HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/magazine Wed, 26 Nov 2025 08:55:16 GMT en hourly 1 Best history books 2025: BBC History Magazine’s Books of the Year https://www.historyextra.com/magazine/history-books-year-2019-christmas-gift-guide/ Thu, 20 Nov 2025 15:13:49 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/magazine/history-books-year-2019-christmas-gift-guide/ In the roster of laudable history books published in 2025, authors tackled topics as diverse as Gaza, Indian partition, extinction, medieval and Stuart monarchs – even historians themselves. Here, a panel of experts recommend the titles they most enjoyed Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War (Basic Books)

Lyndal Roper

A green book cover with a red figure on the front, and the words "Summer of Fire and Blood" written in white

Hannah Skoda: Did you know that Thomas Müntzer, leader of the German Peasants’ War in 1525, used a rainbow flag to rally his followers? It’s an aptly exuberant image for the radical charisma of Müntzer, and for the hope and vision of the peasants. Religious change seemed to open up new ways of thinking about oppression and exploitation for those rebellious upstarts. In Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War (Basic Books), Lyndal Roper works with sources mostly hostile to the peasants, but the result reads with nuance and acuity. We get a real sense of ordinary people longing for justice and a fairer set of relations to the land, alongside the sheer terrors of this war, which was put down with great ferocity.

A Short History of the Gaza Strip (Simon & Schuster)

Anne Irfan

A cream book cover with a red banner across it about two thirds of the way down

Hannah Skoda: Anne Irfan’s A Short History of the Gaza Strip (Simon & Schuster) is a wonderfully informative account of the complexities of the situation. Beginning in 1948, she guides us through these tangled events with great clarity, drawing on a vast array of sources. The text is nuanced, humane and critical at a time when too many assumptions and untruths are floating around. It might helpfully be read alongside the new podcast series Empire: The History of Gaza, presented by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, which explores Gaza’s deep history stretching back more than 4,000 years.

The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Anne Sebba

The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz

Hannah Skoda: The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), by Anne Sebba, is an intensely moving book. At one point, the women’s orchestra at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp was led by Alma Rosé, niece of Gustav Mahler and an extraordinary musician in her own right. This music-making saved the lives of around 40 of the orchestra’s members.

The Impossible Bomb (Yale University Press)

Gareth Williams

A cream book cover with lots of black squares and red circles on it, with the title "The Impossible Bomb" written in cream

Christopher Harding: A host of Second World War anniversaries this year highlighted the enormous part played in that conflict by new and ever more destructive technologies. Gareth Williams’ The Impossible Bomb (Yale University Press) opened my eyes to the role of British science in the development of nuclear weapons. He takes us from trepidation among scientists in the 1930s, through the breakthroughs and political machinations that shaped what came next.

Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan (Allen Lane)

Richard Overy

A book cover showing a plane flying over a city, and the words "Rain of Ruin" written in yellow

Christopher Harding: In Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan (Allen Lane), Richard Overy reminds us that incendiaries caused far greater destruction in Japan than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tested in the US on Japanese-style wooden architecture, they killed 100,000 people in Tokyo in a single night’s bombing in March 1945. Overy’s book includes an excellent discussion of the reasons behind the timing of Japan’s eventual surrender, cautioning us not to overestimate the role played by atomic weapons – the Soviet declaration of war on Japan, a day before Nagasaki, was also hugely significant.

Grave of the Fireflies (Penguin Classics)

Akiyuki Nosaka

Grave of the Fireflies

Finally, one of Japan’s greatest war novels arrived in translation, highlighting the often overlooked cost to children of the Second World War. Akiyuki Nosaka’s Grave of the Fireflies (Penguin Classics) may already be familiar from Studio Ghibli’s animated adaptation of 1988 – undoubtedly the most harrowing film I’ve ever seen. Thanks to Ginny Tapley Takemori’s translation, English-speaking readers can now follow the lives of siblings and war orphans Seita and Setsuko as they are forced to navigate, largely alone, the darkness and chaos of Kobe after large parts of it are laid waste by firebombing.

A History of England in 25 Poems (Allen Lane)

Catherine Clarke

A book with a beige background, three birds cut out of it, and a long banner with the words "a history of England in 25 poems" on it

Alice Loxton: In A History of England in 25 Poems (Allen Lane), Catherine Clarke roams from raging battlefields to royal courts, and darts from the Great Fire of London to the Miners’ Strike, on a literary tour through English history. We unpick the words of The Peterborough Chronicle, Thomas Wyatt, John Dryden and Lord Tennyson, to name just a few. It is a charming mix of history, travel and literature, inspiring the reader to set forth to discover the English countryside – and to reread the poems aloud at the sites that inspired their creation.

Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins)

Sam Dalrymple

A green book cover with a pink hand print on it, with gold letters

Alice Loxton: Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins), Sam Dalrymple skilfully examines how the Indian empire – a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of south-east Asia – was divided into 12 separate nation states between 1931 and 1971. By dissecting this complex past, he shows how the map of modern Asia was made. It is a vast subject, but Dalrymple has achieved the perfect balance of academic excellence and brilliant storytelling.

Kavita Puri: Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins) looks at the vast Indian empire and its break-up. As recently as 1928, it encompassed countries known today as India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. Though the partition of 1947 is well known, the others are less familiar, yet Dalrymple explains how we continue to live with their ramifications and the empire’s legacy. This is an impressive, ambitious debut, deeply researched and with a storyteller’s eye for detail.

Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain (William Collins)

Blessin Adams

A cream book cover with red and black text on it, and an illustration depicting a woman chasing a man with a knife

Alice Loxton: In Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain (William Collins), the historian and former police officer Blessin Adams unpicks the evidence relating to a succession of historical murders, trawling pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts littered with clickbait tales of traitorous wives, greedy mistresses, child killers and malicious witches. And she offers a compelling verdict: society was both repulsed by and attracted to this murderous female rebellion, and – as is so often the case when we interrogate the sources – the truth is far more complex than it first seems.

Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction (Allen Lane)

Sadiah Qureshi

Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction

Olivette Otele: Extinction, often linked to climate change, continues to be a hotly debated issue. Yet, as Sadiah Qureshi argues, it has been the result of political decisions made long before the heavy industrialisation of the 20th century. Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction (Allen Lane) examines the long history of extinction, from the dinosaurs to endangered species today. She demonstrates that the classification and hierarchisation that were at the heart of colonial projects extended to living beings.

Legenda: The Real Women Behind the Myths That Shaped Europe (WH Allen)

Janina Ramirez

A dark blue book cover with a large colourful sketch of women at the bottom, and gold writing across the middle

Olivette Otele: The illusion that the world can be remoulded by human will becomes reality in Janina Ramirez’s outstanding Legenda: The Real Women Behind the Myths That Shaped Europe (WH Allen). This is not a mere retelling of well-known stories of medieval figures; instead, the author reclaims the narratives previously imposed on those women, unveiling their personal lives. This book disrupts established views on legendary women by uncovering the extent of their agency on their own lives and their influence on various kingdoms.

When We Ruled: The Rise and Fall of Twelve African Queens and Warriors (Trapeze)

Paula Akpan

A blue book cover with a black woman dressed in red, with a large blue necklace on

Olivette Otele: Expanding on key figures who shaped women’s history, When We Ruled: The Rise and Fall of Twelve African Queens and Warriors (Trapeze) shifts our attention from Europe. Paula Akpan’s beautiful prose helps us navigate emotions provoked by these women’s little-known yet incredible trajectories, providing enlightening insights into power, diplomacy and war in African kingdoms. These female rulers had to fight for their people while navigating the treacherous waters of ancient civilisations’ polities. From Nigeria to South Africa, we learn that if greed and fear hinder progress, a leader’s faith in her abilities and in her community can bring great rewards.

Tunisgrad: Victory in Africa (William Collins)

Saul David

Tunisgrad: Victory in Africa

James Holland: Saul David is one of my favourite historians writing today, and his latest book, Tunisgrad: Victory in Africa (William Collins), is brilliant. The Tunisian campaign was a pivotal moment in the Second World War – a period when the Allies sussed out how to work together and to harness air, land and sea power effectively to beat the Axis. Saul’s new book is compellingly told and fills a big hole in the popular narrative of the war.

1945: The Reckoning (Hodder & Stoughton)

Phil Craig

1945: The Reckoning

James Holland: Phil Craig co-authored Finest Hour, a book about 1940 and the Battle of Britain published 26 years ago, which had a profound influence on me and my own writing. His new book, 1945: The Reckoning (Hodder & Stoughton), casts fresh light on not only the end of the fighting in the Second World War but also the changing world that emerged and the mayhem that followed, which was often disturbingly violent. Focusing on a number of fascinating individuals, Craig follows a range of unexpected and diverse characters. I never knew, for example, that the British actually used Japanese troops to quell insurrections in south-east Asia in late 1945.

Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee: An Epically Short History of Our Kings and Queens (Mudlark)

Charlie Higson

A pale book cover with six illustrations on the front, depicting kings and queens

James Holland: Charlie Higson’s Willie, Harry, Stee: An Epically Short History of Our Kings and Queens (Mudlark) is the most enjoyable and utterly joyous account of our monarchs I’ve ever read. There’s no lack of research here, but he writes with terrific energy and verve, adding fabulously quirky observations and small details. The illustrations by Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) are superb – look at George V with his tattoos, for example. I can’t think of a better Christmas history book – one that
I would so loved to have read as an impressionable teenager!

The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan (Hutchinson Heinemann)

Lyse Doucet

A red book cover with a large blue K on the front, with yellow writing over the top

Kavita Puri: Lyse Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan (Hutchinson Heinemann) recounts that country’s turbulent history over the past 50 years. Readers view it through the prism of the ‘Inter-Con’ hotel and the people who’ve worked there, including the first female chef, as well as the guests who pass through. It is a poignant and, at times, tragic history of ordinary lives set against the background of royal rule, coups d’état, foreign invasions and two Taliban regimes, the current iteration of which the UN has called a “gender apartheid” state.

Journeys of Empire: British Voyages that Changed the World Forever – and the Rebels Who Resisted (Puffin)

Sathnam Sanghera

A blue book cover with a red and white title across the top. There is an illustration of a lion with a purple crown on its head and a map hanging from its mouth

Kavita Puri: How we teach history to the next generation is something I think about a lot. Sathnam Sanghera’s children’s book Journeys of Empire: British Voyages that Changed the World Forever – and the Rebels Who Resisted (Puffin) would make an excellent Christmas gift, guiding younger travellers to India in the company of royalty, and across the Atlantic with a young enslaved man. They will ascend mountains never before climbed, and visit places that the west never realised existed.

Heaven Does Not Block All Roads (Hurst)

Anna Beth Keim

A book cover depicting a large sea with a small boat with green sails on it

Rana Mitter: The Forrest Gump of Asia? Not quite – but the life of Huang Chin-tao, as explored in Anna Beth Keim’s Heaven Does Not Block All Roads (Hurst), reflects many of the turning points in the modern history of one of the most controversial places on the continent: Taiwan. Huang was a soldier under Japanese occupation during the Second World War, a political prisoner for years under Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship, then a fighter for democracy in what has now become perhaps Asia’s most liberal state. Using archives and interviews married with sparkling prose, Keim tells a compelling story of historical significance.

The Party's Interests Come First (Stanford University Press)

Joseph Torigian

The Party’s Interests Come First

Rana Mitter: Another Asian life story to fascinate is that of Xi Zhongxun. A powerful figure in the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party under Chairman Mao, his son Xi Jinping now rules China. Joseph Torigian’s superb biography, The Party’s Interests Come First (Stanford University Press), reveals the deeply conflicted nature of the elder Xi: an ardent atheist revolutionary who developed a successful (at first) relationship with the Dalai Lama, and a reformist who was an unbending martinet at home. He was purged in 1962, sending his young son Jinping into exile – and helping shape the path of the 21st century.

A Short History of Japan (Pelican)

Christopher Harding

A blue book cover with an illustration of a Samurai warrior on it

Rana Mitter: Meanwhile, across the sea sits Japan. The perfect introduction to that intriguing society is Christopher Harding’s lively new A Short History of Japan (Pelican). Starting with prehistory, Harding explores the importance of Buddhism, the path to modernisation and, in particular, the role of cultural and material history, including the Japanese traditions of theatre and ceramics. The book is short, yes – but its scope is long, deep and rich.

What Is Ancient History? (Princeton University Press)

Walter Scheidel

A cream book cover with "what is ancient history" written in black. There are some images of stone statues

Josephine Quinn: As a harried academic whose only hobby is missing deadlines, I mostly end up reading books from last year, but sometimes a recent publication makes it to the top of my pile – or, even better, turns up as an advance proof. The best book that’s been published about my own field this year – indeed, for many years – is Walter Scheidel’s What Is Ancient History? (Princeton University Press). It’s a lot of fun, identifying the origins of the modern, idiosyncratic equation of antiquity with Greece and Rome in a dual 19th-century move towards scholarly specialisation or ‘dismemberment’ and away from notions of non-European ancestries. There’s a manifesto, too – not for a return to the past but for a new understanding of pre-modern history not simply as ‘ancient’ but as ‘foundational’ for the contemporary world, worth studying in its own right and on a global scale.

