Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
I wrote a letter to the world's most famous terrorist – and nothing could have prepared me for his reply
In December 1975, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez – better known as Carlos the Jackal – attacked the headquarters of a global oil organisation in Vienna. Jason Burke recounts the story of the incident, and reveals how his efforts to interview the terrorist helped solve a 50-year-old mystery
About half an hour after opening the letter sent to me by one of the most notorious terrorists of all time, I realised that not only did it contain a note offering “revolutionary greetings”, but that it would lead to the solution of a decades-old mystery. It was the summer of 2023, and for months I had been trying to contact Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. While researching my book, a narrative history of 1970s terrorism entitled The Revolutionists, I had already spoken to several of those who had bombed, hijacked and shot their way through the decade, but Ramírez Sánchez was the most iconic figure of these years. Arguably the world’s first real ‘celebrity terrorist’, Ramírez Sánchez was responsible for around a dozen major attacks in western Europe between 1973 and 1983. But despite the many articles, books and films about him, there was still much about his career of deadly violence that was unknown. As such, the letter on my doormat marked a significant breakthrough. From Caracas to Paris It had been easy to locate Ramírez Sánchez, who by that point had been incarcerated for nearly 30 years. Captured by the French intelligence service while undergoing minor surgery in Sudan in 1994, he had been convicted of multiple terrorist offences and held in several different prisons across France. Now locked away in a high-security facility in Fresnes, about 20 miles south of Paris, he was allowed a small number of visitors. To be among them, however, I needed an invitation. As a first step, I got a message to him via an intermediary to establish my bona fides. I then wrote directly, explaining my interest in hearing his own version of events. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/9-GettyImages-115106383-1d24d91-e1774617817390.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A multi‑storey brick complex with red‑tiled roofs and uniform tall windows fills the foreground. The older industrial‑style buildings sit within a townscape of smaller houses, trees, and a few commercial structures, including one with a visible shop sign." title="An aerial view of Fresnes Prison in Val-de-Marne – one of several French facilities in which Ramírez Sánchez has been held over the past three decades (Image by Getty Images)" /> Thanks to a large body of existing literature – declassified diplomatic cables, leaked documents and interviews with spies, officials and others – I had already learned a lot about the man from my research. For example, I found that he had not been a precociously young leftwing activist in Venezuela in the 1950s, as often claimed, but a timid and chubby teenager who steered clear of the street politics of his hometown, Caracas. In London in the 1960s, living with his mother and younger brother after his parents’ divorce, his tastes tended more towards Napoleon brandy, tailored suits and sleazy West End clubs than protests and sit-ins. In fact, his journey into violence appeared to have been motivated more by megalomania than Marxism. When sent to Moscow to study for an undergraduate degree by his leftwing lawyer father, Ramírez Sánchez was noticed not for his commitment to ideology, but to what the Soviet capital offered by way of nightlife. If, in 1970, he had made a trip to Jordan to find Palestinian factions dedicated to what they called the “armed struggle” against Israel, his claims to have fought against government forces in the virtual civil war there were exaggerated to say the least. It became apparent, too, that the idea he had been recruited by the KGB was probably just Cold War propaganda. One fact I dug out was the origin of his famous soubriquet: Carlos the Jackal. This was invented by British journalists in the summer of 1975, shortly after he had killed two French policemen, seriously injured a third, and then executed his superior in the breakaway Palestinian faction he had joined, known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations (PFLP-XO). All three murders had taken place within the space of a minute inside a small apartment on Paris’s Left Bank. First, French investigators had found a false passport in the name of ‘Carlos Martinez’ at the apartment of a girlfriend. Then, reporters spotted a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal in the London home of another lover, a Basque waitress. The false ID and the book were swiftly combined, and a thousand headlines followed. Read more | The JFK assassination attempt you’ve never heard of Terror in Vienna In the letter that dropped through my door that summer morning, Ramírez Sánchez expressed his delight at my intended visit. Sadly, this delight was not shared by French authorities, who blocked my request for an in-person meeting but did allow me to send a series of letters. Though he avoided answering my pointed enquiries about his misdeeds, he posted me dozens of printed and photocopied documents. These described his youth and the treble murder in Paris, before going into considerable detail about the attack that earned him global infamy. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/IMG2705-62cdd3a-e1774619170787.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A collection of printed and handwritten documents lies spread out on a surface, many showing the name Ilich Ramírez Sánchez along with numbers and institutional headings. Some pages are typed, others handwritten in French." title="Although the French authorities denied his request for an in-person interview, author Jason Burke received numerous documents from Ramírez Sánchez via post (Image by Jason Burke)" /> The plan had been put together in the early autumn of 1975. Ramírez Sánchez was to lead a team from the PFLP-XO and a West German extremist group called the Revolutionary Cells in an attack on a meeting of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) at its headquarters in Vienna. They would seize the high-ranking ministers due to attend, demand a plane from the Austrian authorities, and then fly around the Middle East, releasing the hostages one by one at the airports of their respective capital cities. Two would not be freed: instead, the ministers from Saudi Arabia and Iran would be shot dead. The date of the attack, 21 December 1975, was a Sunday. The streets of Vienna were quiet, the air was chilly under a clear blue sky, and carols piped over the speakers of the Christmas Market opposite OPEC’s modern, seven-storey headquarters on Ringstrasse. The attackers arrived at their target at around 11am, rushed through the unguarded entrance of the building, and made their way up to the main meeting room on the first floor. Ramírez Sánchez then fired five shots, shouting: “Don’t move… I am the famous Carlos. You may have heard of me.” There was little resistance. Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, the only female member of the team, shot dead a bodyguard of the Iraqi oil minister, before killing a plain-clothes policeman as he tried to surrender. Ramírez Sánchez then killed a Libyan economist, and explosives were wired around the building. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/7-GettyImages-541472303-0c984ab-e1774618111712.jpg" width="1500" height="1500" alt="A black‑and‑white portrait shows a person with curly dark hair wearing large, thick‑rimmed glasses and a collared shirt, photographed straight on against a plain background." title="One of Ramírez Sánchez’s accomplices, Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, killed two men during the OPEC siege. Two years later, she was arrested after shooting two border guards in Switzerland and was sentenced to 15 years in prison (Image by Getty Images)" /> Once he was done, Ramírez Sánchez relaxed. He distributed cigarettes, chatted with his 60-plus hostages (conversing in English, Spanish and French), and ordered food from the local Hilton. Ham sandwiches – which any Muslim captives would not eat – were angrily sent back. When one of the Palestinian gunmen struggled to adjust the explosives, Ramírez Sánchez quipped, “Oh dear, I’ve told him a thousand times how to do it, and he still can’t get it right”. Similarly, when an OPEC driver tried to persuade him to free the female hostages, claiming they “might get hysterical”, Ramirez demurred, pointing to Kröcher-Tiedemann. Three unanswered questions Early the next morning, a bus arrived to take the hostages and their captors to Vienna airport, where a fully fuelled aircraft had been readied as Ramírez Sánchez had requested. He ordered the plane to fly first to Algiers, where a handful of the captives were released. The next destination was Tripoli, where Ramírez Sánchez hoped to obtain a bigger aircraft with enough range to fly around the Middle East. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/6-GettyImages-515113970-52211b8-e1774618468264.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a snowy airfield where several people stand between a bus and the tail section of an aircraft marked “OE‑LDB.” One person appears to be walking toward or boarding the plane, with snow‑covered ground and distant trees in the background." title="The OPEC attackers, including Ramírez Sánchez (thought to be the figure on the left, next to the bus), board the aircraft they had requested at Vienna airport. They planned to fly first to Algiers, before transferring to a larger plane in Tripoli (Image by Getty Images)" /> But he was to be disappointed. In the Libyan capital, there was a frosty reception for the angry, despondent and exhausted terrorists. No one expected them, and not a single person – even in this supposedly ‘revolutionary’ state – wanted to help. It was clear there would be no new plane. The only option was to return to Algiers, where Ramírez Sánchez was presented with an ultimatum by local authorities: he could carry out the plan to shoot the Saudi and Iranian ministers (and take his chances with Algerian security forces afterwards), or accept the $20m being offered by the Saudi and Iranian governments as ransom for the two men. Read more | How Britain stirred the cauldron of conflict in Palestine Amid stormy scenes, tears and obscenities, Ramírez Sánchez told his team that the time had come to end their escapade. A few hours later he was on his way to a five-star hotel in Algiers, thence to a luxurious government guesthouse for a few weeks’ rest and eventually back to the PFLP-XO’s base in Aden. Over the next two decades, Ramirez Sanchez would operate from bases in Baghdad, Prague, Budapest and Damascus. While some attacks were simply motivated by personal vendettas, many were commissioned by powerful patrons, including Gaddafi. Eventually, ‘Carlos the Jackal’ would become a fugitive himself, ending up in Khartoum, where the French found him. Though I had spent months investigating this whole episode, three mysteries remained unsolved. Firstly, who commissioned the attack on OPEC? Secondly, what happened to the $20m ransom payment? Finally, how had Ramírez Sánchez escaped punishment by the PFLP-XO for his failures? My correspondence with the then 74-year-old prisoner resolved the first of these questions. Ramírez Sánchez’s account unequivocally named Libya’s president, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, as the man responsible for the OPEC attack. This made sense. The mercurial Libyan leader had the means – and the motive – to embarrass pro-western Arab countries and hike the price of oil, which would boost his income. Furthermore, I had already seen testimony that a Libyan diplomat had provided weapons to the assault team in Vienna, evidence of previous Libyan support for such violence, and multiple reports of Ramírez Sánchez cursing Gaddafi as “impossible to work with” when he realised that, rather than delivering the vital new plane as presumably agreed, the Libyan leader had simply disappeared into the desert. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/8-GettyImages-591708114-8a4a827-e1774618771964.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person wearing glasses and a collared shirt stands at a podium, speaking into two microphones and gesturing with both hands. The background is plain and dark, drawing focus to the speaker." title="According to Ramírez Sánchez, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi – seen here in 1973 – was the instigator of the OPEC attack (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fame as a weapon The whereabouts of the $20m cash remained unresolved, however. It is possible that Ramírez Sánchez kept it, as some veterans of the PFLP-XO suggested to me when I tracked them down. But I found no proof, and the alleged thief himself did not respond to my questions on the matter. There is some reliable documentary evidence, too, that only Saudi Arabia actually paid up and that these funds were kept by the Algerians – the designated intermediary – as ‘compensation’ for their trouble. And why wasn’t Ramírez Sánchez shot by his comrades? Either after killing a respected member of the PFLP-XO, or after the debacle of the OPEC raid itself? Here, the correspondence offered an important and unsolicited insight. Much of what this most famous of terrorists sent to me consisted of press cuttings. These said nothing new, but confirmed something I had long suspected: that Ramírez Sánchez’s greatest talent was not as a terrorist, but as a self-publicist. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/3-GettyImages-652492568-6c4d73d-e1774618878699.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Several uniformed officers wearing dark clothing, bulletproof vests, and gold‑trimmed hats hold firearms while standing near a stone archway. A dark van with a yellow licence plate is parked behind them on the paved street." title="French police officers guard a van carrying Ramírez Sánchez ahead of a hearing in Paris, 1995. The terrorist only avoided being murdered by his former comrades because of his celebrity, says Jason Burke (Image by Getty Images)" /> If most of his attacks failed to attain their objectives, this did not matter. They all helped construct his legend, and this fame made it impossible for his outraged ‘comrades’ to consign this hero of their cause to a shallow grave in a Middle Eastern desert. It also convinced Gaddafi and other sponsors to pay Ramírez Sánchez tens of millions of dollars to carry out violent new operations in western Europe, and eventually persuaded several eastern European regimes to offer him a base in their own countries as well. The greatest weapon Ramírez Sánchez possessed, I realised, was not his Tokarev pistol or total unconcern for the suffering of others – and nor was it his undoubted ability to manipulate and charm. Rather, it was his celebrity, in which western governments and media were to some extent complicit. It was this, above all, that had allowed him to continue his career of violence at great cost to many hundreds of innocent people. Memories of his violence may have faded, but the morbid fascination with Carlos the Jackal – and sometimes other terrorists too – remains. Jason Burke is the international security correspondent for The Guardian. His latest book, The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists who Hijacked the 1970s (Vintage, 2025), was shortlisted for the 2025 Baillie-Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
Ringing the changes: how the telephone transformed Victorian Britain
To celebrate 150 years since the first telephone call was made, Michael Kay and Coreen McGuire describe how the device reshaped social interactions in Britain – and the somewhat surprising ways it was first used
In autumn 1883, an unusual news story captured the imagination of the British public. It was a tale of deception, fraud – and telephones. On Friday 21 September, a young barrister’s clerk in Birmingham, Robert Danks, set in motion a plan to commit fraud. First he forged a message from a solicitor asking his boss, Jesse Herbert, to travel out of town. Next, he telephoned the office of Herbert’s friend, Alfred Young. Speaking to the clerk, Danks – impersonating Herbert – said he had been called away but had left his cheque book at home. Would Mr Young please lend him £5 (equivalent to more than £500 today – five times Danks’ weekly wage)? Deceived, the clerk agreed, and was told to expect Danks to collect the money – which he did, absconding with it the next day. The story was reported at length across the country – not least because of the novel and ingenious (for the time) method of Danks’ deceit. This was, one commentator noted, the first time the telephone had been used for such fraud – a landmark of sorts in the technology’s short history. Sound idea The first practical functioning telephone was developed by Scottish-born engineer and inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who lived and worked in Canada and the US during the second half of the 19th century. He worked extensively on hearing and speech, experimenting with hearing-aid devices and then acoustic telegraphy – efforts that led to the development of the telephone. Bell was issued the US patent for his telephone on 7 March 1876 – 150 years ago this month. The Bell Telephone Company was established the following year, and within a decade tens of thousands of telephone sets were in use across the US. The first successful demonstration in Britain took place in 1877, and the first telephone exchanges opened in London two years later. By the time of Danks’ fraudulent call, small exchanges up and down the UK were being operated by different companies, invariably serving local business communities. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-464474699webready-add59a2-e1774011650108.