HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-10-21T12:17:16.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/topic/military-history/feed/atom HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Bollocks, bastards and broad arses: the filthy medieval names that expose the real story of 1066]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/1066-bayeux-tapestry-names-of-norman-conquest/ 2026-10-21T12:17:16.000Z 2026-10-21T12:17:16.000Z The Bayeux Tapestry (at the time of writing wowing visitors to the British Museum) is thronged with characters – warriors, of course, but also monarchs, dukes and bishops, plus countless unnamed figures. This famous embroidery helps us think about the people caught up in the events depicted – and examining their names opens a window onto a world in which English, Scandinavian and Norman cultures met, melded and clashed, how conquest and colonisation influenced lives, and how colourful nicknames can preserve glimpses of the way medieval people saw one another at all levels of society.
Ælfgif... who?
The Bayeux Tapestry features only 15 names – and, typically for this period of history, those of women are largely excluded. Curiously, the only woman actually named in the embroidery can’t be identified – a mysterious figure labelled ÆLFGYVA, or Ælfgifu. She is pictured in an interaction with “a certain cleric”, an encounter that may have been innocent – though the depiction of a naked man in the border below her suggests that it may not have been, and could be a reference to a scandalous liaison of some kind.
The fact that we don’t know who this Ælfgifu was can be explained partly by the fact that hers was such a common name in 11th-century England. There had already been three queens named Ælfgifu by the turn of that century, the consorts of Edmund I (ruled 939–46), Eadwig ‘All-Fair’ (r955–59) and Æthelred the Unready (r978–1013 & 1014–16). When Æthelred married the illustrious Emma of Normandy, the great-aunt of William the Conqueror, she was given a new English name. You’ve guessed it: Ælfgifu.
After Æthelred’s death, Emma (or Ælfgifu) effortlessly switched sides, marrying England’s new Danish king Cnut in 1017. In doing so, she replaced Cnut’s previous wife, another Ælfgifu. To add to the general sense of confusion, the Anglo-Saxon Earl Harold Godwinson had a sister called Ælfgifu. Any of these women could be the ÆLFGYVA named in the Bayeux Tapestry – the chances are that we’ll never know for certain – but the use of her name suggests that the story surrounding her was common knowledge at the time, even if it’s no longer familiar to us today.
The mystery of Edith Swanneck
Another question mark lingers over Harold’s ‘unofficial’ wife, Edith Swanneshals (‘Swanneck’) who, we are told, identified the dead English king’s body on the battlefield at Hastings. However, her identity is still disputed. She is often assumed to be the woman recorded in Domesday Book as Edeva Pulchra (‘The Fair’), partly based on the assumption that this epithet, like ‘swan-neck’, referred to beauty, as well as the fact that the woman in William’s survey was listed as being incredibly rich. But this identification is by no means certain.
Again, the confusion is partly down to the prevalence and ambiguity of monikers. By the 11th century, a number of distinct names had come to sound similar: Eadgyth (Edith), Eadgifu (Edeva), Ealdgyth (Aldith) and Ealdgifu (Aldeva). Even then, some of these might well have caused confusion, particularly amongst Norman scribes recording unfamiliar English names. And later writers have tended to merge all of these into one modern name, ‘Edith’.
This similarity still causes problems today. In the 2025 BBC drama King and Conqueror, three Ediths were renamed to avoid confusing viewers. Edith Swanneck kept her forename but Harold’s sister, Edith of Wessex, was renamed Gunhild, and his official wife, Edith of Mercia, became Margaret. The irony is that not all three of these shared that name in the first place: Edith Swanneck was probably Eadgifu (Edeva), while Edith of Mercia was called Ealdgyth (Aldith). Edith of Wessex was definitely known as Eadgyth (Edith), but even she may have been known by a different name – Gytha – before she married Edward the Confessor.
A tale of two Harolds
Hastings was the last of three major battles that decided the fate of England in 1066. While William was readying his troops to cross the Channel, England was already under attack from the Norwegian king, Harald Hardrada (‘Hard Ruler’). The fact that two rival kings bore essentially the same name tells us a lot.
The Viking raids that began in the eighth century may have been dramatic, but it was the long-term influence of interaction and intermarriage of English natives and Scandinavian settlers that had the greatest impact on the land, its language and its names. Scandinavian names became widely used across England ¬– not only by Viking newcomers but also by English people.
This only increased after Cnut conquered England in 1016. His right-hand man here was Earl Godwine, father of the man who became King Harold II (who was quite literally ‘Godwin’s son’), whose family is a great example of Anglo-Scandinavian integration. Godwine and his Danish wife, Gytha, gave their children a mix of Scandinavian names – including Harold, Sweyn, Gunhild and Tostig – and English, including Wulfnoth, Ælfgar and Eadgifu.
In practice, many of these names may not have been considered ‘Scandinavian’ by the people who used them – they were deemed just as English as any other. But one thing we do know is that 1066 marked an abrupt shift in the political and cultural world that England inhabited, as its influences shifted from the North Sea to the English Channel.
Tostig no more
This is epitomised by the fate of the name of another of Godwine’s sons, Tostig. Harold’s brother infamously betrayed Harold by supporting Harald Hardrada in 1066, so played a key role in the end of Anglo-Scandinavian England. His name seems to have been one of those Scandinavian names that had become popular in the 11th century – perhaps partly because of his own fame.
After the conquest, once-popular Anglo-Scandinavian names were quickly discarded in favour of those brought to England by its new Norman overlords. We have a first-hand account of this process in action through the story of a boy named Tostig in the early 12th century. We are told that his childhood friends teased him so remorselessly that he took it upon himself to change his unfashionable name, insisting on being called William instead.
Most people didn’t change their own names, but the speed of the shift more widely was dramatic, with parents swapping English names for Norman ones. William became rapidly popular, thanks to the influence of the hundreds of Williams who came to England after the Conquest. There were almost as many Richards and Roberts, as well as a large number of Walters and Ralphs (and a surprising scattering of Wazos and Bosos).
William the Bastard
The most famous of the new Williams was, of course, the one we know as ‘the Conqueror’, duke of Normandy and king of England. But William wasn’t known by this byname during his lifetime, as far as we can tell. Rather, he was dubbed by contemporaries as William ‘the Bastard’ (through the Latin terms bastardus and nothus).
This wasn’t a judgement on his character but reflected his illegitimacy. Although many noblemen had unofficial partners before taking an official bride, the fact that William was illegitimate clearly mattered, judging by the wide use of this nickname and the fact that his mother, Herleva, was never named as such until after his death.
By the time of the Conquest, the practice of using additional bynames to add detail to the lives and identities of individuals was becoming more common on both sides of the Channel. As William’s nickname shows, these were usually not chosen by the bearers themselves but instead offer us a glimpse into the judgment of other people.
Black beards, barrel cats and broad arses
Bynames were often merely bland descriptors referring to visual characteristics – Burewold Crul (‘Curly’) and Brunstan Blachebiert (‘Blackbeard’), for example. Or they might refer to the occupation of the bearer, such as those of Bernard Faber (‘the Smith’) and William Bruwere (‘the Brewer’). But there were a lot of names that were much more evocative, some of which were mildly insulting – perhaps partly humorous descriptions of someone’s physical appearance, social status or personality traits.
- Read more | The Anglo-Saxons’ last stand
The meanings of some of these names were obvious, but for others we have to read between the lines. Alestan Braders (‘Broad Arse’), Willelm Pinguis (‘the Fat’) and the man just known as Porcel (‘Little Pig’), are likely to have been overweight. Alric Penipurs (‘Pennypurse’) was almost certainly tight with his money. Lewin Gulee (‘Big Mouthful’) probably had a foul mouth. And we can assume that Lefstan Bittecat (‘Barrel Cat’) liked a drink. But how Edwin Wridel came to be known as ‘the Wriggler’ remains a mystery.
A load of Ballocs
The creation and use of derogatory nicknames might have been done in good humour, or could have served a community-building function. However, some of the names from 11th-century England sound downright offensive to modern ears.
In Winchester around 1050, we know of at least three men whose names referred to testicles. There was an Alfred Taddeballoc (‘Toad-bollock’), a Lefwin Balloe (‘Bollock’), and one man known simply by the name Balloc (‘Bollock’). Even if the sexually explicit nature of these names was not as taboo in medieval England as it is today, the use of these names must have still been unpleasant for the people who had to live with them.
This must certainly have been true in the case of Godwinus Clawcunte (‘Scratch-c*nt’), whose name conjures up an image of a man with some sort of unfortunate groin-related ailment.
An artificial divide
The names of English people in the 11th century can tell us a huge amount about their world and how it was changing. Some of this was, undoubtedly, a result of the Norman conquest, but other aspects of its transformation likely reflected longer-term shifts within English society. In fact, names might be linked to the apparent divide evident between the world that came before 1066 and the one that came after.
Names that were popular in England a century after the Conquest could equally be plucked from any census over the past 900 years: William and Richard, Alice and Matilda. They are recognisably English, recognisably modern. In contrast, the Æthelwulfs and Ælfgifus of pre-Conquest England seem alien and unfamiliar. They create an air of fantastical detachment – more like characters from Game of Thrones than the direct ancestors of modern Englishmen and women. And they can create a false sense that the people of England in 1066 were far more different from those that followed them than they really were.
For more detail on the Bayeux Tapestry, you access our HistoryExtra Academy series on the subject: a six-part video lecture series, in which the majesty and mystery of the Tapestry is explored in full.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[George Washington's dirty tricks: how the American hero fooled Britain at Yorktown]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/george-washingtons-dirty-tricks-how-the-american-hero-fooled-britain-at-yorktown/ 2026-10-16T14:31:04.000Z 2026-10-16T14:30:41.000Z 1. Dangerous assumptions
Hannibal lured Roman troops into the perfect trap at Lake Trasimene in 217 BC
On the morning of 21 June 217 BC, during the Second Punic War (218–201 BC), the Roman army of consul Gaius Flaminius marched along the northern shore of Lake Trasimene in central Italy. They were approaching what appeared to be the encampment of a retreating Carthaginian force under Hannibal Barca, then about 30 years old and already Rome’s most dangerous enemy. The Romans believed that they were about to force a decisive battle. In reality, they were walking into one of the greatest ambushes in military history.
The crisis had begun the previous autumn when Hannibal had achieved the seemingly impossible, crossing the Alps with his multinational army and war elephants, then defeating Roman forces at the battle of Trebia in December 218 BC. Determined to restore Roman prestige, Flaminius pursued the Carthaginian forces south through Italy.
As Livy (Titus Livius) observed in his seminal History of Rome, written two centuries later, Flaminius “had more regard for victory than for either prudence or the gods”. Rather than avoid battle, he encouraged pursuit, burning farms, destroying crops and leaving a conspicuous trail of devastation. Hannibal understood exactly the kind of opponent he was facing: ambitious, aggressive and desperate for victory.
So, in selecting the location for his inevitable clash with the Romans, the Carthaginian general “chose the ground with great skill”, as the Greek scholar Polybius remarked in his Histories the following century. A narrow road ran between the lake and wooded hills to the north. During the night, 40,000–50,000 of Hannibal’s men concealed themselves in the high ground while a smaller but visible force blocked the route ahead. When the Roman column, numbering perhaps 25,000–30,000 soldiers, marched on the Carthaginian camp shortly after dawn, the trap was sprung.
Carthaginian infantry, Numidian cavalry, Iberian warriors and Gallic tribesmen attacked simultaneously from the front, flanks and rear: “The enemy appeared on all sides at once,” as Livy described the assault. Units became isolated before many Romans even realised that the battle had begun. Ancient sources suggest that as many as 15,000 Romans were killed – including Flaminius himself – with thousands more captured. The battle lasted only a few hours.