Augustine the African (Profile)

Catherine Conybeare

Augustine the African

Josephine Quinn: Also among books within my field, I’d single out Catherine Conybeare’s Augustine the African (Profile). This short and readable biography explains the bishop of Hippo’s thinking in ways that even I could understand, and situates it, unusually, in his own local experiences growing up in north Africa and then, after a confusing period of travel in Italy as a young man, returning there for good.

What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea (Allen Lane)

Fara Dabhoiwala

A white book cover showing a group of people holding out pieces of papers

Joesphine Quinn: Further out of my own comfort zone, I enjoyed Fara Dabhoiwala’s What  Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea (Allen Lane). I’d never known what to think about the political obsession with free speech on both left and right, so understanding the controversial origins of the concept was very helpful in forming a clearer – and more negative – view of my own.

The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers (Jonathan Cape)

Helen Lewis

The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers

Onyeka Nubia: The soul of a species is under scrutiny in The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers (Jonathan Cape), Helen Lewis’s dissection of human rebels. In it she offers a 21st-century decoding of an 18th-century notion of ‘eminent men’ – and it works. It works for ‘us’, because historical morality is revisionist. But enemies and heroes are socially constructed, and future generations will baulk, aghast at ‘our’ moral imperatives. Perhaps rebels seduce because they represent an alluring aspect of the human psyche. It could be argued human hegemony exists because of Homo sapiens’ capacity to bend the laws of nature.

The Revolutionists (Bodley Head)

Jason Burke

A blue book cover with a couple on the front: the man is highlighted green and the woman red

Onyeka Nubia: Perhaps the idea of home-grown terrorists shocks the system because of manufactured prejudices about who such people are. European terrorism is sometimes offered as an aberration – a ‘rare’ phenomenon – an approach that has influenced portrayals of the Red Army Faction. In The Revolutionists (Bodley Head), Jason Burke defies this intellectual virtue-signalling of ‘western’ values, unpicking the Faction’s forcible entrance into European politics. He holds up a mirror to the Baader-Meinhof gang’s fears of a Fourth Reich – a fear that they felt could justify any action.

Between Two Rivers (Hodder Press)

Moudhy Al-Rashid

A book cover with an intricate gold pattern and banner saying "Between two rivers"

Onyeka Nubia: Moudhy Al-Rashid’s Between Two Rivers (Hodder Press) is a love letter to the Tigris and Euphrates. However, she carefully distances herself from environmental determinism, which may offer the ‘magic’ of civilisation as only a matter of geographical location, boldly and eloquently debunking an obsession with ‘eastern origins’ and orientalism. This is a fine read – historical non-fiction that flows like the best poetry.

Queen James: The Life and Loves of Britain's First King (William Collins)

Gareth Russell

Queen James: The Life and Loves of Britain’s First King

Tracy Borman: James VI & I was a contradictory, often misunderstood character. Only by shining a light on his private life do we glimpse the real man behind the regal mask. That is what Gareth Russell does in Queen James: The Life and Loves of Britain’s First King (William Collins), told with the author’s characteristic verve and exquisite eye for detail – a stunning achievement and a must for history fans.

Queens at War: England's Medieval Queens (Jonathan Cape)

Alison Weir

Queens at War: England’s Medieval Queens

Tracy Borman: Alison Weir’s Queens at War: England’s Medieval Queens (Jonathan Cape) is a gripping new account of England’s medieval queens that brings a dazzling cast of characters – from the formidable Margaret of Anjou to more shadowy figures such as Anne Neville, consort of Richard III – vividly to life. These are women who broke the mould, wielding power not just as the wives of kings but in their own right. In doing so, they shaped the course of English history. Britain’s bestselling female historian has a back catalogue most authors can only dream of, so the queens’ stories are in safe hands. 

Women Who Ruled the World: 5,000 Years of Female Monarchy (Footnote Press)

Elizabeth Norton

A book cover with a purple, blue, pink and red square pattern, with a queen in each square

Tracy Borman: Women Who Ruled the World: 5,000 Years of Female Monarchy (Footnote Press) by Elizabeth Norton is a gripping and beautifully crafted book that skilfully interweaves the stories of female rulers who, on the face of it, have little in common but their sex. As well as introducing the reader to lesser-known characters – Tamar of Georgia and Lili‘uokalani of Hawaii, for example – it provides a fresh perspective on famous figures such as Cleopatra and Elizabeth I. There is a striking contemporary resonance, making even the distant past seem within touching distance. This is a book that effortlessly encompasses a breathtaking span of time, geography and personalities.

Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian (Verso)

Michael Braddick

Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian

Richard J Evans: Biographies of historians aren’t always terribly interesting: we are a tribe that usually does little except sit in archives, libraries, seminar rooms and lecture halls. But sometimes you can find colleagues whose lives are more active and perhaps a bit more interesting than the run-of-the-mill. I certainly struck it lucky with Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012), whose personal archive included a vast mass of diaries, letters, manuscripts and much else besides, which I used for my 2019 biography. Two more lives have appeared this year that tell us a lot about the historical profession and its wider social and political context. Michael Braddick’s Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian (Verso) had to contend with its subject’s rather private nature. However, like Hobsbawm, Hill (1912–2003) was for years kept under surveillance by MI5, and maintained a voluminous correspondence. Braddick is himself a distinguished expert in Hill’s main field, 17th-century English history, and authoritatively assesses his subject’s contribution.

The Indefatigable Asa Briggs (William Collins)

Adam Sisman

The Indefatigable Asa Briggs

Richard J Evans: Asa Briggs (1921–2016) is the subject of another absorbing biography, The Indefatigable Asa Briggs (William Collins), written by Adam Sisman, author of previous lives of Alan Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper. With classic works including Victorian People and The Age of Improvement, Briggs did more than anyone to rescue the Victorians from what another radical historian, Edward Thompson, called “the enormous condescension of posterity”. Both Hill and Briggs wrote gracefully and addressed themselves to a wide readership – an example to us all. Unlike Hobsbawm, however, both men took top managerial roles in higher education institutions – perhaps to the detriment of their actual historical work.

The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive (Hamish Hamilton)

Mathelinda Nabugodi

The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive

Leah Redmond Chang: There is something magical about handling objects in the archive: through them, the past just comes to life. But in Mathelinda Nabugodi’s expert hands, the relics of the 19th-century Romantic past take on startling new meanings. The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive (Hamish Hamilton) is a genre-defying book blending essay, memoir and keen historical analysis. Above all, it is a conversation between a historian and a sometimes hostile archive – a meditation on how history gets made, and by whom.

Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance

Joe Dunthorne

Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance

Leah Redmond Chang: Joe Dunthorne set out to write the story of his Jewish great-grandfather’s escape from Nazi Germany but, through persistent digging, discovered a story far more complex than the one he had imagined. Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance (Hamish Hamilton) begins as a personal memoir but unfurls into a much broader history, revealing how individual people and nations cling to certain stories for the sake of moving forward – often at a steep cost. It’s both a family tribute and a cautionary tale.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (Faber & Faber)

Francesca Wade

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

Leah Redmond Chang: Maybe, like me, you drifted in confusion through one of Gertrude Stein’s books at university, or vaguely recall her as the bossy salonnière in Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris. In her own time, though, she was a cutting-edge writer, a savvy patron of artists, a Jewish American who survived in the heart of Vichy France, and a woman devoted to her lover Alice B Toklas – who in turn fiercely protected Stein’s literary legacy after her death. Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (Faber & Faber) is a fresh, intimate and deeply compelling portrait. Who would have thought that a biography of Gertrude Stein would keep me up late reading? But this is page-turning stuff.

Baltic: The Future of Europe (John Murray)

Oliver Moody

Baltic: The Future of Europe

Peter Frankopan: I hugely enjoyed Oliver Moody’s Baltic: The Future of Europe (John Murray), a brilliant blend of history and reportage – as well as a primer for why this area is central to the world of tomorrow. Much of this region has spent time, energy and thought working out how to address disinformation, hybrid threats, defence readiness and institutional adaptability – and the book urges that others learn from these lessons, too.

The Hour of the Predator: Encounters with the Autocrats and Tech Billionaires Taking Over the World (Pushkin Press)

Giuliano da Empoli

The Hour of the Predator

Peter Frankopan: I was riveted by Giuliano da Empoli’s The Hour of the Predator: Encounters with the Autocrats and Tech Billionaires Taking Over the World (Pushkin Press), which assesses change in today’s world with terrifying clarity. As translated by Sam Taylor, Da Empoli has a wonderful turn of phrase and is an astute picker of historical parallels. Most of today’s leaders are like the Aztecs, he writes, unable to confront reality. Some, though, are like Cesare Borgia – men who believe that they can bend the world to their will and shape it in their own image.

Motherland: A Journey through 500,000 Years of African Culture and Identity (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Luke Pepera

Motherland: A Journey through 500,000 Years of African Culture and Identity

Peter Frankopan: Luke Pepera’s Motherland: A Journey through 500,000 Years of African Culture and Identity (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is another ambitious and expansive book by a first-time author. Pepera starts his investigation deep in the past, looking at themes ranging from migration to oral traditions, matriarchal societies to ancient empires. Blending history, anthropology and memoir, he restores agency and depth to the continent’s story, from chapters about ancient empires to oral traditions and modern diasporas. Rejecting colonial frames, he shows Africa not as a passive backdrop to global history but as one of its enduring creators and moral centres.

These selections first appeared in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> Not 1066 again! Should we ditch our obsession with dates? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/not-1066-again-should-we-ditch-our-obsession-with-dates/ Wed, 19 Nov 2025 13:00:01 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/not-1066-again-should-we-ditch-our-obsession-with-dates/ From 1066 to 1918, our obsession with battles, elections and even voyages of discovery risks distorting a true understanding of the past In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That, at least, is what the famous rhyme tells us. Memorising such dates is a common experience of being taught history – a cliché superbly lampooned by the witty 1930 book 1066 and All That. “History is not what you thought,” its preface suggested. “It is what you can remember.” Accordingly, as per its subtitle, it offered a “Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember, Including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates.” Conspicuously, though, “two out of the four dates originally included were eliminated at the last moment” because “they are not memorable.”

Though evidently both humorists, the book’s authors – Punch writers WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman – were making a serious point. History has long been thought to be concerned with preserving the past. The 12th-century historian and Byzantine princess Anna Komnene observed how “time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity”. Her solution was the study of history, which “forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time”. This is a powerful idea – one that perhaps moved King Charles I, moments before his execution in January 1649, to utter a last single word to William Juxon, the former bishop of London, instructing him: “Remember.”

The cover of a book, with the title 1066 And All That across the top, and two men standing side by side in green and pink clothing

But do our efforts to remember really require us to do something so trivial as memorising dates? More radically, do the historical events these dates mark even matter? The Oxford English Dictionary leaves little room for doubt. Its definition of an event is “something that happens or takes place, especially something significant or noteworthy”. History is often taught as a succinct sequence of such occurrences – those accepted as important moments, neatly knitted together to explain the present. Indeed, for many historians, especially those preoccupied with political, constitutional or military matters, the practice of history itself involves assessing the importance of events by examining their causes, contexts and consequences, considering how they represent change or continuity over time.

Yet almost no archaeologist would approach the past in such terms. Nor would many of today’s social, economic or cultural historians. In the 20th century, proponents of the Annales school, named for a scholarly journal, famously considered events relatively insignificant. French historian Fernand Braudel (1902–85) argued that events were simply “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs”. Has the importance given to events been overstated? Should we, therefore, put less emphasis on learning dates? Are there better ways of understanding history?

The first issue to consider is just how ‘important’ dates are selected. If we are told that some day or year is more noteworthy than another, who decided this? It would be appealing to be able to say that the established chronology has been objectively selected by balanced, skilled historians, and arrived at through years of scrupulous scholarship and vigorous debate. Yet history is a human thing, written and argued over for all kinds of reasons. Even if such matters are really decided by historians – instead of, say, politicians or poets – we are all equally flawed, prone to error and liable to misinterpret the past through a panoply of biases, conscious or not. Moreover, humans are social animals and have consequently evolved to value convention, tradition and the received wisdom of our ancestors. Most of us simply accept the established chronology.

Such a shared history can indeed function as a powerful bond cementing the otherwise disparate identities of social groups. To reinforce this sense of the collective, past incidents thought worthy of remembrance were once upon a time written in stone – literally. The Parian Marble, a fragment of a stele found on the island of Paros and now displayed in the ancient Greek section of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, is inscribed with a neat chronology of events and their dates from 1582 BC to 299 BC in our terms. These include the fall of Troy, purportedly in 1209–1208 BC, and the rather more reliably dated battle of Marathon in 490 BC. The stele’s text, similar to the earlier ‘Sumerian King List’ housed in the nearby Mesopotamian gallery, fuses myth with history.

