413. The Peasants' Revolt: England Erupts (Part 1)

The meeting of the controversial Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and the formidable Emperor Montezuma in 1519 was one of the great hinge moments of world history, and the beginning of the end for t...

Within the turmoil of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte stands out to his military superiors, first by defeating the English at Toulon, then by putting down a royalist mob in Paris when outnum...

“I would plunge the avenging dagger, up to the hilt, in the breast of the tyrant!” Born in Corsica a year after the island was given to France by the Genoese, Napoleon Bonaparte grew up in a world of ...

Cook has been sent by the Royal Navy to the Pacific to track the transit of Venus from Tahiti, but also with a second, secret mission: once he’s reached Tahiti, he will go on to search for the great s...

The greatest sea explorer of all time, James Cook was born to a humble Yorkshire family, and first stood out for his talents as a cartographer for the Royal Navy in Newfoundland. He would go on to lea...

The setting for so many of the Arabian Nights, like the stories of Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, or Aladdin, Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age had a shimmering image, a dimens...

Baghdad was a place of fabulous sophistication and teeming multitudes, where terrible things could happen, but great wonders could also be found… During the Islamic Golden Age, it was the most global ...

“No city in the world will ever rival it for prosperity...“ Baghdad, originally a Christian village in Iraq, was chosen by the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mansur as the site for the new capital of his empire, a...

A story of great myth and of huge historical significance, the foundation of Baghdad is a fundamental episode in the development of Islam. The Umayyad Caliphate, the first great Islamic empire, stretc...