Hannibal’s victory at Trasimene was particularly remarkable in that the battle was effectively won before the first spear was thrown or sword swung. By manipulating Roman expectations and turning terrain into a weapon, he persuaded his enemy to make a fatal assumption about how the clash would unfold. Few commanders in history have demonstrated more clearly that the most decisive battlefield can be the opponent’s mind.
- Read more | Have archaeologists just found proof of ancient Carthage's legendary anti-Roman war weapon?
2. Incendiary ideas
Using diplomacy, deception and a fiery secret weapon, Byzantine forces broke the siege of Constantinople in AD 717–18
In August 717, one of the most ambitious military operations of the early medieval world was launched. The Umayyad Caliphate, the powerful Islamic realm stretching from Spain to central Asia, sent a vast expedition to capture Constantinople (now Istanbul), capital of the Byzantine empire.
Leading the assault was Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik, one of the Arab world’s most experienced commanders. Many contemporary sources suggest that his army numbered well over 100,000 men, supported by a fleet of perhaps 1,800 ships, though the exact figures remain disputed. The prize was immense. Constantinople commanded the Bosporus, controlled key trade routes between Europe and Asia, and was the political and spiritual heart of the Christian east.
The city’s prospects appeared bleak. Years of political instability had weakened the Byzantine empire, and its new ruler, Leo III the Isaurian, had seized the throne only months earlier. But Leo recognised that straightforward military resistance would not be enough. Instead, he directed Byzantine diplomats to quietly exploit divisions among the besiegers and their allies, while his intelligence networks monitored Arab movements and the defenders concealed their true resilience. As one account notes, Leo had already demonstrated his talent for deception: before becoming emperor, he had encouraged Arab hopes of his cooperation in taking the Byzantine capital – before turning the tables and seizing the throne for himself.
As well as a flair for subterfuge, the Byzantines possessed one of history’s most closely guarded military secrets: the mysterious incendiary compound known as ‘Greek fire’, its precise composition still unknown today. Propelled from tubes mounted on warships, it continued burning even on water. Arab sailors expected a conventional naval battle, followed by a blockade to effect a debilitating siege of Constantinople. Instead, they found their ships engulfed by flames. The physical damage was severe, but the psychological effect was arguably greater.
As autumn turned to winter, the siege became a contest of endurance. The attackers expected Constantinople to weaken; instead, supply problems, disease and an exceptionally harsh winter devastated their own troops. Reinforcements and provisions failed to arrive in sufficient numbers, while Byzantine diplomacy persuaded the Bulgars, led by Khan Tervel, to attack Arab forces operating around the city.
After a year of fighting, the siege collapsed in August 718. Thousands of besiegers had perished, much of the Umayyad fleet had been destroyed, and Maslama’s surviving forces withdrew. Constantinople had survived.
The victory preserved the Byzantine empire for another seven centuries, and halted the caliphate’s expansion into south-eastern Europe. It also showed that deception, intelligence and psychological warfare could be as decisive as powerful armies. In persuading a stronger enemy to misunderstand both the city’s strength and its secret weapons, Leo III won one of history’s most consequential defensive victories.
3. Power of misdirection
George Washington tricked enemy leaders into looking the wrong way to overpower the British stronghold of Yorktown in 1781
By 1781, the American War of Independence had been raging for more than six years. Britain still possessed the world’s most powerful navy, controlled major coastal cities and maintained roughly 30,000 troops in North America. Many British politicians believed that the rebellion could still be crushed. Yet within a matter of months, a carefully orchestrated deception forced the surrender of an entire British field army – and effectively decided the war.
The key figures involved were General George Washington, commander of the Continental Army, and his French ally, Lieutenant General Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau. During the summer of 1781, both men remained near New York City facing General Sir Henry Clinton, Britain’s commander-in-chief in North America.
Everything appeared to suggest that New York would be the target of the next major Allied offensive. Troops were moved, supplies accumulated, and intelligence leaks reinforced the impression. It was a bluff. As Washington reportedly explained: “If we do not deceive our own men, we will never deceive the enemy.”
Clinton saw what Washington wanted him to see. In reality, the Allied commanders were secretly preparing an assault elsewhere. Their true objective was to defeat Lieutenant General Lord Charles Cornwallis, who had established a force of approximately 8,000–9,000 British and German troops at Yorktown, Virginia. Standing on the York river that flows into Chesapeake Bay, Yorktown appeared secure so long as the Royal Navy retained control of the coast. The entire Allied plan depended upon preventing the British high command from recognising the danger until it was too late.
In August, while British attention remained fixed on New York, Washington and Rochambeau began moving more than 4,000 American and a similar number of French troops south. Simultaneously, a powerful French fleet under Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse sailed for the Chesapeake. On 5 September, de Grasse defeated a British relief fleet at the battle of the Chesapeake, closing Cornwallis’s escape route and trapping his forces.
By the end of September, some 17,000 Franco-American troops had surrounded Yorktown. After a three-week siege, Cornwallis surrendered on 19 October 1781, handing over more than 7,000 soldiers – one of the largest British capitulations of the 18th century. The following day, he wrote to Clinton: “I have the mortification to inform your Excellency that I have been forced to give up the posts of York and Gloucester, and to surrender the troops under my command.”
Yorktown was not simply a military victory – it was a triumph of deception. Through carefully managed intelligence, strategic misdirection and close Franco-American coordination, Washington persuaded the British command to focus on the wrong battlefield at the decisive moment. Britain continued fighting until the Treaty of Paris in 1783 but, after Yorktown, the political will to continue the war effectively collapsed.
4. Element of surprise
By overturning the expectations of an offensive, the German Kaiserschlacht was able to shatter Allied lines on the Somme in 1918 – for a time, at least
In early 1918, Germany spied a narrow window of opportunity to win the First World War. The collapse of imperial Russia and the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918 allowed Germany to transfer some 50 divisions from the eastern front to the west. For the first time in years, the German high command believed that it could achieve local superiority. Yet General Erich Ludendorff and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg knew that the advantage would be short-lived.
Since declaring war on Germany on 6 April 1917, the US had been steadily building its presence in France, with around 10,000 American troops arriving daily by the spring of 1918. Germany needed a decisive victory before Allied manpower became overwhelming. As Ludendorff put it: “We should strike at the earliest moment… before the Americans can throw strong forces into the scale. We must beat the British.”
The German strategy intended to achieve this was the Kaiserschlacht (Kaiser’s Battle), a series of offensives designed to break the stalemate on the western front. The opening blow, Operation Michael, was launched against the British Fifth Army along the Somme at 4.40am on 21 March 1918. Success depended on achieving something almost unheard of after years of trench warfare: complete tactical surprise.
Since 1914, major offensives had generally been preceded by days of artillery bombardment that advertised an attack long before it began. Ludendorff sought to overturn those expectations. Troops were secretly concentrated behind the front, wireless communications were restricted and dummy positions were used to conceal preparations. Most importantly, more than 6,600 German guns unleashed a sudden bombardment designed to paralyse enemy headquarters, artillery batteries and communications rather than simply destroy trenches. Behind the shellfire surged elite Sturmtruppen units trained to infiltrate weak points, bypass strongholds and penetrate deep into the Allied rear.
The effect was dramatic. Cloaked by dense morning fog, German forces smashed through British positions and advanced farther than any army had on the western front since 1914. In places, they pushed nearly 40 miles west, capturing tens of thousands of prisoners and threatening the vital rail hub of Amiens. Allied commanders were shocked by the speed and scale of the assault.
Yet surprise alone could not deliver victory. German infantry outpaced their supply lines, communications broke down and elite stormtrooper formations suffered heavy casualties. Though the offensive gained significant territory, it failed to destroy the British Army, seize the Channel ports or divide the Allied coalition. By July 1918, Germany’s final reserves had largely been expended, leaving Ludendorff unable to resist the Allied counter-offensives that followed.
The Kaiserschlacht ultimately failed, but it marked a turning point in military deception. Surprise was no longer a battlefield trick employed by a gifted commander. It had become an industrialised system involving intelligence, communications, logistics, artillery science and carefully coordinated operational planning. The offensive did not win the war, but it showed how modern armies could manipulate an enemy’s expectations on a vast scale.
5. Making the impossible possible
Heavy artillery couldn’t be installed and fired in the jungle-clad hills above Dien Bien Phu – or so the French believed in 1954
After almost seven years of war against the communist-led Viet Minh rebels in what’s now Vietnam, France was struggling to maintain its colonial grip on Indochina. Seeking a decisive battle, French general Henri Navarre, appointed commander-in-chief in May 1953, approved the occupation of Dien Bien Phu, a remote valley in north-west Vietnam near the Laotian border.
The plan, launched under Operation Castor in November 1953, seemed straightforward: establish a heavily fortified base supplied by air, then lure the Viet Minh into a conventional battle where French artillery, armour and air power could destroy them.
At first, things went as planned. The French garrison commanded by Colonel Christian de Castries eventually numbered around 16,000 troops including French regulars, Foreign Legionnaires, Moroccan and Algerian units, and Vietnamese auxiliaries. The base was divided into strongpoints with female codenames including Beatrice, Gabrielle, Anne-Marie, Dominique and Isabelle. The French were confident they had chosen the battlefield well.
Yet General Võ Nguyên Giáp, commander of the Viet Minh, had already begun turning that assumption into a fatal weakness. His deception involved reinforcing French beliefs about what was and wasn’t possible in this terrain. For example, French military planners thought that heavy artillery couldn’t be sited in the steep, jungle-covered hills surrounding the valley.
During late 1953 and early 1954, though, an estimated 50,000–70,000 labourers and porters helped move Viet Minh artillery, ammunition and supplies through mountains and dense jungle. Many loads were transported by bicycle, handcart or sheer muscle. Guns were dismantled, hauled uphill and concealed in reinforced caves and camouflaged positions overlooking the valley.
The French knew that the Viet Minh possessed artillery. What they failed to grasp was where Giáp intended to put it. “No Viet cannon will be able to fire three rounds before being destroyed by my artillery,” declared Colonel Charles Piroth confidently before the battle.
That illusion was shattered on 13 March 1954, when Viet Minh artillery suddenly opened fire. Within hours, outpost Beatrice had been overrun. French airfields quickly became unusable, while anti-aircraft guns made aerial resupply increasingly hazardous. The fortress designed to dominate the valley found itself trapped inside it. As the siege continued, Giáp employed trench systems that crept ever closer to French positions, echoing the tactics of the First World War.
After 56 days of fighting, on 7 May 1954 the French garrison collapsed. More than 10,000 French troops were captured, and total casualties on both sides exceeded 30,000. The defeat shocked France, accelerated negotiations at the Geneva Conference, and led to the partition of Vietnam at the 17th Parallel later that year.
Giáp did not persuade French military planners through any single deception. Instead, he exploited their conviction that the jungle-covered hills around Dien Bien Phu were impassable to heavy artillery. Then he hauled dismantled guns into camouflaged hillside positions and launched an attack that proved utterly decisive.
Iain MacGregor is a historian and author. His latest book is Battle: The Moments That Transformed Warfare from Ancient Greece to Ukraine (October, 2026)
This article was first published in the November 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Dan Jones <![CDATA[This Celtic castle was so terrifying that even the Romans were too scared to attack it]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/this-celtic-castle-was-so-terrifying-that-even-the-romans-were-too-scared-to-attack-it/ 2026-10-12T14:31:04.000Z 2026-10-12T14:30:52.000Z 1. Maiden Castle
This Dorset hillfort was a marvel of Iron Age engineering
In AD 43, Roman legions landed in Britannia on a mission to push the borders of their empire to the edge of the known world. They were not keen to go. Britannia was uncharted territory, inhabited by tribal peoples known for their ferocity in battle. Roman writers described how these ‘barbarians’ wore their hair and moustaches long, painted their skin blue, and were adept at guerrilla warfare, launching quick-fire ambushes then retreating to fortified hilltops that resisted assault. Today we know these lofty redoubts as hillforts.