Such objects represent early examples of a phenomenon that has become increasingly common in the past two centuries or so. With the rise of nation states, backstories have been created for their “imagined communities”, as Anglo-Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson famously dubbed nations in 1983. These stories typically rest on simple historical narratives, ideally sprinkled with a few inspirational national heroes and some key dates. In the UK, a chronology of past rulers plays a major role. Reigns became surrogates for eras, suffused with each ruler’s character. Looking back, for example, we see all those who were alive between 1837 and 1901 as ‘Victorians’.

A 2017 re-enactment of the 1410 battle of Grunwald. Poles and Lithuanians see this victory over the German Teutonic Order as a turning point in their national stories (Image by Getty Images)

Battles are often key parts of national stories. Like Marathon for the ancient Greeks, the battles of Hastings in 1066 and Agincourt in 1415 are considered important to the English. For the British more generally, Trafalgar in 1805 and Waterloo in 1815 are significant. In Serbia, the notoriously bloody battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which forces led by Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović squared up to an invading Ottoman army under the command of Sultan Murad I, has been endlessly mythologised. Lithuanians and Poles still celebrate victory over the German Teutonic Order at the battle of Grunwald in 1410.

But few dates and events are as significant as national narratives suggest, battles least of all. Why? Because battles, though certainly rare and dramatic moments, are seldom, if ever, decisive at ending wars so can’t be imbued with much causal importance. Even after Hastings, at which much of the English ruling class was killed, it took William the Conqueror many years to bring England truly under Norman rule, a period notorious for the so-called Harrying of the North (1069–70). Likewise, the greatly celebrated clash at Agincourt (1415), which owes much of its fame to William Shakespeare, saw the mass slaughter of French nobility – but it was not until 1420 that Henry V forced Charles VI to agree to recognise the Plantagenet claim to the French throne under the Treaty of Troyes.

Yet such totemic dates are repeatedly reinforced by that staple of public history and national myth-making: the commemoration of anniversaries. These appear to be good moments to reconsider the past and revive enthusiasm for historical enquiry, but there’s a built-in problem: at least outwardly, nobody involved questions the real significance of the events marked – that would defeat the exercise. It is understandable that, on occasion, people wish to memorialise the loss of their loved ones in wars or other disasters. In general, however, anniversaries reflect current concerns and as such are profoundly unhelpful when it comes to understanding what happened in the past.

Admittedly, some moments appear to have been so overwhelmingly important that they demand our attention. For Europe, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 seems epochal. In China, the final defeat of the Song dynasty by the forces of Kublai Khan in 1279 has a similar significance. Yet these events represent the culmination of long and complex processes. Seen in this light, the events themselves were largely symbolic.

Surely, you say, the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492 had massive historical consequences. Well, one can quibble over whether his first voyage itself achieved much – likewise his three further transatlantic expeditions in 1493–96, 1498–1500 and 1502–04, for that matter – despite being catastrophic for the indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean. Columbus thought – and continued to think for the rest of his life – that he was exploring east Asia.

A painting of a man dressed in a white shirt with a brown cloak, and a dark hat

The world indeed changed thereafter as it gradually fused into what, in 1974, the American economic historian and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein termed the “modern world-system”, but this was not an inevitable consequence of Columbus’s first voyage. After all, Europeans had been in the Americas before. The Norseman Leif Erikson is thought to have reached North America around AD 1000, and a Norse settlement excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada seems to support this. So it is of far greater historical significance that pivotal processes occurred after 1492 – but not after 1000. This is a point made in Alfred W Crosby’s groundbreaking 1972 book The Columbian Exchange, a foundational text of environmental history that charted the seismic global effects of the intercontinental transfer of plants, animals, diseases and cultures.

Such developments can be shown to be genuinely transformative to people’s lives, from the food they ate to the diseases that afflicted them. By contrast, traditional chronology often neglects the experiences of a broad spectrum of people. Not everyone was present at battles or on voyages of discovery. Indeed, most humans who have ever lived were peasants who wrested their subsistence from the soil. For these people, few experiences were shared beyond a restricted locality, especially in periods when speeds of travel were slow and communication limited. Nearly all people must have been ignorant of what we now assert, after the fact, were key events.

Others would have been simply indifferent. According to the historian De Lamar Jennsen, the Spanish Armada – King Philip II of Spain’s unsuccessful project to invade England in summer 1588 – was the “worst kept secret in Europe”. Yet research suggests that, far from striving to achieve victory for their country in some epic national struggle, during the Armada many English sailors and merchants were more preoccupied with selling food and other supplies to the enemy than with fighting them.

Perhaps the key problem is that narrative history gives us a false sense of order, in part by playing to our innate tendency to identify and interpret patterns. It suggests that big events necessarily have big consequences. This completely fails to account for the unpredictable nature of the world through which we move. Seemingly insignificant factors can and do have a disproportionate impact on history. As the proverb has it in James Baldwin’s version: “For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for the want of a horse the battle was lost; for the failure of battle the kingdom was lost; and all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” Conversely, apparently important things can turn out to be irrelevant.

To return to Columbus, how are we to frame the decision of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon to support him, having equivocated for years over whether to stump up the cash to fund his voyage west? Some cite the fall of Granada to Christian forces in January 1492 – marking the end of Islamic rule on the Iberian peninsula, which gave the co-ruler monarchs both confidence and the promise of more secure finances – as the key explanation for their change of heart. Assuming this were true, we could equally portray what happened as the result of the Arab Nasrid dynasty, which ruled the Emirate of Granada for more than 250 years, carelessly losing control of their territory. In the latter reading, Wallerstein’s modern world-system was in a sense created “for want of a nail”.

A photograph of a courtyard under tall, intricate archways with several columns throughout

As should be becoming clear, questioning the assumptions that underpin so much conventional narrative history has serious implications. This forces you, for example, to recognise that the lowliest peasant may have been as significant as an emperor or king, and that their relative impact on history was not necessarily proportionate to their immediate influence. “The ruler’s power was rarely effective,” Danish historian Patricia Crone put it, “even within such sphere of competence as he did enjoy.” Braudel hauntingly evoked a “historian who takes a seat in Philip II’s chair and reads his papers” and is transported into “a world of strong passions” but one “unconscious of the deeper realities of history, of the running waters on which our frail barks are tossed like cockleshells”. Yet such is our wish to impose order on a complex world that we have frequently reached for elaborate explanations for erratic ‘nonlinear’ outcomes, among them the capricious will of deities, the movements of celestial bodies, even conspiracy theories.

In truth, because our evidence of the past is so incomplete, we are unlikely ever to pinpoint true cause and effect. Despite this, we still tend to look for what Annales school historian Marc Bloch called “the idol of origins”. Countless books claim to trace the roots of anything from states and religions to sports. Even the aforesaid Parian Marble located the birth of agriculture to 1409–08 BC when the goddess Demeter supposedly invented grain crops. In practical terms, though, nothing has any origin in history. “For most historical realities,” Bloch wrote in the early 1940s, “the very notion of a starting point remains singularly elusive.” As we have shown, we cannot even be sure that the origin of the Columbian Exchange was Columbus himself.

Indeed, trying to frame this story, we could be more radical and go back even before the time of Leif Erikson – perhaps all the way back to 14,800 years ago, when the Bering Strait Land Bridge was last rendered impassable and Asia was fully separated from the Americas. But where do you stop? Rather than there being actual origins, all things were and are constantly in the course of being made through a process of emergence. As Bloch argued, “A historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time. This is true of every evolutionary stage, our own and all others.”

So how, then, are we to approach history without straightforward narratives? There are any number of options. Some historians, such as those of the Annales school, have examined historical structures – social, political and economic – rather than events to explain change, frequently over the long term. This approach has often been fused with the so-called histoire des mentalités (history of attitudes), which endeavours to understand the perspectives of those in the past in their own terms. Meanwhile, some social and economic historians have used Marxist theory and framed conflict between social classes as explaining change. Others have put the emphasis on demography and land use. Today, in a time of climate change, many historians are interested in understanding past societies’ interactions with their environments.

An image showing four people dressed in wool skins and carrying spears, walking across a large

Each new approach has inevitably attracted criticism for its own alleged oversimplification and misrepresentation of the past. British historians, in particular, were notoriously hostile to the Annales school. Geoffrey Elton of the University of Cambridge, for example, held to his focus on events, with disdain for nearly all scholarship outside the study of power politics. It is said that his colleague Maurice Cowling would privately exclaim: “Annales is balls!” Despite such intransigence, though, new ideas did spread. Going forward, future historians will doubtless find even more innovative forms of historical enquiry using formidable artificial intelligence-driven tools.

To be clear, though they make less of specific events, new approaches are not necessarily histories without dates. Peter Laslett, in his pioneering 1965 work of social history The World We Have Lost, even began with one: “In the year 1619 the bakers of London applied to the authorities for an increase in the price of bread.” Though Laslett pinpoints a moment that might seem banal when compared with a great battle, coronation or discovery, we should arguably accord such granular details equal attention for what they tell us of our ancestors’ priorities. Their world, like our own, was a practically infinite morass of events and dates whose relative importance and interrelationships were vastly more uncertain than we impulsively suppose.

History is not, as one student in Alan Bennett’s 2004 play The History Boys put it, “just one f****** thing after another”. Rather, as the sixth-century historian and bishop Gregory of Tours began his Historia Francorum (History of the Franks), “A great many things keep happening.” Faced with this truth, should we not stop presenting history as neat, ordered and, as such, unrepresentative of how our forebears experienced it?

Ultimately, we cannot preserve the past inside the present. Explorers such as Columbus and rulers such as Charles I or Philip II will eventually be forgotten, just as we will all one day be swept away by the stream of time. Trying to understand this process, not learning dates, is the true art of history. Kings and queens are not innately important; neither are great battles. All things are transient. As the 11–12th-century Persian poet and scientist Omar Khayyam put it, it is far better we “think, in this batter’d caravanserai [a refuge for travellers] whose doorways are alternate night and day; how sultan after sultan with his pomp, abode his hour or two, and went his way”.

This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine out now! https://www.historyextra.com/magazine/current-issue-bbc-history-magazine/ Thu, 02 Oct 2025 06:00:24 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/magazine/current-issue-bbc-history-magazine/ Terror in the deep

Did German U-boats fight fair or did they target the crews of ships they sank? Roger Moorhouse weighs the evidence

Medieval medicine

James Freeman explores how doctors and other healers diagnosed and treated disease during the Middle Ages

Fake news and the Dreyfus affair

Mike Rapport reveals how, after the wrongful exile of a Jewish army officer for treason, French media became a battlefield awash with bias and bile

Spectral beasts and hounds from hell

Why do ghostly dogs dominate tales of supernatural beasts roaming Britain’s landscapes? Karen R Jones tracks these creatures and their origins

1066: not all that

Robert Blackmore questions whether our obsession with individual dates risks obscuring historical truths

Star witness

Louise Devoy explains how the Royal Observatory in Greenwich transformed our understanding of astronomy, navigation and time

SUBSCRIBE TODAY to get our next issue: The December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine is on sale from 30 October 2025. Look inside!

]]> Coming up in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine https://www.historyextra.com/magazine/next-issue-bbc-history-magazine/ Thu, 02 Oct 2025 06:00:16 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/magazine/next-issue-bbc-history-magazine/ In our December 2025 issue, on sale 30 October 2025

Legendary women

Janina Ramirez argues that celebrated figures like Joan of Arc and Isabella of Castile have been misrepresented throughout history

Nazi propaganda

Lisa Pine examines how the Third Reich used posters to reinforce both its policies and its rule

An absent mother?

Lauren Johnson revisits the relationship between Margaret Beaufort and the future Henry VII

Young Caesar

David Potter contends that we need to take a fresh look at the Roman leader’s early life

Dictator to democracy

Paul Preston reveals how Spain moved on from Franco’s authoritarian regime

The surprising Tudors

Ruth Goodman shares five things you probably didn’t know about the 16th century

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]]> Kublai Khan: ruler of the waves https://www.historyextra.com/magazine/kublai-khan-podcast-jack-weatherford/ Wed, 04 Dec 2024 08:30:09 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/magazine/kublai-khan-podcast-jack-weatherford/ Jack Weatherford explains how the Mongol leader became the emperor of China – and dominated the sea in the process Genghis Khan may have built a formidable land empire, but his grandson Kublai Khan mastered the seas. So how did a nomadic leader come to have such a formidable navy – and conquer China in the process? Emily Briffett spoke to Jack Weatherford about his new book on the subject, Emperor of the Seas, to find out more.

