WRITER & HISTORIAN
By the end of the 11th century, Muslim Europe was in retreat. In Spain, Christian kingdoms were slowly pushing south, while in Sicily over 200 years of Islamic rule had been ended by the Norman conquest of the island. One unexpected result of this intermingling of peoples was an unparalleled assimilation of Islamic knowledge and... Continue Reading →
To the physician Tobias Venner, in his Via recta ad vitam longam of 1620, they were ‘Anchovas, the famous meat of drunkards’, only good ‘to commend a cup of wine to the pallat, and… therefore chiefly profitable for Vintners’. No surprise, then, that Prince Hal finds a receipt for ‘Anchovies and sack after supper’ in... Continue Reading →
When the connoisseur Gerrit Braancamp died in 1771, the auction of his collection was one of Amsterdam’s events of the year. Some twenty thousand people saw it; two thousand copies of the catalogue were sold. The two most valuable paintings – a triptych by Gerard Dou known as ‘The Nursery’ and ‘Large Drove of Oxen’... Continue Reading →
It was, Strabo said, “the finest city in Asia”. But ruin was in Smyrna’s bones. It was destroyed by Lydia and Persia, and later by the Seljuks and the army of Timur. In Revelations, it is one of Asia’s seven churches - known for its tribulations, St John said. To the Ottomans, who took it... Continue Reading →
© Matthias Süßen, CC BY-SA 4.0 It has been said that Roger II, self-styled Rex Siciliae et Italiae, conceived of his kingdom as a “work of art”. Perhaps he did. But if so, contemporary reviews were mixed at best. To Bernard of Clairvaux he was “the Sicilian usurper”; to the Byzantine Theodore Prodromos he was... Continue Reading →
She must have been a powerful swimmer. Her name was Hydna and she grew up in the port town of Scione on the northern coast of the Aegean. It was 480BC, and the Graeco-Persian Wars were raging. The Persians had amassed a vast fleet and it was anchored off Thessaly in eastern Greece, waiting for... Continue Reading →
Sometime in 1543 on the island of Hispaniola, a group of Spanish soldiers searching for runaway slaves came across three seemingly feral pigs in the wilderness. The Spanish slaughtered them without a thought. But then they met an Indigenous man. He was distraught. He had been living in the wild for 12 years, and had... Continue Reading →
It was around three or four o’clock in the afternoon, on a spring Sunday in the Oklahoma Panhandle in 1935. In the house, Ada Kearns remembered, the radio was on. And then, out of the blue, it wasn’t. “This is Dodge City,” the announcer said abruptly. “We’re going off the air.” A vast storm cloud... Continue Reading →
On 3 April 1897, nineteen painters and sculptors met in a Viennese coffee house. Out of the meeting came a new arts movement, the Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs, better known as the Viennese Secession. At its head was a young Gustav Klimt. Art in Vienna was controlled by the Künstlerhaus, the artists’ professional body. The... Continue Reading →
“I always see the faults of my friends,” writes Walburga, Lady Paget, in the introduction to her 1923 two-volume memoir Embassies of Other Days. “But I like their faults and I mention them as it adds to the piquancy of their personalities.” The second volume closes with a further disclaimer. “I have related everything exactly... Continue Reading →
They must have looked odd together, the Frankish king and the courtier who later memorialised him. Charlemagne was tall for the period, around six foot three. Einhard meanwhile, his friend Walahfrid wrote, was “despicable in stature” – a “tiny manlet”, in Einhard’s own phrase. Born into a family of modest wealth, Einhard was educated at... Continue Reading →
Ovid was with a friend on Elba in the autumn of 8AD when the crisis broke. A summons arrived for him from the emperor, Augustus. Were the rumours true, his friend asked. Ovid equivocated, half confessing, half denying. Two millennia later, we still don’t know what had happened; we only know what happened next. Following... Continue Reading →
It wasn’t exactly a motto, but they liked it nonetheless. “The sword is our Pope,” the Livonian Knights said, “and it is a Pope that is never far from you.” Formerly known the Sword Brothers, the Livonian Knights were a military monastic order akin to the Knights Templar. They were founded around 1202 to bring... Continue Reading →
It wasn’t until June 1868, when 24-year-old Marie-Catherine Fritzgès fell ill at the Pension Desarzens in Geneva, that the authorities acted. It was much too late. Fritzgès had been befriended by a fellow guest, Marie Jeanneret, a nurse, herself only 32. Jeanneret poisoned her with atropine, a derivative of belladonna, deadly in large doses. Fritzgès... Continue Reading →
Why you? It was a good question. Brother Masseo repeated it three times. What do you mean, Francis of Assisi asked him. “You aren’t a handsome man in body,” Masseo explained. “You aren’t someone of great learning, you’re not noble; so why does the whole world come after you?” Because, Francis said, there is no-one... Continue Reading →
Sometime in 1506, the Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius, stopped at a tavern in the German town of Gelnhausen. There he encountered Doctor Faustus - then going by the name of Georg Sabellicus - handing out what were in essence business cards. Faustus was, the cards said, “the chief of necromancers, an astrologer, the second magus,... Continue Reading →
The Roma are an Indian people. They left what is now north-west India and Pakistan in the early decades of the 11th century for reasons which will likely never be known, but which may relate to incursions by Muslim armies in the region. They moved west around the Caspian and into the Byzantine Empire by... Continue Reading →
Napoleon loved his bath. Sometimes he lay in it for an hour or two, holding meetings or listening while an aide read him his correspondence. “One hour in the bath is worth four hours of sleep,” he said. Afterwards came the frictions, a cleansing ritual of his own devising. He stood naked and poured a... Continue Reading →
Walkelin, the Norman bishop of Winchester, had a problem. He needed more wood for his new cathedral, being built on unpromisingly marshy ground a little way from the city’s two existing Saxon minsters. He went to the man who had appointed him, William the Conqueror. William offered him as many trees from a nearby royal... Continue Reading →
It was the evening of October 13 1761, shortly after 9:30pm, that Pierre Calas discovered the body of his older brother, 29-year-old Marc-Antoine, hanging in a downstairs doorway of the family home in Toulouse. Their father, Jean, a cloth merchant, had his premises on the ground floor. The family had been dining in an upstairs... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 