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph two women sitting at a low table in front of a large wall with several thick wires across it. Each woman is dressed in a long Victorian dress, with their hair up" title="Wired for sound Telephonists at work for the General Post Office c1905. The GPO gradually replaced local exchanges across Britain at the turn of the 20th century. (Image by GettyImages)" /> But were people talking about telephones more than they were talking through them? When it was first introduced, everyone agreed that the telephone was a marvellous invention – though its purpose was far from clear. Was it a device for relaying the sounds of concerts and church sermons? Perhaps it was more useful in the mining industry, utilising the telephone microphone’s sensitivity to vibrations in order to monitor the quality and density of air, and so guard against the build-up of explosive gases? People did use the telephone to speak to each other, but a subscription to a telephone exchange was expensive – often £15 or £20 a year – so for the first several decades in Britain it remained very much a business tool. As well as barristers such as Herbert and Young, early exchange telephone subscribers included companies involved in large local industries – for example, wool in Yorkshire, cotton in Lancashire, jute in Dundee and steel in Sheffield. Also prominent in early telephone directories are professional firms such as solicitors, doctors and banks, as well as local councils and chambers of commerce. In those first decades, contemporaries observed how few telephone subscribers and devices the UK had compared with other countries. That’s in part because the communications context at that time was rich and diverse. Thanks to the success of the telegraph system, the effective penny post service and cheap messenger boys, the telephone had less immediate impact on communication in Britain than elsewhere. Read more | The radio revolution: how Britain found its frequency In addition, the usefulness of exchange telephony depended entirely on who else was also using it. This did not necessarily mean that being in a bigger network was better: many subscribers preferred smaller, more exclusive networks. Subscribers were also concerned about privacy: they didn’t want to be available to just anyone who could wander into a public call office and make demands on their time – nor to leave themselves open to fraudsters like Danks. In short, it suited many subscribers to keep the telephone network limited. And certainly, no one could imagine why the ‘working man’ might need a telephone. Regardless of subscribers’ preferences, exchange companies realised the importance of encouraging groups of subscribers to join at the same time. This often meant targeting professional communities such as lawyers or doctors, whose offices tended to cluster together in the same geographical area within a town. Many companies sold telephony by advertising that they connected their exchanges up to local police and fire stations, and sometimes also to doctors. In sickness and in health In August 1879, shortly before the first British telephone exchanges were established, Eva Lückes wrote a letter to the Telephone Company, which had been established to promote Bell’s patents in Britain. Lückes – the lady superintendent at the Hospital for Sick Children in Pendlebury, Manchester – wanted to thank the company for her telephones. These were used throughout the hospital, but had proved most valuable in the fever ward, where telephony enabled communication without the risk of infection. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-463911827webready-5706511-e1774011631346.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colourful illustration shows four men at dinner: three are sitting at the table while another stands up alongside them. To the right, another man in a suit, carrying a tray is talking into a large tube, sending a message to the room below" title="Upstairs, downstairs A waiter talks to kitchen staff in a restaurant. Before telephony, the speaking tube was a relatively common way to communicate. (Image by GettyImages)" /> Over the next few years, other medical professionals extolled the virtues of the telephone. “All of us must have felt the heartaching anxiety of longing to hear the voice of a dear friend when either ourselves lying on, or the friend being confined to, a bed of sickness,” noted the medical journal The Lancet. Unlike the speaking tubes that had been common for some time, but through which infection could be transmitted, telephones allowed contagious patients speak directly to family and friends while remaining safely isolated. Following an outbreak of scarlet fever in London in 1887, The Lancet was moved to recognise that this kind of remote contact had a curative power. The strength of this belief increased as the system proliferated, and special telephones for hospital patients were increasingly commonplace in the interwar years. In addition, the telephone achieved lasting clinical utility as an audiometer – a device to quantify individual levels of hearing loss in numerical terms. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/HHG5ADwebready-cb80a99-e1774011609462.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Testing time An illustration shows a young man’s hearing being assessed using a Hughes audiometer, invented by David Edward Hughes c1879. (Image by Alamy)" title="Testing time An illustration shows a young man’s hearing being assessed using a Hughes audiometer, invented by David Edward Hughes c1879. (Image by Alamy)" /> Despite these benefits, many people feared that the telephone might pose risks, particularly to users’ mental health. In May 1879, The Times lamented that businessmen’s lives had become increasingly busy, unpredictable and reactive following the advent of telegraphy – a situation that would only get worse with the proliferation of telephones. Concerns about how telephony had increased the pace of modern life, and the associated stress that came with this, were commonplace in this period. In October 1882, the popular science writer Phoebe Lankester encountered a telephone in a private house, and wrote in her newspaper column that: “Extraordinary as this novel invention is, I am not sure that I quite like the idea of its intrusion into our domestic scenes at any moment of the day… [W]hen it comes to being at the beck and call of any intrusive person who may possess a telephonic wire… no man’s house can thenceforth be called his castle, unless he be brave enough to resist such innovations, and leave himself far behind the rest of the impetuous world – in peace.” Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain This combination of excitement and anxiety typified the Victorian response to the telephone in the business and domestic spheres. In public spaces, too, overhead telephone wires raised concerns, being viewed as unsightly at best, and even dangerous. Accidents involving falling telephone wires were rare but reported widely. In 1885, the council in Bath was reluctant to establish an exchange at all, citing concerns that overhead wires would disfigure the city, a picturesque and popular tourist destination. The GPO intervenes In most towns and cities, exchanges were established by large companies that were offshoots of the US Bell Telephone Company, operating using Bell’s patents. The largest of these was the National Telephone Company (NTC), which eventually absorbed the other companies operating in different regions around the UK. However, in late 1879, as the first British telephone companies began to establish exchanges, the General Post Office (GPO) successfully argued that the telephone came under its monopoly on telegraphic communications. This was based on its ownership of the telegraph network, which had been nationalised in 1870. As a result of this legal decision, telephone companies required GPO licences to operate. In addition, the GPO began to open its own exchanges around the country. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3315417webready-054117c-e1774011586519.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Historical photograph of a spacious telephone exchange filled with rows of operators working at manual switchboards. The high, vaulted ceiling and hanging lights frame dozens of workers plugging cables to connect calls" title="from low volume levels to overhearing private conversations between other people. (Image by GettyImages)" /> In towns such as Sheffield, Dundee, Swansea and Preston, local people also established their own exchanges. Despite patent disputes and fierce competition from the larger companies, these were able to operate for many years. Cleverly branding themselves as being run by and for local people, these companies charged lower subscriptions, enabling a broader range of businesses to sign up. They often inspired greater loyalty among their subscribers than the larger companies. Together, these factors meant that, by the late 1880s, towns such as Dundee and Sheffield had some of the most developed exchange telephone infrastructure anywhere in the country. For 30 years, therefore, provision was quite messy, with different companies and the GPO providing services in different areas. This situation ended only in 1912 when the NTC, the last remaining private telephone company, was nationalised. Wartime lifeline Although telephony seemed to be gaining ground in Britain, many in the military still viewed it with scepticism. Telephones proved suitable for point-to-point communication with surveillance balloons from the ground below, and were used as Morse receivers, but they seemed unlikely to replace messenger communications. How could you trust that a barely audible message relayed via this method was sufficiently secure during battle? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3243926webready-bca04cb-e1774011559272.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photograph of a soldier kneeling outdoors, holding a field‑telephone receiver to the ear while speaking into it. The device is wired to a wooden pole fitted with multiple cables and a small switchboard‑like unit. The barren, muddy landscape suggests a wartime setting" title="in October 1918. The needs of the military drove innovations in telephony during the First World War. (Image by GettyImages)" /> The dark, isolated and stagnant conditions of mechanised conflict in the First World War changed everything. Suddenly, telephones became a lifeline – a crucial means of communicating between trenches and relaying news from the battlefront to headquarters. By 1920, the GPO had, at great cost, supplied 40,000 specially protected telephones to the army, meaning they were unable to invest in the development of telephone technology on the home front. Yet this expense was hidden from the public, who complained extensively about the failings of domestic telephony. Reliance on this technology in the context of war drove innovations in audibility and portability. Crucially, clearer transmission of speech was vital, and equipment needed to be light enough for repeated dismantling and movement. These aims were in tension, because improvements to audibility added weight. Improved audibility was also important for the generation of men who had fought in the war. Many of these servicemen suffered deafness or hearing loss from the bombardment of artillery and shells. In 1928, the National Benevolent Society recorded that “33,768 men were discharged from the army and navy on account of deafness”. Symptoms of deafness or deaf mutism also presented with shell shock. So hearing loss was regarded as a national problem in the interwar years. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3301550webready-8b9948e-e1774266801629.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a woman standing in country road, looking up some fallen telegraph lines. In the background, a small bus is driving towards the camera" title="A woman gazes in bemusement at storm-damaged telephone wires in south Wales, 1939. Overhead lines were initially viewed as unsightly or even dangerous. (Image by GettyImages)" /> Though valve technology had improved the telephone, individual voices remained hard to comprehend. Early telephone lines were noisy, open and messy, with background noise described in a Birmingham newspaper in 1888 as “a buzzing obbligato which gives a faint suggestion of bees, but has no precise resemblance to anything in nature”. In addition, problems of induction between overhead wires, with signals from one call leaking into another, often led to subscribers being able to overhear supposedly private conversations. This had obvious privacy implications for those engaged in business conversations, as did fears of exchange operators listening in on calls. In 1897, a Glasgow corn merchant, Anton Kufeke, described overhearing a conversation between his competitor and a customer, thereby learning that the competitor was selling more cheaply than he was. This was sensitive business information. In 1893, another Glasgow subscriber recounted a conversation he had overheard between a man and a woman: after a brief exchange, the man announced that he was going for a clean shave – and another listener on the line commented “Is that a clean shirt you’re going for? You need one badly”. The conversation finished with various listeners joining in a rendition of a popular song. Read More | How did Bletchley Park shape the success of D-Day? Agitations from exchange subscribers in Leeds and Glasgow in local newspapers in the late 1880s and early 1890s illustrate the great difficulties many faced in trying to use their telephones. One correspondent in Leeds wrote that: “I occupy more time in communicating through it than I should do if I went to the offices or places of business of nine out of ten of the persons with whom I wish to communicate.” A Glasgow subscriber said that one thing he had learned from using the telephone and overhearing his colleagues and neighbours was just how much they swore when frustrated. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-515579042webready-0db1e60-e1774267416605.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photograph of a telephone operator seated at a manual switchboard. She wears a cloth mask over her nose and mouth and speaks into a candlestick‑style telephone. Papers and notes lie on the desk beside the switchboard equipment" title="Wearing a gauze mask, a telephone operator works during the devastating flu pandemic that spread across the world from 1918 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Restricted information A broad range of people struggled with such issues, including some who had trouble following telephone conversations yet didn’t consider themselves to have hearing loss in other contexts. It was strange to have access to speech without visual information. Moreover, the frequency band of the telephone was restricted, so people making or receiving calls were receiving far less sonic information than when talking in person. These difficulties are clear from a 1923 advice sheet issued by the GPO. This gave instructions on what to say when picking up the receiver, and how to speak with maximum audibility and effectiveness. Users were counselled to speak “clearly”, and to roll the rhotic R when saying the number three, because the telephone would blur consonants and elide vowel sounds. “The telephone is no louder or clearer now than it was 40 years ago,” HA Garratt complained to The Times in 1934. Although he admitted that he was “just the least bit deaf”, he still could hear the wireless perfectly well, which led him to conclude that the telephone model he possessed was faulty. Faced with such criticisms, it became clear how the GPO could both recoup financial losses sustained in the war and move beyond issuing edicts to encourage clear speech: by repurposing technology used in the trenches to create amplified telephony. When the telephone was first introduced, the deaf community was excited about the possibility that the new device could be used as a hearing aid. Bell’s wife and mother were both deaf, and the telephone had in fact been initially designed as a type of hearing aid. Instead, it initially excluded the hard of hearing. Moreover, its development encouraged the measurement of levels of deafness in increasingly narrow and strict terms. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/10720997webready-b2202ae-e1774266977716.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A small brown pouch with a long strap, alongside two small vials, one yellow, one black. The vials are attached to a small black box which has a pale wire with an earpiece attached to it" title="Hear this A body-worn Medresco portable hearing aid. Such analogue devices were supplied by the NHS from the late 1940s until the early 1980s" /> The first amplified telephone designed for people with limited hearing was advertised by the GPO in 1924 “for the use of ‘Deaf Subscribers’ who experience difficulty in the use of the standard telephone”. It featured a controlling key to adjust the volume; this was stored in a separate wooden box, along with the valve amplifier. Following numerous complaints from customers about the stigmatising box, an improved amplifier telephone was released in 1934. The new device was cheaper, with a freehand microtelephone – the volume control being embedded in the telephone itself rather than in a box – and more powerful valves to boost the signal and increase the volume. Previous models comprised a separate receiver, held to the ear, and a transmitter into which one spoke. Newly integrated receivers combined the two, creating the telephone familiar to us today. When using early devices, people with hearing loss had been able to press the receiver to their mastoid bone, behind the ear, receiving the sounds via bone conduction. As the GPO explained, such users “had been accustomed to holding the bell receiver to the bone at the back of the ear to obtain best reception for his [sic] particular deafness”. This was not possible with the integrated receiver, and the GPO received a flood of complaints. In the UK, categories of deafness were defined according to audiological tests that were themselves biased, being driven by the GPO’s development of Artificial Ear technology. This machine designated standards of normal hearing in narrow mechanical parameters. The standardisation of ‘normal’ hearing and the categorisation of the deaf was therefore created in line with the priorities of the Post Office’s telephone system. Those who did not fit within the GPO’s standards were categorised as customers in need of a “telephone service for the deaf”. So ‘deafness’ was constructed both socially and technologically at the behest of the GPO. Despite these obvious limitations and biases, the GPO was a repository of expertise in electroacoustics in Britain during the interwar years, and it engineered the first NHS hearing aid – the Medresco. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1498115609webready-e515da9-e1774267518636.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photograph of a person in a fuzzy striped sweater standing beside a wooden bookshelf, holding a cream‑coloured rotary telephone receiver to their ear. Books, a potted plant, and framed botanical prints appear in the background" title="By 1960, when this studio portrait of a model was taken, telephones were installed in many British homes (Image by Getty Images)" /> Change and change again Today, an irony often highlighted is that technologies designed to bring us together are actually having the effect of isolating us. Yet, as we have seen, communication and isolation have been in tension since telephony began. The telephone was always perceived as a threat to societal mental health, and there were always isolated portions of society unable to make and receive calls easily. In recent years, mobile phones have changed our behaviour. Domestic landlines are becoming rarer, for example, largely replaced by smartphones. For a time, landlines were important for the roll-out of the internet, with dial-up connections being the norm before broadband usurped that technology. Today, many young people dislike speaking on the phone, instead preferring to communicate through text. But as we embrace a more individualistic model of telephony, do we appreciate what has been lost with the decline of the home phone, with access to it shared by members of a family or friend group? Whatever your take on such a question, aspects of mobile-phone culture might well seem familiar to our forebears. In 1885, a London-based commentator wryly described a group “telephone party”: “There sat about 15 well-dressed persons, gazing straight in front, apparently deep in thought, and with a black tube held up to one ear. They heeded not the entry of anyone, and silence and inactivity reigned supreme.” The ever-evolving telephone has radically reshaped our lives – but concerns about its impact on mental health and wellbeing are nothing new. Michael Kay is a senior learning designer at King’s College, London. Coreen McGuire is a historian of interwar Britain, and assistant professor of history at Durham University This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Churchill vs Stalin: did this one speech cause the Cold War?
It’s 80 years since the war victor delivered his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, sounding the alarm for a perilous new age. The speech, given as tensions with Stalin soared, is among the most famous in modern history. Yet, asks Richard Toye, has it been misunderstood?