Jack Weatherford is the author of Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2024)

]]> 57 history questions for your home pub quiz https://www.historyextra.com/magazine/history-quiz-questions-list/ Tue, 21 Jul 2020 10:05:05 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/magazine/history-quiz-questions-list/ Planning a historical quiz for a celebration with family and friends? We’ve shared a selection of history questions perfect for your next trivia round… In our current times, many of us are taking the opportunity to create a quiz from home to share with family and friends – but you might be stumped for the right questions. We have rounded up a selection of questions from across HistoryExtra; feel free to mix and match to create your own history pub quiz…

(Answers on page 2)

  1. Which queen had the shortest reign of Henry VIII’s six wives?
  2. In 16th-century Japan, who was Yasuke?
  3. Who wrote the 12th-century account Historia regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), which is often credited with making the legend of King Arthur popular?
  4. It is thought that Harriet Tubman directly rescued around 300 people from slavery and gave instructions to help dozens more. But in which conflict did she become the first woman to lead an armed assault?
  5. In which country is the Bay of Pigs?
  6. Which medieval queen was married to both Louis VII of France and Henry II of England?
  7. Who was the first human to journey into space?
  8. Whose body was exhumed from Westminster Abbey, more than two years after his death, to be ‘executed’ for treason?
  9. Who ultimately succeeded King Alfred the Great as ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’?
  10. By what nickname is Edward Teach better known?
  11. Julius Caesar was assassinated on 15 March 44 BC, a date now often known by what term?
  12. Where did the Great Fire of London begin, on 2 September 1666?
  13. What German dance, which sees partners spinning together in close contact, was condemned as depraved when it was first seen in Regency society?
  14. Which king preceded Queen Victoria?
  15. Guy Bailey, Roy Hackett and Paul Stephenson made history in 1963, as part of a protest against a bus company that refused to employ black and Asian drivers in which UK city?
  16. Who famously duelled Alexander Hamilton on 11 July 1804, resulting in the founding father’s death?
  17. What, in the 16th and 17th centuries, was a ‘drunkard’s cloak’?
  18. What is considered the world’s oldest writing system?
  19. Who was the mother of Emperor Nero and the wife of Emperor Claudius?
  20. Which pioneer of hair products became America’s first black female millionaire?
  21. What was Mary Anning (1799–1847) famous for?
  22. Who gave Queen Elizabeth I the soubriquet ‘Gloriana’?
  23. Although never taking her seat, who was the first woman to be elected to the houses of parliament?
  24. Where was Napoleon Bonaparte born?
  25. Can you name the five beach codenames used by Allied forces on D-Day?
  26. Where was the first British colony in the Americas?
  27. In August 1819, around 60,000 peaceful pro-democracy protestors were attacked in an open square in Manchester. This event was known as...
  28. Which rock band formed in 1994 takes its name from a term used by the Allies in the Second World War to describe various UFOs?
  29. In which year did Emily Wilding Davison die as a result of a collision with King George V’s horse during the Epsom Derby?
  30. In medieval history, what was a 'schiltron'?
  31. Which English king died in 1066, leaving no heir to the throne?
  32. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and…? Who was the third astronaut involved in the Apollo 11 mission that landed on the moon?
  33. What was Matthew Hopkins famous for in the 17th century?
  34. In what century did the Peasants’ Revolt take place?
  35. During the US civil rights movement in the 1960s, who said: “We declare our right on this earth...to be a human being...by any means necessary”?
  36. Who was the wife of the future Henry VIII’s older brother, Arthur?
  37. What is trepanning?
  38. In which decade did the potato famine strike Ireland?
  39. Who led the Scottish army to victory over the English at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314?
  40. What were the four humours that the ancient Greeks believed made up the body and determined illness?
  41. Who sent the Spanish Armada to England in 1588?
  42. Which English king built castles in the 13th century to help conquer Wales?
  43. The Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law by which US president in 1882?
  44. Which 19th-century Englishwoman became the first qualified medical doctor?
  45. Which part of Berlin was enclosed by the wall?
  46. Which prominent Kurd, born in Tikrit, united Muslim forces against the crusaders in the 12th century?
  47. Which rebellious leader of the Catuvellauni tribe was caught and taken to Rome in AD 50, then pardoned by Emperor Claudius?
  48. Which American president was in power during the 'Black Thursday' Wall Street crash?
  49. At what famous French landmark was the document signed which set out the terms of ‘peace’ following the First World War?
  50. Where were Charles I’s headquarters during the Civil War?
  51. Who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914?
  52. Who was the last king of the Plantagenet line of monarchs?
  53. The controversial film Birth of a Nation, which was released in 1915, was used as a recruiting tool for which organisation?
  54. What was Eleanor Roosevelt’s maiden name?
  55. Who was the last tsar of Russia?
  56. During 1963, in Washington DC, Martin Luther King Jr gave his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech on the steps of which famous landmark?
  57. Which monarch appointed Pitt the Younger to the office of prime minister in December 1783?

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Exclusive quizzes for HistoryExtra members from our archives

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Head to page 2 for the answers…

Answers

  1. Anne of Cleves
  2. Yasuke is known as the first foreign-born samurai in 16th-century Japan
  3. Geoffrey of Monmouth
  4. Harriet Tubman served in the America Civil War
  5. It was the site of a failed attempt by a group of Cuban émigrés, with the backing of the US government, to invade the island in 1961.
  6. Eleanor of Aquitaine
  7. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, in April 1961
  8. The body of Oliver Cromwell was exhumed in 1661.
  9. Edward the Elder, son of Alfred and Ealhswith of Mercia
  10. Edward Teach is better known to history as the notorious 17th-century pirate ‘Blackbeard’
  11. The Ides of March
  12. In Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane (though technically the bakehouse was not located on Pudding Lane proper, but on Fish Yard, a small enclave off Pudding Lane) | Learn more with this guide to the Great Fire of London
  13. The Waltz
  14. King William IV (who was Victoria’s uncle)
  15. Bristol | Read more about the Bristol bus boycott
  16. Aaron Burr, the sitting vice president of the USA | Read more about the Hamilton-Burr duel
  17. The drunkard’s cloak was a form of humiliating punishment used in the past for people who were perceived to have abused alcohol
  18. Cuneiform, an ancient writing system that was first used in around 3400 BC
  19. Agrippina the Younger
  20. Sarah Breedlove – who later became known as Madam CJ Walker
  21. Collecting fossils, she was a palaeontologist
  22. Edmund Spenser, in his epic poem ‘The Faerie Queene’
  23. Countess Markievicz
  24. Corsica
  25. Utah; Omaha; Gold; Juno and Sword
  26. Roanoke (and read more about its disappearance)
  27. The Peterloo Massacre
  28. The Foo Fighters
  29. 1913
  30. A battle formation that consisted of soldiers with long spears placed into circular, tightly packed formations
  31. Edward the Confessor
  32. Michael Collins
  33. He was a witch-finder
  34. The Peasants' Revolt took place in 1381, in the 14th century
  35. Malcolm X
  36. Catherine of Aragon
  37. The drilling of holes in the head and scraping or cutting of the skull
  38. 1840s
  39. Robert the Bruce
  40. Blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile
  41. Philip II of Spain
  42. Edward I
  43. Chester A Arthur
  44. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
  45. The west
  46. Saladin
  47. Caractacus
  48. Herbert Hoover
  49. The Palace of Versailles
  50. Oxford
  51. Gavrilo Princip
  52. Richard III. He was defeated at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 by the army of Henry Tudor
  53. The Ku Klux Klan
  54. Roosevelt
  55. Nicholas II
  56. The Lincoln Memorial
  57. George III

Fascinated by the royal family and The Crown?

We rounded up 24 history questions about the royal family for your home pub quiz  

Members of the royal family: Prince Louis; Prince George; Prince William, Duke of Cambridge; Princess Charlotte; Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge; Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall; Prince Charles, Prince of Wales; Princess Anne, Princess Royal; and Queen Elizabeth II during the Queen's annual birthday parade on 8 June 2019 in London, England. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

Want to put your own knowledge to the test? Browse our full range of history quizzes here

]]> Virtual museum and monument tours: how to explore the wonders of history from your home https://www.historyextra.com/magazine/virtual-remote-museum-exhibition-tours-how-explore-history-from-home/ Tue, 21 Apr 2020 13:29:16 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/magazine/virtual-remote-museum-exhibition-tours-how-explore-history-from-home/ Many museums have opened up their doors to the wonders of virtual reality, letting you ‘walk around’ and admire exhibitions from the comfort of your own home. Emma Slattery Williams of BBC History Revealed shares just a few of the museums, artefacts and historical spaces that you can explore from afar…  

The Vatican

Where? Vatican City

What? A virtual reality tour

You don’t need to be in Rome to visit the smallest sovereign state in the world. The Vatican has created a series of virtual tours that let you loose inside the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church – the home of the Pope and one of the most important churches in Christianity, St Peter’s Basilica.The Vatican City traces its history back to the fourth century, when a church was built over the tomb of St Peter – one of Jesus’s 12 apostles and widely regarded as the founder of the Catholic Church. In the 16th century, a new church replaced the 1,200-year-old one, and it’s still standing today. This is the current St Peter’s Basilica – and the tomb of St Peter is believed to be directly under the high altar. The basilica is a renowned piece of Renaissance architecture.

A range of 360° virtual tours will transport you around some of the grand rooms and chapels within the Vatican, allowing you to admire the exquisite paintings and sculptures of one of the largest art collections in the world. You can also take a virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel; one of the highlights of a trip to the Vatican, the chapel is perhaps most famous for its impressive ceiling mural, painted by Michelangelo. It’s also where the papal conclave (the election of a new pope) typically takes place.

The interior of the Sistine Chapel

The Vatican boasts many museums within its complexes, too, and it has opened up a number of these collections to virtual visitors. One that you can peruse through your phone is the Pio Clementino Museum. Named after the two popes who supervised its creation, Clement XIV and Pius VI, it houses ancient Greek and Roman sculptures as well as the finely-carved sarcophagus of St Helena – the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who was famously the first Roman ruler to adopt the Christian faith.

 

Petra

Where? Petra, Jordan

What? A virtual reality trek and tour

The ancient city of Petra in Jordan is one of the world’s most valuable archaeological sites. Known as the ‘Rose City’, every dwelling, tomb and temple was painstakingly carved directly into the sandstone cliffs – with the rockface’s vibrant colour giving many of the buildings a distinctive rose-pink lustre.

Settled by the Nabataeans in the 3rd century BC, the city flourished until at least the 6th century AD. There’s evidence of a Crusader outpost in the vicinity in the 12th century, but after that the ruins were lost to the Western world until their rediscovery in the 19th century. Since then they have attracted worldwide attention – particularly from Hollywood directors. The city has often been used as a filming location, perhaps most famously as a backdrop for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: the eastern entrance to Petra inspired the film’s invented Canyon of the Crescent Moon.

A classic view of El Deir, the monastery in Petra.

Google has created a virtual tour of the mysterious city that allows you to clamber among the cliffs and experience this ancient wonder first-hand. Trekking through the city, you can explore a number of locations, accompanied by an audio track that’s brimming with fascinating facts about Petra.

 

Palace of Versailles

Where? Versailles, France

What? A virtual reality tour

The marvellous imagination of King Louis XIV transformed what was once a small hunting lodge into an extravagant palace that became the home of the French court. The Sun King wanted to create a royal residence that would be the envy of the world, and it seems he succeeded: his successors continued to add to the palace until revolution rocked the country in 1789, and the palace today is a sprawl of 2,300 rooms, each more elegant than the last.

A virtual tour (offered by Google) takes you into some of the palace’s grandest rooms – including the Hall of Mirrors, where the walkway’s glittering chandeliers and opulent gold furnishings are dizzyingly reflected in the myriad of mirrors that line the walls. The hall was also the site where the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919, thereby ending World War I.

Some of the palace’s past and present exhibitions can also be explored online.

 

The Anne Frank House

Where? Amsterdam, the Netherlands

What? A virtual reality tour

In 1942, Otto Frank and his family went into hiding in a secret annex above Otto’s offices. The family had moved to the Netherlands from their native Germany in the summer of 1933, after the Nazi Party’s rise to power. The Nazis occupied the Netherlands in 1940, and two years later Otto decided to take his wife and two daughters into hiding. They moved, suddenly and secretly, into an annex within his office, where they were soon joined by another Jewish family, the Pels, and a family friend, dentist Fritz Pfeffer. The Franks remained here for 761 days.

This virtual tour lets you experience what it was like in the cluster of rooms hidden behind a bookcase. It was here, secluded from the outside world save for the small cadre of helpers in office beyond, that young Anne Frank would chronicle her and family’s lives in her diary. If you have a virtual reality headset, you can also navigate the annex in VR.

The bookcase in Anne Frank's house

Anne’s last diary entry was on 1 August 1944. Three days later, the Nazis raided the annex; the Franks, the Pels and Pfeffer were sent to Nazi concentration camps. Otto was the only one to survive, freed from
Auschwitz when the Soviets liberated it in 1945. Anne and her sister Margot ended up in Bergen-Belsen, where they both died of typhus – aged 15 and 19 respectively – just a few months before it was liberated. Otto returned to Amsterdam, where he discovered that Anne’s diary had been found and saved by one of their former helpers. It was published as The Diary of a Young Girl in 1947, and since been reprinted in 60 languages.

 

The Colosseum

Where? Rome, Italy

What? A virtual reality tour

Imagine the roar of the crowd as a gladiator stands victorious in the Colosseum’s pit, blood-stained sword in hand, having just bested their foe in deadly combat. From grand mock battles to one-on-one bouts and grisly executions, the Colosseum was the heart of life in ancient Rome and could hold around 50,000 spectators. Since 2010, visitors to the arena have been able to navigate the underground tunnels known as the hypogeum, where the animals and warriors who awaited their turn in the arena were kept.

