The Bastille falls, a king loses his crown and then his head, and a republic that began with a
Rats, plague pits and beaked masks: most of us carry a handful of half-true images of the Black
Knights, castles and cathedrals, plague and crusades: everyone knows the pieces of the Middle
One city on the River Tiber came to rule lands from Britain to Syria and Egypt. For about five
Two armies meet in a narrow pass. A fleet of small wooden ships waits in a strait. A city votes
For more than eleven centuries, an empire that called itself Rome ruled from a city on the
The raiders came out of the sea mist in AD 793, fell on a holy island off the coast of
Most of us learn a handful of names. This book introduces a hundred more: inventors who fought
In 1300 there was no Italy to speak of: only a crowd of walled cities, each with its own bells,
Everyone knows the picture: a wall of concrete cutting through a great European city. Far fewer
A shot in a Bosnian street, six weeks of telegrams, and a continent that marched to war
He charged with the cavalry at Omdurman, escaped from a prison in Pretoria, was blamed for the
He painted the most famous portrait on Earth, and he finished almost nothing. He filled
At twenty he inherited a rough kingdom on the northern edge of the Greek world. At thirty-two he
For twenty-one years she ruled Egypt, charmed two of the most powerful Romans of her age, and
He was born on an island that had just changed flags, spoke French with an accent, and rose to
By her own account she could not read or write, yet at about seventeen a farm girl from a border
She was born a disappointment, declared illegitimate before her third birthday, imprisoned in
He was a slow talker, a poor fit for strict schools and a clerk in a Swiss patent office when,
He conquered Gaul, crossed a small river and started a civil war, ruled Rome as dictator and was
A young woman from Russian-ruled Warsaw, barred from the university in her own city, arrives in