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” It was the soundbite of the century – or at least of the Cold War. Uttered by a former prime minister in a speech on 5 March 1946 at a small college in Missouri, its intended audience was far larger than the scholars and public figures assembled in the institution’s gymnasium. The fact that the ex-PM in question was war victor Winston Churchill – and that sitting on stage alongside him was US president Harry S Truman – helped turn this lecture into a world-shaking historical event. Churchill made a lot of speeches in his long political career. Few of them, however, had the same resounding impact as this warning about the Soviet threat. A set of unique circumstances lent his oration its unusual power – and endowed it with the capacity to shape the language of east-west conflict for decades to come. The Iron Curtain speech was delivered at a time of acute – and escalating – tensions between the Soviet Union and western powers. It’s often been described as the moment that the starting gun was fired on the Cold War. It’s indisputably among the most momentous pieces of oratory of the postwar period. And yet, for all that, it’s clouded in misunderstanding. Much of that misapprehension stems from the fact that the speech had surprisingly long roots – roots stretching all the way back to Anglo-Russian imperial conflicts in the late 19th century. When Churchill rose to his feet and addressed his audience at Fulton, he was 71 years old. He was, as he declared himself, a child of the Victorian age. The legacy of the so-called ‘Great Game’ – strategic competition between Britain and Russia in central Asia – was a factor throughout his political career. Even as a schoolboy, he wrote an essay in which he fantasised about a British invasion of Russia and gloated of “the superiority of John Bull over the Russian bear”. Strangling Bolshevism Yet Churchill’s attitude to Russia – and even to the USSR – was by no means one of unremitting hostility. And that was reflected in the Fulton speech, too. He was no admirer of tsarist autocracy, and even less so of Soviet communism. But during the First World War he eulogised Britain’s Russian allies, and was distressed when they dropped out of the conflict. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-2148990418webready-1ebb782-e1773837016975.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A Soviet propaganda poster shows a person in a white shirt lifting a red flag with gold tassels against a red background." title="A poster declares the Soviet Union’s commitment to “stable peace”. By the time Churchill delivered his Iron Curtain speech, such peace appeared fragile" /> Churchill became the strongest advocate of intervention in the civil war that followed the October Revolution of 1917, and always regretted the failure “to strangle Bolshevism at its birth”. Following Hitler’s rise to power, he began to see the Soviet Union as a counterweight to Nazi Germany, and even as a possible ally. In a March 1939 interview, he asserted that the USSR had “hitherto shown no trace of the aggressive intentions” behind the recent actions of the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. Even after the Soviets and Germans signed a non-aggression pact that August, he appeared to foresee that the USSR’s national interests would eventually force Stalin into an anti-German posture. His prediction came true with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The functional but troubled Anglo-Soviet alliance that followed provides the crucial backdrop to the breakdown in relations that the Iron Curtain speech signalled. Churchill continued to view diplomacy through a traditional ‘Great Power’ lens. That is to say, history was made via hard bargains between the paramount countries, recognising each other’s spheres of influence and legitimate interests, and often involving the ruthless sacrifice of weaker peoples and nations. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-544235714webready-7c819e2-e1773923825162.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A dynamic propaganda illustration depicts revolutionaries on a massive red machine marked “1917,” waving red flags and carrying rifles as they charge ahead, while caricatured figures of the old regime are shown below, fleeing or being crushed." title="Withdrawing money: A Soviet propaganda poster shows bankers fleeing the Russian Revolution. Churchill viewed the events of 1917 as an enormous tragedy. (Image by GettyImages)" /> Churchill’s wartime meetings and correspondence with Stalin were based on this principle – and also on the belief that personal relations were crucial, and that his own individual charm could make a difference. He said in 1942 that he “liked Mr Stalin, liked his jokes and his humour, but could have gotten on with him a lot better if he could have talked with him directly instead of through an interpreter”. Combining tough talk with schmoozing and flattery, he believed that mutual recognition of British and Soviet spheres of interest represented the path to a safer future. The Iron Curtain speech of 1946 reflected the continuation of this approach, rather than a radical shift in outlook. Read more | Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt: the big three's war of words Falling for Stalin’s charms Churchill, however, oscillated between optimistic and pessimistic interpretations of Soviet behaviour. After the February 1945 Yalta conference – at which the British, Soviet and American leaders discussed the postwar reorganisation of Europe – the prime minister told colleagues: “Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.” Yet as the Red Army’s advance progressed, he became increasingly concerned about the prospect of Soviet dominance of Europe. On 12 May, just a few days after VE Day, Churchill wrote to President Truman of the need to reach a concordat with the USSR before the British and American armies ‘melted’ with the onset of peace. “An iron curtain is drawn down between their front,” he added. This was his first rehearsal of a phrase he would later make famous. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-690507912webready-b966227-e1773837530368.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A military parade of uniformed soldiers marches in front of the heavily damaged Reichstag building, its dome partially destroyed." title="On the march Red Army troops in Berlin, 1945. Western leaders were, by now, growing ever more alarmed at the prospect of a Soviet-dominated Europe" /> Six days later, Churchill lectured the Soviet ambassador, accusing his Kremlin masters of “dropping an iron screen across Europe from Lubeck to Trieste, behind which we had no knowledge of what was happening”. Churchill’s diatribe did not have the desired effect. The ambassador told Moscow that “we need to bear in mind that we are dealing with an adventurer, for whom war is his natural element”. Indeed, Churchill was already pondering ‘Operation Unthinkable’, a military plan – quickly dropped – for a potential military conflict with the Soviets. But at the Potsdam conference of July 1945 (at which the ‘Big Three’ Allied leaders convened once more), he was, in the words of foreign secretary Anthony Eden, “under Stalin’s spell again”. Eden reported that Churchill "kept repeating: 'I like that man.'" <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1354478830webready-bf749bf.jpg" width="4630" height="3087" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows several men in formal suits and military uniforms gathered closely, speaking with one another indoors." title="Admiring gaze Stalin (second left), Truman (centre) and Churchill (right) at the Potsdam conference of summer 1945. It was here that the British PM repeatedly remarked of his Soviet counterpart: “I like that man”" /> Churchill’s participation in the negotiations was about to be brought to a sudden and unexpected end – for, before the Potsdam conference was concluded, news came through that he had been voted out of power in that summer’s general election. Churchill’s shock electoral defeat was a bitter political and personal blow, but it didn’t have a material impact on Anglo-Soviet relations: the new Labour government carried on foreign policy on familiar lines. When parliament reassembled, Churchill made his first public reference to “the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain”. His words were reported in the press but did not make headlines, and attracted little comment. It should be noted that Churchill was now speaking in a new context, following the successful test of the atomic bomb and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though he could not say so openly, he hoped that the American monopoly of the new weapon would be the lever that would keep Soviet ambitions in check. He was thoroughly conscious of Britain’s weakening global strength, and believed that a strong relationship with the US was key to escaping its precarious position. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-513666223webready-da7f49c-e1773838887773.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a towering mushroom cloud billowing upward over a city landscape" title="Bargaining power An atomic bomb explodes over Hiroshima, 6 August 1945. This display of might persuaded Churchill that the west could negotiate with Stalin from a position of strength. (Image by GettyImages)" /> For this reason, the message he received from Truman that autumn was a godsend. The president passed on an invitation from the head of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri to deliver the annual John Findley Green Foundation Lecture on problems of international concern. “This is a wonderful school in my home state,” scribbled Truman on the letter. “Hope you can do it. I’ll introduce you.” Churchill, still harbouring designs of returning to Downing Street, now had an opportunity to relaunch himself on the world stage, as well as to take a holiday in the sun. During his lengthy absence from home at the start of 1946, Churchill sojourned in Florida and Cuba before travelling to Washington, DC. Truman accompanied him to Fulton by train. As the train approached Missouri, a crisis was unfolding in Persia (now Iran) on the back of a speech by Stalin that seemed to anticipate conflict with the capitalist powers. The Soviets had failed to withdraw all of their troops from the north of Persia by the deadline that had previously been agreed. But though the president was increasingly incensed by their stonewalling stance, he was not yet ready to lay his fears and frustrations in front of his war-weary populace. With no official responsibilities, however, Churchill could speak frankly in a way that those in government could not. Read more | How the Cold War made the modern world The bombshell moment On 5 March, Churchill delivered his remarks before 2,700 people, all of them white. As one black American newspaper noted, the college was “located in a state where Jim Crow is a legal instrument of government and Negro boys and girls are barred from its portals by law”. The mainstream media made little of this shocking fact, but the message contained within the speech itself was regarded as a bombshell. Churchill’s oration was 46 minutes and 5,000 words long. The ‘iron curtain’ phrase came at the two-thirds mark. It was part of a broader warning about the Soviet Union’s “expansive and proselytising tendencies”, which Churchill backed up with claims about Moscow’s search for “totalitarian control” in the countries of central and eastern Europe. Yet despite the muscular rhetoric, scholars now tend to emphasise that the Iron Curtain speech was not a Cold War clarion call intended to stoke tensions. This is another way in which the speech has been misunderstood. Churchill undoubtedly wanted to reset relations through plain speaking, but he also wanted to show the Soviets that he understood their perspective. Hence he stressed his “strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin”. He stated that he understood “the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression”. It was necessary, he said, to reach “a good understanding on all points with Russia” under the auspices of the recently formed United Nations. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-514080312webready-522ed2b.jpg" width="3115" height="2076" alt="An older man in a light smock and hat sits in a wicker chair, painting a coastal landscape at an easel." title="Brush with destiny Churchill at his easel in Miami Beach, February 1946. President Truman’s invitation to speak at Fulton gave the former PM an opportunity to soak up some sun and" /> Over the following days and weeks, few observers paid much heed to the more emollient sentiments in Churchill’s speech. The nuances of the former PM’s words were easily lost in the media tumult. In fact, the forcefulness of his overall message risked exacerbating the problem he was trying to solve. “Churchill’s speech is sure some blockbuster, as one American paper describes it,” noted one ordinary observer, a female librarian back in Britain. “I read it first in full, and later heard extracts; and I must say that his delivery was so calm and flowing that the parts which had horrified me in print seemed perfectly innocuous as he spoke them.” Churchill offered not only a diagnosis of the perils of deteriorating east-west relations but also a remedy – and in the US it was the latter that proved especially divisive. He urged that a robust response to the Soviets should be built upon “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and empire and the United States”. This seemingly innocuous phrase was widely (and correctly) perceived as a concealed call for a military alliance between the UK and the US. Read more | Winston Churchill created the special relationship. Could Donald Trump kill it? This lit a fire, because former isolationists still distrusted the British empire, and progressive idealists believed that a bilateral pact would be a threat to the integrity of the UN. Leo Amery, Churchill’s former secretary of state for India and Burma, thought it was an error to link the admonitions about the Soviets and the alliance concept together in one speech. “The Americans are intensely suspicious of any attempt to inveigle them into being mere instruments of British policy in the Old World,” observe Amery. Meanwhile, Adam Clayton Powell, the first African American to represent New York in Congress, claimed that Churchill wanted “an English-speaking dictatorship” and “a form of super-nationalism based on race” that would plunge the world once again into war. Truman had known of the speech’s contents in advance but, when the political kitchen heated up, denied having done so. Britain’s Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, took refuge in the claim that his government was “not called upon to express any opinion of a speech delivered in another country by a private individual”. However, in private he was less dismissive: “It will certainly have done good if it encourages the Americans to think and to recognise the need for the United States and the British Commonwealth to work together,” he said. The destiny of the world It is not clear if Churchill really expected the speech to cause the Soviets to change their attitude – but if so, he failed. “Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation,” Stalin told the Soviet state-mouthpiece, Pravda. “Mr Churchill sets out to unleash war with a race theory, asserting that only English-speaking nations are superior nations, who are called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world.” With fear spreading, Moscow housewives started panic-buying. The Soviet authorities then tried to calm the public, spreading the message that “Stalin’s interview did not mean that war was in sight”. The Fulton speech may have elicited a frosty reception in Moscow but, within a year, despite the initial misgivings, its once-controversial message had found widespread acceptance in the west. As tensions between America and the Soviet Union ratcheted up further, the 1947 Truman Doctrine committed the US to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”. The doctrine is now seen by some historians as marking the true start of the Cold War. To this day, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic pay lip service to the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. And Churchill was not quite done with the Soviet Union. Prime minister again from 1951–55, he ploughed his remaining strength into a vain quest for a rapprochement with the post-Stalin Kremlin. This was not because he had changed his mind; rather, his quest for détente was of a piece with his longstanding approach to great power relations and his belief in the importance of negotiating from a position of strength. He was convinced that the greatest chance of peace lay in convincing the Soviet government that they were confronted by superior force that would be used ruthlessly against them unless they mended their ways. “Then the communists will make a bargain,” he judged. East-west relations would have continued declining with or without the Iron Curtain speech. Yet although Churchill did not start the Cold War at Fulton, he selected its defining image – and with carefully crafted vocabulary he created an indelible mental picture that influenced all subsequent debate. Metal coinage Was Churchill really the first to use the phrase 'Iron Curtain'? “Iron curtain: a state of rigid censorship and secrecy (coined by Winston Churchill in 1946 to describe the line of demarcation between western Europe and the Soviet zone of influence)”. This was the definition included in the American College Dictionary. But the editors remained uncertain – had Churchill genuinely originated the term? In 1951, a member of that publication’s team wrote to him to find out. There were good reasons for wondering. The metaphor is based not on conventional domestic drapes but on the fire safety curtains used in theatres. In a 1904 novel, Churchill’s friend HG Wells (pictured) described how, when a character is deprived of his freedom, “an iron curtain… dropped between him and the outer world”. The historian Patrick Wright credits the writer Vernon Lee (a pseudonym for Violet Paget) as being the first to deploy the term in an international relations context. She wrote of “war’s monstrous iron curtain” dividing the two sides after the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. After the October 1917 revolution, the phrase was used in a new sense. In her 1920 book Through Bolshevik Russia, Ethel Snowden described her arrival in Petrograd as part of a Labour delegation: “We were behind the ‘iron curtain’ at last!” It is more than possible that Churchill was acquainted with these examples. But, if so, the influence was unconscious. In response to the query about the origins of his words, he replied: “No. I didn’t hear of the phrase before – though everyone has heard of the ‘iron curtain’ which descends in a theatre.” The dictionary definition stood. The fact that Churchill saw ‘iron curtain’ as a standard expression may explain why he did not do more to attract attention to it. The official title of his speech was ‘The Sinews of Peace’. This, in turn, offers a clue as to why the famous phrase didn’t dominate newspaper headlines. The Daily Express, for example, ran with “CHURCHILL URGES EMPIRE ‘ALLIANCE’ WITH U.S”. The first BBC reporting, on the 11pm radio news, omitted the ‘iron curtain’ passage altogether. Churchill was a genius with words. But even he did not know which of his own would be best remembered. Was ChurcWas Churchill really the first to use the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’?hill really the first to use the ph Richard Toye is professor of modern history at the University of Exeter. He is co-host of the podcast Churchill: The Finest Half Hour This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
What was the most important year in history? We asked 9 experts – and this is what they said
Our crack team of historians, broadcasters and authors offer their takes on a conundrum that continues to divide opinions
AD 1000 Norse power: when worlds collide This moment is surely imbued with the most global symbolism. It was when, according to the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas, adventurers sailed across the north Atlantic from settlements on the west coast of Greenland to the edge of the North American continent. There they met inhabitants of coastal regions of what’s now Canada: ancestors of peoples such as the Beothuk and Algonquin. The circle of humanity was closed for the first time in recorded history. In the 1960s, archaeologists found a Norse overwintering site at L’Anse aux Meadows, at the northern tip of Newfoundland. This backed up what the sagas had already described: a series of voyages west from Greenland, the discovery of new lands and resources, and increasingly violent encounters with the people they called Skrælingar – an unpleasant name meaning ‘wretched ones’. These cross-cultural encounters began promisingly enough, with red cloth and dairy products traded for animal pelts. Eventually, though, relations disintegrated into distrust, violence and murder – an uneasy foreshadowing of what would follow centuries later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2RA49CHwebready-675b6fb-e1772549042852.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A cluster of reconstructed Viking buildings with sod-covered roofs sits inside a white wooden fence near a rocky coastline. The turf-walled structures vary in size and line a central dirt path, with wooden beams and tools displayed outside. Low hills and open water frame the background, evoking the historic Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland." title="Viking dwellings reconstructed at L’Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland, likely the site of the first Norse settlement in North America (Image by Alamy)" /> This is, of course, a moment of retrospective significance. Those voyagers didn’t realise that they had reached an entirely new continent. Their expeditions did not make big news around the world. For me, that makes this moment in history even more interesting. Because when we’re being carried along by the churning currents of time, it’s not always possible to tell which events and dates will mean the most to those looking back. Eleanor Barraclough, historian, broadcaster and author of Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (Profile, 2024) 1066 Conquest, castles, class shifts and chivalry For British history, at least, the answer is 1066. This might seem surprising to people who remember only the battle of Hastings, the death of King Harold and the accession of William the Conqueror, but the regime change that followed the Norman takeover went far beyond just a new royal dynasty. As Domesday Book shows, by 1086 the old ruling class of Anglo-Saxon England had been replaced almost entirely, and more than 90 per cent of the land was now held by continental newcomers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/HYH4NP-CMYK-04891b5-e1772549396426.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A scene from the Bayeux Tapestry shows soldiers attacking a fortified structure. Armoured figures with spears and shields climb ladders toward battlements, while others fight at the gate below. The stylized medieval architecture frames the action, and a line of Latin text runs above the figures." title="A scene in the Bayeux Tapestry depicts a motte-and-bailey. The proliferation of castles was among the major changes that swept England after the Norman conquest (Image by Alamy)" /> This had an immediate effect on the country’s physical appearance. Castles, which had hardly existed in England at all before 1066, were constructed in their hundreds. Cathedrals and abbeys were ripped down and rebuilt in a new Romanesque style. Notoriously, the north was brutally harried into submission and turned into a desert. Less perceptibly, but even more importantly in the long run, the Conquest also introduced new ideas about how society should be regulated. Slavery, which had been commonplace among the Anglo-Saxons, disappeared over the next half-century. The custom of sparing the life of a defeated opponent became the new norm among the ruling elite. The rapid adoption of these new attitudes by the English set them apart from their insular neighbours, who continued to slaughter their enemies and practise war as slave-hunt. The novel perception of the Welsh, Scots and Irish as uncivilised barbarians was a direct result of the Norman conquest, and fuelled the aggressive English colonisation of those countries in the centuries that followed. Marc Morris, medieval historian, writer and broadcaster Read more | Conquest? What conquest? The other dramatic events that really mattered in 1066 1945 World war, international aftermath At a global scale, the Second World War was the most momentous period in history. So it follows that the year of its conclusion – 1945 – was the most important year. The list of transformations that took place because of that war is truly astonishing. There were massive advances in computer technology, radio technology, plastics research, jet planes, rocket science and the production of antibiotics. Nuclear power quite literally exploded into our consciousness in 1945. Super Glue was discovered during the war, as was the technology behind microwave ovens. And it was the final victory in 1945 that allowed such innovations to be released from the secrecy of wartime and into the wider world. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-2161195064webready-ac6bc7d-e1772538184798.