Now, with the help of Google, you can explore the Colosseum’s labyrinthine walkways and virtually stand in the grand amphitheatre that was once home to Rome’s greatest – and bloodiest – entertainment. How do you think you would have fared?

 

The British Museum

Where? London, UK

What? Walkthrough and Collection explorer

The British Museum houses some of the most famous artefacts from across the world (and across time) – and now you can stroll through the museum online. As well as virtually roaming the museum’s galleries, you can also look in depth at their collections. From the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles to Hoa Hakananai’a – the moai statue from Easter Island – there are priceless objects from a wealth of civilisations waiting to be explored.

 

The National Computing Museum

Where? Milton Keynes, UK

What? A virtual tour

It seems only right that the location for the National Computing Museum is in the grounds of Bletchley Park, the centre of Allied codebreaking during World War II and the site of the development of the world’s first computer. Most of the museum’s exhibits can be explored via a virtual tour, including the world’s oldest working computer, the Harwell Dekatron. The museum also holds a replica of the device used to crack Germany’s Enigma code.

Bletchley Park

 

Museo Nacional de Anthropologia

Where? Mexico City, Mexico

What? A virtual tour

Mexico’s national museum, located in Mexico City, has some of the country’s most important pre-Columbian artefacts, including the Aztec Calendar stone, known as the Stone of the Sun, giant head sculptures from the Olmec civilisation and treasures from the Mayan city of Chichen Itza. Another highlight of the museum is the supposed headdress of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma – a man who, it’s said, drank 50 cups of hot chocolate a day to enhance his ‘prowess’. Get up close to some of these amazing finds with the museum’s 360° virtual tour.

 

The National Museum of Natural History

Where? Washington, DC, USA

What? A virtual tour

Run by the Smithsonian Institution, this venerable edifice is one of the most visited natural history museums in the world. Go online to take a walk through the exhibits, which range from the dinosaurs that used to roam America (including a 11.6m-long Tyrannosaurus rex), the world-famous (and quite unusually blue) Hope Diamond and a fossilised Neanderthal.

The Tyrannosaurus rex on display was found in 1988. It’s unusual in that more than 80 per cent of its skeleton was uncovered.

Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History

 

The Louvre

Where? Paris, France

What? A virtual tour

Standing in the ground of the former royal palace of the same name, the Louvre Musuem is the largest art museum in the world. In just a few clicks of a mouse, you could be admiring the opulent Grand Salon in the apartments of Napoleon III before casting your gaze on the sculptures of the Ancient Greeks. In addition to its most famous resident – Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’– the Louvre houses one of the world’s largest Egyptian collections, a combination of objects from the French royal collection, as well as from Napoleon’s Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign in 1798. This latter campaign led to the discovery of thousands of artefacts and gave birth to Europe’s fascination with Egypt and the rise of Egyptology.

We update this page regularly, so keep checking back for new recommendations of virtual tours. Last updated 21 April 2020

This content first appeared in BBC History Revealed magazine

]]> Who is the greatest leader in world history? https://www.historyextra.com/magazine/who-greatest-leader-world-history/ Wed, 04 Mar 2020 09:25:59 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/magazine/who-greatest-leader-world-history/ Courage, tolerance, ruthlessness: which factors define an inspiring, effective figurehead? BBC World Histories Magazine asked historians including Rana Mitter, Margaret MacMillan and Gus Casely-Hayford to nominate the greatest leader – someone who exercised power and had a positive impact on humanity – and to explore their achievements and legacy. So who has topped the poll? Maharaja Ranjit Singh, leader of the Sikh empire in the early 19th century, has topped a poll of the greatest leaders in world history.

At the beginning of this year, BBC World Histories Magazine asked historians including Rana Mitter, Margaret MacMillan and Gus Casely-Hayford to nominate their ‘greatest leader’ – someone who exercised power and had a positive impact on humanity – and to explore their achievements and legacy. The list was voted on by more than 5,000 readers, and Singh has been named history’s greatest leader. You can read more about Singh’s life, successes and failures here.

Taking more than 38 per cent of the vote, Maharaja Ranjit Singh was described by nominating historian Matthew Lockwood as a modernising and uniting force, whose reign “marked a golden age for Punjab and north-west India”.

A 19th-century depiction of Maharaja Ranjit Singh

In second place, with 25 per cent of the vote, is African independence fighter Amílcar Cabral (nominated by Hakim Adi), who united more than one million Guineans to free themselves from Portuguese occupation and in turn propelled many other colonised African countries to rise and fight for independence. British prime minister Winston Churchill (nominated by Andrew Roberts) is in third position with 7 per cent of the vote for his sharp political manoeuvring that kept Britain in the war.

Further down the list, American president Abraham Lincoln (nominated by Adam I P Smith) is in fourth place and British monarch Elizabeth I (nominated by Tracy Borman) is the highest ranked female leader in fifth position, with 4 per cent of the vote.

Why did Amílcar Cabral come in second place? Hakim Adi offers his take…

The readers of the poll undoubtedly had a variety of reasons for voting for Amílcar Cabral. They may have thought it important to vote for an African and there were not nearly enough African leaders for readers to choose from. Even though Africa is the world’s second largest continent with the oldest human history, the leaders selected by historians were predominantly European. However, even African countries with small populations, such as Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, can make historic advances and produce great leaders. Greatness is not the preserve of any one country or continent. Cabral represented many of those important characteristics most sought after in a great leader. He was a man of the people, one who shared their concerns and who had faith in their ability to be the agents of change and the makers of history. He recognised that the problems faced by Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde, the suffering caused as a result of Portugal’s oppressive colonial rule, had to be taken up for solution. Moreover, he recognised that it was only the people themselves who could solve these problems, that truly they were their own liberators. The great absence of leaders of his type in Africa, and in other continents, today only serve to make his life and work even more inspiring. It might be thought that Cabral’s leadership of the struggles for liberation and empowerment in Africa were just of significance in the 1960s and 1970s, but the poll showed otherwise. For one thing, Cabral not only contributed to significant political changes in Africa but also to the demise of the dictatorial regime in Portugal itself. His life and work demonstrated that the struggles of people in one continent could have a profound effect on the lives and circumstances of those thousands of miles away. Indeed, it could be said that those in Africa and Europe were engaged in a successful joint struggle against a common enemy. Today such a victory continues to resonate with people all over the world and accords with their aspirations to empower themselves and become the decision-makers in a new and modern society. In short, people’s support for Cabral is surely connected with their admiration for the stand that he took, the fact that he gave his life not only for the liberation and advancement of Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Africa but also for the progress of all humanity.

Who were the other nominees? Read more about the other great leaders below...

 

Amenhotep III

Pharaoh of Egypt c1390–1352 BC

Great because… he was Egypt’s greatest pharaoh when Egypt ruled the ancient world

Chosen by Joann Fletcher

Egypt's pharaoh Amenhotep III

During his long reign, Amenhotep III presided over a golden age during the 18th dynasty when Egypt was the most powerful nation on Earth. And, although his grandson Tutankhamun is far more widely known today, it is Amenhotep III who was taken as the ultimate role model by subsequent monarchs.

Drawing inspiration from the earlier Pyramid Age, when solar worship had dominated religious life, Amenhotep declared himself the living sun god, to outmanoeuvre and transcend the political ambitions of the Egyptian clergy. The ‘Sun King’ further augmented his power through his control of the gold mines of Nubia (modern Sudan), then part of Egypt’s vast empire, which stretched as far north as Syria and with its influence felt as far away as Mycenae in Greece.

In a world then briefly at peace, tribute nonetheless poured into Egypt from neighbouring powers, all keen to gain the favour of a pharaoh who was then the world’s richest man. Surviving diplomatic correspondence (the ‘Amarna Letters’) also reveals Amenhotep as a consummate politician, able to maintain peace and the power balance through his canny use of Egyptian gold and his own dry wit to counter the actions of those failing to achieve his own high standards.

The finest Egyptian craftsmanship was created under his personal patronage, as was the ambitious construction programme that made him the most prolific builder in Egyptian history. Fully deserving his title Menwy (‘Monument Man’), Amenhotep clad the walls of Karnak temple in gem-studded gold, and there erected Egypt’s tallest statue, his own image standing well over 20 metres tall. Directly across the Nile, his funerary temple at Kom el-Hetan was the largest royal temple ever built in Egypt, fronted by the twin statues known as the Colossi of Memnon, and once accompanied by hundreds more in the largest sculptural programme in history.

As more statues re-emerge in ongoing excavations at the site, so does the legacy of a king who was not only Egypt’s greatest pharaoh but, in my opinion, the greatest leader in world history.

Joann Fletcher is honorary visiting professor at the University of York. Her latest book is The Story of Egypt (Hodder & Stoughton, 2015)

 

Isabella of Castile

Queen of Castile 1474–1504

Great because… her influence reshaped the western world

Chosen by Sarah Gristwood

Isabella of Castile

When Isabella took the throne of Castile in 1474, she did so largely by her own efforts, in the teeth of a rival faction. Even her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon, who provided the military expertise for her endeavour, had been of her own making. Together they completed the Reconquest from the Moors of the Iberian peninsula, laid the foundations of the Spanish and, indeed, Habsburg empires, and reshaped the western world.

Isabella’s career illustrates the dark side of power as well as the light. She is remembered for the expulsion of the Jews from the reorganised Spain, and for the introduction of the Inquisition. Even her sponsorship of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 expedition to the New World had (contrary to Isabella’s own wishes) dreadful consequences for the indigenous peoples of that region.

But Isabella’s influence changed the pattern of the globe – something few women of past centuries could say. And the working partnership she achieved, with a husband to whom she’d never cede pre-eminence, provides a notable example even for today.

Sarah Gristwood is a historian and writer whose books include Game of Queens: The Women who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe (Oneworld, 2016)

 

Oda Nobunaga

Japanese feudal lord, 16th century

Great because… he succeeded in unifying Japan

Chosen by Christopher Harding

Japanese feudal lord Oda Nobunaga

Oda Nobunaga was born in 1534 into a country at war with itself. Once ruled by emperors and later by shoguns, Japan was by then split into fiefdoms whose samurai fought endless battles with one another. Inheriting a fief in central Japan, Oda spent 30 years trying to put the situation right. He was not an altruist, a pacifist or a diplomat. There was only one way of unifying Japan, he thought, and he made of it a motto: “Rule the realm by force.”

In battle after battle, Oda proved to be a first-class tactician. He defeated far larger forces than his own using surprise attacks. On land, he had his engineers widen roads and build pontoon bridges ahead of him to accommodate the rapid movement of enormous numbers of troops. On sea, he was the first in Japan – perhaps in the world – to send iron-clad ships against his enemies.

Oda changed forever the sound of battle in Japan, becoming the first leader to make systematic use of the firearms brought to the country by Portuguese traders in the 1540s. Whereas proud samurai fought from horseback, using swords and bows that took long years to master, Oda trained peasant foot soldiers to fire muskets in rotating ranks. Load, point, shoot, repeat: simple, yet so effective in bringing down a cavalry charge that samurai began seeking out pock-marked armour – when it came to stopping a bullet, they preferred battlefield proof to a forger’s promise.

In this way, Oda dispensed with secular and religious enemies, the latter taking the form of Buddhist sects boasting their own armies, rural guerrillas and towering fortresses. Oda used fire, starvation and mass execution against monks and laypeople alike – to impressive strategic and psychological effect, but also to satisfy a more personal lust. At one New Year banquet he threw, the centrepieces were the skullcaps of two enemy warlords lacquered in silver and gold for use as sake cups; these grisly vessels were passed around while a celebratory song was sung.

In 1568, Oda fought his way into Japan’s capital city, Kyoto. There he bent a powerless shogun to his will and used a penniless imperial family to provide fig-leaf legitimacy for a dictatorship that covered the heartlands of Japan’s main island of Honshū. As his grip tightened, Oda turned warlord after warlord effectively into his vassal, and began the process of restoring trade, agriculture and taxation in support of his newly united nation.

On his way west in 1582, preparing to claim yet more of Japan for himself, Oda was surrounded in a temple by allies-turned-traitors who attacked him. He died as many of his victims had: in pain and confusion, engulfed in flames. But his project lived on. A humble foot soldier called Toyotomi Hideyoshi had risen through the ranks to become a trusted general. He picked up where his boss left off, with an Oda ally, Tokugawa Ieyasu, completing the job in 1600 and bringing to Japan a peace that lasted well into the 19th century.

Japanese schoolchildren learn about these men, Oda foremost among them, as the ‘three unifiers’, using a little ditty to tell a great tale: Nobunaga pounded the rice.

Christopher Harding is senior lecturer in Asian history at the University of Edinburgh, author of Japan Story: In Search of a Nation, 1850 to the Present (Allen Lane, 2018) and presenter of the BBC Radio 3 series Dark Blossoms.

