Medieval

The Viking Age - from 750 to 1050 saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe....

The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in 25 years than the Romans did in 400....

The Crusades is an authoritative, accessible single-volume history of the brutal struggle for the Holy Land in the Middle Ages. Thomas Asbridge—a renowned historian who writes with “maximum vividness” (Joan Acocella, The New Yorker)—covers the years 1095 to 1291 in this big, ambitious...

The New York Times bestseller that tells the story of Britain’s greatest and worst dynasty—“a real-life Game of Thrones” (The Wall Street Journal)—by the author of Powers and Thrones. The first Plantagenet king inherited a blood-soaked kingdom from the Normans and transformed it into...

The 15th century saw the longest and bloodiest series of civil wars in British history. The crown of England changed hands five times as two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty fought....

The 14th century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry; and on the other, a time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world of chaos and the plague....

An essential new history of Central Europe, the contested lands so often at the heart of world history  Central Europe has long been infamous as a region beset by war, a place where empires clashed and world wars began. In The Middle Kingdoms, Martyn Rady offers the definitive history of the...

This erudite book tells the fascinating, often violent story of kings, generals, and the peoples they ruled....

Our image of the Middle Ages—filled with scenes of chivalric tournaments, epic battles, devastating plagues, revered saints, powerful kings, noble knights, and courtly ladies—was not uncovered through objective historical research. Rather, it was largely shaped and even invented in the 20th century.

Templars in America reveals the story of two leading European Templar families who combined forces to create a new commonwealth in America nearly a century before the voyages of Christopher Columbus....

Tom Holland describes how the Arabs emerged to carve out a stupefyingly vast dominion in a matter of decades, overcoming seemingly insuperable odds....

A renowned scholar brings to life medieval England’s most celebrated knight, William Marshal—providing an unprecedented and intimate view of this age and the legendary warrior class that shaped it. Caught on the wrong side of an English civil war and condemned by his father to the gallows at...

These 24 lectures trace a journey from Scandinavia across central Europe to the farthest reaches of the Byzantine and Islamic empires, providing insight to this one-lost era....

“Powerful, rich with details, moving, humane, and full of important lessons for an age when weapons of mass destruction are loose among us.” — Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb The Great Plague is one of the most compelling events in human...

Imagine you could travel back to the 14th century. What would you see? What would you smell? More to the point, where are you going to stay? And what are you going to eat....

In this sweeping yet crisp history, Thomas F. Madden offers a brilliant and compelling narrative of the crusades and their contemporary relevance....

A riveting and authoritative history of the single most important event in English history: The Norman Conquest....

Alison Weir strips away centuries of romantic mythology and prejudice to reveal the lives of England's queens in the century after the Norman Conquest....

Brought to you by Penguin. In Search of the Dark Ages is an unrivalled exploration of the origins of English identity, and the bestselling book that established Michael Wood as one of Britain's leading historians. Now, on the book's 40th anniversary, this fully revised and expanded edition...

A vibrant and illuminating exploration of medieval thinking on women's beauty, sexuality, and behavior....

The definitive history of a powerful family dynasty who dominated Europe for centuries -- from their rise to power to their eventual downfall. Habsburgs ruled much of Europe for centuries. From modest origins as minor German nobles, the family used fabricated documents, invented genealogies...

This is the story of a thousand years, a must-listen narrative history of ambitious aristocrats, family dysfunction, treachery, savage battles, luxury, and madness....

The first major book on Vikings by a Scandinavian author to be published in English reframes the struggle for a North Sea empire and puts listeners in the mindset of Vikings, providing new insight into their goals, values, and what they chose to live and die for....

Read by the author. An extraordinary journey that uncovers historical secrets about England’s forgotten Queen. From Alice Loxton, author of the acclaimed bestseller Eighteen. ‘Alice Loxton is the star of her generation’ – Dan Snow, historian and host of History Hit ‘I loved this...

Historian Chris Wickham defies the conventional view of the Dark Ages in European history with a work of remarkable scope and rigorous yet accessible scholarship. The Inheritance of Rome presents a fresh understanding of the crucible in which Europe would ultimately be created....

If you want to understand what the Crusades were, why they happened, and why they still shape the modern world, this book gives you a clear and grounded explanation. It covers Christian crusading, Islamic expansion, Jerusalem, holy war, and medieval power struggles without turning history into propaganda.

Joan of Arc is one of history’s most famous figures—and one of its most misunderstood. This audiobook presents a historically grounded biography that moves beyond legend to reconstruct Joan’s life through trial records, witness testimony, and modern historical scholarship. It is not historical fiction or mythic retelling, but a serious narrative history of a teenage peasant whose conviction reshaped the course of medieval France. Rising from a remote village during the darkest years of the Hundred Years’ War, Joan claimed divine guidance at a moment of national collapse.

Before Bram Stoker created his fictional vampire, before Hollywood gave the world a caped count with a Transylvanian accent, there was a real man named Dracula. Vlad III of Wallachia earned his epithet "the Impaler" through methods so brutal that they shocked even the violent fifteenth century. His story involves hostage years at the Ottoman court, the murder of his father and brother by treacherous nobles, and a campaign of terror that killed tens of thousands and stopped the most powerful empire on earth in its tracks. The historical Vlad bears almost no resemblance to the vampire who ...

The Fall of Rome: Decline and Transformation — How the Ancient World Became the Medieval The greatest civilization the world had ever seen didn't fall in a day. It took three centuries of plague, civil war, economic collapse, and barbarian pressure — and the story is more complex, more human, and more relevant than you've been told. Rome ruled the Mediterranean for centuries. Sixty million people lived under its laws. Its roads, aqueducts, and cities represented a level of infrastructure that wouldn't be matched for a thousand years. And then it was gone — replaced by a patchwork of ...

Sur les trônes vacants, on pourrait en dire long. À travers l’histoire, de l’Antiquité aux temps plus récents, l’absence d’un héritier et la mort soudaine d’un monarque aimé ont toujours été synonymes de troubles. Quand la place d’un roi est à prendre, nombreux sont les ambitieux à se manifester.