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph of a man seated at a large round table signing a document while several men in formal military and civilian attire stand behind him. Numerous national flags hang in the background along with a large United Nations emblem." title="Delegates from 50 nations gather in San Francisco in 1945 to agree and sign the United Nations Charter, part of a postwar process to restore international order (Image by Getty Images)" /> Alongside new technologies came huge social and geopolitical changes. It was in 1945 that today’s map of Europe was drawn during the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. At the same time, the communist takeover of eastern Europe began. This was the year when the nations of Asia and Africa, inspired by wartime rhetoric, began their final push towards decolonisation. The international order was reborn with the establishment of the United Nations that summer, and a whole network of affiliated organisations followed. The list goes on. The Second World War cast a shadow on the world so long that it still affects us to this day. The memory of 1945, and of all that it represents, is preserved in our culture of storytelling, movie-making and novel writing, and we still commemorate it annually. No other single year in history has ever held such power over us – nor is ever likely to do so again. Keith Lowe, author of The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us (Viking, 2017) 31 BC Actium: turning the tide of Roman history At noon on 2 September 31 BC, Marcus Agrippa stood aboard his flagship and gazed towards the Greek promontory of Actium. Some 60 of his enemy’s warships were speeding over the Ionian waves in the direction of the 400 vessels led by him and Octavian, who was watching from an advantageous point on land. Those approaching were part of the fleet of 230 led by Mark Antony, Octavian’s former Roman ally, and Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. As they reached the melee, Cleopatra’s ships sailed straight into the middle of the battle line – and for a moment it seemed as if the tide might turn. Instead, they surged straight through and into the open sea: Cleopatra was escaping. Panicked, Mark Antony abandoned his flagship and followed her with several smaller vessels, leaving their remaining fleet to face the onslaught alone. Surrender followed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/E75F2Xwebready-cd56f0d-e1772549167562.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A carved marble relief shows several ancient ships packed with soldiers in battle. Warriors hold shields and weapons as the vessels move through stylized waves. One ship carries a large horse, and fortified walls and towers rise behind the fighting, suggesting a coastal city under attack." title="Octavian’s forces triumph at the battle of Actium, shown in a first-century AD Roman relief (Image by Alamy)" /> At the time of the battle, the Roman empire was divided between Octavian in the west and Mark Antony in the east. With the suicides of Cleopatra and Mark Antony in 30 BC following their defeat at Actium, Octavian became sole ruler of Rome and conqueror of Egypt. Three years later, the Roman senate conferred on Octavian the title Augustus, officially marking the end of the Republic and the start of the Roman empire. Had Antony prevailed, Rome’s centre might have shifted eastwards. Alexandria might have become a second capital, Rome’s ambitions would likely have turned towards Mesopotamia and Persia rather than Germania and Britannia, and today Europe might instead have a Greek rather than Latin language base. Jess Venner, ancient historian, presenter and author 1453 Bye bye Byzantines, all hail the Ottomans It is, of course, an impossible task to select one specific year. Momentous happenings do occur, but they’re made possible by structural changes – political, economic, cultural – over many decades or even centuries. Having said that, I’d pick 1453. That was the year in which the Hundred Years’ War ended – but also, even more significantly, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. That marked the end of the Byzantine empire – the last remnant of the Roman realm – which had lasted for more than 1,000 years. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/JR3129webready-fd2997a-e1772549266648.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustrated battle scene shows two opposing armies fighting outside a fortified city. In the foreground, soldiers in turbans and bright clothing wield curved swords, while behind them a dense line of armored troops with helmets advances. Domed buildings and towers rise in the background, suggesting the clash is taking place at a city’s walls." title="A 19th-century illustration shows Ottoman troops surging into Constantinople, sealing the fall of the Byzantine empire (Image by Alamy)" /> The city became the capital of the growing Ottoman empire, which endured until 1922 as a major global power. The religious make-up of the region changed dramatically, though it remained a melting pot of peoples of different cultures and faiths. The fall of Constantinople led to an influx of Greek scholars to Europe, who brought deep learning and fresh ideas that added extra stimulus to the Renaissance. It also represented a tectonic shift in global geopolitics, changing the balance of power in the Middle East and radically reconfiguring trade routes between Europe and Asia. Some argue that growing complications involved in trading along overland routes through Eurasia stimulated European Atlantic exploration. It also contributed to a reconfiguration of the medieval slave trade. As it became harder for European traders to traffic people via the Black Sea, they turned increasingly to the coast of west Africa – fuelling the growth of one of the most appalling and tragic phenomena in human history. Hannah Skoda, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford 1533 The wedding that reshaped England’s religious, social and political life It’s for good reason that the dawn of the Tudor era has widely been considered to mark the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Early Modern age. The 118 years when this celebrated dynasty occupied the throne witnessed unprecedented change in every aspect of English life. And no single year was more transformative than 1533. In 1527, Henry VIII had first petitioned the pope for an annulment from wife number one, Catherine of Aragon. He was driven by his all-consuming desire for a son and his obsession with Anne Boleyn, a woman of his wife’s household who had told him that if he wanted her, he’d have to put a ring on it. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-463925937webready-63091c6-e1772538301249.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painted portrait of a woman in Tudor‑style dress, shown from the waist up. She wears a dark gown with a square neckline, a pearl necklace with a gold pendant shaped like the letter B, and a black headdress trimmed with pearls. She faces forward against a dark background." title="Henry VIII's determination to marry Anne Boleyn (above) had lasting consequences (Image by Getty Images)" /> Henry eventually took matters into his own hands by breaking with Rome and setting up a new Church of England, with himself as the supreme head. On 25 January 1533, he married Anne Boleyn. In May, his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was formally annulled and Anne was confirmed as his legitimate queen by the archbishop of Canterbury. She was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 1 June, by which time she was visibly pregnant. On 7 September, the new queen gave birth – not to the hoped-for son but to a daughter, the future Elizabeth I. This proved to be the beginning of the end for Anne. But her marriage to Henry had sparked a seismic shift in England’s religious, political and social life that would reverberate down the centuries. It also produced a monarch who ruled for longer than any of her Tudor predecessors and blazed a trail for future queens regnant. Tracy Borman, author, historian and broadcaster Read more | Elizabeth I and Anne Boleyn: the Tudor queen’s undying love for her mother 1858 Dawn of the Information Age On 16 August 1858, Queen Victoria sent a message to US president James Buchanan. Ordinarily, it would have taken about 10 days for such a communication to cross the Atlantic by ship – but this one arrived in only 16 hours. It was sent to mark the connection of the first transatlantic telegraph cable – a direct line between the Old World and the New. Shorter connections had already been completed between Britain and mainland Europe, including a cross-channel line in 1850, but the Atlantic presented a tougher challenge. For years, engineers including Samuel Morse had debated whether it was possible to lay 2,500 miles of cable beneath the ocean. The first attempt in 1857 failed when the line snapped. But now, at last, it was done. Some commentators hailed it as the Eighth Wonder of the World. An excited newspaper in Boston announced simply: “THERE IS NO MORE SEA!” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-90739586webready-a414067-e1772538374282.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A wooden display case with a blue background holds several cross‑sections of thick telegraph cables and related components. Each piece is mounted with a small printed label, and the items are arranged in two rows, including cable segments from different years and a metal grapnel model used for cable recovery." title="Submarine cables and grapnels used in 19th-century attempts to lay transatlantic telegraph lines (Image by Getty Images)" /> This first transatlantic cable failed after only three weeks, and it wasn’t until 1866 that a permanent line was established. But a precedent had been set: it would now be possible to connect every corner of world in an ever more extensive network of telegraph cables, eventually allowing huge volumes of information to pulse around the globe at previously unimaginable speeds. It was many years later before this vision was fully realised, but in 1858 we see the beginning of the new Information Age – a recognisably modern moment that culminated in the arrival of the internet. Bob Nicholson, writer, broadcaster and historian at Edge Hill University 1917 When revolution reshaped alliances, identities and ambitions In this pivotal year, Russia stopped fighting in the First World War and the US entered it. Neither country ranked much as a world power at the time, but wartime actions sparked global transformations. President Woodrow Wilson’s championing of international cooperation and American-style democracy (universal in rhetoric but deeply racialised in practice) signalled US ambitions for the world stage. But the big story was Russia: its economy shattered by the war, its people toppled the tsar in March (February in the Julian calendar then in use), setting the stage for the Bolsheviks to seize power in November (Julian: October). The Russian Revolution – the most important event of the 20th century – was complete by the end of 1917, and the Soviet Union was secured by 1922. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-526928472webready-bdd9558-e1772538521653.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A stylized poster shows a red figure raising a large hammer above their head, standing over broken black chains. The figure wears clothing marked “1917.” Red star shapes around them contain English and Russian words including “Socialism,” “Democracy,” and “Peace.” The background is light with bold graphic contrasts." title="A Soviet poster celebrates the Russian Revolution of 1917, which inspired anticolonial struggles in Asia and Africa (Image by Getty Images)" /> Neither the civil rights movement nor decolonial struggles would have unfolded as they did without the Soviet Union, whether as foil or ally. In the US, for example, communist organising and Soviet propaganda forced segregationists to either justify or modify their system of racial division. In the world subject to European empire, Soviet communism offered intellectual and material resources to anticolonial nationalists. Cold War historians tend to focus on the ascendant US and its Soviet nemesis duking it out for global hegemony via conflicts in Latin America, Africa and Asia. More salient are the ways in which the revolutionary model and the revolutionary challenge pushed communities, groups and nations to articulate who they were and who they wished to be. The Russian Revolution helped remake the world – and we live out its legacy. Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University Read more | Why does Putin think Ukraine should be Russian? It’s all to do with the Vikings 490 BC Marathon: a victory for democracy Six decades after Cyrus the Great had founded the Achaemenid empire, the Persian forces of King Darius I – also ‘the Great’ – were pushing west to conquer all of Greece. Their primary aim was to lay waste to Athens, which had had the temerity to support a revolt against the empire that by then controlled swathes of the region. But they hadn’t banked on the determination and tactical nous of their opponents. By September 490 BC, the Persian fleet had landed on the coast of Attica about 17 miles north-east of Athens, its troops disembarking onto the plain of Marathon. Around 10,000 Athenian men mustered in the surrounding hills, joined by 1,000 from Plataea – but were still vastly outnumbered. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-475596641webready-ac6297a-e1772538584504.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A carved stone relief showing several human figures in a crowded, dynamic scene. At the center, an older bearded man sits upright while other figures around him lift, support, or carry objects resembling large torches or cornucopias. A reclining figure appears at the lower right. The relief is detailed with drapery, musculature, and expressive poses, and a decorative frieze of circular and floral motifs runs along the top edge." title="The battle of Marathon, in a sarcophagus relief from the second century BC (Image by Getty Images)" /> On learning that the Persian cavalry was absent, Greek warriors led by Athenian general Miltiades swept down on the enemy. Against the odds, the Persian troops were routed – reputedly at the cost of only 192 Athenian dead. This was a critical moment in ancient history: it gave confidence to the Greeks that they could stand up to the mighty Persian empire and, thanks to their part in the victory, the Athenians emerged as the most important polis in Greece. It also provided momentum for Athens’ emerging democracy. In the mid-19th century, English philosopher John Stuart Mill claimed that “as an event in English history, the battle of Marathon was more important than the battle of Hastings” because Greek (and, particularly, Athenian) victory in that clash was so linked to the development of democracy. Michael Scott, professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Is the Bayeux Tapestry in "mortal danger"? I think that's the wrong question to ask
Rather than focusing on the risk to the Bayeux Tapestry in its forthcoming loan to the British Museum, David Musgrove argues that we should be talking about how the massive media interest in the exhibition will surely be a huge reward for the venerable embroidery – and guarantee its long-term survival
It’s not often that a medieval embroidery gets broadcast across the huge electronic billboards at Piccadilly Circus. But that’s what happened on the morning of 26 February, as the British Museum made its first big splash to announce details of its forthcoming blockbuster Bayeux Tapestry exhibition (tickets go on sale 1 July). I was there to enjoy the experience, and it was a delight to see an artefact that I’ve spent a long time thinking about getting the full film-star treatment (I’m co-author of The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry). The exhibition is not without controversy. Questions have been raised by French campaigners and one celebrated English artist (David Hockney) on how fit the Bayeux Tapestry is to travel, and whether it’s right to subject this venerable artefact to the rigours of a trip from Normandy to London. These are reasonable concerns, but they miss the point. Yes, there is risk, but what about the reward? What does the Tapestry gain from being transported and displayed in such a high-profile way? I’d argue that, rather than putting the Tapestry at mortal danger of destruction, the loan guarantees its long-term survival and will be a boon for the tourist business in Bayeux to boot. What other medieval artwork or contemporary documentary source could hope to receive the wall-to-wall media exposure that the Tapestry is currently receiving? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/20260226090016-92f3207-rotated-e1772119755759.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A busy city street with pedestrians and vehicles passes beneath a large digital billboard mounted on the side of a modern building. The billboard displays an advertisement for the British Museum, featuring a scene from the Bayeux Tapestry, with figures in period clothing and the words “REX,” “HAROLD,” and “The British Museum – From Egypt to…”. Surrounding buildings include shops with street‑level storefronts, and a white truck and van are visible in the foreground" title="The Bayeux Tapestry is broadcast across Piccadilly Circus, 26 February 2026. It has received the “full film-star treatment”, says David Musgrove (Image by David Musgrove)" /> When the exhibition opens in London in the autumn, there surely won’t be many people who haven’t heard of the Tapestry, the story it tells and the many mysteries it still contains. The queues will be round the block to see it. And when it returns to its newly revamped museum back in Bayeux in 2027, in time for the millennial commemorations of the birth of William the Conqueror, the press interest will be just as high: people will be keen to see how it will be displayed in its new permanent home. This is priceless PR, and it will keep a steady flood of visitors heading to Normandy for years to come, paying the museum entrance fee and spending their tourist money in the town and region. That is the long-term reward for the risk of the loan. Surviving against the odds The Bayeux Tapestry is likely around 950 years old (we don’t actually know when it was made, but most experts would agree that it was shortly after the event it depicts, the Norman Conquest of 1066). It was designed to be displayed, and probably to be moved around. Whether it was made for secular great halls or to be hung around the naves of churches, it was meant for show. The artefact offers a specific, partial and male-heavy telling of the Conquest story, positioning the Norman invasion as a straight clash between two worthy military men – England’s Harold and Normandy’s William – and excluding other important figures from the narrative (women generally, Norway’s Hardrada, Harold’s brother Tostig and Edgar Ætheling, the closest blood relative to the old king Edward the Confessor). I imagine that the designers would be delighted to see that, almost a thousand years on, the Tapestry is being displayed once more to such fanfare and is still able to get its message across. Read more | The strange story of the Nazi obsession with this legendary artefact still isn't over Given the Tapestry’s age, it’s not surprising that it’s a fragile artefact. It’s been through some tough times, having nearly been chopped up in the frenzied years of the French Revolution, wound and unwound for visitors on a rolling mechanism in the 19th century, soldered into a cylindrical zinc case during the Franco-Prussian War, and manhandled by the Nazis in the 1940s. These various depredations explain why it seems to be lacking its final panel, fraying into oblivion as the defeated Anglo-Saxon troops flee the field after William’s great victory at the battle of Hastings. It’s been patched up over the years, and wears some of this repair work pretty obviously. It’s fair to say that the 19th-century restoration it underwent wasn’t always particularly sensitively done. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/Coll.ections-Musee-Tapisserie-de-Bayeux-Fonds-documentaire-H.-Jeschke-Cliche-Rolf-Alber-FT-746.44-JESPHO09-a34a40a-e1772122650745.jpg" width="613" height="429" alt="A group of high‑ranking German military officers from the World War II era stand around a large table studying the Bayeux Tapestry. They wear dark uniforms with insignia and medals, and several lean in closely as if discussing strategy. The room is formal and dimly lit, with the tapestry dominating the centre of the scene." title="Coll.ections Musée Tapisserie de Bayeux - Fonds documentaire H. Jeschke -Cliché Rolf Alber - FT 746.44 JES_PHO09" /> So yes, the Tapestry demands careful attention and handling, and yes, we need to be mindful of potholes on the roads from Bayeux to Bloomsbury. But as Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum, has pointed out, the business of moving priceless and fragile historical artefacts around the world is precisely what museums do on a regular basis. French and British experts are working together to ensure that the move and redisplay in London is carried out to the highest standards. Lessons from the Ladies of Leek To see what impact the loan exhibition will have, we need only look a little to the west of London and consider the story of its fabulous full-size 19th-century replica, housed today in Reading Museum. It was made by the Ladies of the Leek Embroidery Society 140 years ago, under the strenuous stewardship of Mrs Elizabeth Wardle. Almost immediately after they’d completed their work, Mrs Wardle and the stitching Ladies of Leek allowed their labour of love to go on tour, around the UK, and as far afield as Germany and the US. At a time when international travel was more challenging than today, the replica gave crowds on both sides of the Atlantic a first-hand view of this celebrated medieval artwork. Read more | Michael Wood on women's contributions to the Bayeux Tapestry Five times in the 20th century, requests were made from the UK for a loan of the original Bayeux Tapestry: in 1931, 1953, 1966, 1972 and 1980. All these attempts to secure a loan came to nought. In 1953, staff at the V&A were so confident that the Tapestry was coming that they prepared an introductory guidebook, and, as I reported in a recent article for HistoryExtra, in 1980 officials even considered whether a trip to Bayeux by the Queen Mother might have helped seal a deal. In 1966, negotiations faltered because it wasn’t clear to the British delegates whether they should be talking to the French state or the municipality of Bayeux to make progress. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-2236196240-7778166-e1772120361828.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person in a white protective suit and blue gloves adjusts a large historic tapestry that hangs from a metal rail system in a controlled conservation workspace. The tapestry shows intricate woven patterns and text, and the individual is carefully supporting its surface with both hands, highlighting the delicate, detailed work of preserving cultural artefacts" title="A worker prepares the Bayeux Tapestry for transfer to the British Museum, September 2025. There were five attempts at securing a loan of this kind in the 20th century, all of which failed (Image by Getty Images)" /> In that year, the 900th anniversary of the battle of Hastings, though the original did not cross the Channel, the Reading replica sated the interest in Britain for a Bayeux Tapestry tour. It was sent on an extensive exhibition circuit around the UK from 1965 to 1967. From Aberdeen to Bournemouth, via Gateshead, Anglesey, Doncaster, Hereford and many other stops between, the replica was on show to anyone who wanted to have a look at this recreation of the medieval marvel. It was this sort of exposure that helped to cement the Tapestry’s place in our national consciousness as the archetypal artwork of the Middle Ages. Read more | The Bayeux Tapestry: a political football for 900 years From Tutmania to Tapmania If the Reading replica’s extensive touring schedule through the 19th and 20th centuries has helped to drive awareness of the Bayeux Tapestry, that is nothing to what the loan of the original 11th-century embroidery will do when it comes to London this year. Interest will be stratospheric. As Helena Dollimore, MP for Hastings and Rye, noted in a parliamentary debate on the Tapestry on 25 February, “The Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum will be the exhibition of a generation”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/K08G5Y-3103f6b-e1772120781998.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A section of the Bayeux Tapestry showing mounted soldiers in chainmail riding horses and holding spears, arranged in a dynamic battle scene. Decorative animals and motifs run along the top and bottom borders, and a line of Latin text appears above the riders." title="A section of Reading Museum’s replica Bayeux Tapestry. This facsimile toured the UK after requests for the original to be loaned were rejected (Image by Alamy)" /> She’s right, based on the recent polling carried out on behalf of the British Museum that says that 71 per cent of parents want their child to learn more about the story of the Tapestry whilst it is in the UK. Those children will, in time, want to share the memory of this experience with their offspring, and so the Tapestry will indeed get a generational boost from this. According to the British Museum’s chair of trustees, George Osborne, 7.5 million visitors are expected to flock to see the Tapestry. This loan will do for early medieval history what the mighty Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum in 1972 did for Egyptology. Tutmania blossomed then, and Tapmania will bloom among us this year. The ongoing visitor flow to Bayeux will mean that it will be amply financially supported for decades to come. That’s the reward to balance the risk, and that’s why the forthcoming loan to the British Museum is something we should celebrate and be immensely excited about.