 

Boudica

Queen of the Iceni, first century AD

Great because… her rebellion inspired women leaders across the centuries

Chosen by Vanessa Collingridge

Boudica, Queen of the Iceni

Relatively few women make it into the history books, and even fewer do so for being a leader in their own right. Kudos, then, to Boudica – that terrifying, kick-ass, carrot-top queen who in AD 60 or 61 almost drove the Romans out of Britain. At least, that’s the version of history that the Romans would have us believe.

According to their written accounts, Boudica’s vast army of barbarians – the Iceni tribe of what’s now largely Norfolk – rose up against their foreign overlords, destroying the three most important towns of the new Roman province of Britannia: Camulodunum (Colchester, the Roman capital), Londinium (London, their trading centre) and Verulamium (St Albans), a key pro-Roman settlement. It was only in a final pitched battle that Boudica’s army was ultimately defeated by the strategic military brilliance of the Romans. Although the site of that battle has never been located, archaeologists have found supporting evidence for the Boudica story, including thick burnt layers in the soil of the three towns.

Boudica’s uprising profoundly shocked the Romans, who hated the idea of women rulers. Tales of the eventual downfall of such female leaders comprised an important cultural message, warning: “Don’t mess with the (male) establishment”! So Queen Boudica was either ignored or vilified in the west for the next 1,500 years. But when Elizabeth I needed to shore up her right to rule – and to go to war – she turned to Boudica as a role model, just as Queen Victoria and Margaret Thatcher did in the centuries to follow.

The image of this ‘Warrior Queen’ has been used to threaten, to inspire, and to shore up Britain’s identity as an imperial power. She is portrayed as protecting its citizens like a loving mother – a mother who would fight for liberty, bringer of both life and death. Her story has been continually recast over the past 2,000 years to suit changing political and social agendas but, whether viewed as a ‘treacherous lioness’ or ‘Braveheart in a bra’, Boudica remains one of our most beguiling historical figures.

Vanessa Collingridge is a writer and broadcaster, author of Boudica (Ebury, 2005)

 

Maharaja Ranjit Singh

Ruler of the Sikh empire 1801–39

Great because… he forged a modern empire of toleration

Chosen by Matthew Lockwood

Maharaja Ranjit Singh

For most of the 18th century, India was a fractured and war-torn place. As the once-dominant Mughal empire entered its period of terminal decline, it left behind a power vacuum. Punjab was not exempt from this problem. By the time Ranjit Singh was born in 1780, Afghan raids, chronic infighting among Punjab’s various misls (sovereign states) and the looming presence of British expansion left the region politically fragile, economically weak and religiously splintered. All this changed with the rise of Singh, the ‘Lion of Punjab’.

By the early decades of the 19th century, he had modernised the Sikh Khalsa army, embraced western innovations without abandoning local forms and institutions, unified the fractious misls, stabilised the frontier with Afghanistan, and reached a mutually beneficial detente with the British East India Company. Singh, however, was more than a mere conqueror. While the Indian subcontinent was riven with imperial competition, religious strife and wars of conquest, Singh was, almost uniquely, a unifier – a force for stability, prosperity and tolerance.

His reign marked a golden age for Punjab and north-west India. Though a devoted Sikh who embarked on a campaign to restore the great monuments of his religion – including the Harmandir Sahib or ‘Golden Temple’ at Amritsar – he also went to great lengths to ensure religious freedom within his lands. He patronised Hindu temples and Sufi shrines, attended Muslim and Hindu ceremonies, married Hindu and Muslim women, and even banned the slaughter of cows to protect the religious sensitivities of Hindus. Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Europeans were all employed in the modernised army and administration of his empire. Under his leadership, infrastructure was improved, commerce opened and expanded, and the arts flourished.

This golden age would not survive him. After his death in 1839, Ranjit Singh’s empire of toleration unravelled. The British invaded, the Sikh empire collapsed and instability returned to the region. Though certainly an imperialist, Ranjit Singh represented a different, more enlightened, more inclusive model of state-building, and a much-needed path towards unity and toleration. We could still benefit from his example.

Matthew Lockwood is assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama

 

William III

King of England, Scotland and Ireland 1689–1702

Great because… he freed Europe from French hegemony

Chosen by Philip Mansel

An 18th-century portrait of William III and his wife and consort, Mary II

The prince of Orange, a small principality in southern France, became Stadholder (governor) and commander-in-chief of the Nether-lands in 1672 at the age of just 21 in circumstances that would have daunted most other leaders. William (1650–1702) was descended from earlier Dutch leaders and, through his mother, Mary Henrietta (daughter of Charles I), from the kings of England, but faced a hostile ruling class and an Anglo-French invasion by land and sea. Rather than surrender, he resolved to “die in the last ditch”, a phrase that he invented.

Through a combination of acumen, persistence and courage, by 1689 he transformed himself into the political master of the Netherlands, king of England, Scotland and Ireland, and leader of a European alliance against his cousin and deadliest enemy, Louis XIV. He was braver than Louis XIV, too, often joining in cavalry charges on the battlefield.

In November 1688 he invaded England, backed by a force of 400 ships and 15,000 troops mustered from throughout Protestant Europe, and marched on London almost without a shot being fired in anger – a masterpiece of political and strategic planning, unequalled until D-Day.

His ruthlessness towards political enemies was felt in Holland and Ireland. Nevertheless, though often exasperated by English insularity and unpopular with part of the English ruling class, he successfully harnessed English wealth and power to the common cause of the freedom of Europe from French hegemony.

Everything he touched turned to gold. He helped found the Bank of England in 1694. He permanently enlarged the British army. He established Protestant supremacy in Ireland – which he thought in that island’s best interests – and the Protestant succession in all three kingdoms. And it was he who, by the Act of Settlement (1701), ensured that George I would succeed to the throne in 1714.

If William III and his popular consort and cousin Mary II, elder daughter of James II and VII (whom they had deposed), had had children then England would have had a stronger, more popular and more confident monarchy, with a taste for splendour suggested by the palace Wren built for them after 1689 at Hampton Court.

William III was also personally tolerant: he dined in Richmond in 1699 with the Jewish entrepreneur Solomon de Medina, whom he knighted at Hampton Court in 1700, some 130 years before the creation of the next Jewish knight in England. A world figure, above many of the national and religious prejudices of his time, William III showed that a European could be a more successful ruler of England than local politicians.

Philip Mansel is a historian and writer. His latest book is King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV (Allen Lane, 2019)

 

Wu Zetian

Emperor of China 690–705

Great because… she was the most powerful woman in Chinese history

Chosen by Rana Mitter

A portrait of Wu Zetian, who ruled China as emperor from 690 to 705

What does greatness mean? Sometimes it is something inherent within a person. Sometimes it’s the nature of their achievements. For example, regardless of their own records, Barack Obama and Margaret Thatcher are transformative figures in national and global terms because they represented important ‘firsts’.

So, whatever what you may think of her personal record – and I’ll say more about a record that was both benevolent and bloody – Wu Zetian (also known as Wu Zhao) recorded one incontestable achievement: in the history of China, a country containing a huge proportion of humankind, she is the single most powerful woman ever to have held office. In the thousands of years of recorded Chinese history, from the far-off Shang dynasty (c1600–1046 BC) to the current People’s Republic, no other woman has wielded the same level of direct control over so many people.

Wu Zetian, born in AD 624, is the only woman ever to have sat as emperor of China in her own right. She ruled during one of the most glorious periods in Chinese history – the Tang dynasty. To get there, she had to overcome not only the abiding prejudice in traditional Confucian thinking, that a woman could never be a ruler, but also had to remove the numerous rivals who stood in her way.

Wu Zetian was recruited to the Chinese imperial court in a role not much more senior than a high-class domestic serving woman, but she took advantage of her position to get close to her emperor, Taizong, by changing his bedsheets. When he died in 649, her chance of preferment seemed to have ended, and she was sent to a Buddhist nunnery, but she made her escape, returning to court as a concubine of the new emperor, Gaozong. She had much bigger ideas on her mind, however – a quest to reach the very highest levels of power.

Her methods of reaching that position could have inspired Shakespeare, if he had ever heard of her. While the emperor’s concubine, she killed her own (and the emperor’s) newborn child, and framed the empress for the murder. That rival was lucky only to be exiled, leaving the way clear for Wu Zetian to take her place at court. Still she felt, perhaps with justification, that living enemies would always be a threat, so she ordered the limbs of her rivals to be cut off, before those rivals were placed in a vat of wine and left to drown.

In some respects, the level of intrigue and violence at court during her tenure was not so unusual. What was astounding was her next step. In 690, after the emperor and then his sons had died, Wu Zetian declared herself the new emperor, at the age of 65. “The heart of a serpent and the nature of a wolf,” was the verdict of one contemporary critic on her unprecedented action.

Let’s ignore, if we can, the pools of blood and screams of dissected concubines, and turn instead to the female emperor’s political record. The territories she ruled stretched from central Asia in the west to the borders of the Himalayas in the south and the breadbasket provinces of central and eastern China.

Some historians have argued that her rule helped to strengthen the Tang Dynasty when it was under threat from ethnic groups from the north and west. Their general verdict is that during her reign the empire was well-run and its people well fed and relatively content. Wu Zetian may not have been the most magnificent ruler to have sat on the Dragon Throne, but she was in the top tier when it came to competence, and certainly the equal of many of her male peers.

So why did her name become a byword for vice and degradation? Essentially, because she was a woman. Ruling queens, such as Mary and Elizabeth of England, were rare but not illegitimate in Europe. In contrast, traditional Confucian thinking argued that having a woman in power in China was deeply unnatural.

Of course, Wu Zetian was clearly a dangerous person to know, particularly if you were standing in the way of her route to power. But countless male emperors who had been equally ruthless weren’t treated as anomalies or monsters. Wu Zetian was criticised for promoting Buddhism, an import from India, above the indigenous Chinese systems of thought and faith. Yet Buddhism also gave more space to women than Confucian thinking – so her interest in it may have been perfectly natural in the circumstances.

After Wu Zetian died in 705, the court hierarchy refused to carve any record of her achievements on her tomb – a final rejection of the anomalous emperor. Yet she has become a figure of fascination to later generations in China, even inspiring a multi-part soap opera in recent years. For even though China has progressed hugely over the past 1,300 years, no other woman in the country’s history has ever had such direct influence over so many of her compatriots, nor used it so effectively.

Rana Mitter is professor of the history and politics of modern China at the University of Oxford

 

Oliver Cromwell

Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland 1653–58

Great because… he was a parliamentary champion whose ideas defined Britain

Chosen by Dominic Sandbrook

Joseph Wilton's 1762 bust of Oliver Cromwell

Nobody in British history has a personal story to match that of Oliver Cromwell. Born in Huntingdon in 1599, he spent much of his first four decades as an obscure farmer (with a brief stint as MP for Huntingdon in 1628–29). Yet at the age of 50 he was the most powerful man in the country, and in 1653 became Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland – the first and only non-royal head of state in British history.

A man of burning religious passion, Cromwell believed that God had chosen him to guide his country through the horrors of the Civil War. As the Irish discovered, he could be a robust antagonist. But he was remarkably tolerant by the standards of the age, and his deep personal self-doubt meant he never became a dictator. For 300 years after his death in 1658, the things Oliver Cromwell stood for – the rule of parliament, the importance of commerce, the rise of sea power, freedom of religious belief and, above all, the extraordinary moral, cultural and economic energy of the Protestant middle classes – defined Britain itself.

Dominic Sandbrook’s latest book is Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979–1982 (Allen Lane, 2019)

 

Joan of Arc

French military leader, 15th century

Great because… she led an army to triumph by sheer force of will and belief

Chosen by Laura Ashe

Joan of Arc, from a miniature of c1485

On 29 April 1429, dressed as a soldier in full armour at the head of an army, ‘La Pucelle’ (‘The Maiden’) reached Orléans, coming to save the French city besieged by the English. Within a week, the invaders from across the channel had been defeated and forced into retreat – the major turning point of the Hundred Years' War. Joan (1412–31) had declared to the English that she was “sent here by God, the king of heaven, to drive you all out of France” and, though she did not live to see it, she was the inspiration who turned the tide.

Joan, a woman from a peasant family, could not lead an army by any normal means. But her sheer force of will and belief transfixed her followers: they praised her as a gift from God, pure as the Virgin Mary and powerful before their enemies as Christ. She proved herself as a battle leader and campaign strategist, promising “a war cry that will be remembered forever”, repeatedly defeating the English and leading her prince to his coronation as Charles VII. Captured in May 1430, she was tried and, a year later, executed for crimes against the faith in an attempt to break her powerful spell – but her work was done.

Laura Ashe is professor of English literature at Worcester College, University of Oxford

 

Elizabeth I

Queen of England and Ireland 1558–1603

Great because… she reestablished peace and built national power after tumult

Chosen by Tracy Borman

Queen Elizabeth I holds an olive branch

Upon Elizabeth’s accession, firebrand Reformation leader and minister John Knox declared that: “It is more than a monster in nature that a Woman shall reign and have empire above a Man.” But the new queen, born to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in 1533, confounded all expectations. Rather than fight against the misogyny of her male advisers, she pretended to share their regret that she had been born “a weak and feeble woman” – but used her feminine wiles to devastating effect.