Thousands of Iron Age hillforts were in use when the Romans arrived. One of the largest hillforts in Britain – indeed, across all of Europe – is known as Maiden Castle, a vast site in Dorset where the brutal reality of warfare can still be felt today.
Archaeologists have found evidence here showing that, on a hilltop some 130 metres above sea level, people of the Durotriges tribe built roundhouses, baked bread and made jewellery. To protect themselves, the Durotriges maintained huge stepped earthworks, begun in c600 BC and extended 200 years later, that hindered assailants ascending the hillside. They also designed complex, narrow approach routes and installed gatehouses to guard their huge compound. And they dug storage pits to hold the standard ammunition of the day: slingshots.
The slingshot, a simple weapon made from woven cord or leather, was used to hurl river pebbles or pieces of clay at adversaries. At least 30,000 of these smooth stones have been found buried at Maiden Castle, hinting at a time when an approaching enemy would have had to endure a vicious hail of shot to get anywhere near the hillfort’s fenced-off summit. The Roman historian Tacitus described how the great general Agricola had to march at the front of his men “to inspire [them] to march with equal courage” when they attacked tribal folk dug in on high ground.
If slingshots and earthworks failed to deter attackers, and fighting came to close quarters, it could be horrific. During the 1930s, the first major archaeological dig at Maiden Castle unearthed a ‘war cemetery’ containing dozens of skeletons dating from the two centuries before the Roman conquest. Many had been buried hastily, having suffered terrible injuries: cracked skulls, broken noses, shattered hands.
So hillforts were not invincible, but the Romans judged them impressive enough to take over several to be repurposed as barracks. By Tudor times, the sheer size of these hillforts, and the folk memories of the battles that had occurred around them, birthed a legend that it was on such a hilltop where King Arthur kept his court of Camelot.
2. Tower of London
How a gleaming projection of Norman domination became a potent emblem of the new regime’s power
When William the Conqueror defeated Harold Godwinson at the battle of Hastings in 1066, it was said that the earth was “drenched in blood”. That clash marked the beginning of a brutal campaign of Norman colonisation in which the key piece of military technology was the castle.
Just weeks after Hastings, when William marched on London and accepted the terrified citizens’ surrender, one of his first actions was to install a wooden fortress in the city’s south-eastern corner, to keep watch over his new people and on traffic on the Thames. Over time, this timber sentry-point became the Tower of London: the world’s most famous castle.
The Normans were expert castle builders whose best-known fortification style was the motte-and-bailey castle. This consisted of a mound topped by a wood or stone tower – the motte – enclosed by a fence or wall surrounding the bailey, an area of protected land studded with outbuildings. The Bayeux Tapestry provides a vivid snapshot of such a fortress in action, showing the defenders of a castle at Dinan hurling spears at attackers from their tower, while the assailants try to set the castle on fire.
Given the threat that fire posed to wooden structures, stone was considered the best material for making durable castles. So, from 1078, William had the Tower of London rebuilt, its new walls incorporating creamy, gleaming stone quarried near the Norman city of Caen. The central building, now known as the White Tower, would have soared over the city. It was equipped with state-of-the-art facilities: a chapel, a water well and, of course, latrines that emptied out over the walls.
The Tower was built to garrison knights and project armed power and, as it expanded over the centuries, it retained its military function. However, like many of the scores of castles founded by the Normans in England and Wales, it quickly became more than just a base for troops who could ride out to impose discipline on the local area.
It was a residence, a prison and the site of executions. It housed a mint and a zoo. It was a storehouse for weapons and treasure including the crown jewels. Above all, it was a symbol of the new regime’s authority. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle summed this up in a gloomy line describing the first phase of the Conquest: “And they [the Normans] built castles widely throughout this nation, and oppressed the wretched people, and afterwards it always grew very much worse.”
3. Krak des Chevaliers
A soaring crusader castle redefined fortresses for the ages
As Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade at Clermont in 1095, he can scarcely have had an inkling of the events he was setting in train. Over half a millennium, crusading reshaped medieval Christianity and created a new geopolitics across Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. It also gave rise to a monumental new age in castle-building.
The finest castles of the crusader states established in the near east were built by the military orders: the Knights Templar and Hospitaller. Handed responsibility for protecting the Holy Land after the Third Crusade, in the 13th century they constructed fortresses on a vast scale, with cutting-edge designs.
Structures such as Krak des Chevaliers (literally ‘Fortress of the Knights’), built by the Hospitallers on a 650-metre-high plateau some 25 miles west of Homs in Syria, boasted radical improvements on the old Norman motte-and-bailey design.
Taking inspiration from Byzantine castles, they consisted of circuits of internally vaulted walls connecting large stone towers. These towers were fitted with arrow slits and topped with the jagged, tooth-like defences known as crenellations, making it easier for defenders to shoot arrows from cover. Another ingenious development was the machicolation – a structure projecting from an outer wall, with a hole in the bottom from which stones or boiling liquids could be dropped on attackers.
Krak des Chevaliers was massive – as it needed to be. In its 2.4 hectares lived 60 Hospitaller knights and a support staff of 2,000 men who controlled the trade road that connected Homs with the coastal city of Tripoli. The castle’s facilities included industrial-sized brick-built ovens, stable blocks and a water-management system. It was effectively a self-contained military town – but its inhabitants never forgot their Christian mission. A Latin inscription on the wall of the Hospitallers’ central hall can be translated as: “You may have wealth, wisdom and beauty, but beware of pride, which spoils all it touches.”
The Hospitallers quit Krak des Chevaliers when the Holy Land fell to the Mamluks in the late 13th century. But it was as impressive as ever in 1909, when Lawrence of Arabia visited it on his 21st birthday. “The finest castle in the world, certainly the most picturesque,” he wrote. He thought that it summed up the architectural elegance of Europe married with the military functionality of the crusader states.
The castle has been considered a useful stronghold in more recent conflicts: during the Syrian civil war, anti-government forces used it as a defensive position.
4. Château Gaillard
This Normandy landmark was an expression of an English king’s swagger
When Richard the Lionheart toured the construction site of Châsteau Gaillard in Normandy one day in the late 1190s, it began to rain. Cries of disgust and terror rang out – because the liquid falling from the clouds was not water but blood.
This story of a bizarre natural phenomenon, related by the chronicler William of Newburgh, was intended to illustrate Richard’s obsessive drive to build a castle that matched his own personal swagger and reputation. This bastion was constructed in the borderlands between Richard’s territories and those of his great rival, the French king Philip II Augustus. The Lionheart’s desire to put one over on Philip was such that he drove his workers on with a near-demonic urgency. “Even if an angel from heaven had told him to abandon [the castle],” wrote William, “he would have cursed that angel.”
Richard imported the latest thinking on castle-building from the east, where he had led the war against Saladin on the Third Crusade. Gaillard’s round towers connected directly with one another like flower-petals, presenting no weak point for enemy catapults to batter. It was also the first European castle to feature machicolations.
But this was more than just a military building: it was an expression of chivalry, the prevailing martial culture of the age. Chivalry demanded soldierly skill and courtesy, but it also prized bravado. In building Château Gaillard, Richard was making a statement about his self-appointed status as the leading prince in Europe. Gaillard meant ‘saucy’ – and the castle was a cheeky thumb to the nose in the direction of the French. When Philip Augustus came to spy on the building site, and saw what a colossal fortress was being created, he said that he wished it was built from iron so that, when he finally conquered it, his satisfaction would be all the greater.
When this was relayed to Richard, he uttered his famous line: “By God’s throat, if that castle were made entirely of butter, never mind iron or stone, I would have no doubt at all that I would be able to defend it stoutly against him [Philip] and all his forces.”
That may well have been true, but Richard wasn’t to get the chance to prove it. He died of gangrene in 1199, having been shot with a crossbow bolt while besieging another castle. His brother and successor, King John, managed to lose Château Gaillard within five years, thereby revealing an eternal truth about castles: no matter how thick their walls, they are only ever as strong as the person defending them.
5. Great Wall of China
China’s vast but vulnerable barrier proves that size isn’t everything
Throughout the ages, when empires have been threatened by outsiders, their leaders have often constructed boundary walls to keep out would-be intruders. In the second century AD, the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall to keep the Caledonian tribes of northern Britannia at bay. In the fifth and sixth centuries AD, the Persians built the Great Wall of Gorgan to protect their lands from the nomadic tribes known as the White Huns. In the 20th century, the French built the Maginot Line to protect themselves against German armies. In a sense, we can see history’s great walls as attempts to make a castle of an entire realm.
At many times during China’s long history, emperors decided to build or extend the network of fortifications and barriers that ran through the borderlands between China and the tribes of the steppe to the north.
The styles and materials used in the Great Wall of China varied enormously over time. In the third century BC, the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, sent hundreds of thousands of labourers, mostly peasants and convicts, to build a 3,000-mile ‘Long Wall’ consisting of rammed earth and rubble, and making use of existing territorial obstacles such as mountain ridges. The scale was so vast that later observers thought that a huge dragon had fallen from the sky and turned into a wall where it lay.
Spectacular as it was, however, that wall was porous. Its most famous failure came in the 13th century AD when northern China – then ruled by the Jurchen Jin – was attacked by the Mongols under Genghis Khan, whose lightning horseback raids were likened by one chronicler to “thunder pealing and wind blowing”. The Mongols sent raiding parties around the wall and through mountain passes. Later that century, they took control of all China.
The most iconic section of the Great Wall was built by the Ming dynasty in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was a brick and stone-built barrier but also a causeway allowing rapid horse and troop movements along its length. Yet it, too, failed, when the Ming were overthrown in a revolution in 1644. The gates in the wall were thrown open, allowing the Manchus of the northern steppe to rush through and take control of the empire. “The Great Wall of China is a monument to fear,” wrote Voltaire, sniffily. To enemies undaunted by its vast size, it was never as robust a defensive line as it looked.
6. Castel Sant'Angelo
Renaissance ideas inspired a new era of castle artistry in the heart of Rome
In May 1481, miraculous news arrived in Rome: the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, scourge of Christendom, was dead. To celebrate, night parties were held around the city, with fires lit, trumpets blown and guns fired. Some of this took place on the terrace of the looming papal fortress known as the Castel Sant’Angelo.
A later legend reimagined the blasts of guns as a colourful firework display designed by Michelangelo Buonarroti. In fact, Michelangelo was only six years old at the time, but the myth had the ring of truth – because during the Italian Renaissance, castles were undergoing huge transformations, inside and out. Sweeping changes to both military technology and artistic techniques spread across Europe. Fortress defences were reconceived to respond to the rise of gunpowder weapons, which had appeared in Europe in the 14th century. Their chambers were decorated by the new artistic masters of a revolutionary age.
The Castel Sant’Angelo captured the spirit of this age. It was originally built as Hadrian’s Mausoleum, a huge tomb for the funerary urns of dead Roman emperors. During the Renaissance, when the classical world was revived to delight the modern, it was fitted with bastions – angled, protruding towers from which artillery could be fired in any direction, including enfilading fire along the wall’s length. A passageway known as the Passetto was built to allow popes to flee directly to the castle from the Vatican should the city come under siege or bombardment. (As it often did amid the turbulent politics of the Reformation.) Meanwhile, the papal apartments inside were renovated and brilliantly decorated by artists including the renowned painter Pinturicchio.
As the Renaissance unfolded, and cannon began to render the classic medieval castle obsolete, great artists turned their minds to military design. In c1482, Leonardo da Vinci wrote to the Duke of Milan offering his services as a builder of siege weapons and boasting of his “plans for destroying every fortress or other stronghold even if it were founded on rock”. He was employed to survey the defences of the duke’s Sforza Castle. Michelangelo, meanwhile, was hired to redesign the walls of Florence, drawing up plans for jagged artillery platforms, with dozens of sharp angles for gunners to exploit, though those schemes were never brought to fruition.
