HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-11-24T18:47:54.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Who won the crusades? The causes, death toll, and number of medieval holy wars explained
items: Wanderlust: Bettany Hughes on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
items: Give away your worries, like an ancient Mesopotamian
items: A history of the Bible: who wrote it and when?
items: “I don’t underestimate how difficult it is to satisfy everybody” | Simon Sebag Montefiore on writing the history of Jerusalem
items: Leper Crusaders: how disease-stricken knights forged an army in the Holy Land
items: Michael Wood on Gaza's astonishing cultural heritage
items: North, south, east and west: how ancient civilisations found their bearings before the compass
items: The Iranian embassy siege: an SAS hostage drama in London
items: Michael Wood on the Bangladesh Liberation War

Who won the crusades? The causes, death toll, and number of medieval holy wars explained
type: item
date: 2025-11-24T17:30:10.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Crusades
subject: Historical people
description: Who won the crusades, how many were there, and what caused them? Medieval expert Rebecca Rist answers these major questions, exploring how centuries of religious conflict reshaped the medieval world
encoded: The crusades were a centuries-long sequence of era-defining medieval holy wars that transformed dynamics of power and religious ideas across Europe and the Middle East. But who won the crusades, and just how many crusades were there? Those are two of the questions answered by professor Rebecca Rist, an expert on the crusades and their broader medieval context. Speaking about the topic on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Rist steps into the dust of medieval roads and the heat of besieged cities to explain why these campaigns erupted, what the major expeditions set out to accomplish, how those ambitions played out on the ground, and how the long arc of conflict finally came to an end. Who won the crusades? Overall, the Muslim forces won the crusades, and the Christians lost. However, as Rist explains, while that was the final state of play, the granular details were far from that simple. "The final bastions of the crusader states were lost in 1291 (having been founded originally in 1099) to Muslim forces. In that sense, obviously the Muslims won the crusades and the Christians were defeated. "However, the crusades span a very long period of time, starting with the First Crusade in 1095 and ending with the loss of Acre in 1291. There were many individual crusades within that period, some of which were won by the Christians – by the Western Franks, like the First Crusade – and others by Muslims. For example, the Muslim forces were successful in the Fifth Crusade in capturing Damietta." In other instances, Rist says there were greater degrees of complexity. "In some crusades, we have partial victories. If we take the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart was partially successful, in the sense that he was able to take and maintain Acre. But, of course, he didn't win back Jerusalem with a military victory." <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/06/GettyImages-1186332544-4f0a3d8-e1764009254971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Th…

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Wanderlust: Bettany Hughes on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
type: item
date: 2025-08-01T12:00:07.000Z
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
description: The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were daring and dazzling constructions that have burned bright in the human imagination right up to the modern day. Bettany Hughes follows in the footsteps of the ancients to tell their remarkable stories
encoded: Crawling underneath Egypt’s Great Pyramid, 70 metres down, is an unforgettable experience. On hands and knees in the sand, as the descending tunnel gets narrower and deeper, the bedrock of the Giza Plateau presses in so close you can actually taste it. The rock is salty, because 50 million years ago this was all sea. I am not the first to have had this visceral, time-travelling experience. As well as the Greek and Roman tourists who left graffiti here, this subterranean tunnel, and the chamber which it led to, was described by the ‘father of history’ Herodotus, and some 2,300 years later was explored by the Italian tomb-raider Giovanni Battista Caviglia. Other passages in the Great Pyramid – a huge burial place for Egypt’s King Khufu – were charted by medieval Arabic scientists and desecrated by off-duty Napoleonic soldiers. Built more than 45 centuries ago, this pyramid, the oldest of the famous Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, has always been a catalyst for awe. And it is not alone. Across time, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – the Pyramids at Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria – have really mattered. They mattered so much that, in the epoch after Alexander the Great’s death, a bespoke catalogue, the Laterculi Alexandrini, was generated to group them together. Written in papyrus about 150 BC, it is our oldest extant evidence for a catalogue. We are not sure who created the list, but we do know that it was copied and shared, and that it has inspired poetry, prose and works of art for millennia. Don't miss... Bettany's new three-part docuseries Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is airing on Channel 5 from Saturday 2 August 2025 The precise entries vary a little: in some versions, the walls or an obelisk of Babylon are included; later, the Colosseum is mentioned; the Lighthouse has sometimes bee…