"It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years": why the modern world was born of bloodshed
In the 18th century, developments in finance, weapons and industry converged to create a modern economy born of bloodshed. Clifton Crais explores how killing powered the industrial age
Imagine you’re in Nebraska, standing on North America’s Great Plains, where the broad Platte and Missouri rivers join on their way to the mighty Mississippi. It’s 1804, and in the blistering 36°C heat of summer you’re accompanying Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark as they head west towards the Pacific Ocean, exploring the commercial possibilities of this vast new country. Stretching away in front of you is a sea of chocolate-brown: thousands of animals, each standing as high as a man and weighing upwards of 900kg. Now picture putrefying carcasses and heaps of bleached bones extending as far as the eye can see. “The bones were everywhere,” homesteaders complained, “as thick as cones under a big fir tree”, and so numerous that it was impossible to plough the land. That was mere decades after Lewis and Clark’s fabled expedition. By the end of the 19th century, America’s population of bison had been reduced from tens of millions to around 350. Much of this killing unfolded over the course of just a few years – one of the most concentrated acts of ecological destruction in history. The usual explanation for the slaughter of the American bison ties it to the government’s decision to solve its ‘Indian problem’ – kill the bison and you destroy the Indigenous peoples’ food supply. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who had fought in the Civil War before heading west to subdue the Native American population. But politics didn’t kill the bison. Economics did. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-515301392webready-0494d00-e1771951017974.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing large piles of bison hides piled up after many animals have been killed for their skins" title="Thousands of bison hides lie in huge piles in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878. Advances in chemistry enabled hides to be processed and used in belts in industrial machinery (Image by Getty Images)" /> General Philip Sheridan, another Civil War veteran who led the Indian Campaign across the Great Plains, knew as much. These hunters “have done more in the last two years… to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years”, he said. “Send them powder and lead, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.” A combination of guns, finance and industry made the near extinction of the bison possible. New advances in firearms made the act of slaughtering bison faster and achievable from a far greater distance. Banks rushed across the Mississippi, lending money to hunters and turning them into “businessmen with rifles”. Advances in chemistry transformed the animals’ body parts into saleable commodities, especially their notoriously difficult-to-process hides. Many of these hides ended up in factories – somewhere between 2 and 6 million in England in the 1870s and 1880s alone. Skins became drive belts that were integral to the machinery of mass production in the industrial revolution. Until the advent of rubber, industrial belting was made from hides, including those of the American bison. Meanwhile, American settlers gathered millions of tonnes of bison bones. Railway companies laid down branch lines for the sole purpose of collecting the bones and shipping them east, where they were processed in places such as the Michigan Carbon Works in Detroit – that state’s largest factory before the automobile revolution. Bones were turned into fertiliser, carbon filters and inks. For a time, bison bone could be found in ‘fine bone’ china and even in mascara. Back on the Great Plains, wealth accrued by killing and bone harvesting supported the rise of farming and ranching. Read more | These three unsuspecting inventions won the American Wild West – but did they destroy it too? What unfolded on the killing fields of the US was part of a global phenomenon. Industrial capitalism’s ‘big bang’ and our current age of global warming emerged out of the greatest act of violence the planet had seen since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, when a meteor crashed into the Yucatán, killing off the dinosaurs and enabling the rise of mammals. The development of modern finance and the mass production of guns, bullets and gunpowder made killing for capitalism possible. This also helps explain the rapid rise to global economic dominance of the UK and the US: two countries that were adept at extracting wealth from destruction. By the first decade of the 19th century, the US’s GDP per capita was on a par with the UK’s. The economic historians Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson have written that the US became “one of the first, if not the first, [countries] to join the modern economic growth club” pioneered by the UK. The two would soon account for a large percentage of global wealth and until 1900 were responsible for most global industrial CO₂ emissions. Firearms have a long history – almost 1,000 years – but in the 18th century the flintlock musket became the ubiquitous weapon of choice. A dramatic improvement on earlier guns that used matchlocks, it was versatile and cheap to produce – the Ford Fiesta of firearms. An experienced marksman could get off three shots in a minute. Workshops and factories across the western world scrambled to meet the insatiable global demand for the new weapon. England became the world leader in musket manufacture and distribution, beginning in London’s East End before spreading to Birmingham and Liverpool. Muskets were useless without gunpowder and lead, and England had plentiful supplies of the latter. Mines in Northumberland and Derbyshire yielded thousands of tonnes of the metal each year. When it came to gunpowder, the British East India Company’s exploitation of the subcontinent’s resources proved vital, especially the principal chemical, saltpetre. The monopolistic East India Company considered its control over the saltpetre trade to be “combined and interwoven with the welfare and even with the existence of the empire in India”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL44583webready-ef1bf1a-e1771951145854.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Workers inside a brick‑walled workshop tend large heated pans built into furnaces while others handle tall conical molds set over containers, with steam rising from the equipment. Metal vessels filled with processed gunpowder materials are scattered across the floor, showing multiple stages of early gunpowder production." title="Gunpowder is made at the Woolwich Arsenal, c1750. Controlling large reserves of Indian saltpetre, an ingredient of gunpowder, Britain became a major player in arms manufacture (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Thanks to the research of Dr Nicholas Radburn at Lancaster University, we have quite precise figures for the millions of pounds of saltpetre imported into the UK, and the overall production of British gunpowder, across the entire 18th century. Between 1698 and 1808, Britain produced more than 522 million pounds of gunpowder. Much went to its military, especially the navy, where a single shot from a 16-pound cannon used 8 pounds of powder. But more than 78 million pounds were exported to Africa, the Caribbean and what would become the United States and Canada. These are just the official numbers, though; the real totals are probably higher. In any case, that was enough powder for more than 1.25 billion musket shots – a number greater than the entire global population in 1750. Other nations got in on the action, too, especially the French and the Dutch. Americans weren’t far behind, and by the 1820s US-made weapons were being sold far and wide, especially across the Pacific Ocean and into China, where American Colt pistols were used in the 1850–64 Taiping Rebellion – one of the most catastrophic wars in human history. Plying the world with weapons was a volatile business – literally. Stores of gunpowder and saltpetre frequently exploded. The 1794 Ratcliffe Fire in London, sparked when a barge loaded with saltpetre caught fire, was the worst conflagration in the capital since 1666. It was described by The Times as “a striking and awful spectacle” – devastation on a scale not matched in London until the Blitz of 1940–41. On the other side of the Atlantic, throughout the 19th century there were almost yearly accidents at the huge DuPont explosives factory in Delaware, where a local cemetery was filled with the victims. Murder and pillage are nothing new. In fact, both are as old as our species. However, with the widespread proliferation of weapons in the 18th century, killing became infinitely easier. Read more | Did Aztec civilisation really ‘collapse’? The reality isn’t as simple as you might think This is where modern finance enters the picture. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Spanish were outstanding at pillaging, producing men such as Hernán Cortés who rampaged across Mexico. The Conquistadors ransacked from the Americas the equivalent of billions of dollars in today’s money, much of it in precious metals. But Spain struggled to convert wealth produced by violence into capital for investment and production – and capital is what capitalism is all about. Instead, it spent its fortunes on religious and dynastic wars, churches, art, buildings and other forms of conspicuous consumption. England’s financial transformation was a game changer, building on innovations pioneered by the Dutch in the 17th century. In the 18th century, there was a revolution in English banking, along with a tranche of developments including insurance, bonds, stock markets, patent law and an increasingly standardised currency. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the number of banks outside London increased 30-fold, and doubled in that city. London became the “capital of capital”, as the economic historian Youssef Cassis termed it, led by the Bank of England, which was established in the closing years of the 17th century. “The multiplication of banking companies,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776), was a great example of the virtues of competition and increased public confidence in the economy. Wealth – including that generated by violence – was free to become capital. By 1820, the US had just over 300 banks. Forty years later, that number had grown to more than 1,500 – a five-fold increase, and many more than in the UK. With banking came an array of financial innovations, from insurance to stocks and bonds. Like that of its former imperial master, the US legal system protected wealth – whether it was land, money or, across the South, human beings – which meant that it was easy to transform wealth into investable capital. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL87937webready-7efb6df-e1771951291786.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A busy 19th‑century city street where a crowd of men in top hats gathers in animated discussion, while two barefoot newsboys hold up papers in the foreground. Behind them, tall commercial buildings with large signs and a horse‑drawn streetcar marked “Broadway” frame the bustling urban setting." title="Crowds throng Wall Street, New York City’s banking hub, during a financial panic in 1857. The United States’ rise as an economic heavyweight was boosted by its ability to convert the wealth it accrued from the killing of bison, beaver and whales into capital for investment (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> This is how bison hides ended up in factories, and their bones in your ancestor’s teacup, connecting Manchester with Wyoming, halfway around the world. The connections to killing don’t stop there, though. Those factories required lighting. Sunlight alone was unacceptable to factory owners, who wanted their workers to be labouring as long as humanly (or inhumanly) possible, sometimes from five in the morning until well into the night. Until the advent of hydrocarbons such as paraffin and natural gas, it was whale oil that kept these places lit. England was soon consuming at least 50,000 barrels of the stuff each year, generating more than 3 billion lumen-hours of illumination. By the 1830s, most of the whale oil entering England ended up in its factories for lighting and lubrication. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, anywhere between a quarter and a third of sperm-whale oil (which produced the best light) harvested by American whalers made its way into factories. Whale oil was also used for lighting in Caribbean mills, where enslaved people were forced to work continuously to process the sugar-cane juice that helped provide cheap energy for the industrial working classes. Demand for lubrication and lighting in both factories and cities resulted in the mass slaughter of whales, from Greenland to the Indian Ocean. Though it is impossible to determine the exact scale of the killing, we do know that about 2 million whales were slaughtered between 1750 and 1900. Whaling produced huge profits until the number of those marine mammals dwindled, and whalers were forced to spend more time at sea, often returning home with empty casks. In the case of New England’s whale industry, profits were reinvested in a variety of businesses, from cotton mills to railways and the transition to fossil fuels in the US. One of the world’s largest textile factories – the Wamsutta Mills in New Bedford, Massachusetts – was funded by the harvesting of whales. And some of the early investors in what became John D Rockefeller’s powerful and notorious Standard Oil Company amassed their capital from hunting whales. People found many ways of turning into capital the natural resources in their surroundings. England’s land-enclosure movement was one of them, and has commonly been offered as an explanation for the development of capitalism, going back to the works of the classical political economists in the 18th and 19th centuries. But using violence to generate capital was a global process, and an ongoing one. It proved possible to turn just about anything into profit, from whales and bison to deer, beaver and African elephants – plus another mammal: Homo sapiens. The spread of guns led to a global increase in enslavement, most infamously across Africa. Beginning in the early 16th century and continuing for over 350 years, more than 12.5 million enslaved people were trafficked from Africa’s shores – by far the largest forced migration in human history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-517213402webready-820476d-e1771951455442.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting depicting a slave auction. A man in a blue suit and grey top hat stands on top of a large box, talking to a crowd of gentleman, pointing towards a group of people of colour sitting on the floor, looking sad" title="Enslaved African people are sold at auction in the US, c1852. Vast numbers perished as a result of the transatlantic slave trade (Image by Getty Images)" /> However, nearly 7.9 million people – 63 per cent of the total Atlantic trade in human beings – were moved in just 60 years from the mid-18th century, during the industrial revolution and just as weapons began flooding the continent. This rapid expansion of the slave trade precisely tracks the import of gunpowder into Africa, as Nicholas Radburn has demonstrated definitively. The UK alone exported more than 26 million kg of explosives to Africa in the 18th century, most of it after 1750. Weapons yielded the greatest gains. One result, as the tyrannical King Adandozan of Dahomey (reigned 1797–1818) bragged, was a kingdom where his people “cultivated not with hoes, but with guns”. People hunting people is part of the nasty and brutish reality of enslavement. But how many people lost their lives to produce the 7.9 million people shipped across the Atlantic, where nearly 10 per cent died along the way to the Americas? I have estimated upwards of 2–3 people died to yield a single enslaved person. In other words, perhaps as many as 24 million humans perished in the flood of weapons and enslavement. Similar ratios unfolded elsewhere in the world, where guns were used to hunt people. In the south-east US – where Indigenous people were employed to hunt and enslave other Native Americans – the hunters killed three Native Americans for every one they captured. We know that profits from the transatlantic trade increased dramatically in this period, as work by Nobel-Prize-winning economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson has demonstrated. The Caribbean sugar and American cotton that made its way into workers’ cups of tea and into the English textile mills – which were releasing CO₂ and beginning to warm the Earth’s atmosphere – were tied to Africa’s killing fields. The industrial revolution and our own age of global warming are inextricably tied not just to the institution of slavery – a continuing subject of debate across the world – but also to the mass destruction of people, animals and the environment that guns and finance made possible. Read more | The profits of slavery: the dire impact of empire on Britain's countryside This is the dark reality of capitalism’s creation myth – one that historians and climate scientists are now beginning to understand. The industrial revolution and the global warming that now threatens our very existence emerged from the globalisation of killing for profit. The deaths of millions of Africans that underpinned the entire Atlantic slavery complex is only the most obvious connection. While there were other factors at play here, the wealth generated by the system of slavery “contributed causally to Britain’s industrial revolution”, according to a 2022 study. This recognition underpins many ongoing and fraught discussions, especially in the UK – most recently the February 2025 parliamentary debates on reparations, and the July 2025 University of Edinburgh report on donor links to slavery. These conversations, however, miss something very basic. History’s horrors go deeper into the totality of destruction that made our world economy – one that entangles the deaths of Africans with the slaughter of bison and whales in addition to a vast number of other species. This is one reason why the popular term ‘Anthropocene’ may not suffice, and why I have suggested a different word to describe the epoch that created our contemporary planetary peril: the ‘Mortecene’ – the Age of Killing and Death. Clifton Crais is a professor of history at Emory University. His new book is The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (Picador, 2026) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
How do civilisations collapse? That was the question at the heart of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Two hundred and fifty years after it was published, Guy de la Bédoyère argues that Gibbon’s magnum opus remains a landmark in the writing of history