A master of pragmatism, she settled the vexed question of religion and established much-needed peace and stability after one of the most turbulent half-centuries in England’s history. During her long reign, England emerged as a world power, defeating the Spanish Armada and laying the foundations of an empire.

An exceptionally intelligent and cultured woman, Elizabeth ushered in a golden age of the arts, patronising the likes of Shakespeare and Spenser. More than any monarch before or since, Elizabeth appreciated the power of PR and crafted her public image so effectively that she was lionised as the ‘Virgin Queen’ both during her lifetime and for centuries after her death.

Tracy Borman is a historian, writer and joint chief curator for Historic Royal Palaces. Her latest book is The Devil’s Slave (Hodder and Stoughton, 2019)

 

Mansa Musa

Emperor of Mali c1312–c1337

Great because… he used his wealth to enlighten his people

Chosen by Gus Casely-Hayford

Mansa Musa, emperor of Mali, c1312–c1337.

Mansa (emperor) Musa I (c1280– 1337), who ruled the Mali empire for 25 years from about 1312, has a claim to being the richest person who has ever lived. He inherited a throne that was incredibly stable and an empire that was hugely, unprecedentedly wealthy. But, rather than dedicating his life to putting his feet up, he decided to try to enlighten himself and his people.

He set about creating a great body of written material and assembling some of the greatest thinkers. For the site of this new centre of knowledge he chose Timbuktu, a city right on the far eastern fringe of his empire.

Taking his retinue and followers on pilgrimage, when he arrived in Mecca he was met by great intellectuals from the university in Salamanca and from places as far afield as Venice and south Asia. Some of these people, including the great architect Al-Sahili, agreed to travel back to Timbuktu with Musa. As a result, the city became a great centre of learning, and transformed the way in which people understood Mali. It grew into a place driven not by money but by the exchange of knowledge, with dozens and dozens of archives and a mosque at its heart.

What’s incredible about this story is that Musa ruled with absolute power – yet, by focusing on learning and on writing things down, he divested some of that power. Whereas, in the oral societies of the past, rulers could craft histories in ways that purely suited them, the fact that there were now documents meant that people could both build a historical narrative with a level of objectivity and contest that narrative. It became possible to create a legal system featuring such things as mechanics of ownership – and, as a result, separation from power. This was the beginning of a kind of democratisation of learning that was, I think, the most generous thing he did during a reign that also distinguished him as inordinately clever and thoughtful.

Musa did make mistakes. Early in his reign, he tried to force Mali’s gold miners to adopt Islam rather than any other religion. They essentially rebelled by reducing production, which taught him a valuable lesson about moderating his thinking on certain issues to allow for a kind of liberal state that included a variety of possibilities. That really marks out his reign and his kingdom: it was a state in which there was acceptance and tolerance. After all, learning from mistakes is the mark of a great leader. He recognised that he had to change paths, and that he was not omnipotent. His rule was not just about the personality of the ruler.

Today, we know little about African history. But it’s a region with a hugely complex, rich, deep historical narrative, and Mansa Musa – who was deeply invested in trying to save and preserve that narrative – is indicative of that. Those histories are still very present in Timbuktu today. When the militant Islamist group Ansar Dine attacked Timbuktu recently, ordinary Malians put themselves in the line of fire to try to protect the amazing medieval archives. These histories remain critically important to understanding not just the region but also the identity of many Malians today. One of Musa’s great legacies is that he enshrined a set of values that continue to infuse the cultures of west Africa into the 21st century.

Gus Casely-Hayford is director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC. For more details of the museum’s current exhibition Heroes: Principles of African Greatness

 

Winston Churchill

UK prime minister 1940–45 & 1951–55

Great because… he refused to accept capitulation to Hitler

Chosen by Andrew Roberts

Winston Churchill on the deck of HMS Prince of Wales

On Saturday 25 May 1940, as the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was being flung back towards Dunkirk before being expelled from the continent by the Wehrmacht, the British foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, suggested to the five-man War Cabinet in London that peace negotiations be initiated with Adolf Hitler via the (then neutral) Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

Over the next three days, while the BEF started to be evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk, the Cabinet discussed the pros and cons of ending a war Britain seemed to have comprehensively lost. The subject was brought up at no fewer than eight successive meetings, several times dominating the agenda. An initial meeting was even held between Halifax and Giuseppe Bastianini, the Italian ambassador in London.

It seemed only logical: the French were being knocked out of the war (they capitulated in mid-June); the Russians had been effectively allied to Hitler since the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939; the Poles had been annihilated by the twin German and Russian attacks of September 1939; and isolationist sentiment in America meant that the United States was not about to enter the war anytime soon. Halifax’s stance seemed the rational one.

Furthermore, it was probable that, in his desire to avoid a war on two fronts, Hitler would have offered Britain a generous peace deal, allowing her to retain her sovereignty, Royal Navy and empire. His main ambition was to attack the Russians, and he would most probably have been highly amenable to an arrangement in the west that meant that he did not need to station troops there. The leaflets advocating peace that the Luftwaffe were to drop across southern England and south Wales in August 1940 were testament to his eagerness on that score.

A large number of Britons, especially in the Communist Party, the British Union of Fascists and the pacifist movement, were vocally in favour of peace. However, Winston Churchill (1874–1965), by then prime minister for only 15 days, was utterly opposed. In eight cabinet meetings, he made argument after argument against the proposed deal – some of which were pretty flimsy, considering how dire the situation was for the BEF, which started to embark from Dunkirk on 26 May, with evacuation not completed until 4 June 1940. He even suggested at one point that he was not ideologically opposed to the idea of peace negotiations, and might consider giving up Gibraltar or Malta in order to extricate Britain from the coming calamity.

In fact, this was merely a negotiating tactic to outmanoeuvre Halifax politically in cabinet: pretending that Churchill’s mind was not closed to the possibility of listening to an offer, were one presented. The truth was that he had spent his ‘wilderness years’ of the 1930s watching Hitler and correctly predicting his moves in a way that Halifax and their colleague in the War Cabinet, the ex-premier Neville Chamberlain, never could or did. He knew that Hitler could not be trusted, and that anyhow if Britain negotiated peace it would be disastrous for domestic morale and her reputation in the world, especially in the United States.

It would also have allowed Hitler to invade the USSR with his entire military might and at a time of his own choosing. He would not have needed to waste six precious weeks knocking Yugoslavia and Greece out of the war in April and May 1941, but would have been able to launch Operation Barbarossa against Russia much earlier in the year. Bearing in mind that German forces reached the underground stations on the Moscow subway by early October 1941, before the front solidified for the winter, that extra time could have proved fatal for the Soviet Union.

Even more importantly, if Britain had made peace with the Nazis in May or June 1940, Hitler would have been able to concentrate his entire army and air force on Russia; as it was, some 25% of it was needed to stand guard in western Europe, to fight the British in north Africa, and to protect German cities from RAF bombing. Considering that, with three-quarters of his forces in the east, Hitler managed to subject Leningrad (now St Petersburg) to a gruelling 872-day siege, nearly captured Moscow and almost seized central Stalingrad, it is impossible to know what he might have achieved had he been able to move his entire force on Russia. As it was, on 18 October 1941 Josef Stalin’s personal train was ready in Moscow to evacuate him behind the Urals in case he needed to flee a successful German assault.

It was Churchill’s decision and sharp political manoeuvring in the War Cabinet that kept Britain in the war, meaning that the nation could eventually be used as the unsinkable aircraft carrier for the Allied invasion of the western part of Nazi-dominated Europe in 1944. Through his inspiring leadership and indomitable moral and physical courage, Winston Churchill saved the world from the most evil regime in history – surely the mark of the greatest leader.

Andrew Roberts is a historian and writer. His latest book is Leadership in War: Lessons from Those Who Made History (Allen Lane, 2019)

 

Innocent III

Pope 1198–1216

Great because… he redrew the map of Europe

Chosen by Sophie Thérèse Ambler

Pope Innocent III

The medieval popes wielded vast spiritual and political power, and Innocent III was arguably the most influential of them all.

Born Lotario di Segni near Rome, he was elected pope at the age of just 37 or 38. He reformed church law and spiritual life, tightening the laws on marriage, prescribing annual confession and helping launch the Franciscan order. He banned the involvement of churchmen in trial by ordeal, on the basis that it was superstitious and unjust (because it was not the duty of the accused to prove their innocence) – a decision with huge ramifications for the development of European legal systems.

He redrew the political map of Europe, making England and Aragon vassal states of the papacy and launching an expedition against heresy in southern France that would ultimately bring the region under the French kings.

Having lost control of the Fourth Crusade (during which participants sacked the Byzantine city of Constantinople), he revolutionised the planning and recruitment of crusade expeditions, and helped to reverse the advance of the Islamic conquests by uniting the kings of Spain against the Almohad Caliphate. The resulting vast army won a decisive victory at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 – a key date in Spanish history.

Sophie Thérèse Ambler is lecturer in later medieval history and deputy director of the Centre for War and Diplomacy at Lancaster Universit

 

Amílcar Cabral

20th-century African independence fighter

Great because… his struggle for independence in Africa also transformed Portugal

Chosen by Hakim Adi

African independence fighter Amilcar Cabral

Greatness is an attribute best judged by circumstances. In every era, humans have had many apparently insuperable problems to overcome. Those who are great are those who can find solutions to these problems, or who can inspire others to solve them.

In the 20th century, most of Africa was faced with the task of liberating itself from foreign colonial rule. In many countries, a form of independence was achieved by the early 1960s. However, the dictatorial government of Portugal refused to acknowledge the rights of Africans to govern themselves in its colonies, which included Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde and Portuguese Guinea (which became Guinea-Bissau after independence).

The struggle for independence in Guinea was led by the great Amílcar Cabral (1924–73), who also played a leading role in the liberation of Portugal’s other colonies in Africa. He was one of the founders of the Movimento Popular Libertação de Angola (MPLA), and founder and leader of the Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Capo-Verde. The armed liberation struggles that he led eventually resulted in revolution in Portugal and the start of a new democratic era in that country, too.

Cabral found ways to unite the nearly one million people of Guinea, women included, even though most were illiterate peasant farmers and they spoke different languages. With limited outside support, the people of Guinea fought to liberate their country and started to build a new society in which they themselves were the decision-makers. They did this even when parts of their country were still occupied by Portugal, which had the military support of Britain, the US and other Nato members.

Under Cabral’s leadership, the people of Guinea achieved great advances – progress that induced the government of Portugal to plot to assassinate him. His murder was carried out in 1973, just before Guinea achieved independence from Portuguese colonial rule.

Many Africans continue to be inspired by Cabral’s great leadership. His life and work show that, whatever the obstacles, the people are capable of being their own liberators.

Hakim Adi is professor of the history of Africa and the African diaspora at the University of Chichester

 

Catherine the Great

Empress of Russia 1762–96

Great because… she drove Russia into the modern era

Chosen by Margaret MacMillan

A portrait of Catherine the Great

Let me start in a disobliging way by saying that there is no greatest figure in history. The past is not an Olympic race: it doesn’t have rules to decide winners or losers. And what is ‘greatness’? Making the biggest impact on politics or science or values? Perpetrating the worst crimes? I can guarantee that whatever name each of us comes up with will be met with cheers, boos or caveats.

Yet it is quite a fun game to play, and gets us thinking about who has made a difference. So what do you say to Catherine the Great as one of the most important figures in history? She was among those few women who managed to achieve real political power when men dominated society. Elizabeth I, Wu Zetian, Maria Theresa of Austria – we remember them partly because of their rarity. And the legends – man-made – accumulated around them, to suggest that they were somehow not proper women. Elizabeth, the ‘Virgin Queen’, was rumoured to be frigid, while Wu Zetian and Catherine were said to possess abnormal and extravagant sexual appetites. Only Maria Theresa, with her exemplary private life and 16 children, managed to escape such comments.

Catherine’s story is extraordinary. Born in 1729 into a small, unimportant German court, she was married off to the heir to the Russian throne at the age of 16. She found herself yoked to an excessively stupid and drunken husband, as well as having to navigate the murky and often brutal politics of the Russian court. Where others would have floundered, Catherine triumphed. She won the approval of Empress Elizabeth, and became deeply, demonstratively Russian. She converted to Orthodoxy, took a series of noble-born Russian lovers and became a firm enemy of the powerful Prussia and its ruler, Frederick the Great.

Unlike her unfortunate husband, Catherine was highly intelligent and formidably energetic. She possessed great charm, winning over many of the Russian elites, including important sections of the military. When Elizabeth died in 1762, the new tsar, Peter, talked openly about replacing Catherine as his consort with one of his mistresses. Catherine encouraged a military coup against him, and was made ruler of Russia. She may have had a hand in the death of Peter soon afterwards, but I suspect she did not suffer a moment’s guilt.

Catherine had great ambitions for Russia, aiming to drag it, as she wrote, “out of its medieval stupor and into the modern world”. Modernisation in those days meant using Europe as a model. She read and admired the works of leading figures of the Enlightenment, with their challenges to tradition. Voltaire praised her as an enlightened despot, calling her the “Star of the North”. Although he – wisely, perhaps – refused Catherine’s invitations to visit St Petersburg, the two conducted a lively correspondence for over a decade.

