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 […]

In 1919, when someone began to carefully examine the binding of an 8th-century codex preserved in the Chapter Archive of the Cathedral of Barcelona, they discovered that the back cover hid something more than leather and stitches. Beneath the skin, placed in folds, appeared ten fragments of papyrus. More than a century later, six of […]

In 1648, as Swedish troops looted Prague Castle at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, someone carried off among the spoils a volume that weighed 75 kilos and required two people to move. It was a book, the largest surviving illuminated manuscript of the entire Middle Ages, an object so disproportionate for its time […]