Sometimes, a single narrative comes to dominate how we remember a year. So it is with 1776. This, as every history lover knows, was the date that the American colonies declared their independence, beginning the history of the United States. But back in the old world, another, rather more modest event would have a profound influence on cultural history. For 1776 was also the year that the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in London. And though it may not have spawned a nation, there’s little doubt that the book’s release was a landmark moment in the writing of history. Authored by Edward Gibbon, an essayist and, at this time, Whig MP for Liskeard, this epic work eventually grew to encompass the story of the Roman empire from the accession of the emperor Trajan in AD 98 through to 1453, when the Ottomans captured Constantinople and the rump of the Eastern empire fell. The last of its six volumes appeared in 1788 just before another tumultuous year in global history, 1789, when the opening salvos were fired in the French Revolution. What, in the year of its 250th anniversary, are we to make of Decline and Fall? Is it coincidental that a book written at a time of rebellion, and where so much of the narrative is about political intrigues and the loss of power, connected with 18th-century readers? And how did a history based on limited resources that few scholars would refer to today escape its time to become a classic? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-122219029webready-2206e03-e1771851490986.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A life‑sized marble statue of a Roman leader stands upright against a carved stone wall. The figure wears ornate armor decorated with reliefs, including a central face and small mythological scenes. A heavy cloak drapes over the left shoulder and arm, adding a sense of movement to the otherwise rigid pose. The right arm is raised, holding a scroll that suggests authority or command. The statue’s expression is calm and formal, and the smooth, pale marble contrasts with the textured architectural backdrop" title="Trajan’s reign marked the beginning of a time when, wrote Gibbon, the Roman empire presided over the “most civilised portion of mankind” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Young and lonely To begin to answer these questions, it helps to know a little about Decline and Fall’s author. Gibbon was born in Putney in 1737 to a family of considerable means. But for all his privilege, there’s more than a suggestion of loneliness in his early life. His relationship with his mother was troubled. None of his six siblings survived to adulthood. He attended Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford, but is better understood as someone who was largely self-educated as a result of his extensive reading. His decision to convert to Catholicism in 1753 brought his time at Oxford to an abrupt end, but under threat of being disinherited by his father, he swiftly returned to Protestantism. There’s a sense at this stage of Gibbon failing to find a purpose in life. Or perhaps, bearing in mind his bookish creativity, a failure to find the right project. This would not arrive until 1764 when, travelling around Europe on a Grand Tour, Gibbon reached “the great object of [my] pilgrimage”, Rome. In Decline and Fall, he would famously note, “It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near 20 years of my life”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/1649172Gibbonwebready-365c81c-e1771851649321.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of six books standing side by side, with their spines facing the viewer. Each book is brown, red and green in colour with gold lettering" title="The six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall were published in the 12 years between the American and French revolutions. The author declared that the book itself documented “a revolution which will ever be remembered and is still felt by the nations of the Earth” (Image by Peter Harrington)" /> Gibbon had found his calling. By the end of the 1760s, he had begun the work that would define him. His preface suggested he knew exactly what he was doing as he explained how he intended to cover the 13 and a half centuries from AD 98 to 1453 by dividing his subject into different periods. He began by explaining: “The first of these periods may be traced from the age of Trajan and the Antonines, when the Roman monarchy, having attained its full strength and maturity, began to verge towards its decline; and will extend to the subversion of the Western empire, by the barbarians of Germany and Scythia, the rude ancestors of the most polished nations of modern Europe. This extraordinary revolution, which subjected Rome to the power of a Gothic conqueror, was completed about the beginning of the sixth century.” From there, Gibbon planned to move on to a second period starting with Justinian (reigned 527–65), who was emperor for close to four decades, and lasting to the reign of Charlemagne, who founded the Carolingian empire in AD 800. A third period would take the story from this Frankish revival of the Western empire to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Read more | Meet the “grossly underappreciated” Roman emperor who became the enemy of the ancient world Blind faith Gibbon baulked at the prospect of completing the massive task he had set himself. “I dare not presume to give any assurances,” he warned his readers. Yet for all his modesty, there was a sense of purpose about his writing. From the off, he wanted to argue that the Roman empire fell due to a combination of Christianity’s corrosive influence, which eroded civic ambition and responsibilities, and barbarian invasions, which acted as the final blow to an already weakened state. He believed that Christianity redirected the focus of citizens from worldly concerns to the afterlife, diminishing their commitment to the state. He also suggested that other internal factors – like despotism, corruption and military weakness – contributed to the empire’s internal decay before the external pressures became overwhelming. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL206171webready-bdcce3f-e1771852336666.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="“A painted portrait of an 18th‑century man wearing a red coat with gold buttons, a white cravat, and a powdered wig. He faces slightly to the side against a dark background, which highlights his pale face, formal clothing, and the refined style typical of the period" title="Edward Gibbon shown in a portrait from c1779. “He deserves to be admired for as long as there is anyone around to read him,” writes Guy de la Bédoyère (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Gibbon didn’t think he was writing about a remote and arcane subject. He believed that, “In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the Earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind”, neatly brushing over the total dependence of the Roman empire on slavery. The empire’s decline and fall was, Gibbon said, “a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the Earth”. Here lay his central point. The collapse of the Roman empire, however long it had taken, had a decisive effect on the world that followed. It was, therefore, a lesson for all time in how civilisations can fall to pieces and what this might mean for those who follow. Although there are countless observations that could be made about Gibbon’s use of ancient sources, and the limitations both of his technique and the evidence he had to hand, it would be difficult to quarrel with his interest in trying to understand why and how a state could fail. This shouldn’t blind us to Decline and Fall’s limitations. One of those limitations emerges during Gibbon’s discussions of the invasion of Britain in the first century AD (in which the author looked back to see how the Roman empire grew to become the dominant force of the second century). Of the British tribes, he noted that “while they fought singly, they were successively subdued”. This is an instantly identifiable line borrowed and translated from Agricola – written by the Roman historian Tacitus and named after the general who helped mastermind the conquest of northern Britain. Read more | Roman invasion of Britain: did the Britons ignore them? Unattributed borrowings like this were commonplace at the time. In one sense, they were homages, but they also served to showcase the author’s learning and easy familiarity with classical texts. Gibbon may have expected, even wanted, his readers to notice this kind of copying and pasting, but it also illustrates an uncritical approach to his source material. A few lines on, Gibbon discussed the recall of Agricola, despite “his superior merit”, from his post as governor of Britain in the AD 80s. Agricola was Tacitus’s father-in-law, and the biography Tacitus wrote was an unashamed hagiography. Gibbon simply copied Tacitus’s very evident bias and accepted the criticisms of the last Flavian emperor, Domitian (ruled 81–96). Happy days? Gibbon was prone to making sweeping judgments. Among the most famous lines in the entire book is his assertion that, “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus”. This statement may be well known but that doesn’t mean it was correct. As I alluded to earlier, we now have a far more graphic understanding of the reality of Roman slavery. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-2181025710webready-7b1c152-e1771851899984.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A marble statue of a man with curly hair and a beard, looking down towards the left with a serious expression on his face" title="Gibbon saw in the second-century emperor Commodus a man unable to cope with the colossal responsibilities of imperial power (Image by Getty Images)" /> Yet Gibbon could also be astute. His stance on Commodus – the much-maligned emperor assassinated in a palace coup on the last day of 192 – showed an understanding of the vulnerability of the imperial system when the emperor lacked the personal resources to cope with the enormous demands of the job. “Commodus was not, as he has been represented, a tiger born with an insatiate thirst of human blood, and capable, from his infancy, of the most inhuman actions,” observed Gibbon. “Nature had formed him of a weak rather than a wicked disposition.” Gibbon’s descriptions of Commodus also reveal a pithiness and a joy in the use of language that helps explain Decline’s and Fall’s initial success. There are many examples of Gibbon’s meticulous turns of phrase but only room here to highlight a small number. Commodus’s downfall was precipitated by him having “discovered an aversion to whatever was rational or liberal, and a fond attachment to the amusements of the populace” since childhood. When Emperor Septimius Severus died at York on campaign in 211, Gibbon described the moment thus: “The declining health and last illness of Severus inflamed the wild ambition and black passions of [his son] Caracalla’s soul.” We might choose different words today, but Gibbon’s meaning remains obvious. He was foreshadowing what came next. Caracalla, “the common enemy of mankind”, now embarked on a tyrannical rule that lasted until his own murder in 217. The only historical figure whom Caracalla admired, Gibbon tells us, was Alexander the Great. But “in no one action of his life did Caracalla express the faintest resemblance of the Macedonian hero, except in the murder of a great number of his own and of his father’s friends”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-464435571webready-2521f5e-e1771851785523.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A marble bust of a bearded man with thick, curly hair, shown from the chest up. His expression is intense, with furrowed brows and a slightly turned head that gives a sense of movement. The sculpted curls, textured beard, and draped garment are finely detailed, highlighting the craftsmanship of the classical style" title="Gibbon reserved some of his most stinging criticisms for the emperor Caracalla, whom he labelled “the common enemy of mankind” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Maxims of persecution Gibbon also had sharp words for Constantine I, who famously converted to Christianity and issued an edict banning the persecution of Christians in 313. What this shift meant in practice, Gibbon contended, was that Christians themselves became oppressors: “The emperor imbibed the maxims of persecution; and the sects which dissented from the Catholic church were afflicted and oppressed by the triumph of Christianity.” Like so many passages of Decline and Fall, Gibbon’s writings on the impact of Christianity on Rome were phrased beautifully. But that didn’t stop them triggering a firestorm of criticism. Leading the charge was the theologian George Travis, who outlined his grave objections to the book in a series of letters published in 1785. Travis’s condemnation centred on a specific passage in the Bible known as the Johannine Comma. This was a phrase affirming the unity of the Holy Trinity that appeared in the Epistles of John, but was absent from ancient Greek manuscripts. Travis defended the Comma as authentic scripture. Yet, in his discussion of the conversion of “barbarians” to Christianity in Decline and Fall, Gibbon labelled it a “pious fraud”. Travis wrote to Gibbon to say: “It will become one who wishes to live to posterity as a historian, to consider well how he can justify himself either in literary candor [sic] or Christian charity, for accusing men so evidently conscientious… of the complicated crime of the falsification of Scripture!” Travis went on to accuse Gibbon of “bigotry” because of his “perverse adherence to any opinion of any kind, without giving to the evidence on the contrary part, an open hearing”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-1336622679webready-094aff8-e1771852165870.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A circular mosaic showing the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River. At the centre, John the Baptist pours water over Jesus, who stands waist‑deep in the river. A white dove descends above them, symbolizing the Holy Spirit. The scene is surrounded by brightly colored, gold‑accented figures of angels with halos arranged in a radial pattern, creating a sense of sacred ceremony and ornate Byzantine style" title="A fifth-century mosaic shows Jesus Christ being baptised in the river Jordan, which is depicted as a pagan god. Edward Gibbon noted the ease with which early Christians made the transition from the oppressed to the oppressors (Image by Getty Images)" /> Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Travis story is how the affair might have inspired Jane Austen. As he dashed off his pen to slate Gibbon, Travis included the phrases “partiality and prejudiced” and “certain truths which you affirm to be now universally acknowledged”. In her History of England (1791), a piece of juvenilia poking fun at school history books, the 15-year-old Austen referred to herself as a “partial, prejudiced, and ignorant historian”. In addition, Austen’s celebrated words “pride and prejudice” can be found in Decline and Fall when Gibbon refers to them as a cause of slavery. Read more | Divided they fell: how war, revolution and sectarianism led to the end of the Ottoman empire In the knives-out scholarly argument that followed the clash between Gibbon and Travis, Gibbon’s view prevailed with the support of an ancient Greek scholar called Richard Porson, who produced evidence suggesting that the Comma was a later insertion. But the episode demonstrates how, in its time, Decline and Fall was hugely controversial. Gibbon was believed by many, especially the clergy, to be attacking the very institution of the church. Resentment of Gibbon’s perceived criticism of Christianity proved enduring. The Rev HH Milman edited an 1845 edition of Decline and Fall and contributed a foreword in which he warned the reader: “We may deplore the bias of his mind; we may ourselves be on our guard against the danger of being misled, and be anxious to warn less wary readers against the same perils.” While he was gracious enough to acknowledge that Gibbon “leaves us the materials for forming a fairer judgment”, Milman insisted “that great misrepresentation which pervades his history” was a “false estimate” of the influence of Christianity. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-566460025webready-1a85702-e1771852243572.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A pencil sketch depicting a woman dressed in a white dress and cap, with her arms crossed. She has dark curly hair escaping out the front of the cap and is looking towards the left" title="A c1810 portrait of Jane Austen. Was the title of her bestselling novel inspired by Edward Gibbon’s prose? (Image by Getty Images)" /> Churchillian praise If conservative religious voices criticised Gibbon, Conservative politicians have often expressed their admiration. Winston Churchill, who was inspired by Gibbon’s self-education, said he had “devoured Gibbon”. He praised Decline and Fall and “was immediately dominated by both the story and the style”. In more recent times, Gibbon appeared at the centre of another controversy. In a 2021 interview, Boris Johnson claimed the fall of Rome was “largely the result of uncontrolled immigration”, an argument derived ultimately from Gibbon. Johnson’s warning that Europe was itself not immune to a similar fate was widely criticised for being over-simplistic, outdated and provocative. Where, then, does all this leave Edward Gibbon? If he did wish “to live to posterity as a historian”, he succeeded. Does it matter that he is now regarded as being out of date? Of course not. Decline and Fall is a valuable artefact of its own time, as is every history book. Glibly criticising works for such a failing is the last refuge of idle academics indulging the conceit that they have themselves pulled off the impossible feat of eternal and indisputable objectivity. If there was no subjectivity or bias in history there would be no history, and instead merely a series of statements of fact. Decline and Fall is also a magnificent monument to a pre-digital era when assembling a book of such epic complexity and range had all to be done by hand and in person. That Gibbon both managed this – and to do so with a memorable use of his native language – means he deserves to be admired for as long as there is anyone around to read him. As so often with the creators of great works, Gibbon’s life after Decline and Fall was an anti-climax compounded by serious ill-health and loneliness. He had never married, his father obstructing the one union – with the salon host and writer Suzanne Curchord – Gibbon had wished to pursue. Gibbon died in 1794, aged only 56 and afflicted with gout and several other ailments. He is buried in Fletching, East Sussex. When he laid down his pen in 1787, Gibbon said in his final paragraph that he hoped his readers would be excited by “a History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind”. He acknowledged his own imperfections, and the inadequacy of the book compared to his own wishes but delivered it “to the curiosity and candour of the public”. And there it has remained ever since. Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer with numerous books to his credit, many about the Roman world. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations (Abacus, 2025) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
London 1908 was the weirdest Winter Olympics in history – and here's why
Boxing and football? In a Winter Olympics? In October? Held in 1908, the first-ever winter games was an experimental affair. But, writes Martin Polley, it was one that sowed the seeds for future – and snowier – competitions
“Outside dirty, slushy streets, a melancholy drizzle and a muggy, uncomfortable atmosphere suggestive of nothing more remote than the crisp, keen, invigorating air that is associated in everyone’s mind with the sport of skating.” This editorial, published in Sporting Life, was far from a sparkling endorsement of the first-ever Olympic skating event. But then this was far from a typical Olympics. In fact, the inaugural Winter Olympics, held in London in 1908, would be unrecognisable to modern eyes familiar with today’s four-yearly snow-and-ice spectacle. Yet it forged the way for what’s now become a major fixture on the international sports scene, the latest iteration of which – Milano Cortina 2026 – is being staged across Lombardy and north-eastern Italy this February. The figure-skating event introduced in such dismal terms by Sporting Life was held in the Prince’s Club, Knightsbridge, and was part of a larger ‘winter’ programme staged in Britain as part of the fourth modern Olympic Games. Those games would witness a number of innovations, some of which today sound odd or even faintly ridiculous – motorboat racing or bicycle polo, for example. Other experiments stuck, though. The 1908 games saw the concept of national teams first formally introduced, while the distance for the Marathon that the London organisers used went on to become the standard for the race. And like these other innovations, the winter programme left a long-lasting legacy. Though it was another 16 years before Olympic organisers staged a full Winter Olympics, it was the British Olympic Council (BOC) that first put an ice-based sport on the programme, and which first organised an event called the Olympic Winter Games. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-1236365554webready-ddcdecb-e1770899425786.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A postcard depicting a large white, circular stadium in London. It is surrounded by free spaces and in the background, Big Ben and the houses of parliament stand. The sky is pink and blue" title="The Great Stadium at what’s now White City was the first purpose-built Olympic arena (Image by Getty Images)" /> Organisational feat London took on the 1908 Games in late 1906. In less than two years, the BOC pulled off an enormous organisational feat. It scheduled a fortnight of sports in July, centred on the world’s first purpose-built Olympic stadium at the Franco-British Exhibition Grounds in Shepherd’s Bush, known at the time as the Great Stadium (or just the Stadium), later as White City. Other events – from sailing and rowing to shooting and polo – were held at venues in London and farther afield. London’s Winter Games was conceived as a distinct programme involving six disciplines. Four were team games – football, hockey, lacrosse and rugby – that were played between September and May in Britain, and thus considered winter sports. The fifth was boxing, added to the Olympic programme too late to be held in July. The sixth was figure-skating – the sport that gave the programme a genuinely winter flavour, and which made this experiment a forerunner of the Winter Olympics that started in earnest in 1924. From its first meeting in December 1906, the BOC comprised representatives from numerous disciplines, including two people from snow and ice sports: W Hayes Fisher of the National Skating Association (NSA), and Edgar Syers of both the Ski Club of Great Britain and the Figure Skating Club. They joined counterparts from the Football Association and the Rugby Football Union. That first meeting discussed “the possibility of holding Olympic Skating Competitions in the winter of 1907–08”. By March 1907, the Amateur Hockey Association (AHA) had joined the committee, the English Lacrosse Association had been invited, and the BOC agreed to stage “a cycle of winter sports [as] an integral part of the Olympiad”. The meeting minutes don’t explain this decision. At that time, just over a decade after the first games under the auspices of the IOC was held in Athens in 1896, the Olympics was still a novelty without any fixed programme; local organisers were relatively free to shape the schedule. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/0720506webready-d570ad7-e1770900127137.