By the end of the 16th century, the age of the classic medieval castle was over. Modern warfare demanded fortresses built with gunpowder in mind. This new age was awe-inspiring: one observer who saw the guns of a Venetian fortress firing wrote that “it seemed as if the world had burst to pieces… the fortress, with all those flaming cannon, had the appearance of a volcano and of hell itself”.
7. Fort Pulaski
New cannon technology signalled the end of the castle – as a famous American general discovered to his cost
In 1829, a promising young West Point graduate, Robert E Lee, was posted to Savannah, Georgia, to assist with building a defensive fortress guarding access to the city. Named Fort Pulaski, it was part of the Third System of American fortifications conceived to protect the Atlantic seaboard after the disastrous War of 1812 against the British. The new bastion was being built on an island surrounded by sea and marshes. Its brick walls were to be more than 2 metres thick, backed by masonry pillars, and would be unbreachable by any known artillery. As one US army officer later remarked: “You may as well bombard the Rocky Mountains.”
In 1861, Lee returned to Fort Pulaski – though now as a general in the Confederate army, fighting for independence for the South in the US Civil War. The fortress was in Confederate hands but a Union assault was expected, and Lee was tasked with upgrading the defences further. After advising on gun placements and reinforcing earthworks, Lee considered the job done. The nearest point on land was more than 1,500 metres away, and accepted military wisdom of the time held that cannon could not penetrate masonry from more than 800 yards (about 730 metres) away. “They will make it very warm for you with shells,” Lee told the fort commander. “But they cannot breach at that distance.”
Lee was wrong. In spring 1862, Union forces brought a new weapon to Savannah: rifled cannon, which fired exploding shells farther and more accurately than traditional smoothbore guns. Fort Pulaski was reduced to wreckage by the 30-hour bombardment. Over the months that followed, more Confederate forts suffered the same treatment. “The result of this bombardment must cause… a change in the construction of fortifications,” wrote Union general David Hunter. The artillery fort had died an abrupt death.
By the end of the US Civil War, the shape of forts had changed entirely. In 1864, at the battle of Petersburg in Virginia, fighting was conducted between trenches. The earthwork and timber-clad gun positions dug into the ground were officially known as Fort Sedgwick and Fort Mahone, but troops called them “Fort Hell” and “Fort Damnation”. It was a grim foreshadowing of the trenches of the western front in the First World War – and a return to an era of castle-building last seen in the hillforts of Iron Age Britannia.
This article was first published in the November 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[The Soviets found proof of Hitler's death. So why did they hide it from the world?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/soviet-proof-of-hitlers-death-hid-it-from-the-world/ 2026-10-11T03:24:42.000Z 2026-10-11T13:00:04.000Z In the ruins of Berlin in May 1945, Soviet investigators recovered dental remains and tracked down two people familiar with Adolf Hitler’s mouth: his dental assistant and the technician who had made his elaborate dental work.
Both quickly recognised what they were shown.
“They are able to not only describe all of the complex dental treatment that Hitler has had over the years, but then, when confronted with the physical remains in front of them, they're said, ‘Yes, straight away, these are Hitler's teeth,’” explains historian Caroline Sharples, author of The Long Death of Adolf Hitler.
But even as Soviet investigators assembled their findings, Moscow publicly encouraged uncertainty about whether Hitler was dead at all. Why would the power that had captured Berlin withhold evidence confirming the Nazi leader’s fate?
The death of Hitler
Hitler died on 30 April 1945 in the Führerbunker, the underground shelter beneath the Reich Chancellery complex in central Berlin, as Soviet troops were closing in. His staff carried his body and that of his wife, Eva Braun, into the garden, doused them with petrol and burned them.
When Soviet forces took the site, its investigation fell partly to SMERSH, the military counterintelligence organisation whose name abbreviated the Russian phrase “Death to spies”.
According to the Soviet account, investigators recovered the charred remains of a man and woman outside the bunker and performed autopsies. The dental identification became the strongest element of that investigation.
“They take them to their field headquarters, they perform an autopsy, they have dental remains extracted, and they immediately hunt down Hitler's former dental nurse and his dental technician,” says Sharples speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
The witnesses were Käthe Heusermann and Fritz Echtmann. Their knowledge of Hitler’s distinctive bridges and other dental work gave investigators crucial evidence that was much more tangible than a subjective resemblance between a burned corpse and a photograph.
But evidence gathered inside the intelligence organisation did not automatically become information available to allies, or even to other Soviet officials.
As Sharples explains, “the Soviets have this evidence, but the public line is always, ‘No. We haven't found anything.’”
In practice, Soviet statements fluctuated. Reports suggesting that a body had been identified were followed by denials. On 9 June, Marshal Georgy Zhukov publicly said there was no identified corpse and raised the possibility that Hitler had escaped. Soviet suggestions that he might be in Spain prompted an official Spanish denial.
Why ambiguity about Hitler’s death was useful
For the Soviets, this intentional uncertainty was politically useful. Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union had fought a common enemy, but following crucial developments at the Yalta conference, their alliance was already strained over the direction of Europe’s postwar future. Suggestions that Hitler remained at large could cast suspicion on other countries and sustain the argument that the Nazi threat required continued vigilance. Historians have therefore interpreted Stalin’s handling of the evidence partly as an attempt to strengthen his position in the postwar settlement.
For Western investigators, the immediate consequence was that they had to reconstruct Hitler’s death without access to the strongest physical evidence. In June 1945, witnesses in British and American custody began describing the burning of the bodies. They included Hitler’s chauffeur, Erich Kempka, who had supplied the petrol.
“They're interrogated separately, and then in late June they're both paraded before the press,” says Sharples of Kempka and a guard who had observed the burning.
- Read more | Did Hitler really shoot himself? Here's why the Führer's death is more complicated than you think
“They tell their stories, and this is the first real testimonial evidence that we have from people who are able to say, “yes, he's dead. Yes, we saw his body destroyed.””
But without the dental records for corroboration, these eyewitness statements weren’t enough to silence every objection. Had Hitler’s staff agreed on a cover story? Could witnesses distinguish what they had seen from what others had told them?
British Military Intelligence commissioned the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to investigate. He sought witnesses, compared their accounts and reconstructed events inside the bunker. On 1 November 1945, he presented his conclusion in Berlin: Hitler had killed himself.
“This isn't necessarily the whole truth by any means,” Sharples observes. “This is what has been unfolding publicly.”
Behind the scenes, Soviet inquiries continued. In May 1946, investigators from the internal-security apparatus associated with the NKVD (the Soviet Union’s secret police organisation) returned to the bunker site, after further questioning witnesses in custody. They recovered skull fragments from the Chancellery garden where Hitler’s corpse was burned. One fragment appeared to contain a bullet hole. “Again, this evidence isn’t shared [with other countries],” Sharples says.
The truth emerges
During the 1950s, that secrecy became harder to maintain. Germans returning from Soviet captivity included members of Hitler’s household who had witnessed the aftermath of his death.
“They have been his valet or his close advisers,” says Sharples. “They have been the people who were instructed to carry out that cremation of his corpse. So they have handled his body, let alone just seen it.”
German legal proceedings gathered testimony, including from these people, to establish Hitler’s death formally. The Berchtesgaden court’s investigation culminated in a declaration of death in 1956. Accounts of the dental identification also started to emerge, revealing that Soviet investigators had possessed evidence unavailable to their Western counterparts.
Then, in 1968, Soviet journalist Lev Bezymenski published The Death of Adolf Hitler, including an autopsy report and previously withheld material.
“It is very much a propaganda text in its tone,” Sharples says. “Much of the book is a celebratory account of the Soviet war effort, and then Hitler's autopsy report is in this collection.”
The publication acknowledged the recovery and examination of remains. But its insistence on cyanide poisoning also challenged the Western account centred on a gunshot.
For Sharples, this interpretation carried an ideological purpose. Soviet narratives presented poison as a supposedly weak, feminine means of death, denying Hitler the image of a soldier dying by his pistol. Those were propagandists’ gendered assumptions, not forensic distinctions.
Western scepticism consequently concerned both the findings and their presentation. Evidence released selectively, inside an overtly political account, was difficult to assess separately from the motives of those releasing it.
Caroline Sharples was speaking to Charlotte Vosper on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[These are history's greatest unsung heroes. How many have you heard of?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/these-are-historys-greatest-unsung-heroes-how-many-have-you-heard-of/ 2026-10-07T15:01:06.000Z 2026-10-07T15:00:22.000Z Nordic women...
…or, more explicitly, all the women denied their place in history
Excuse the shouty capitals for a moment, but my answer is MOST WOMEN. Take, for example, the women of the early Nordic world, who spent so much of their lives making the cloth for the sails and clothing that would power the whole of the Viking Age. After all, if you’re trying to settle the islands of the North Atlantic and even reach the edge of North America, you can’t sail across an ocean without a sail. Or without tough waterproof clothing. Or, in fact, without any clothing at all.
Nor could your society have survived without the food that the women cooked, preserved and stored, the farmsteads they ran, the children they birthed and/or cared for, and so on.
But did the deeds and talents of these women make it into Old Norse poetry? Not unless they were being praised for their beauty. Are there any sagas named for their female protagonists? Not really: it’s the Saga of Erik the Red (even though he falls off a horse and drops out of the narrative after the first few chapters), not the Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveller. Did the names of all of those influential Norse women echo down the ages, immortalised in chronicles and annals? I think we all know the answer to that.
Eleanor Barraclough, historian and author of Embers of the Hands (Profile, 2024)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
The Georgian socialite who transformed Britain’s fight against smallpox
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is best known – if she is known at all – as a writer and socialite. She graced the most fashionable drawing rooms and assemblies that Georgian society had to offer. By the age of 16, she had taught herself Latin and written two volumes of poetry and a short novel. In 1712, she married Edward Wortley Montagu who became British ambassador to the Ottoman empire, and wrote extensively of her experiences as a woman in Constantinople (now Istanbul).
Her views were shockingly unconventional and way ahead of her time: “Turkish ladies don’t commit one sin the less for not being Christians,” she wrote in one letter. “’Tis very easy to see they have more liberty than we have.” She became a leading light of the so-called ‘Bluestockings’ who, often hailed as England’s earliest feminists, hosted salons to promote literature, conversation and female education.
But Lady Mary’s achievements went further still. Smallpox was one of the greatest scourges of the age, and had afflicted her own family. During her time in the Ottoman empire she encountered variolation – inoculation using material from a smallpox sufferer – and asked the British Embassy’s surgeon to inoculate her young son.
After returning home, in 1721 she had her daughter inoculated, too, and campaigned tirelessly to encourage others to do the same. Her efforts were met with bitter hostility, even physical violence, and dismissed as the fad of ignorant women. Undaunted, Lady Mary continued to pioneer inoculation, thereby saving countless lives across Britain and western Europe well before Edward Jenner introduced his more famous vaccination.
Tracy Borman, author, historian and broadcaster
- Read more | "An enlightened turn": how medicine (and the vaccination) developed in Victorian Britain
Pliny the Elder
The Roman encyclopaedist whose pursuit of knowledge ended in heroic sacrifice
Gaius Plinius Secundus, aka Pliny the Elder, is best known for his extraordinary dedication to the encyclopaedia known as the Natural History, composed of 37 books. Completing the work around AD 77, Pliny documented a vast range of topics, from plants and zoology to art and geography. Though his investigations are at times astoundingly accurate, his descriptions sometimes veer into wildly speculative ground, giving us a fascinating insight into the ancient Romans’ understanding of the natural world.
Yet this was not Pliny’s only achievement. He was also the praefectus classis (admiral) of the Roman navy stationed at Misenum on the Bay of Naples. In AD 79, on the day Vesuvius erupted, Pliny was at his villa across the bay. At first, he seems to have treated the phenomenon with curiosity rather than alarm. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, who was with him watching the events unfold, later records that he exercised, dined and bathed before receiving word that those nearer the volcano were in urgent need of help.
