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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

Danish archaeology is facing one of the most unique discoveries of the last decade in the field of ancient Nordic clothing. During the excavation at the site known as Skonager (ARV 661), carried out near Varde, in the heart of Western Jutland, a team of archaeologists has located a female tomb from the Viking Age […]