When the dying teenage king Edward VI rewrote the royal succession in his own hand, he tried to overturn his father's wishes, disinherit both Mary and Elizabeth, and place his Protestant cousin Lady ...

For much of the 20th century, historians tended to imagine ordinary Romans as relatively cut off from long-distance trade. The assumption was that most people lived as subsistence farmers, producing ...

The Holy Roman Empire was a notional realm in central Europe, which lasted for around 1,000 years, until 1806. Its name, however is rather misleading: the French philosopher Voltaire once decried the ...

The Odyssey is one of the most celebrated stories ever told, recounting the tale Greek hero Odysseus’s journey home from the Trojan War. It should have taken him weeks – and it would have done, had he ...

Remembered for: Conspiring against James VI and I and planning to blow up the House of Lords. Every year on 5 November people mark the anniversary of the failure of the Gunpowder Plot. Family: Guy ...

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With a slew of automatic features like Smart Matches and Instant Discoveries, which allows you to add entire branches to your ...

Early December 1941 was a momentous point when two wars at opposite ends of the world – in Europe and in the Far East – became joined in one colossal global conflict. On 7 December, the Japanese ...

Cosimo de' Medici (later known as Cosimo the Elder) was, according to Pope Pius II, “king in all but name” of Florence. This was not entirely a compliment: like Pius's home city of Siena (a Tuscan ...

Aethelred II – best known by the epithet, ‘the Unready’ – was king of the English for two periods, from AD 978 to 1013, and a brief second spell from 1014 to 1016. His combined reign of nearly 38 ...

History is written by the victors, it’s said. Certainly, much of what we know about the early story of Paris dates from the conquest of Gaul under Julius Caesar, who wrote about the capital of the ...