Pliny immediately ordered his fleet to set sail, both to assist those in danger and, characteristically, to observe the eruption at closer range, perhaps intending to record it.
He never returned. Most likely overcome by respiratory distress, he was found two days later on the shore, his body lying as though at rest. In more ways than one, Pliny gave himself not only to those he sought to rescue, but to those who came after him, preserving knowledge that has endured for nearly 2,000 years.
Jess Venner, ancient historian and author of The Lost Voices of Pompeii (Mudlark, 2026)
Megasthenes
The Greek ambassador who helped connect the ancient world
In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s reign, his vast empire split into several parts, each ruled by one of his generals, who in turn made themselves head of a ruling dynasty. The Seleucid empire, established by the general Seleucus, governed a large part of what had been the Persian empire. And in the last years of the fourth century BC, Seleucus sent a formal ambassador from his court to the court of King Chandragupta Maurya, in Pataliputra (modern Patna), India.
The ambassador’s name was Megasthenes, a man rarely credited with establishing a permanent link between the Hellenistic world and the world of the Mauryan empire. And for me, he is the unsung hero from history. Megasthenes wrote a whole book, Indica, about his experiences of the Mauryan empire, the incredible nature of the king’s capital at Pataliputra, the wondrous geography of the Indian landscape, and of the comparative workings of Indian society and the king’s court. Indica also articulated a number of ways in which the worlds of Greece and India could have been connected in the mythical past, positioning an opportunity for dialogue and collaboration between the two.
His was the first word in the connections between cultures that would become essential to the functioning of the wider world, as routes for trade, people and ideas began to open up, not just between the Greek world and India, but also between India and central Asia and central Asia and ancient China, which would eventually become the Silk Roads. As such, Megasthenes became a first-hand witness to a new world of connection.
Michael Scott, professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick
Antoine Simon
The enslaved man who crossed the Pyrenees in search of freedom
In 1446, a black man enslaved in Barcelona made an extraordinary escape across the Pyrenees: his name was Antoine Simon. Somehow he had heard that Pamiers, in the south-west of France, outlawed slavery and that he might live as a free man there. The punishment for escaped slaves was utterly brutal yet he took the courageous step of running away.
There is so much we don’t know: how did he navigate this dangerous terrain? What did he eat? How did he find shelter? One possibility is that he’d gathered information from merchants who came into contact with his enslaver’s household. Another is that freed black slaves offered advice to those who were not yet free. Historian Debra Blumenthal has uncovered evidence of a black confraternity in late medieval Valencia, which offered this kind of support.
When, against all the odds, Simon reached Pamiers his travails were not over. His former enslaver pursued him and took out a case against him – for theft of himself. This was heard in the court of Pamiers and it was gruelling. Simon was supported by a local notable called Pierre Toc, who had employed him on his arrival in Pamiers; the local count supported Simon’s former owner. The municipality, however, was clear: slavery had no place in the civilised society of Pamiers.
The more I delve into this story, the more I am struck by Antoine Simon’s extraordinary determination and courage, and by how that courage was sustained by the support he received.
Hannah Skoda, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford
Sir Hugh Dowding
The uncharismatic genius who built Britain’s winning air-defence system
“The bomber will always get through.” This was Stanley Baldwin’s famous summary of what the future of air war looked like in the 1930s. But the head of RAF Fighter Command, Sir Hugh Dowding, refused to give in to such pessimism. It is largely down to this remarkable man that British air defences did not completely collapse during the Battle of Britain.
At first sight, Dowding was a stereotypical middle-class Scot: dour, stubborn, with a moustachioed stiff upper lip. His contemporaries made fun of his puritanical nature: his nickname was ‘Stuffy’. But when it came to air defence he was a true revolutionary.
In the late 1930s, it was Dowding who pushed through the development of the Spitfire, and who championed the rapid construction of radar stations all across southern and eastern England. He then created a whole system of aerial defence which rapidly channelled information about incoming German bombers through to fighter pilots via a network of central control rooms. His incredibly efficient system undoubtedly saved Britain in the darkest days of 1940.
Dowding’s fatal flaw was his lack of personal charisma. His rivals in the RAF included the fighter ace Douglas Bader and Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the hugely ambitious commander of 12 Fighter Group. These men criticised him incessantly and wanted to try an alternative system of defence – the ‘Big Wing’ strategy (which actually turned out to be far less efficient than Dowding’s system).
When the Germans switched to bombing by night, and Dowding struggled to answer this new threat, they finally succeeded in ousting ‘Stuffy’ from both his post and the public imagination. It was a painful lesson in the art of leadership: sometimes charm is more important than being brilliant at your job.
Keith Lowe, author of The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us (Viking, 2017)
- Read more | Did the Spitfire really save Britain in WW2?
Isabelle Émilie de Tessier
The pioneering female cartoonist whose contribution was erased
I suspect that most readers won’t recognise the face of the cartoon character who appears on this page, but his bulbous nose, gangly frame and battered top hat were beloved by millions of Victorians. His name was Ally Sloper, and he is widely regarded as the first superstar of British comics. His misadventures were chronicled in one of the country’s bestselling papers, legions of loyal readers joined his fan club, and his face appeared on merchandise from doorstops to tobacco pipes.
However, Ally himself isn’t my choice for the great unsung hero of history. Instead, I want to champion the artist who made him such a success. Sloper was technically invented by Charles Ross, editor of the satirical magazine Judy, a rival to the better-known Punch. But Ross was a clumsy artist, and the true creative force behind Ally Sloper was his wife. Isabelle Émilie de Tessier, who worked under the penname Marie Duval, was an actress-turned-artist. Her work had a loose, surrealist and occasionally grotesque quality that perfectly suited the slapstick adventures of Sloper and his pals. By the mid-1870s, Duval was contributing more than a hundred new cartoons to Judy each year. It was her humour and talent that made Sloper such a star.
Ross was quick to credit his wife but, in the decades after their deaths, her contribution was gradually erased. Accounts of Sloper’s origins relegated her to a mere ‘assistant’ or ‘helper’, and her true contribution only came to light fairly recently. It’s a familiar story. Duval stands for all the brilliant Victorian women whose pioneering work was credited to their husbands.
Bob Nicholson, writer, broadcaster and historian at Edge Hill University
Ida B Wells
The activist who challenged segregation and fought lynching
Some people have heard of journalist and NAACP co-founder Ida B Wells, but her badassery still outmatches her level of fame. Born enslaved in 1862, Wells started battling injustice in the US while still only a young woman. In 1884, she successfully sued a railway company after a conductor dragged her from the train for refusing to trade her ticketed seat for the Jim Crow car.
That was not the only time she bodily defied segregation: in the 1913 national women’s suffrage parade, Wells rejected orders for black women to walk at the back. Instead, she waited in the crowd until she could slip into the parade and join the white women of her state’s delegation.
The fight against lynching was the defining endeavour of Wells’s life. Defenders of the gruesome practice claimed that it was merely a response to black crime. Wells knew better – especially after a number of black men in Tennessee were killed by white storeowners. She combated misinformation with data, revealing through statistics that lynchings arose most often from economic rivalries and political terror. She published horrifying accounts in exposés such as A Red Record and launched an international campaign, lecturing in Great Britain about American ‘barbarism’ and spurring the founding of the London Anti-Lynching Committee.
For decades, Wells waged war with facts and pen, even as she founded numerous organisations for women’s and civil rights. A “sword among lions”, as historian Paula Giddings dubbed her, Wells spent her life causing what later activists would call “good trouble”.
Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[This was one of the most brutal battles of WW2 – so why have you never heard of it?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/battle-of-hill-170-arakan-offensive/ 2026-10-06T17:01:57.000Z 2026-10-06T17:01:57.000Z When the men of 44 Commando occupied a position called Pinner near Kangaw, in western Burma, they dug in and waited. The knew the opposing Japanese forces were nearby. Why were they not attacking?
“It was almost eerily empty. Tensions were high,” explains historian Lucy Betteridge-Dyson, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
The wait didn’t last too long. After darkness fell, artillery opened fire from the surrounding rice paddies, with shells bursting among the trees above the commandos. “There is a very brief barrage, and then it stops. It stops completely.”
But that brief silence was only a prelude to further conflict, and infantry attacks quickly followed, bringing Japanese soldiers into the defenders’ trenches. Pinner was one position in a wider struggle around Kangaw in January 1945, remembered chiefly for its climax on nearby Hill 170. The stakes extended beyond these small patches of high ground: control of them could determine whether Japanese troops retained a crucial route of withdrawal.
That night’s fighting at Pinner was an early phase of the Kangaw operation, distinct from the major assault on Hill 170 a week later.
The Burma campaign
Three years earlier, it had been the British and their allies who were retreating.
Japan invaded Burma, now Myanmar, in January 1942. Burma stood between Japanese forces advancing through south-east Asia and British India. Its loss would expose India’s eastern approaches and disrupt the overland supply route to China, which was also fighting Japan.
The ensuing Allied retreat covered roughly 1,000 miles. British, Indian and Chinese troops withdrew under conditions of exhaustion, disease and collapsing communications. Rangoon, Burma’s principal port, fell in March.
“[The Allied forces] were completely kicked out of Burma, back to the borders with British India,” says Betteridge-Dyson. This retreat was followed by a prolonged process of “getting to grips with this new enemy, the Imperial Japanese Army”.
That required understanding the landscape as well as Japanese tactics. Because Burma, she explains, “isn't just jungle”.
“It's mountains, it's open plains, and you've got to deal with the climate. So you've got to deal with malaria, you've got to deal with the heat, the monsoons.”
By 1944, improved training, supply arrangements and leadership were changing Allied prospects. General William Slim, commanding the Fourteenth Army, and Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the supreme Allied commander in South East Asia, helped rebuild confidence. The victories at Imphal and Kohima that year defeated Japan’s offensive into India and demonstrated that its armies could be beaten.
Previously, Betteridge-Dyson explains, rumours had presented Japanese soldiers as “these supermen, these terrifying jungle fighters”. Now the men increasingly believed: “We can win this.”
The next challenge was to turn that confidence into an advance.
The Arakan offensive
On Burma’s western coast lay Arakan, separated from the country’s central plains by the Arakan Yoma mountains. The limited routes across this barrier made roads and passes particularly valuable. Capturing coastal airfields would also support operations inland.
Here, Lieutenant General Philip Christison’s XV Indian Corps conducted an offensive involving British commandos, Indian formations and other Allied troops. Waterways offered a means of bypassing difficult ground and threatening Japanese positions from unexpected directions.
“This was done basically in a series of amphibious landings,” explains Betteridge-Dyson.
Kangaw was so significant because of its road. Japanese forces used it for communications, supplies and withdrawal towards a mountain crossing.
“Because there were so few lateral road links, it was a big fight between the Japanese and the British as to who was going to control these,” she says. “They were very, very important.”
On 22 January 1945, 3 Commando Brigade landed south of Kangaw. These specialist assault troops included both army and Royal Marine commandos. Mangrove creeks and rice paddies complicated movement, while Japanese-held high ground stood between the landing area and the road. No 1 Commando secured Hill 170; 44 Commando occupied Pinner the following day.
“The chaps came ashore. This audacious landing caught the Japanese entirely by surprise,” says Betteridge-Dyson.
The following bombardment brought incredible danger from above. Shells exploding in branches produced “tree bursts”, scattering metal fragments and splintered wood over positions that offered better protection against blasts at ground level.
And the pauses between barrages were deliberate.
“They're trying to unnerve the commandos,” Betteridge-Dyson explains. “They're trying to get them to break their position. They're trying to get them to reveal themselves.”
Close-combat warfare
Eventually, the Japanese infantry climbed towards the defenders.