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Give away your worries, like an ancient Mesopotamian
type: item
date: 2025-06-07T08:30:06.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: What can we learn about managing worrying from the people of ancient Assyria and Babylonia? Dr Selena Wisnom offers some Near Eastern wisdom to Dave Musgrove
encoded: Do you worry about things? Do you wake up in the middle of the night, sweating about what might happen to you, to your family, to the world in general? I do. If you do too, rest assured you’re not alone. It’s a natural human trait, and it’s something people have been doing for millennia. In evolutionary terms, I imagine it’s something to do with forcing our minds to think about the things we ought to be doing next to keep ourselves alive, and keep us out of dangerous situations. It’s counterproductive, of course, to worry yourself into a state of paralysis – that’s when worrying goes wrong. Are there any lessons we can take from history that can help us worry productively? I went to the Assyria Galleries in the British Museum late one Friday afternoon to reflect on this. They are well worth a visit, whether you’re a worrier or not. Turn left at the main entrance and you’re straight into them. I wanted to go there because Dr Selena Wisnom, an expert on the history and heritage of ancient Mesopotamia and author of the excellent new book The Library of Ancient Wisdom (Penguin, 2025), had told me these people were worriers of renown: “They worry so much that they invent an entire branch of scholarship devoted to it. This is worrying on a kind of national cosmic scale.” This organised worrying was called ‘lamentation’. It wasn’t just a private matter – it was ritualised, institutionalised and shared across the whole society. We know they worried and lamented because they wrote about it. I wanted to get up close and personal with some ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform script. There is a lot of cuneiform script on display in the British Museum. I can’t read it – and there aren’t many people who can – but I figured it would be instructive just to look at it, and think a bit about the people who carved it. Hands and minds of the Mesopotamians Cuneiform is the writing system that they used in Mesopotamia. It was invented in the mid-fourth millennium BC and used for millennia aft…

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A history of the Bible: who wrote it and when?
type: item
date: 2025-01-16T08:30:36.000Z
creator: Spencer Mizen
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: General ancient history
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Evergreen
description: The origins of the Bible are still cloaked in mystery. When was it written? Who wrote it? And how reliable is it as an historical record? Spencer Mizen charts the evolution of arguably the most influential book of all time
encoded: In 2007, Time magazine asserted that the Bible “has done more to shape literature, history, entertainment, and culture than any book ever written.” With phrases like “an eye for an eye” and “thou shalt not kill” embedded in our language and over five billion copies sold worldwide (swollen by a further 100 million every year given away for free), its impact is undeniable. Though, while its cultural influence is clear, the history of the Bible is much less so. Questions about who wrote the Bible, when, and why have fascinated and perplexed scholars for centuries. These are the thorniest of questions, made all the more tangled by the Bible’s great age, and the fact that some, or all of it, has become a sacred text for members of two of the world’s great religions – Judaism and Christianity – numbering more than two billion people. Where does the Bible originate? Archaeological discoveries and the study of written sources, such as Merneptah's Stele, have shed light on the history of both halves of the Bible: the Old Testament, the story of the Jews’ highs and lows in the millennium or so before the birth of Jesus; and the New Testament, which documents the life and teachings of Jesus. These findings may be incomplete and they may be highly contested, but they have helped historians paint a picture of how the Bible came to life. For centuries, the Old Testament has been widely interpreted as a story of disaster and rescue – of the Israelites falling from grace before picking themselves up, dusting themselves down and finding redemption. Nowhere is this theme more evident than in Exodus, the dramatic second book of the Old Testament, which chronicles the Israelites’ escape from captivity in Egypt to the promised land. Read more | On ancient battlefields, the world's oldest civilisations turned beloved pets into weapons of war The Bible tells us that Moses led the Israelites out of their captivity in Egypt (whose population had been laid low by ten plagues inflicted on the…

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“I don’t underestimate how difficult it is to satisfy everybody” | Simon Sebag Montefiore on writing the history of Jerusalem
type: item
date: 2024-12-12T09:00:52.000Z
creator: Matt Elton
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Debate
description: More than a decade since its original publication, historian and broadcaster Simon Sebag Montefiore’s updated biography of Jerusalem charts events right up to the present day. Why did he choose to examine such a contentious past? And is it possible to remain entirely impartial? Matt Elton caught up with him to find out
encoded: You’ve just published a new edition of your history of Jerusalem. What were your aims in updating it? The book is a history of the Middle East, the Holy City and Holy Land across 3,000 years – from the Canaanites to the 2020s, encompassing all faiths, all religions, all conquerors, all empires and all states. Where possible, it’s mainly told through the stories of individuals. The previous version of the book came out in 2011, and largely ended in 1948 – though it did include a brief section on the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem in the Six-Day War of 1967. So its coverage of the 20th century was incomplete, which seemed okay when I wrote it – but so much has happened since then that I began to think I should update it. I was in the process of doing that when the attack by Hamas in southern Israel happened on 7 October last year. Since then there’s been such a deluge of misinformation and, frankly, ignorance and bias from all directions that it seemed even more urgent – particularly because, in the year after that attack, the book sold out many times in Britain and the US. Read more | Israel and the Palestinians: a history of conflict in 8 key episodes For better or worse, the book is one of the few balanced accounts that attempts to tell the story of the creation of the Israeli nation and the Palestinian nation. Nothing is perfect, of course, and it would be hubristic and arrogant to think that anyone could write a perfectly balanced history. But I think this is as close as it gets. This is among the most contested areas of world history, so how did you navigate the process of writing this book in a balanced way, fending off potential accusations of bias – from all sides? First, you have the manuscript read by experts on both sides, who will hopefully advise you if you’ve got something wrong. But it’s also a matter of respect. When writing any book, if I recognise a preconception I have, I try to wipe it out and start looking at the evidence both ways. The tragedy of…

