Imagine that an artist is given just one sentence: Azure, a lion rampant Or, armed and langued Gules. No drawing, no reference image, no photograph. Yet anyone ...

In the history of great conquests, commanders and rulers are often the same people. Alexander the Great conquered for Alexander, Caesar fought for himself and ...

It is difficult to imagine a medieval knight without his horse. Popular culture has made the pair almost inseparable: an armored warrior sits astride an ...

In the Middle Ages, a title was far more than an impressive word placed before a man’s name. It defined his position in society, carried legal privileges, ...

Imagine a small French village in the twelfth century. A few dozen peasant households, a church, fields, pastures, woodland, a mill, and somewhere nearby, a ...

In 1543, a weapon arrived on the Japanese island of Tanegashima that local warriors had barely encountered before. The Portuguese brought matchlock arquebuses ...

On March 19, 1279, the Chinese Song Empire had, in practical terms, already ceased to exist. Its capital was lost, most of its provinces had fallen under enemy ...

At the beginning of the eleventh century, an embassy arriving in Córdoba from Christian Europe entered a different world. Beyond the city walls stretched a ...

In 1487, a book was published in Germany that contained no groundbreaking scientific discoveries, no revolutionary philosophy, and no tales of great military ...

In the mid-eighth century, the name of the Umayyads was known from the shores of the Atlantic to the Indus Valley. Their governors ruled Spain, North Africa, ...

Some pieces of armor are instantly recognizable, even to people with little interest in history. Gothic plate armor immediately evokes images of ...

Imagine walking into the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople around the tenth century. Above you, golden mosaics shimmer in the candlelight. The air is filled with ...