“It gets down to really nitty-gritty hand-to-hand fighting. You've got suicidal attacks from the Japanese. They're coming in with grenades on sticks and throwing themselves into the frontline trenches.”
The commandos organised their positions for defence in every direction. Tin cans provided improvised warning devices; heavily armed men covered the corners of their defensive perimeter. Remaining in position, and resisting the impulse to fire at every sound, was essential.
Firsthand accounts describe Japanese “jitter parties”: men attempting to unsettle defenders and draw fire that would disclose their positions.
“They're calling out to the commandos, ‘We know where you are. Come out.’”
Betteridge-Dyson also describes accounts of attackers wearing captured green berets to provoke the commandos. Such incidents added an emotional strain to the practical difficulty of distinguishing an approaching enemy from movement in the darkness.
“And they did amazingly manage to do so,” she says of the men holding their fire. “They waited.”
The assault on Hill 170
The wider battle continued, and Indian infantry and tanks reinforced the landing, and the struggle to dominate the road intensified. On 31 January, Japanese troops launched a major assault against Hill 170. Losing the hill would threaten the Allied foothold behind the troops operating towards Kangaw.
At its northern end, Lieutenant George Knowland of No 1 Commando commanded a platoon of 24 men. His Victoria Cross citation records repeated attacks, mounting casualties and his efforts to keep the position fighting.
- Read more | How and when did WW2 end?
When a Bren gun crew was wounded, Knowland took over the weapon. Later he used a light mortar, then a rifle and a submachine gun as attackers closed in. He was mortally wounded. His platoon continued resisting; its stand lasted 12 hours before relief. Knowland was 22.
Other commandos and Indian troops helped sustain the defence. “By the evening of 31 January, the assault had been defeated, and the surviving Japanese attackers were withdrawing.” Their attempt to dislodge the commandos had failed.
Hill 170 formed part of a much larger offensive, dependent on infantry, artillery, naval transport, aircraft and supply services working together. But the contrast with the 1942 retreat was substantial. Allied troops were now landing behind Japanese positions, threatening their communications and holding their ground through determined counterattacks.
The fighting around Kangaw showed what years of adaptation to the Asian landscapes of war had achieved, and how much was still demanded of the men in the trenches.
Lucy Betteridge-Dyson was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Charlotte Vosper <![CDATA["The Iraq War was a disaster": a historian's view on the modern Middle East]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-iraq-war-was-a-disaster-a-historians-view-on-the-modern-middle-east/ 2026-10-05T13:24:52.000Z 2026-10-05T15:00:09.000Z Charlotte Vosper: You begin your new book with Abdulaziz’s raid on Riyadh in 1902, a major event in the foundation of Saudi Arabia. Why?
Simon Sebag Montefiore: Virtually all histories of the Arab world start with the traditional Levant – Jerusalem, Lebanon, Syria – or Constantinople; anywhere but Saudi Arabia. Yet Saudi is really the centre of the Middle East. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina are in Saudi Arabia, so the Gulf has become the heart of the Arab and Islamic worlds. I began my book with Riyadh to signal that this is very much an Arab-centric history of the modern Middle East. Plus I think that Abdulaziz Ibn Saud’s raid is one of the best stories – like something out of Lawrence of Arabia.
What powers were at play there at the turn of the 20th century?
In 1900, the Middle East was really another world – and that’s the central point of this book: to get across just how recently the Middle East, as we know it today, was created.
At the turn of the century, half of the Middle East was ruled by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The other half was ruled by the British – the Trucial States (essentially, what’s now the United Arab Emirates), plus places such as Aden, along with Egypt. France ruled Algeria and Tunisia. There were virtually no independent Arab states except central Arabia.
What happened in the Middle East when those imperial powers fought the First World War?
First of all, most people forget that a large part of the First World War was fought in the Middle East. Britain suffered some major disasters in the region – defeat at the Dardanelles, surrender at Kut in Iraq – and it’s often forgotten how resilient the Ottoman empire really was.
More importantly, the war was also a major turning point for the Middle East. With the western front in a desperate state, Britain promised swathes of Ottoman territory to other powers and groups including France, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Jews, the Italians, the Armenians, the Kurds and, above all, Russia. So there were many competing claims to Middle Eastern territory.
One of these promises was the Balfour Declaration of 1917. By the early 20th century, the ancient Jewish desire to return to the Holy Land and the longstanding connection to Jerusalem had inspired a political movement, and Jews – like other nations – sought to create a homeland with a shared religion and language in Palestine. Jewish leaders successfully persuaded the British, French and Americans that one of the entities to be carved from the Ottoman empire should encompass this Jewish ‘national home’. Zionists envisaged this as a land of socialist farming communities under British rule or an Arab monarchy, or a single state shared with the Palestinian Arabs.
In the event, the British and the French divvied up the whole Middle East between them. It was decided that the British would get Iraq and Palestine, and the French took Greater Syria (Lebanon and Syria). Constantinople would be ruled by the Allies, while the Greeks and Italians got half of today’s Turkey, with Kurdish and Armenian states in the east. The British and French provinces were called ‘mandates’: Middle Eastern states that would be under British or French control while the peoples prepared for full statehood. As we can see today in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Yemen, Libya and Sudan, the nation-state structure isn’t necessarily suited to the incredibly complex, multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian patchwork that is the Middle East.
- Read more | “The early 2000s was a strange era of fear and terror”: remembering the Iraq War 20 years on
How did Middle Eastern people respond to the imposed mandates?
Not well. They were extremely disappointed – they’d swapped one empire for another. The state of Iraq, for example, followed a British mandate in 1920 – but, though the British initially promised freedom to the Iraqis, they changed their minds and decided to keep Iraq as a client state. The Iraqis certainly didn’t want to be ruled by Britain, so they launched a huge rebellion against their new mandatory power, which the British brutally crushed. Similarly, the Syrians didn’t want to be ruled by the French, and rebelled in 1925. In 1919, the Egyptians launched a revolution that also resulted in defeat by the British.
You describe the Second World War as the start of a new Middle East. Why?
The Second World War brought about the realisation that the west needed to give independence to the Arab world. During the war, the British occupied southern Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon but, with the European powers financially exhausted by 1945, and the increasing waves of nationalist movements, several of the countries that now make up the Middle East were created as independent nation states. Syria became fully independent in 1946 and, with the termination of the British mandate for Palestine, Israel was created in 1948. Turkey had already formed in 1923, and the British mandate over Iraq had ended in 1932.
Following the world wars, a new Middle East was born – with varying degrees of success. Many of these new states proved either ungovernable or dominated by autocrats – and that’s another of the central debates that runs through the book: who or what should we blame for the failure of many of these states? Is it their corrupt oligarchical dictatorial rulers? Or the imperial powers that created the states? Does it come down to Arab culture or Jewish nationalism? Was it the creation of Israel that poisoned the whole Middle East and made it ungovernable? Or was it the Cold War, and the interference of the Americans and the Soviets, that undermined the Middle Eastern state system? These are all vital questions.
Did new ideologies or identities emerge in these newly established nation states?
With the new states came the rise of Arab nationalism, particularly the ideology of pan-Arabism. This is the idea that the Arab world should be ruled by one state, and it’s a natural reaction to the division of the Middle East by borders drawn by the imperial powers. What’s interesting, though, is that the former imperial powers also embraced Arab nationalism. They wanted to create strong Arab states, and it was actually Britain that sponsored the creation of the Arab League, which promoted the idea that the separate states should act together as a community.
For the next 30 years after independence, pan-Arabism became the ruling ideology among Arab leaders including Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and its greatest champion, Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Of them, Nasser was the most successful and popular; at his apogee, he united Egypt with Syria as the United Arab Republic in 1958. (Three years later, Syria seceded.)
If pan-Arabism had such powerful political proponents, why did it decline?
In reality, the Arab world is much less monolithic than sometimes we in the west like to think. The different states and regions all had their own dialects, agendas and circumstances, and it’s questionable whether a single Arab state could ever have held together.
It also failed badly, in both governance and war. In the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt fought Israel in a series of regional conflicts – and each time, Israel won out. The creation of Israel in itself was a huge blow to Arab pride, and its military victories undermined the confidence of the surrounding new nation states. In 1948, the UN partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish sectors, and the State of Israel was declared. Five Arab countries immediately invaded Israel but, with their war aims divided, Israel was able to defeat them all. Then, in 1967, Nasser hubristically threatened war – and was defeated spectacularly by Israel, discrediting Nasserism.
By the 1970s, pan-Arabism was declining and a new ideology, Islamism, was about to explode.
You’ve also described 1979 as a turning point in this history. Why was that year such a decisive moment?
It brought an ideological shift in the Middle East. Islamic anti-western radicalism had always existed in various forms, but in 1979 an Iranian Shia variant mobilised the belief that Islam should govern society as well as the state, in resistance to the west and pro-western versions of Islam. In January of that year, a huge popular revolt overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah, the last Shah of Iran, who had ruled Iran for 37 years.
When the country fell to Ayatollah Khomeini, it shook the whole Middle East. Khomeini was an incredibly brutal and oppressive figure with a vision of Islamic rule that had never really been put into practice before. His idea was that, while Shiite Muslims waited for the Occulted Imam to return as Mahdi (Messiah), a trusted member of the Islamic clergy should rule Iran. With this Islamist ideology, Khomeini created an extraordinary system that was really a sacred monarchy ruled by one man – himself. That is still the system ruling Iran today.
So, first of all, a new system was created in 1979 in Iran – a Shia theocracy, a sacred dictatorship – and, at the same time, the revolution also unleashed a radical Islamism on the rest of the Muslim world. This was a fusion of Sunni Islamist radicalism, Arab nationalism and Arab resistance, making it distinctly anti-western.
If 1979 unleashed the ideological movement, we now see its manifestation in all sorts of ways. Radical Islamism became a resistance movement against a version of moderate Islam that was open to western ideas in pro-American states such as Egypt, Jordan, UAE and, to an extent, Saudi Arabia. Today, we see the influence of Khomeini’s Islamism in Hezbollah in Lebanon and in Hamas in Gaza.
Following the end of the Cold War, did the Middle Eastern states start to become more stable?
No – and where it looked stable, that was due to the stagnant, oppressive rule of long-reigning dictators: Gaddafi, Saddam, Mubarak, Assad. It’s a question that you could ask at any point during the history of the region – or, as I’ve called it, The Cauldron – and you’d get the same answer. This is a story of continued tumultuous bubbling, which is why I gave the book its title.
Having said that, we do see something different after the fall of the Soviet Union: the emergence of the US as a unipolar paramount power in the Middle East. To be fair to the Americans, they did try to use this power in a positive way to create a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Though these attempts are now discredited among many people, they nearly worked. Israel and Palestine needed to recognise the other’s existence, national narratives and possible Palestinian statehood – and, for around two decades (1990–2012), there were people in both nations who were willing to do so. The Madrid Conference took place in 1991 under George HW Bush, and the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 under Bill Clinton, but ultimately peace fell through. Israel-Palestine peace looks incredibly distant now. I still believe that a pathway to two republics, two nations, is the only way – but that means many things.
The rest of the Middle East also didn’t gain stability. It is important to note, though, that by that stage the Middle Eastern states were no longer dominated by imperialist powers, and the end of superpower competition gave them more space to assert themselves. After the end of the Cold War, they were freer than they ever had been. This idea – that the Middle Eastern states were not simply subject to greater powers but had their own agency – is another key theme in the book. The Middle Eastern states really recreated themselves, and they’ve been independent for almost 80 years now.
How much of the recent turbulence in the Middle East do you think stems from the attacks on 9/11?
A lot of it. The story of Osama bin Laden and his ‘Planes Operation’, as he called it, is just extraordinary. It was intended to draw the US into the Middle East – and it worked. When Joe Biden flew to Israel after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, he said of 9/11: “We overreacted”. There are arguments to say that’s true.