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Leper Crusaders: how disease-stricken knights forged an army in the Holy Land
type: item
date: 2024-12-06T09:34:32.000Z
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Crusades
description: During the Crusades, one Christian order transformed from caring for those suffering from leprosy in Jerusalem to fielding an army of leper knights. Matthew Doherty explores the story of the the Lazarites
encoded: In the history of the Crusades, a number of military orders made their names with their exploits in the Holy Land. The likes of the Knights Templar, the Knights Hospitaller, and the Teutonic Order all formed in the 12th century, in the decades after the First Crusade (1095-99) had captured the holy city of Jerusalem from Islamic control. Alongside the more prominent orders, however, was a small group called the Order of Saint Lazarus. Although formed with the sole purpose of caring for the sick, by the 13th century the Lazarites, adorned in white with a green cross, were among the ranks of crusader knights. But they were no ordinary fighters: the majority of them suffered from the dreaded scourge of leprosy. Read more | Crusader criminals: why medieval knights went rogue in the Holy Land Rise of the order The beginnings of the Order of Saint Lazarus can be found in a leper hospital in 12th-century Jerusalem, with the purpose of helping and caring for sickly pilgrims to the Holy Land. Leprosy appears to have been particularly prevalent in the Near East in the 12th and 13th centuries, at the same time as waves of Christian invaders descended on the region. In 1142, Fulk, the Christian king of Jerusalem, conceded to “the church of Saint Lazarus and the convent of the sick who are called miselli, an estate… which is between the Mount of Olives and the Red Cistern on the road which leads to the River Jordan.” Miselli can be roughly translated to “little wretched ones” and referred to leprous beggars. The land granted to this church was well situated, for it was on a key crossroads close to the Jordan, where those suffering from leprosy could bathe in its supposedly curative waters. Styling themselves ‘Lazarites’, the monks who cared for the afflicted were successful enough to buy more land two years later and expand their ministrations. Read more | Melisende of Jerusalem: the queen of a crusader kingdom A living death In the 21st century, it’s known that leprosy (also kn…

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Michael Wood on Gaza's astonishing cultural heritage
type: item
date: 2024-10-15T16:26:42.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: General History
subject: Period
description: "The current destruction in Gaza is more thorough than any ancient siege," says historian Michael Wood
encoded: Back in the mid-nineties, I went on a journey following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, travelling down through Lebanon to Egypt, and I stayed in Gaza. Alexander had waged a brutal siege of the city, which ended with the vindictive killing of the heroic governor, Batis, who was dragged around the walls behind Alexander’s chariot, as Achilles had done with Hector. War is a horrible business. And Gaza has known more than most. My photos show the old Great Mosque, with its huge circular window; originally a temple to Marnas, the chief Gazan deity, then a Byzantine church, it’s now destroyed. The Greek church of St Porphyrius, perhaps the third-oldest in the world, has been wrecked. The souk, squares, gardens and orchards – all obliterated, along with mosques, churches, universities, libraries, hospitals, schools, museums, cemeteries, even the zoo. Alternate history: What if Alexander the Great had lived longer? Back then I stayed in the Marna Guest House. Opened in 1946, it was run by Alia al-Shawa, a warm hostess from an old Gazan family. There was a sunlit terrace, a garden with a huge plane tree, and an old well of good water for which Gaza was once famous. That first evening I had a dinner with Gazan scholars including Dr Moain Sadek, who had studied in Germany and had just become head of Gazan Antiquities; he has since written distinguished studies on Gazan archaeology and architecture. We talked about the city’s long history: first settled in the fifth millennium BC, Gaza has always been a crossroads between Egypt, the Near East and Anatolia. It was sacked and ruined many times – including bombing by the British in 1917 – but always rose again. After dinner we walked in the garden. “In the west, when you think of Gaza, you think of violence and war, poverty and despair,” observed Dr Sadek. “But there’s another Gaza – rich in ancient heritage, openness to the world and a determination to preserve the culture of the past amid all the destruction.” After al…

