In November 1983, the Soviet Union came to believe that NATO might be preparing a nuclear attack. The trigger was a war game. The alliance’s annual exercise, Able Archer 83, ran from 7 to 11 November and rehearsed what would happen if a conflict in Europe escalated until nuclear weapons were released. It even simulated […]

Most of us can rattle off Europe’s great royal houses: the Bourbons, the Habsburgs, the Plantagenets, the Stuarts, the Romanovs, the Windsors. Far fewer people have heard of the House of Oldenburg, yet few families have left a deeper or longer-lasting mark. Through a long chain of marriages, the Oldenburgs spread across the north of […]

In 1787, Catherine the Great set off on a six-month tour of Crimea, a territory Russia had annexed only four years earlier. The emperor of Austria and a group of European diplomats travelled with her. Along the route, triumphal arches had been built specially for the occasion, and the inscription they carried was hard to […]

In 2017 the director Christopher Nolan brought Dunkirk back to cinema screens with Dunkirk, a film about the hurried and agonising retreat of the Allied armies from the European mainland in 1940. The German advance through France had been unstoppable, and the Second World War was only months old. That evacuation is the best-known episode […]

On 26 August 1346, English and French armies met at one of the most important battles of the Hundred Years’ War: Crécy. Edward III’s English army crushed the French army of Philip VI. The defeat was so complete that it allowed Edward to lay siege to Calais and tilt the whole war in his favour. […]

Most of the Persian kings whose names we know are Cyrus, Darius, Cambyses, Xerxes, Artaxerxes, Khosrow. Each has a number after his name, and they belong to different dynasties and eras. But they share one thing: they were all men. In the whole history of that vast empire, only three women sat on the throne. […]

India calls it Haifa Day. The regiments that get the credit are the lancers of Jodhpur, Hyderabad and Mysore — cavalry units raised not by Britain directly, but by India’s semi-autonomous princely states, which supplied their own troops to the British war effort. Grouped into the 15th Cavalry Brigade and led into the final charge […]

Tharangambadi is a fishing village on India’s Coromandel Coast, in the state of Tamil Nadu. Its name means “place of the singing waves,” a nod to the Indian Ocean lapping at its shore. It isn’t much of a tourist stop, and fishing is still its main trade, but anyone who walks its streets runs into […]

Winchester Cathedral covers roughly 53,800 square feet (about 5,000 square meters) of floor space, making it one of the largest cathedrals in Northern Europe. At 558 feet (170 meters) long, it’s also the longest medieval cathedral in the world. Neither the congregation nor the more than 365,000 tourists who visit each year to admire its […]

In the United States, the phrase Indian Wars conjures a specific set of images: the Battle of Little Bighorn, the massacres at Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, the forced marches of the Trail of Tears, the decades-long manhunt for Geronimo. All of it is generally remembered as a 19th-century story, closed out by the early […]

In the first quarter of the 11th century, a force of Kievan Rus’ warriors sailed for Constantinople hoping to join the Varangian Guard — the Byzantine emperor’s elite personal bodyguard, foreign troops trusted precisely because they had no stake in local politics, not unlike Rome’s Praetorian Guard centuries earlier. The city turned them away at […]

Two of the most prominent belligerents of World War II ended up clashing despite having initially fought on the same side, and it wasn’t until 1951, six years after the end of the conflict, that they signed an unusual peace. One of them was Italy, obviously, where the government that succeeded Mussolini signed an armistice […]

As indicated in its statute of autonomy, the flag of Cantabria (in north Spain) is “formed by two horizontal stripes of equal width, white on top and red on the bottom”, with the coat of arms in the center. It is a banner that traces its origins back to the 18th century, but in recent […]

It is clear that ethnic differences, like religious ones, have been the origin of countless conflicts throughout the world from Antiquity to the present day. It is not surprising, then, that this also occurred when the Old and New Worlds established definitive contact after Columbus’s arrival in 1492. These differences manifested in Spanish America through […]

In Greek mythology, Delphi was considered the omphalos or navel of the world, the womb of the goddess Gaia (in fact, that is what the original name means, and it is believed that dolphins are named after it because of their womb-like shape), and although it was the possession of Apollo, it had previously been […]

It is very common to find images of birds in the art of Ancient Egypt. We see them in paintings and sculptures with species of all kinds, from the ducks hunted on the Nile to the ibis that lent its head to the god Thoth, to the vulture that topped the white crown of Upper […]

To this Greek philosopher, follower of Pythagoras and teacher of Heraclitus, to whom he instilled the idea that the arché or principle of all things was fire, are attributed—disputably—the discovery of irrational numbers, the construction of a dodecahedron inscribed in a sphere, and several works on acoustics. He also founded a mathematical section in the […]

“I have sent him a ribbon when, in fact, what he deserved was a rope.” This phrase is attributed to King George IV of England, and the ribbon in question would be that of the Order of the Bath, which had just been awarded to Edward Codrington, the admiral who had achieved victory in the […]

One of the greatest affronts suffered by the Roman legions took place in 321 BC, after the Battle of the Caudine Forks. Not only because of the forced surrender, without even fighting, but also due to the humiliation that officers and soldiers endured afterwards, being forced to pass, dressed only in their tunics, under a […]