There was definitely a case for invading Afghanistan in 2001, but the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was, I think, totally misconceived. It was based on false intelligence, but even if you believe that the invasion was justified, it was utterly misgoverned. The Iraq War was a disaster, its main effect being to empower a rising Middle Eastern state: Iran. The US knocked out the other great power in the Middle East, Iraq, and the country never recovered. To be clear, I’m not nostalgic for Saddam, but I think there’s something to be said for a measured response, particularly in the Middle East.
Why do you think that democracy has made few inroads in the region?
There are all sorts of reasons across the different Middle Eastern countries. I don’t think for a moment you could say that the Arab world is not suited to democracy, but there is a habitual resort to autocracy. I think this comes from the belief that only an autocrat is strong enough to hold together disparate states and resist Islamism, which often resorts to armed revolution. That’s combined with a long Middle Eastern tradition of one-man rule – sultanates, kingdoms. The best-ruled countries in the Middle East are actually the absolute monarchies that weren’t created by the west but grew organically – such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Morocco.
Conflict remains ongoing in the Middle East. Do you think that it is somehow an inherently violent place?
I don’t think that’s really true. If you look at the Middle East across the 20th century, the number of deaths never came close to the bloodletting of the world wars in Europe, or Stalin’s Red Terror, or Hitler’s Holocaust, or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Statistics are sometimes used in a distasteful parlour game of ‘who’s worst’, and I don’t want to play. But, if you look at the pure numbers of people killed in the entire Israel-Arab-Palestine conflict from 1948 to today, it’s a mere iota of those killed just on the western front in the First World War.
That said, every death is a tragedy. The Middle East is a very turbulent place – a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian patchwork with so many interwoven layers of tension piled on top of each other. There’s nothing quite like it.
- Read more | The overlooked history of Muslims in Europe
Why is understanding this history so important?
The truth matters in itself. Its moral lessons matter, and anything based on lies and conspiracies is brittle and will crumble. Our societies are successful because we respect facts, sources, truth – and that encompasses history. In the post-religious, post-Christian world of the west, history has assumed a moral importance that allows it to be a propellant of political power, similar to the power that religion once had.
And for history to matter, it has to be right. That’s why this book aims to show how the present Middle East –19 states in all – came to be, and how to understand the nuances that created it. I don’t just mean Israel and Palestine. You can’t really understand Saudi Arabia unless you realise that it’s the third Saudi Arabian kingdom, not the first. You can’t really understand what’s happening in Iran unless you understand Twelver Shiism and who the last shah was. You can’t understand Turkey without understanding Ataturk.
In a way, I think it’s strange that this book didn’t exist before. There are histories of the Arabs, of the Jews and of the Turks, but no one had put it together. I’ve tried to do it in a nuanced and balanced way that is entirely based on fact – though myths and conspiracies are important, too. But I also want this to be a great read. So you can read it as the history of how the Middle East came to be what it is today – or you can just enjoy this extraordinary story.
Simon Sebag Montefiore is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and historian. His previous books include Jerusalem: The Biography (W&N, 2011, revised in 2024) and The World: A Family History (W&N, 2022)
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Hitler ordered my father’s death – but an SS general spared his life]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/george-lascelles-harewood-gottlob-berger-colditz-ww2/ 2026-09-27T19:56:01.000Z 2026-09-27T20:00:06.000Z It was April 1945. As the Second World War entered its final stages, my father, First Lieutenant George Lascelles of the Grenadier Guards, was imprisoned in Oflag IV-C, Colditz Castle.
The prisoners there called it a straflager – a punishment camp – much to the irritation of their German captors, who insisted it was just an ordinary PoW camp but with better security. It was where they sent particularly troublesome prisoners, the habitual escapers and those considered to be deutschfeindlich, hostile to German ways.
My father, just 22 years old, didn’t see himself as any of those. He had been a prisoner for less than a year and had never tried to escape. What he was, though, was well connected. His maternal uncle was King George VI, and he was one of a small group of young British officers being held together in Colditz, all of them related to members of the establishment: the son of the Viceroy of India, the nephew of Clementine Churchill, and so on.
The Germans called them the ‘Prominente’. They were hostages, kept together for who knows what purpose when the war ended: perhaps as bargaining chips for captured high-ranking Nazis, or as human shields in Hitler’s rumoured last redoubt in the mountains of southern Germany.
For the other prisoners in Colditz, the sound of the Allied guns was the sound of approaching freedom. For the Prominente, it signalled the moment of maximum danger. Sure enough, just a couple of days before the Americans liberated Colditz, they were roused from their beds in the middle of the night, loaded onto a bus and driven south, destination unknown.
Fear and uncertainty
The Prominente were on the road for more than two weeks. It was a time of fear and uncertainty. They never knew where they were going to be the next day or whether that day might be their last.
After being transported to another medieval castle prison in the town of Tittmoning, they encountered a Dutch officer who had a plan that might buy them a little time – time, they hoped, for the approaching Allied armies to arrive.
- Listen | Ben Macintyre discusses his book Escape from Colditz
A small chamber had been excavated in the thick castle walls, in which five of the men could hide. A sixth, Giles Romilly, would escape with one of the Dutch prisoners in a pre-arranged plan. Hopefully the Germans would think they had all escaped.
It almost worked. It was four days before they were discovered, and Romilly and his Dutch companion made it all the way to Munich, arriving there a matter of days before the Americans liberated the city.
The Prominente were watched even more closely after this, with their guards now Waffen-SS rather than regular soldiers. So when they were moved to a run-down camp just outside the alpine town of Markt Pongau, they thought it was a concentration camp and that this was to be their end.
After a couple of days at the new site, they received an unexpected visitor: Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, the SS general recently appointed as Germany’s head of prisoner-of-war affairs. He showed them a letter from Hitler. It contained a list of their names, ranks and PoW numbers, with a short note attached: “On no account must the listed prisoners be allowed to fall into Allied hands.” It was their death warrant.
Berger had other ideas, however. The order was pointless and certainly illegal, he told them, and he – for the first time in his long military career – was not going to obey it. Instead, he was going to arrange their safe passage to the Allied front line, only a few hours’ drive away.
“I ask for nothing in return,” he added, “except that you remember this moment when the war is over.” And he presented the most senior member of the group, John Elphinstone, with a gift: an ornamental pistol in a red leather case. “This is,” he said, “of my goodwill the proof.”
Years later, Michael Alexander – one of the other Prominente and the cousin of a senior British general – described the moment in vivid detail:
“In the box, resplendent on a couch of red velvet, lay an enormous automatic pistol about the same size as a Colt .45. This splendidly flashy weapon was inlaid with ivory and enamel; its squat barrel was elaborately chased with golden oak-leaves in high relief. On the butt was the enamelled monogram of the SS and a small plate with Berger’s signature.”
Within days, the Prominente were home. Berger, on the other hand, was arrested, interrogated and tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and his lawyer asked Elphinstone to write to the appeals court on behalf of the Prominente, explaining what Berger had done for them.
This affidavit was an important factor in Berger’s sentence being heavily reduced. Twenty-five years became 10 and, with further time off for good behaviour, he was released by the end of 1951.
Berger then settled in the small town of Gerstetten in southwest Germany, where his wife, two children and two grandchildren were living. He died there in 1975, still connected to many figures on the far right and still bitter at his treatment by the Allies. He said he regretted ever having trusted his long-time boss, Heinrich Himmler.
But why had he decided to spare the lives of my father and his fellow Prominente? Remorse? A belated onset of compassion? Or simply self-interest?
After Colditz
The Prominente returned to their old lives, or at least a version of them. My father was the youngest of the group, still at school when the war began, and just 22 when he returned to England. The next six years – 1945–51, when Berger was in prison – were perhaps the most tumultuous of his life.
- Read more | The Nuremberg Trials: the real history behind the post-WW2 tribunal
After leaving the army, he served as an aide to the governor general of Canada before graduating from Cambridge and getting a job in the business about which he was most passionate – music, especially opera.
His father died in 1947, and he inherited the family title, becoming the 7th Earl of Harewood. By the end of 1949 he was married, and his first child was born in 1950. That’s me.
The return home was not so straightforward for all the other Prominente. Some of the men almost certainly suffered from what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), though the condition wasn’t recognised then. “Pull yourself together and get on with it,” they would have been told.
Dawyck Haig, for example, son of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force during the First World War, wrote in his memoirs that he had “a sort of breakdown”.
Giles Romilly, who had escaped from Tittmoning, was also haunted by his wartime experiences. “My five years of absence were like a deep shaft,” he wrote. “I at the bottom, able to see the free people overhead, not able to make them see or hear me.” He died of an overdose of barbiturates in California in 1967.
Michael Alexander, meanwhile, led a colourful postwar life in London, entertaining fellow members of what became known as the Chelsea Set in his flat in Eaton Square and at his restaurant just off the King’s Road.
The hunt for the pistol
Years later, I met several other descendants of the Prominente. There was one question that I asked each of them: did they know what had become of Berger’s pistol?
I had been intrigued by it from the moment I started working on my new book, Out of Colditz. It seemed like a classic MacGuffin – a plot device in a movie that helps drive the story but is otherwise unimportant to the audience (the Maltese Falcon, for example). The story of Berger and the Prominente would have been much the same without the pistol, but the weapon seemed to embody the theatricality of their brief, strange encounter.
Berger had presented the pistol to John Elphinstone, so I set out to learn more about him. Elphinstone was a countryman, a fisherman and a keen shot. After the war, he returned to manage the family estate in Scotland. I assume he took the pistol home with him, though I could find no evidence of this or of what happened to it next.
- Read more | I’ve just been inside a Nazi monster’s mansion – and what I found there was deeply haunting
Its last known sighting was on the popular TV programme This is Your Life in 1985, when my father was the subject and Michael Alexander – a guest on the show along with a couple of the other Prominente – produced it from his pocket with a theatrical flourish. “Do you remember this, George?” he asked.
Elphinstone had died in 1975, so Alexander seemed to me to be the most likely holder of the gun. However, Alexander had died without leaving a will, and his friends had no idea of the weapon’s whereabouts. It was another dead end.
So if Alexander or his descendants didn’t have the pistol, who did? Elphinstone’s family seemed the most likely. He never married, so the title, the estate and the contents of the family home passed to his nephew, Jamie. Jamie married Willa Chetwode shortly after inheriting, and they had four children together before Jamie died in 1994, aged just 41.
Willa was left rattling around with four young children in a large house that held unhappy memories for her. Within a year she had sold the house, moved out and put its contents into storage. There it all remained, untouched, until a fire at the storage unit destroyed much of it. Did that include the pistol, I wondered?
When I finally tracked down Willa, who had since remarried, I asked her whether she had any idea where the pistol was. “Oh yes,” she replied. “I know exactly where it is. I’ve got it here in my safe.”
A special weapon with a strange history
I drove to meet Willa and her husband Thomas Lloyd at their home in west Wales, getting hopelessly lost in the narrow lanes around their house and arriving late, hot and flustered. “Don’t worry about that,” said Willa. “I expect you want to see the pistol.”
Thomas held up a red leather case. He clicked open the brass catches on the lid. It was, in its own small way, a dramatic moment. The lining of the box was a faded yellow, not the red that Michael Alexander had described. The case was a little battered, the engraved brass barrel quite tarnished and the ivory handle discoloured, but the Nazi eagle, swastika, SS insignia and Berger’s signature were very much as originally stated.
I lifted the pistol carefully out of the case. It was smaller than I had expected, settling easily into my palm, but heavier too. I checked the safety catch and the trigger. Both were jammed solid – hardly surprising, as it hadn’t been handled for a long time and had probably never been fired.
There was something almost comically theatrical about the way it had been presented, but the SS insignia and the swastika gave it a sinister edge. As often happens if you’ve been looking for something for a long time, the moment of discovery can be an anti-climax, but there was a tickle of emotion there, too, as I tried to picture the strange scene when the presentation was made.