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North, south, east and west: how ancient civilisations found their bearings before the compass
type: item
date: 2024-10-15T16:26:40.000Z
creator: Professor Jerry Brotton
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Why did the ancient Chinese associate north with power? What led early Muslims to pray to the south? And what role did winds have to play in our understanding of directions? Jerry Brotton takes us on a journey through the history of the four points of the compass
encoded: Writing in his philosophical work the New Organon in 1620, the English scientist and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon famously identified China’s three great inventions, “which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure and inglorious; namely printing, gunpowder and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.” Much has been written about the historical impact of printing and gunpowder. But there’s been far less emphasis on the magnet, and how (using lodestones to magnetise iron needles) it enabled the ‘obscure’ invention of the magnetic compass during the Han dynasty in the third century BC. This technology enabled China and, subsequently, other societies to navigate and orientate themselves according to the four points of the compass: north, east, south and west. We tend to think about these directions and the art of navigation as a consequence of the invention of the compass, but this is not in fact the case. The ancient history of direction and its relationship to the magnetic compass is altogether more surprising. How ancient civilisations understood east and west Thousands of years before the discovery of the compass, early human societies observed the sun rising in the direction we now call ‘east’ and watched it setting in the direction now known as ‘west’. East to west was probably the earliest prime axis that people understood by simply watching the sun’s path across the sky. The worship of the sun, or heliolatry, characterised ancient Egyptian worship of solar gods: Horus (the rising sun), Ra (the noon sun) and Osiris (the dying or setting sun). Read more | Sun gods and goddesses: 16 solar deities from world history This initial east-west solar axis was gradually followed by the understanding of another axis. This one ran vertically from north to south, and could be identified by observing the sun and stars. At noon the sun is always due south in the northern hemisphere…

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The Iranian embassy siege: an SAS hostage drama in London
type: item
date: 2024-09-13T15:34:30.000Z
creator: Rob Attar
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Ben Macintyre tells the dramatic tale of the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege and the dramatic SAS operation that brought it to an end
encoded: In May 1980, TV coverage of the world snooker final was interrupted by live footage of men in black balaclavas abseiling down the walls of the Iranian Embassy in London. This was Operation Nimrod, a daring SAS plan to free dozens of hostages who'd been held captive in the building for almost a week by a group of gunmen. In his new book, bestselling author Ben Macintyre tells the story of the Iranian Embassy siege, from its roots in the Middle East to its incredibly dramatic conclusion. He spoke to Rob Attar about this defining event of Margaret Thatcher's premiership. View Green Video on the source website

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Michael Wood on the Bangladesh Liberation War
type: item
date: 2024-03-14T16:30:50.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: “From Africa to the Indian subcontinent, imperialism has left a trail of damage,” writes historian Michael Wood
encoded: Over the past four months I have watched the Israel-Gaza war with horror. And I have been struck by the growing international reaction to it all: the stark division between the Western world and the rising ‘Global South’, which increasingly no longer accepts the ‘rules-based order’ that it sees as being imposed by the West to support its hegemony. It feels like a big moment in history. Is a new world order emerging? It has left me reflecting on the legacy of the age of colonialism. Some influential modern historians have argued that colonial powers were, on balance, a force for good, improving the lot of humanity. I disagree – and that is even before we mention the climate catastrophe, largely caused by the ravages of international capitalism. On the podcast | Cricket as a colonial weapon In my job, I have travelled the world and seen for myself the aftermath of empire. From apartheid South Africa and the Congo through to Afghanistan, the Americas and the Indian subcontinent, colonialism and imperialism have left a trail of damage. And that damage is both psychological and material. The development of traditional societies has been disrupted and arrested, ancient cultural identities have been erased in a few generations. And, as current events show, we are still living with the divisions we bequeathed. Those divisions are laid bare in a powerful documentary by Krishnendu and Madhurima Bose, Bay of Blood, about the liberation war in Bangladesh in 1971. This story is largely forgotten today outside that country, but it is part of one of the most significant events in the history of the modern world, one in which the aftermath of empire had a catastrophic impact on millions of lives: the partition of India. Read more | 10 historical turning points for modern India Or perhaps we should say the partitions of India, because they took place over the course of a century. In fact, the tensions currently besetting Kashmir suggest that they are not over yet. The viceroy of Ind…