Catherine reformed the creaky Russian bureaucracy, attempted to rationalise the administration of her huge territories, and created new codes of law. Seeing the landed gentry as key to Russia’s modernisation, she set new standards for their behaviour and obligations to the state, and established state schools to educate their children. She brought the powerful Orthodox church firmly under state control, and gained much-needed funds by expropriating its land and serfs. She encouraged manufacturing and trade, and imported western experts to introduce new ideas and technologies. She herself set an example by having the new inoculation against smallpox, which had been pioneered in Britain, administered to herself, her son and her court.

Her critics say she could have done much more for Russia – that, while St Petersburg became a cultural and intellectual centre, most of Russian society remained untouched by her reforms. She toyed with the idea of abolishing serfdom, which tied millions of Russian peasants to the land, and even drafted a policy. In the end, she not only shrank from carrying it out but extended serfdom to peasants who had previously been free. She may have talked the Enlightenment talk but she also dealt rapidly and ruthlessly with opposition.

Her defenders argue that she did as much as she could have done in the Russia of her day. Her attempts at reform not only roused conservative opposition but risked creating disorder. After she crushed the Pugachev rebellion, which had set vast parts of south-eastern European Russia aflame, she increasingly relied on the nobles for support.

While Catherine struggled, with limited success, to make significant reforms within Russia, she made it respected and feared abroad, transforming it into a formidable military power. In wars against Ottoman Turkey, she extended Russia’s borders south to take in huge stretches of territory including Crimea and southern Ukraine. Before she died in 1796, she colluded with her old enemy, Prussia, and rival, Austria, to divide up Poland. During her reign she added more than 200,000 square miles to Russia. For better or worse, Russia and its neighbours are still dealing with her legacy.

The sharp-eyed French painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, who encountered the elderly empress, wrote that Catherine possessed “such an air of majesty that to me she might have been Queen of the World”. For all that she was flawed and inconsistent, Catherine deserves to be remembered.

Margaret MacMillan is a professor of history at the University of Toronto

 

Alfred the Great

King of Wessex 871–99

Great because… he unified and organised a kingdom of the English

Chosen by Kathleen Burk

A bronze statue of Alfred the Great

King Alfred – he was not widely referred to as ‘the Great’ until the 16th century – was remarkable for taking the kingdom of Wessex in southern England from a nation of warring ealdormen, the leaders of the shires, to a unified kingdom of the English. With its dependent kingdoms, it incorporated all of southern England including the old Wessex, Kent, the West Country and the western Midlands. Unifying territories into a political whole is not unusual; it was the reorganisation of defence, the law and, especially, education carried out by Alfred that makes him a memorable example of a true leader.

Beginning in the later eighth century, the British Isles were for several centuries subject to raids and invasions by Vikings. Wessex, with its extensive coastline, was frequently the object of raiding parties. Alfred (born c848/9) became king of Wessex in 871 and, after initial defeats, at the battle of Edington in 878 he defeated the most powerful Danish leader and established the boundaries of Wessex.

The most important duty of a leader is the defence of the realm, and Alfred used the relatively quiet years after Edington for military reorganisation. His forces had been based on local levies or fyrds, militia led by the ealdormen; these took time to organise and march to the place of attack, by which time the raiders had often slaughtered, plundered and departed. Alfred created a national, centrally directed force supported by taxation; he also established a network of fortified burghs across his territories, set 30 miles apart and garrisoned for rapid response. Towns grew up within and around the burghs, which encouraged trade and the growth of an urban culture and a middle class. He also reminted a dependable coinage.

Alfred believed a that a kingdom required a law code. He produced one that incorporated his own laws, which included those he approved of from Mercia, Kent and the Church, and appended the law code of his predecessor, King Ine (died c726). These laws were a hodgepodge, but they included a most important one: that “each man keep carefully his oath and pledge”. Since pledges were given within and to every class in society, the implementation of this law would help to ensure its smooth running.

The most revolutionary change was Alfred’s insistence on general literacy in the everyday language, English. Beginning with a school in his court, he decreed that free-born young men were to learn to read, write and speak English. He wanted practical men around the land who could read and carry out his instructions; by this means he would further unify the nation and save it from its enemies. The precedent, if not its range, was set.

To emphasise the responsibilities of both religious and secular men, in his thirties Alfred learned Latin, and translated and ordered to be translated into English great works such as Boethius, and Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care. He also commissioned the English-language Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

When Alfred died in 899 he was ‘king of the English’, leaving a unified and uniquely organised state and society on which his successors could build. In sum, he was one of few monarchs in world history who have been deemed ‘Great’.

Kathleen Burk is emeritus professor of modern and contemporary history at University College London

 

St Anthony the Great

Ancient Christian hermit

Great because… he sparked the monastic revolution

Chosen by Catherine Nixey

St Anthony the Great

Around 1,700 years ago, a young man left his house in Egypt, walked into a pigsty – and stayed there. It was an act that should have been odd but unremarkable. Yet it was revolutionary. This man’s life would go on to inspire St Augustine, help spark the monastic movement and, thus, change the face of Europe – and the world – for ever. Indeed, this magazine, and the history it celebrates, owes a debt to this man. But his name has been largely forgotten in the modern world.

In a way, that is just how St Anthony (c251–356), as he is now known, would have liked it. One day around AD 270, Anthony was in a church near his home when words from the Gospel of Matthew reached his ears: “If you want to be perfect, go – sell your possessions and give to the poor.” He took them seriously: he gave away his house, sold his possessions and walked into that pigsty (as some writers describe it). The monastic revolution – one that shunned possessions and the city in favour of God, poverty, isolation and religious learning – had gained one of its greatest figures.

After the pigsty, Anthony moved to a cave in the desert then, finally, a remote mountain, suffering ever greater hardship. He ate dry bread, wore rags and faced down demons. Yet, paradoxically, the more Anthony shunned mankind and its baubles, the more mankind admired and followed him until finally, according to Anthony’s biographer Athanasius of Alexandria, “the desert was made a city” populated by young men following Anthony’s example.

It wasn’t merely the desert that was changed. In embracing this odd, austere, isolated life, Anthony helped drive forward the monastic movement. And it was these monasteries and libraries that, in the period once called the Dark Ages, preserved and produced many of the histories that we still read today. Anthony, the leader who never wanted to lead, changed the world for ever.

Catherine Nixey is the author of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (Macmillan, 2017)

 

Blanche of Castile

Queen of France, regent 1226–34 & 1248–52

Great because… she turned the French court into the cultural centre of Europe

Chosen by Lindy Grant

Blanche of Castile

Blanche of Castile, born in 1188 in Palencia (now in north-central Spain), was probably the most successful female ruler of the Middle Ages. Leadership was in her genes: she was the granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II of England, and niece of Richard the Lionheart. When her husband, Louis VIII, died in 1226, leaving a young son to succeed, he appointed Blanche as sole regent; she ruled France until 1234. Then, when her son, Louis IX, went on crusade in 1248, he appointed his mother as sole regent.

At that time, kingdoms were usually ruled by regency councils – the sole rule by a queen was unprecedented. But both kings knew that she would be a formidable ruler. There was the inevitable baronial revolt, but Blanche faced down or charmed her baronial foes. One of the barons wrote that: “She knew how to govern a kingdom, while the barons couldn’t run a village.” She wrote music and poetry, and her sophisticated patronage of music, architecture and manuscript painting played a key role in turning the French court into the cultural centre of Europe. And she was the mother of the greatest of medieval European kings, Louis IX – Saint Louis.

Lindy Grant is emeritus professor of medieval history at the University of Reading

 

Akbar

Mughal emperor 1556–1605

Great because… he founded a mighty Indian empire infused with tolerance

Chosen by Diana Preston

Mughal Emperor Akbar rides an elephant in a 17th-century miniature

When 16th-century Europeans spoke of ‘The Great Mughal’, they meant Emperor Akbar. Travellers to India brought back fantastical accounts of his vast armies led by trumpeting war elephants, and his treasuries piled with gleaming gems. And Akbar truly was a great leader. During a 50-year reign, this almost exact contemporary of the English queen Elizabeth I transformed a foreign occupation into a strong, cohesive empire of 100 million ethnically and religiously diverse people.

The blood of two great Asian warriors, Genghis Khan and Timur (Tamerlane), ran in Akbar’s veins. Born in 1542, he was the grandson of Babur, founder of the empire, who in 1525 invaded northern India from Afghanistan. When Akbar was only 13, his father Humayun, the second Mughal emperor, died after falling downstairs while hurrying to evening prayers, leaving both Akbar and the fledging empire under threat.

The Mughals followed the takht ya takhta (‘throne or coffin’) code of their central Asian ancestors. By this principle, princes did not inherit by primogeniture but had to fight for the throne. To forestall rivals, loyal courtiers hastily crowned Akbar as third Mughal emperor on a makeshift throne in a Punjab field. For six years, while his mother governed alongside a regent, Akbar lived ‘behind the veil’ in the harem, emerging to take power only at the age of 19 after he thwarted an assassin who entered the harem to kill him.

Determined to extend his empire, Akbar launched wars of conquest against neighbouring rulers. Those he crushed included the saffron-robed Rajputs who, like the Spartans, believed the only alternative to triumphing on the battlefield was to perish there. By the end of his reign, through a combination of daring, imagination – he was a master of the surprise attack – and, on occasion, supreme ruthlessness, Akbar had nearly trebled his territories. His empire stretched north to the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush, west to the desert borders of Persia (Iran), east to the Arakan (now Rakhine state, in Myanmar/Burma) and south to the golden tablelands of the Deccan plateau.

Yet Akbar’s genius extended to matters off the battlefield. He consolidated his conquests and conciliated his subjects. In particular, he reconciled the majority of the inhabitants of an overwhelmingly Hindu empire to Muslim rule, through shrewd political alliances and judicious dynastic marriages, particularly with the martial Hindu Rajputs. When he died, he had more than 300 titular wives. He defied his mullahs to abolish taxes and laws that discriminated against Hindus. He opened his court to people of talent, whatever their background, attracting scholars and holy men from across his empire and beyond – Jains, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, Confucians and Sikhs as well as Hindus.

What he learned of other faiths inspired him to inaugurate a new religion, the Din-i Ilahi (Divine Faith) – a distillation of what he perceived as the best of other religions – which he hoped would unite his people without compelling them to forego their original beliefs. Although his religion did not last, it is a remarkable symbol of tolerance at a time when religious wars were dividing Europe.

Like Shakespeare, Akbar died on what’s sometimes said to have been his own birthday, 15 October 1605. Some three decades later, his grandson Shah Jahan built that most potent emblem of the Mughals, the Taj Mahal. Yet none of Akbar’s successors would match the statesmanship, tolerance and vision for which many people in the subcontinent still remember and respect him today.

Diana Preston is a historian and writer. Her latest book is Eight Days at Yalta: How Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin Shaped the Post-War World (Picador, 2019)

 

Abraham Lincoln

US president 1861–65

Great because… he championed working people and the emancipation of slaves

Chosen by Adam IP Smith

Abraham Lincoln

As a teenager in County Durham in the late 1980s, during the last gloaming of the coal industry, I first encountered Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) in an unexpected place. Browsing in a second-hand bookshop, I found him in the autobiography of John Wilson, the founder of the Durham Miners’ Association. Wilson recounted how, blacklisted for union organising in north-east England in the 1860s, he had been forced to emigrate to western Pennsylvania, where he found himself in the midst of a bloody civil war. Though some of his fellow miners openly cheered when Lincoln was assassinated, Wilson became so enamoured with the Union cause and its martyred leader that, when he wrote his memoirs half a century later, there was to him no greater leader in any time or place than Abraham Lincoln.

It was surprising to me then to discover the strong affinity of a Durham miner for an American president, but today it makes sense. Lincoln had risen from manual labour to the highest office in the land, then used his power to hold together a republic “conceived in liberty”, as he put it, “and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”. These were grandiose words, but they were deeply meaningful to a foreign observer such as Wilson, who saw the American Civil War as a superficially local conflict with global ramifi-cations, in which the forces of freedom were locked in combat with the forces of reaction – much as later labour leaders saw the Spanish Civil War.

Wilson was right to see Lincoln as a champion of the dignity of work and working people. His sincere hatred of slavery was rooted in the injustice of men “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces”. Lincoln does not deserve all the credit he has sometimes received for being the ‘great emancipator’, yet no white person in a position of power did more than he to ensure that, when the Civil War ended, slavery ended also.

Lincoln’s humility was genuine and his sense of purpose profound. He did not take the easiest course, but acted according to his conception of what was right. He was a man of common origins and uncommon qualities, whose leadership helped transform the lives of millions in his lifetime and, through example, of millions more since.

Adam IP Smith is Edward Orsborn Professor of United States Politics & Political History at the University of Oxford. His books include Abraham Lincoln (History Press, 2014)

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This article was first published in issue 20 of BBC World Histories Magazine

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