“Wow!” I said, rather feebly. “So it really does exist.” Willa smiled ruefully. “Yes. It’s been sitting there all this time, and I’ve never known what to do with it.”
We talked about what might happen next. We agreed that a museum, probably the Imperial War Museum, would be the pistol’s best destination. It would be a permanent home for this “splendidly flashy” weapon, as Michael Alexander described it – a special weapon with a strange history.
As I write, Elphinstone’s family and the Imperial War Museum are currently in discussions. There could be no more suitable home for a weapon that, to me, has come to represent the extraordinary encounter between Berger and the Prominente, and its enduring impact on the lives of all concerned.
David Lascelles, 8th Earl of Harewood, is a BAFTA-winning film and television producer. He is the author of Out of Colditz: My Father the POW and the Nazi Who Controlled His Fate (Profile Books, 2026)
]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[Did Hitler really shoot himself? Here's why the Führer's death is more complicated than you think]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/how-did-adolf-hitler-die-gunshot-cyanide/ 2026-09-18T17:15:04.000Z 2026-09-18T17:15:00.000Z On 30 April 1945, as Soviet troops fought their way through Berlin, Adolf Hitler’s world had contracted to a bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, the headquarters of his government.
The dictator who had pursued an empire across Europe was now sheltering underground. With him was Eva Braun, his long-standing partner, whom he had married only the previous day. That afternoon, both died by suicide. Their bodies were carried into the garden outside and burned. MI5’s account of the bunker witnesses describes the hurried destruction amid Soviet shellfire.
The broad outline is well established. But precisely how Hitler killed himself has proved harder to settle.
Witnesses pointed towards a gunshot. A Soviet autopsy report attributed his death to cyanide poisoning. Skull fragments apparently offering physical evidence of a bullet wound brought complications of their own.
For historian Caroline Sharples, author of The Long Death of Adolf Hitler, these disagreements reveal the difficulty of reconstructing an event when the evidence was damaged and dispersed, and part of the struggle to determine how the Nazi dictator would be remembered.
What the witnesses saw
The case for a gunshot rests on several kinds of testimony from people inside the bunker.
“Some witnesses talk about hearing a gunshot,” Sharples explains, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “Witnesses who happen to enter the study after his suicide talk about seeing the pistol on the floor.”
Others described the scene and Hitler’s body.
“People have described, in very consistent terms, the size of the blood splatter in the room, and there are also descriptions from witnesses who saw his corpse in the immediate aftermath, and they talk about the blood to his head.”
These were observations of the immediate aftermath, rather than accounts of someone watching Hitler pull the trigger. Nevertheless, their cumulative significance is substantial.
“So collectively, all of those things add up to this idea that he shot himself.”
Gathering this evidence required investigators to trace members of Hitler’s scattered entourage. In autumn 1945, British intelligence officer and historian Hugh Trevor-Roper questioned witnesses and examined accounts gathered by the Allies. His investigation concluded that Hitler had killed himself; his book, The Last Days of Hitler, followed in 1947.
But Western investigators lacked access to crucial physical evidence. Soviet forces had occupied the site where the bodies were burned. The witnesses and the remains were being examined through separate investigations, controlled by powers whose wartime partnership was already deteriorating.
The Soviet case for poison
More than two decades later, a different account reached Western readers.
“When the Russians published their autopsy report in 1968, they talk about finding fragments of glass among the dental remains, which is indicative, of course, of someone potentially biting down on a cyanide capsule,” says Sharples.
An autopsy is an examination of a body to establish the cause of death. Here, however, investigators were dealing with badly burned remains, limiting what could be reconstructed. The reported glass fragments offered evidence of possible poison use, but did not automatically explain away the testimony about a gunshot.
The report also arrived with political baggage.
By 1968, the wartime alliance had given way to the Cold War: a prolonged confrontation between the Soviet Union and Western powers, particularly the United States. Germany itself was divided into rival states. Accounts of the Nazi defeat carried implications for the authority and prestige of its victors.
“The Soviets are very keen to put forward the idea that if Hitler is dead, he has to die in a cowardly, weak way,” Sharples explains, “to, again, puncture any potential heroic myth-making before it can take hold.”
That distinction reflected a political judgement about supposedly honourable and dishonourable deaths. Neither method conferred dignity on Hitler’s actions. But shaping the account of his end offered another opportunity to demolish any positive image cultivated by his regime. In effect, it could be PR.
“This is part of the reason why the West is a bit sceptical of this autopsy report, because it doesn't align with their narrative that they've already established, that he shot himself.”
A skull with an uncertain history
The Soviet archives also contained evidence that seemed to support the gunshot account: fragments of skull, including a piece bearing an apparent bullet hole. But these bones had a different history from the dental remains.
“These skull bones are not discovered at the same time as the rest of the corpse,” Sharples explains. “And indeed, they're discovered a whole year later by a different intelligence body.”
Their recovery in 1946 created a fundamental problem of provenance: the documented history connecting an object to the person it supposedly belonged to.
“On the surface, you think, ‘Ah, brilliant. This will prove the idea that he did shoot himself.’ But the provenance of these bones is challenging.”
The same location did not necessarily mean the same body.
“We don't have anything to definitively link it to the original corpse, which had, in the meantime after autopsy, been destroyed further and buried, and then reburied. So, we can't match the two.”
The skull fragments were also held in a separate archive from the teeth. Their preservation introduced further difficulties.
“The conditions in which those skull fragments have been kept have not been ideal, shall we say, over the years.”
When apparent proof creates more questions
A later American documentary subsequently gave the controversy new momentum, claiming that examination of the skull material indicated it belonged to a younger woman.
For Sharples, that claim requires caution too.
“Now, we can't verify that either. That work hasn't been peer-reviewed or published, but it is enough to set the whole question of ‘how did Hitler die?’ running again in the media.”
“The skull is interesting, though, because it has been held up in exhibitions and it's labelled as Hitler's skull,” Sharples says. “But we are not quite sure. Let's just say that it's not so convincing.”
The teeth offer firmer ground. A 1973 dental study compared distinctive dental features documented in the Soviet findings with wartime X-rays and interrogation records, supporting Hitler’s identification.
As Sharples explains, “there's a clearer chain of evidence between that and the rest of the remains and the whole discovery process in 1945.”
Identifying a dead man and establishing precisely how he died are different tasks. The teeth support identification; witness testimony supplies much of the evidence for a gunshot. Possible poison use does not, by itself, exclude a shooting.
“So I think, with that in mind, we probably come down more on the side that Hitler died by gunshot,” Sharples concludes. Did he bite down on a cyanide pill simultaneously? It’s possible.
Either way, while Hitler’s life ended in Berlin, the contest over how to describe his death continued long afterwards.
Caroline Sharples was speaking to Charlotte Vosper on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[The Vikings mutilated and maimed their defeated enemies. So why did Alfred the Great spare their leader?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/alfred-the-great-versus-guthrum-viking-leader/ 2026-09-11T10:20:54.000Z 2026-09-11T10:20:54.000Z How should a leader who has achieved victory on the blood-soaked field of battle treat their defeated opponent?
Throughout history, the usual answer has been: without mercy.
Take two examples. In AD 70, Roman forces crushed the First Jewish Revolt and retook Jerusalem, devastating the city, destroying the Second Temple – the holiest site in Jewish life – and imposing an onerous religious tax.
And in 1919, after defeat in the First World War, Germany was forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles – accepting loss of territory, severe military restrictions and huge reparation payments.
In both instances, the defeated were humiliated, politically subdued and economically debilitated – arguably fuelling renewed conflict in decades to come. Hence Winston Churchill’s declaration after the Second World War that the Allies should show “In victory, magnanimity” to halt an ongoing cycle of violence.
He wasn’t the first to see the wisdom in this approach. As early as the ninth century, an Anglo-Saxon king who paved the way for the foundation of England came to the same conclusion.
How Alfred the Great defeated the Viking invaders
King Alfred of Wessex – widely known today as ‘the Great’ – ruled at a time when Norse invaders seemed set to topple the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Britain. Wessex was, as the cliché goes, the last stronghold resisting the Great Heathen Army – a marauding force of Vikings battering the British Isles.
One by one, the kingdoms fell: Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia. By the time the Viking forces – now led by the enigmatic warlord Guthrum – turned their attention to Wessex, the outcome seemed inevitable.
The first of many pivotal moments came at the end of the Christmas period in 878. Alfred, a staunch Christian, was at Chippenham in early January, no doubt pondering how best to repel the Vikings. Surely he had a moment of respite: not only was it a holy season, but also winter – not the time for warfare.
Guthrum did not agree.
“This Viking army doesn’t play by the rules,” says Dr Eleanor Barraclough, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “It attacks at the time of a very holy Christian holiday.” Guthrum’s force launched its attack on Chippenham, probably on the night of 6 January – the feast of Epiphany – taking Alfred by surprise. He fled in panic, taking a small warband, and hid in the marshes of Somerset.
During his short time in the wilderness, Alfred gathered the remaining strands of Wessex resistance, bringing together disparate warbands and marshalling his people. With his renewed military force, he marched east to confront his foe, winning victory at the battle of Edington in what’s now western Wiltshire. Eventually, “ tired, hungry, cold, despairing, defeated, Guthrum surrenders to Alfred,” says Barraclough.
What did Alfred the Great do with his defeated enemy?
Having regained control of Wessex, how should Alfred treat his defeated foe – the enemy who had taken his land and killed his men? “This is a story that we would expect to end in the death of at least one of the leaders,” says Barraclough. “And it doesn't.”
Faced with his deadly enemy, Alfred instead turned to his Christian faith. He had Guthrum baptised, and sponsored the Viking warlord as his godson. Guthrum took the baptismal name Æthelstan – the same as Alfred’s later grandson – and subsequently ruled East Anglia. Alfred forgave him, “and they feast together for days afterwards,” adds Barraclough. “This is not only a political allyship but the start of what essentially is a personal relationship.”
For their remaining years, Alfred and Guthrum ruled as neighbours, largely in peace. Guthrum embraced Christianity, minted coins in his new name in an Anglo-Saxon style, and ruled in the manner of previous Anglo-Saxon kings.
With the defeat and conversion of Guthrum, the Great Heathen Army’s campaign was essentially brought to an end. Alfred’s war against the pagan men from across the North Sea did not resume in earnest, at least during his lifetime.
Alfred’s actions didn’t demonstrate pure mercy – strategic thinking also played a part. “One of the most useful things you can do with the defeated Viking is to make them an ally,” explains Barraclough. “If you can do that, not only are you cutting off that source of violence, you've also got someone who also is invested in not suffering more Viking attacks. The best way to do that from a Christian perspective – and, as we know, Alfred is a very religious man – is to convert your enemy.”
A pause in the Viking violence
True, the Viking threat later returned to haunt Anglo-Saxon England. Alfred’s own descendants – his daughter Æthelflæd and grandson Æthelstan among them – were forced to face the Vikings at battles such as Brunanburh (in 937), as were later kings such as Edmund Ironside and Æthelred the Unready.
Indeed, in the early 11th century, the mighty Sweyn Forkbeard and Cnut the Great – Danes in the Viking tradition – dominated the Anglo-Saxons completely, becoming kings of England and, under Cnut, bringing the country into the short-lived North Sea empire.
Sweyn Forkbeard’s invasion of England may, at least in part, have been motivated by revenge after Æthelred the Unready had, contrary to the example set by Alfred, ordered the killing of Danes whom he believed had betrayed him – an outburst of violence remembered as the St Brice’s Day Massacre.
In bringing Guthrum onside, rather than killing him and attempting to subjugate his people, Alfred won relative peace for years. And he did it with magnanimity. In his unremittingly violent era, that is an achievement worth reflecting on.
Dr Eleanor Barraclough was speaking to James Osborne on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
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