in the northern slave trade. Using a wide variety of source materials, including archaeology, runes, Icelandic sagas, early law, place names, personal names, and not least etymological and semantic analyses of the terminology of slaves, Thraldom provides the most comprehensive survey of slavery in the Viking Age.