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a large crowd of men standing looking in the same direction. To the right of the crowd, some brick building stand, and there are some children standing on one of the roofs, looking out over the crowd" title="Competitors prepare for the marathon at the Athens Olympics in 1896. When the games reached London 12 years later, they were still a novelty with no fixed schedule (Image by Topfoto)" /> The BOC, led by sportsman and politician William Grenfell, Lord Desborough, wanted to use the Olympics to showcase British sport in the round. In his younger days, Desborough had been something of an archetypal Victorian amateur sportsman, and he had served as an MP before entering the House of Lords in 1905. With his sporting credentials and political networks, he was perfectly placed to drive the Olympic project. He led fundraising schemes, chaired the BOC, organised banquets, and delivered speeches to garner maximum publicity for the Games. Read more | Cricket, cocaine and cocoa houses: 5 ways Victorians spent their free time The winter programme was a crucial part of this project, intended to ensure that the Olympics would achieve more than they would if they finished in July. What’s more, the Franco-British Exhibition – the organisers of which financed the London Olympics – did not close until 31 October. Having extra sport in October would bring in more paying customers to the exhibition. International ambition There was also an international imperative. From Desborough’s idealistic perspective, the inclusion of winter sports ensured an extension to what he called, in his speech at a banquet for competitors, “the great idea of the Olympic Games”: that they could “draw together, not in a small sphere, but in the larger sphere of the world’s politics, the nations of the world… through the idea of friendly competition”. The BOC hoped that the team sports would inspire entries from overseas, and give the Winter Games an international profile. Rugby already had a significant following in South Africa and Australia, both of which sent teams to the summer Games. The Olympics were for amateurs only, and rugby union broadly conformed to this culture. Football and hockey were both growing as amateur sports in many European countries, as was boxing. Skating, an amateur but socially elite sport, could draw from many European nations. Lacrosse was the outlier, with a smaller reach, but the organisers hoped at least for a Canadian entry and some British representation. The fact that countries were able to send teams at what Desborough described as “an inclement time of year” added to the value of the winter project. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/1304204webready-bf6df5e-e1770900245969.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of men running along a field, holding hockey sticks. To the right, there are two men wearing pale shirts with black shorts and long black socks. To the left, there are two other men dressed in all white, with black socks" title="England take on France in the first round of the field hockey tournament, winning 10–1. They went on to victory over Ireland in the final (Image by Topfoto)" /> As preparations progressed in 1907, the BOC planned to stage the Winter Games at Easter of the Olympic year, then settled instead on two weeks in October 1908. Of the six sports included, competitions in hockey and skating had not been held in the previous three Olympics. Football had appeared in the previous two, rugby had featured at Paris 1900, and boxing had made its debut at St Louis in 1904. The innovation, then, lay both in some of the sports and in packaging them as a winter programme. The Olympic Winter Games of 1908 opened on 19 October. First up was football, with matches held at the Stadium; Great Britain won the six-team tournament with a 2-0 victory over Denmark in the final. In between football matches, the Stadium hosted a two-team lacrosse event in which Canada beat Britain. In the two-team rugby tournament, Australia ran out winners over Britain. The action then moved to the Northampton Institute in Clerkenwell on 27 October for the boxing tournament. Two days of skating began at Prince’s on 28 October, followed by the six-team hockey tournament at White City. The Games ended on 31 October with the hockey final. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BL0000560190810280590009boxingwebready-e8211dc-e1770907962273.jpg" width="1500" height="1001" alt="A black and white photograph of a large boxing ring, with one man on all fours on the ground, while another man stands over him. Surrounding the ring is a large crowd, all sat down looking towards the ring. There are white posters and signs around the sides" title="English boxer RK Gunn defeats his French opponent in a featherweight bout in 1908. He was one of the five British pugilists who took all of the top medals in that sport at the Winter Games (Image by British Library)" /> Think rink It was, of course, the skating that gave this programme a winter feeling, away from the muddy pitches at White City. The BOC hired the Prince’s Club, London’s only all-year private rink, for several weeks in October, allowing competitors to practise ahead of the two-day event. Spectator tickets were expensive – £2 2s (well over £200 today) for a two-day pass, or £1 1s for one day – but they sold well, and there were full houses throughout the competition, perhaps because it attracted some of the biggest names in the sport. There was Ulrich Salchow of Sweden, who won gold in the Gentlemen’s Individual, and Nikolai Panin of Russia, winner of the Special Figures. They were joined by Britain’s leading female skater, Florence ‘Madge’ Syers. She won the Ladies’ Individual event and, partnering her husband and BOC member Edgar, took bronze in the Pairs. These Olympic medals rounded off a stellar international skating career in which she had won British and World titles. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-881629540webready-3559007-e1770899596586.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A gold medal depicting three naked people: one man standing in the middle and a woman each side of him, placing a wreath on his head. On the bottom left, the words OLYMPIC GAMES are written. On the opposite side, the words LONDON 1908 are there" title="A gold medal from the London games of 1908, which saw a number of Olympic innovations (Image by Getty Images)" /> The relatively low turnout of countries in the team sports rendered some of the games sadly one-sided, as seen most clearly in the early rounds of the football. Bohemia and Hungary withdrew at a late stage, so France entered A and B teams to make up the numbers, competing alongside Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden. France B lost 9–0 to Denmark, while the same opponents hammered France A 17–1 in the semi-final, before Britain took gold. With rugby and lacrosse attracting only two teams each, these tournaments comprised just finals. The Australian rugby team happened to be in Britain at the time anyway, so simply added the Olympics to its schedule. A British tour of Australia and New Zealand that year prevented the main team from competing, so the BOC designated the county champions, Cornwall, as Britain’s representatives. Australia won 32–3. Hockey attracted only Germany and France from overseas, so the AHA split Britain into its four constituent nations (at the time including Ireland as one entity) for the tournament. England beat Ireland 8–1 in the final. In boxing, 32 of the 42 fighters were British; the other 10 included representatives from Australia, Denmark and France. All five of the gold medals went to Britons. Skating was the most international event, with entrants from Britain, Argentina, Germany, Russia, Sweden and the US. Read more | From Hollywood to war heroes: 10 Olympians who were more famous outside sport In the gold medal tally for the Winter Games, Britain came top with eight, followed by Australia, Canada, Germany, Russia and Sweden with one each. Frosty reception This pioneering Winter Games programme had a mixed reception. Crowds at the stadium events were small, with fewer than 3,000 watching the rugby final and 2,000 at the football (in a venue that had held more than 80,000 back in July). Tickets in the uncovered sections were available for only 6d (about £3 today), but most matches were held on weekdays and in bad weather, which did not help attract spectators. Boxing and skating, both held indoors, fared better. Most newspapers, both general and sporting, were interested throughout, with the Daily Mirror leading the way. It offered updates on all of the competitions throughout October, and ran action photographs that ranged from the Canadian lacrosse team in training to portraits of the Olympic boxing champions, and action photographs from the skating and the team games. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL294984webready-d9b66c6-e1770899858122.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a large group of men dressed in white shorts and white jumpers with a maple leaf reading Canada on the front. They are all holding lacross nets up in the air and cheering. In the background to the right is a man dressed in a long black coat and a bowler hat" title="Canadian lacrosse players cheer their defeated opponents, Great Britain, after the Olympic final. They were the only two teams involved in that competition (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Sporting Life also excelled, running interviews, previews, fixture lists, ticketing news and match reports. Other papers and magazines, including Country Life, The Field, the Daily Mail and the Athletic News, gave the Winter Games coverage in the form of previews, reports and, in some cases, action photographs. Local newspapers carried syndicated stories, ensuring nationwide coverage. Read more | The madcap Paris Olympics: the chaos that nearly derailed the 1900 Games In some cases, the reporting was negative. The Athletic News described the two-team rugby tournament as “an Olympic Fiasco”, and The Field printed the slightly barbed remark that the boxing bouts involved “more fighting than science”. Broadly, though, the press took a positive approach, welcoming this novel gathering of international teams across so many sports. However, at a time when the Olympics had not yet become the centrepiece of world sport, these events were relatively minor elements of Britain’s sporting scene. That status was reflected in some of the press, with fixture lists particularly revealing. So, for example, the football match between Paddington Thursday and Great Eastern Railway appeared just below the Olympic semi-finals in Sporting Life on 22 October. Similarly, The Field’s account of the hockey final ran in the same column as its report of Cambridge University’s match against Beckenham. Lasting legacy The 1908 games were staged long before the idea of legacy figured in Olympic thinking. However, the experimental Winter Games had some lasting impacts. Though lacrosse has not returned to the Olympic programme since 1908, and rugby struggled along only until Paris 1924 (though it was reintroduced in Sevens mode in 2016), the other team sports blossomed after their inclusion at London. The football tournament was the largest of its kind held to that date, and hockey has featured in all but two subsequent editions. Similarly, boxing later became a permanent fixture. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-541055111webready-753f687-e1770900377445.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of five men dressed in black uniforms, black hats and black ice skates. Behind them, other men dressed in dark clothing look across the ice rink at them" title="Figure-skaters including Ulrich Salchow (centre), who won numerous World and European titles around the turn of the century as well as Olympic gold in 1908 (Image by Getty Images)" /> It was the skating, though, that helped to create a specifically winter legacy. No ice sports featured at the Stockholm Olympics in 1912, but Antwerp’s planners re-introduced figure-skating at their 1920 Olympics. British skater Phyllis Johnson returned at that games – adding the bronze in the Pairs to her silver from 1908 – and Salchow unsuccessfully defended his Olympic title. Antwerp also saw the first Olympic ice hockey tournament. From that point, it was a short step in 1924 for France to organise a programme of snow and ice-sports at Chamonix to complement that year’s Paris Summer Olympics. The IOC formally launched a separate Winter Olympic Games in 1928 at St Moritz in Switzerland. Almost a century on, the 2026 iteration in northern Italy is set to be a sporting behemoth, featuring more than 3,500 athletes from 93 nations. Yet the seeds for this now-global event were sown not on pristine Alpine slopes but in the “melancholy drizzle” of London’s “dirty, slushy streets” in October 1908. Breaking the ice Five athletes who made their mark at London's Winter Games William Grenfell: Channel-crossing chairman The 1st Baron Desborough (1855–1945) was the first chairman of the British Olympic Association, and the head of the British Olympic Council that organised the 1908 Games. Educated at Harrow and Oxford, he was a talented amateur sportsman in his student days. He twice rowed in the Boat Race against Cambridge, and excelled in cricket, fencing and athletics. His wider sporting adventures included climbing the Matterhorn, rowing across the English Channel in an eight, and swimming across the pool at the bottom of Niagara Falls. Florence 'Madge' Syers: England's ice queen The London-born daughter of a property developer, Syers (1881–1917) had revolutionised the sport of figure-skating by entering the World Championships in 1902 – even though there was no dedicated female class. She came second. Syers advocated for more practical dress for skaters, arguing against “flowing skirts and garden-party hats”, proposing that skirts should be short, falling above the ankle, and narrow. She also decried corsets, explaining that “the waist must be free, so that the muscles of the back may have play, and the body be easily rotated from the hips”. Syers also wrote about winter sports, and competed to a high standard in swimming and diving. Sophus Nielsen: free-scoring Scandi strikerThis famously bow-legged footballer (1888–1963), nicknamed ‘Krølben’ (‘curly legs’), netted a staggering 10 goals in one incredible match – Denmark’s 17–1 win over France A team in the 1908 Winter Games semi-finals. That scoreline has never been matched in the Olympics, and the record of one player scoring 10 goals in a game has been repeated only once. One English sporting newspaper joked that many clubs in the Football League “would be glad of a forward who would shoot at goal 10 times in a match, let alone score 10 goals”. Nielsen played for Denmark again in the 1912 Olympics, and later managed the national team. Tom Richards: lion-hearted wallaby This Australian rugby player (1882–1935), who won the 1908 Olympic gold medal with his team – scoring a try in the final – was described by the Daily Telegraph as “the cleverest forward in the world” for his overall performance in the Wallabies’ 1908–09 tour of Britain. The son of a Cornish migrant to Australia, Richards was one of only two players to have played for both Australia and the British Lions – a fact celebrated by the Tom Richards Cup, named in his honour and contested between Australia and the British & Irish Lions between 2001 and 2025. During the First World War he served with the Australian Imperial Force, fighting at Gallipoli and Arras, and was awarded the Military Cross.Ulrich Salchow: Sweden's skating superstar This all-conquering Danish-born Swedish figure-skater (1877–1949) won numerous World and European titles, most of them in the first decade of the 20th century. Sporting Life described his gold medal-winning performance in the Individual event in 1908 as “an astonishing display [that] combined acrobatics with wonderful power and fascinating elegance”. Speaking at the Olympic banquet on 31 October, Salchow said that it was “quite admirable that the skating competition should have been carried out in such a splendid way in a country where for climatic reasons skating cannot be said to be a national sport”. In 1909, Salchow pioneered a move still named after him, which involves the athlete taking off for a jump on the rear inside edge of the skate on one foot and landing on the outside edge of the other. Martin Polley is professor emeritus in history at De Montfort University. His books include The British Olympics: Britain’s Olympic Heritage 1612–2012 (Historic England, 2011) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
From maniacal horses to bat-men on the moon: 14 strange newspaper headlines from history
Muckraking journalists and money-hungry editors have been publishing sensational stories since newspapers first began. Hilary Mitchell flicks through the archives and reveals some of the weirdest press cuttings of all time
1. "German ghouls: corpses converted to soap and explosives” Yorkshire Telegraph and Star, April 1917 If you think that ‘fake news’ is a new phenomenon, think again. One of the most notorious pieces of misinformation actually dates to the First World War. During the conflict, a gruesome rumour spread that German leaders were using “Kadaververwertungsanstalten” – ‘corpse factories’ – to turn the dead bodies of their own soldiers into products such as soap, candles, and even bombs. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/German-Ghouls-0741ad1-e1769765897344.jpg" width="620" height="411" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline GERMAN GHOULS across the top" title="German leaders were creating soap and explosives out of corpses, claimed this 1917 newspaper article. In reality, they were victims of a deliberately shocking propaganda campaign (Image by the Newspaper Archive)" /> The lurid story unsurprisingly sparked widespread outrage, but it wasn’t true. It was a purposefully shocking piece of war propaganda, and the German government protested in the strongest terms against the “loathsome and ridiculous” claims. However, that didn’t stop the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star gleefully reporting on the hoax in April 1917, in an article that claimed the Germans were making “dividends from death” by distilling glycerine from dead bodies “and so obtaining some portion of their explosives.” 2. "O Dammit wants his name changed" The Richmond Climax, 6 June 1913 Orlando Dammit was featured in the 6 June issue of the equally curiously named Richmond Climax newspaper. The short article explained that the man wanted to change his name from “O. Dammit” because he “can’t tell whether people are calling him or merely venting injured feelings when they say ‘O, dammit.’” It’s not clear what he wanted to change his name to, or if he was successful in his attempts to change it, but presumably he would have been happy with anything that didn’t begin with the letter ‘O’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Vampires-in-Rhode-Island-Public-Domain-3e1421d-e1769766218331.jpeg" width="620" height="413" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline BELIEVE IN VAMPIRES across the top" title="Rhode Islanders were convinced the undead were sucking the blood of their own relatives and causing consumption – sparking ‘vampire hysteria’ throughout the state" /> 3. "Vampires in Rhode Island" Boston Evening Transcript, 18 January 1896 On 18 January 1896, a particularly strange story ran in the Boston Evening Transcript. The headline was ‘Vampires in Rhode Island’, and the story went on to explain: “Respectable people [are] digging up the bodies of defunct relatives… The belief is that persons dead of consumption leave their graves and suck the blood of members of their own families.” This outbreak of ‘vampire panic’ was sparked by a wave of tuberculosis (then known as consumption) in New England. Some rural communities decided that the often-fatal illness was the work of the undead and began exhuming bodies, looking for what they believed were signs of vampirism, such as fresh blood in the heart. The most famous case occurred in 1892 in Exeter, Rhode Island, when the body of a young woman called Mercy Brown was exhumed. Her heart was reduced to ashes and given to her sick brother as a remedy for his own illness. He died anyway – after all, burned organs aren’t a cure for TB – but the story became a lasting symbol of the panic. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Ouija-boardPublic-Domain-7d2ac73-e1769766295767.png" width="904" height="1000" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline CONSTANT USE OF OUIJA BOARD DRIVES SEVEN PEOPLE INSANE across the top" title="Rooted in the Victorian obsession with spiritualism, encounters with ouija boards were common. The story of Adeline Bottini, featuring an alleged séance in the nude, was particularly dramatic" /> 4. "Constant use of ouija board drives seven people insane" The Long Beach Telegram and The Long Beach Daily News, 4 March 1920 In 1920, Long Beach newspapers reported that a 15-year-old girl in California had introduced “the [ouija board] and convinced other six [people] of its spiritual power”. The story went on to claim that all seven of the people involved were now under observation in the “insane ward”. The girl at the heart of the scandal was one Adeline Bottini, who police alleged was performing séances in a state of undress, “the better to communicate with the spirits”. Ouija boards were first commercialised in 1890 by a businessman from Baltimore, towards the tail end of the Victorian obsession with spiritualism: the belief that the living could communicate with the spirits of the dead. The craze began in 1848 with the Fox sisters in New York state, whose séances drew wide attention, and it didn’t take long before copycat socialites started to host similar gatherings. At these, participants were – unlike poor Adeline Bottini – always fully clothed. Read more | Fake news and the Dreyfus affair: the media-fuelled scandal that divided France <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Boy-Eats-BibleGettyImages-164563808-960838d-e1769766508270.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A cartoon of a boy wearing a pink T shirt, green trousers, a blue backwards cap on his head, and blue shoes, eating a blue Bible" title="In one of the more trivial stories from rural 1920s Hilton, Mellzo McCoy munched on the family Bible, resulting in an appearance in the newspaper – and a stomach ache" /> 5. "Boy eats Bible" The Hilton Record, 17 June 1926 “Unknown to his parents, Mellzo McCoy ate the family Bible with the exception of the covers and a few pages. The loss was only discovered when Mellzo complained of a stomach ache.” This 1926 snippet in The Hilton Record – the weekly community newspaper for the village of Hilton in Monroe County, New York – definitely won’t win any awards for the most detailed news article of all time. This is probably why it was buried on page eight of the publication, alongside another article (‘Bee Causes Wreck’) about a man losing control of his vehicle after a bee got into it. When it comes to stories like this, it’s important to understand how local papers worked at the time. Rural weeklies like the Record often had unpaid neighbourhood correspondents who contacted them with (fairly trivial) stories about what had happened in their neck of the woods. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Terrified-by-Donkey-f14e9ba-e1769766740393.jpg" width="620" height="414" alt="A black and white illustration shows a woman falling to the floor in front of a donkey" title="Scared to death by the sound of a donkey’s footsteps behind her, a young woman’s sad demise ended up in the Illustrated Police News, known for its lurid coverage (Image by The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive)" /> 6. "Trampled to death by a donkey" Illustrated Police News, 21 July 1883 The Illustrated Police News was a sensationalist Victorian weekly newspaper published in Britain, infamous for its lurid crime coverage and emotive illustrations. It launched in 1864 and this rather sad story ran in their 21 July 1883 edition. It recounts the final hours in the life of a young woman who had set off to visit her grandparents and heard footsteps behind her. She ran for her life. Her grandfather found her body the next day, noticed his donkey standing close by and concluded that she’d been frightened by the sound of the animal following her home. Although the stories featured in the Illustrated Police News were reported in a very melodramatic way, they were, unlike the German ‘corpse factory’ article above, completely true. The publication’s content, though bombastic, was based on police reports, coroners’ inquests and court reporting. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Children-Not-Fish-Public-Domain-889d371.jpg" width="299" height="258" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline CHILDREN NOT "FISH" SO CAN'T BE MAILED across the top" title="After at least two separate attempts to send children via mail, the postal department had to step in. Children, they said in 1920, were not “harmless animals” so couldn’t be mailed" /> 7. "Children not 'fish' so can't be mailed" Des Moines Tribune, 16 June 1920 “Children do not come within the classification of ‘harmless animals’, and therefore are not mailable,” the Des Moines Tribune reported the postal department as saying in 1920, apparently prompted by two applications to ship children around the country inside packages. Parcel post was still a relatively new phenomenon in 1920, having been introduced in 1913. Some inventive parents realised that the cost of sending a package was often cheaper than a train ticket and news reports of the time carried stories about attempts to mail children: for example, in St Louis in 1913, a mother allegedly tried to mail her eight-year-old to relatives a few hundred miles away and in 1914, a 10-year-old-boy was purportedly mailed as a parcel to his grandmother. 8. "Battle with a bald eagle" San Francisco Call, 9 October 1891 The San Francisco Call was known for its flamboyant coverage, and this thrilling tale of a balloonist’s high-altitude encounter with an eagle, published in 1891, is a great example. The article describes the ascent of a 24-year-old named Arthur Cleveland in a hot air balloon. Once he had climbed to 3,000 feet, “he saw a huge bird flying swiftly toward him” and became aware it was a bald eagle. The article goes on to describe Cleveland’s daring – and victorious – battle with the rogue bird. He later retrieved the dead eagle, only to discover the local constable wasn’t too impressed; he suggested Cleveland be fined $550 for killing a protected species. Read more | A Victorian-era journalist snuck into an infamous asylum, and what she exposed shocked New York <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Real-Puppy-Love-Public-Domain.jpg-f48d0e7-e1769767410147.png" width="620" height="413" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline REAL PUPPY LOVE HERE AS DOGS GO ELOPING across the top" title="Canines under the spell of Cupid were the news of the day in 1910s Minneapolis – showing the sensationalism of early 20th-century press" /> 9. "Real puppy love here as dogs go eloping" The Minneapolis Morning Tribune, 2 March 1911 It must have been a slow news day in Minneapolis on 2 March 1911, as one of the headlines in the Tribune appears to have been about dogs having sex. The rest of the headline reads: ‘Canines Fall Under Shafts of Cupid and Kennel Society is Stirred, Four Hundred of Dogdom Buzzes over Scandals Among Young Set, Irate Husband of French Poodle on Warpath after His Rival.’ Although the full details of the story are lost in the mists of time, it’s another good example of early 20th-century press sensationalism, one which also documents the rise of pet culture we still have today. The early 1900s saw a rise in the popularity of organised dog breeding, which in turn led to the formation of kennel clubs; these sometimes became embroiled in controversies and rivalries, which were equally good tabloid-fodder. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Bat-Men-GettyImages-1397982878-a7ec22c-e1769767491349.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white illustration of large winged creatures flying around a mountainous area with a river running through it" title="A lithograph depicts the lunar civilisation that New York newspaper The Sun claimed had been found on the moon (Image by Getty Images)" /> 10. ”Bat-men on the moon” The Sun, New York, 1835 In August 1835, New York newspaper The Sun published a series of six articles claiming that life had been discovered on the moon. Not only life, in fact, but an entire lunar civilisation. The stories, credited to the famous astronomer Sir John Herschel and supposedly sourced from a (non-existent) Edinburgh paper, detailed lunar landscapes populated by bison, goats, unicorns, tail-less beavers, and bat-like humanoids called ‘Vespertilio-homo’ who built temples. The articles claimed that discoveries had been made using a revolutionary new telescope. It turned out that the hoax was the work of one of The Sun’s reporters who later admitted to inventing the stories to boost sales. However, The Sun never issued a formal retraction, making the ‘Great Moon Hoax’ one of the most famous examples of 19th-century ‘fake news’. 11. "Man doesn't trust horses" Amador Ledger, 3 October 1902 Letters to the editor aren’t a new phenomenon, as this extract from the Amador Ledger, itself lifted from Harper’s Weekly, shows. In this example, a man from Kentucky wrote into Harper’s to share his opinion that, in his long experience, “every horse at some time in his life develops into a homicidal maniac… I have driven one commonplace horse every other day for six years over the same road and then had him go crazy and try to kill himself and me because a leaf fluttered down in front of him.” The entry had the subheading: ‘Part maniac and part idiot, is what one man calls them’, which many present-day horse owners will no doubt relate to. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/TypistGettyImages-97226313-cb961e1-e1769767620435.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white cartoon of a woman sitting at a typewriter" title="In an eerie ‘true ghost’ story, a woman reportedly saw a ghost fall from a building in Aldwych, London – the same building from which a woman had previously fallen to her death (Image by Getty Images)" /> 12. "Girl typist saw a ghost fall in city street" Sunday Mirror, 29 July 1934 In July 1934, the Sunday Mirror reported the case of a typist who claimed to have seen a ghost fall from a building in Aldwych, London. She fainted and was carried into a nearby chemist’s shop. When she regained consciousness, she told reporters she’d seen a girl fall from a high window and land at her feet. Interestingly, 18 months earlier, a young woman had actually fallen from an upper storey at that very location and was killed. The typist claimed she had no prior knowledge of the tragedy – whether you believe her is entirely up to you. As noted above, the mid-19th century saw a rise in spiritualism and séances. As a result, papers often reported ‘true ghost’ stories or mysterious happenings. However, by the 1920s and 30s these stories had begun to decline in mainstream tabloids, so this 1934 Mirror story is a bit of a (spooky) outlier. Read more | Did he photograph the ghost of a president? Meet the scheming Victorian who exploited a grieving America <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Devil-WorshipGettyImages-1387752195-62248fc-e1769767805608.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Seven people are standing in a line with their heads bowed slightly forward. Each is wearing a black hooded gown and a red devil mask on their faces" title="The global ‘satanic panic’ of the 1980s led to many stories of witches and ritualistic practices. In Utah, a 12-part series in the Provo Daily Herald was dedicated to devil worship (Image by Getty Images)" /> 13. "Satan worship in Zion" Provo Daily Herald, July–August 1985 No, this isn’t a particularly far-fetched plot from hit Netflix series Stranger Things: the US newspaper Provo Daily Herald really did publish a series of 12 articles in 1985 alleging widespread devil worship in Utah Valley. The articles were written by two reporters, Patrick Christian and Vicki Barker, who claimed to have interviewed “dozens” of psychologists, therapists and law-enforcement officers so they could “educate readers about the prevalence of Satanic worship in this area”. Subjects of the articles included a teenager who, it was claimed, drank animal blood after meeting a Satanist in seventh grade. Also, two Utah County Sheriff's deputies reported on “covens of witches” operating in abandoned buildings. Proof of these claims was lacking, to say the least, and the Provo Daily Herald faced criticism for adding fuel to the global ‘satanic panic’ that gripped the media in the 1980s. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Tiger-WoodsGettyImages-1097899790-f941754-e1769767906185.jpg" width="620" height="747" alt="A man wearing a black Nike sports jacket and black Nike cap stands holding multiple white golf balls in his hand" title="Tiger Woods holding his custom-made golf balls, which caused a stir following his endorsement of Nike Tour Accuracy ones (Image by Getty Images)" /> 14. "Tiger Woods plays with own balls" Associated Press wire story, 2000 The editor of this news story by journalist David Kravets was either very naive or purposefully channelling their inner Carry On scriptwriter when they crafted this saucy headline in the year 2000. The story is about the fact that pro golfer Tiger Woods had endorsed Nike Tour Accuracy golf balls in adverts, when (shock horror!) he actually played with custom-made balls unavailable to amateur players. Nike was eventually forced to confess that the balls Woods played with had a slightly harder inner and outer core than the balls sold to the public. It wasn’t exactly the most exciting story of all time, which is possibly why it was given such a cheeky, Barbara Windsor-esque headline.
Conquest? What conquest? The other dramatic events that really mattered in 1066
1066 is synonymous with the battle of Hastings. Yet while Duke William was launching his conquest of England, the rest of Europe had its own crises to contend with. Charles West takes us on a tour of the continent during a dramatic year
It was the summer of 1066 and two powerful leaders were rallying their supporters behind them and preparing for war. Their clash would result in political chaos, the spilling of much blood, and one of those leader’s violent deaths. Yet the people of England barely noticed. That’s because the clash took place hundreds of miles to the south-east on the Italian peninsula, and it involved two figures – a renegade cleric named Arialdo and Guido da Velate, the archbishop of Milan – who have rarely troubled British history books. These two men had been butting heads since the 1050s and, by 1066, their intense rivalry had pitched the city-state of Milan into chaos. The trouble started when Arialdo and his supporters began accusing Milan’s formidable clerical elite of corruption, chiefly because the city’s priests were married – a longstanding local practice that many non-Milanese found deeply shocking. Things quickly turned violent: armed skirmishes erupted on the streets. The showdown was soon heading for a bloody denouement. We might suppose that the pope in Rome would take a dim view of an open rebellion against the clerical hierarchy in a major Italian city. But from the middle of the 11th century, the papacy was occupied by men who agreed that the Catholic church was in desperate need of an overhaul, and so they sided with Arialdo. In March 1066, Pope Alexander II went so far as to excommunicate Archbishop da Velate because of the charges Arialdo laid against him. It was a radical move. And it backfired spectacularly. The canny archbishop was able to spin his excommunication to his benefit by positioning himself as the champion of Milanese traditions against toxic ‘external’ interference. An enraged local populace turned on Arialdo and chased him out of the city. In June 1066, while he was making his way to Rome, emissaries of da Velate hunted down Arialdo and murdered him. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-931173370webready-9665804-e1769423234953.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting shows four men sitting at a table covered with glasses of wine. Three of them are dressed in red cloaks with gold trimming, and wide red hats. The other man is dressed all in gold and wears a tall, layered gold and white crowned hat" title="In 1066 Pope Alexander II (second from left) excommunicated the Archbishop of Milan, who was accused of corruption (Image by Getty Images)" /> Mob power 1066 is surely the most famous date in all of English history, synonymous with one event: Harold II and William of Normandy’s bitter struggle for the throne of England. We think of charging Norman knights and Anglo-Saxon foot soldiers, of the battle of Hastings and a famous arrow in the eye – all recorded in exquisite detail by the Bayeux Tapestry. Yet as Arialdo’s fate on the road to Rome proves, the Norman conquest was far from the only significant event to occur in Europe in 1066. In fact, while Norman and Anglo-Saxon forces slugged it out at Hastings, people from Spain to Scandinavia, Kyiv to Constantinople were embroiled in events every bit as momentous as those unfolding in England. By exploring those events in the round, we can build a better picture of the currents convulsing the lives of the people of Europe in the late 11th century. Read more | 1066: who was the rightful king? Take Arialdo’s uprising in Milan as an example. This wasn’t just an urban revolt, but also a sign of how western Europe was being shaped by its growing economy in the late 11th century. After the fall of the Roman empire, many western European towns had shrunk to a shadow of their former selves. But from the ninth century, or perhaps earlier, they had been steadily growing again. In 1066, Milan’s population had grown large enough for urban mobs to prove seriously troublesome for governing elites – as Archbishop da Velate discovered. This posed a problem that had not been encountered in the Christian west for centuries. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-146324414webready-77668b0-e1769423035894.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A knight is purified in a medieval relief from a holy-water font in northern Italy. By the late 11th century, urban mobs were increasingly challenging clerical elites in cities such as Milan (Image by Getty Images)" title="A knight is purified in a medieval relief from a holy-water font in northern Italy. By the late 11th century, urban mobs were increasingly challenging clerical elites in cities such as Milan (Image by Getty Images)" /> Life on the frontline Milan wasn’t the only conurbation to be rocked by significant violence in 1066. The city of Barbastro is located in what’s now north-eastern Spain, but in the 1060s it was on the frontier between Muslim Iberia – also known as Al-Andalus – and the Christian kingdoms of the north. That placed it right on the frontline of one of the most contested swathes of territory in 11th-century Europe. Barbastro had been in Muslim hands since the Arab conquest of Iberia in the eighth century. All that was to change dramatically in 1064. For, two years before the Norman conquest of England, a Christian force besieged and conquered the city. The composition of this army was varied – and even included some Normans – but it was probably led by Sancho Ramírez, ruler of the kingdom of Aragon. Pope Alexander II – the same pontiff who would go on to excommunicate the archbishop of Milan – was involved, actively encouraging the siege. In a letter referring to the troops participating in the attack on Barbastro, he wrote that, “by the authority of the holy apostles Peter and Paul, we both lift their penance and make a remission of their sins”. Exactly what he meant by this terse statement has been widely debated. But on the face of it, it sounds a lot like the terms given by Pope Urban II to participants of the First Crusade three decades later in 1095. Yet, for all Alexander’s words of encouragement, the Christian triumph in Barbastro was short-lived. Thanks to the efforts of Ahmad al-Muqtadir, the emir of Zaragoza, by 1066 Barbastro was back in Muslim hands – and would remain so for nearly four decades. While kingdoms in the north of Spain, such as Castile and Aragon, did make major territorial gains late in the 11th century, the fate of Barbastro proves that there was nothing inevitable about the Christian reconquest of Iberia. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/BAL555342webready-65c8ded-e1769423374470.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colourful manuscript illustration shows large groups of soldiers mounted on horses fighting one another" title="The Christian reconquest of Spain, depicted in a 13th-century manuscript. Events in Barbastro in the mid-11th century suggest this was a messy, contested affair (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Pagans v Christians Most of Europe in 1066 lay under Muslim or Christian control. But this was not the case everywhere. In the far north, the Sámi peoples, who lived chiefly from their reindeer herds, steadfastly resisted efforts to convert them to Christianity. So, too, did Slavic-speaking peoples around the Baltic coastline, including a group in present-day north-eastern Germany known as the Wends, who fended off various invasions from Saxony in the east. In the summer of 1066, this resistance crystallised into an uprising against a man called Gottschalk, one of the Wends’ own rulers. Gottschalk had converted to Christianity and wanted the pagan populace to follow suit, but they took a different view. The uprising claimed the lives of not only Gottschalk but also, in November that year, John Scotus, a missionary from Scotland or Ireland, who had become bishop of Mecklenburg in modern-day Germany. Read more | The crusade against the odds: how the First Crusade succeeded despite the obstacles If a contemporary chronicler named Adam of Bremen is to be believed, John’s murder was particularly grisly. “And because [John] confessed Christ, he was beaten with cudgels and then was led in mockery through one city of the Slavs after another,” Adam tells us. “Since he could not be turned from the profession of Christ, his hands and feet were lopped off and his body was thrown upon the road. Cutting off his head, the barbarians fixed it on a spear and offered it to their god Radegast in token of their victory.” Debate has gone back and forth as to how literally we should take Adam’s account, since Christian monks’ descriptions of pagan practice were always heavily layered with their presumptions. What can’t be disputed, however, is that this part of Europe remained pagan for nearly another century. The allure of monotheism was not irresistible. Families at war To the east of the pagan people of the Baltic coastline lay Kyivan Rus. This was medieval Europe’s largest territory – stretching from the Gulf of Finland down to modern-day Ukraine – and, from 978 until his death in 1015, it was dominated by Volodymyr the Great. He was a formidable ruler who had converted to Orthodox Christianity in 988 as part of an alliance with the Byzantine empire, fought wars of conquest, and sired many children. That was all well and good, but four decades later, Volodymyr’s propensity for producing offspring was causing problems. In the 1060s, Rus was ruled over by one of Volodymyr’s grandsons, Iziaslav I, and his wife, Gertrude of Poland. Iziaslav had reigned as Grand Prince of Kyiv since 1054 but, by the middle of the following decade, his position was increasingly being challenged by rival relatives. By 1068, such was the intensity of the dynastic struggles, that Iziaslav and Gertrude were forced to flee into exile in Poland. There they sought help from Gertrude’s family. Her nephew agreed to help and, with a contingent of Polish warriors behind him, Iziaslav returned to power in Kyiv in 1069. We have some insight into Gertrude’s state of mind at this perilous moment in her life, thanks to the survival of a remarkable manuscript, now in the town of Cividale in northern Italy. It’s a psalter – a book of psalms – and was originally made in the 10th century. Yet it somehow ended up in Gertrude’s hands. While the book was by this point perhaps a century old, Gertrude made adjustments to it, including copying personal prayers into its margins and blank spaces. These heartfelt additions give a sense of her anxieties as she resided in a foreign, turbulent country: “O holy Helena, most Christian of queens… I beg you humbly … that you may deign to turn the hearts of your servants to peace and love and affection towards me, as our Lord Jesus Christ opened the heart of your emperor [Constantine] to remember you, and filled it with love.” Even though this piece of evidence is unique to Gertrude, she was hardly the first elite woman in 11th-century Europe to find herself in a country with which she was no longer familiar. At that point, kings tended to prefer marrying women from abroad, just as William the Conqueror chose the daughter of the Count of Flanders as his wife. The result was a criss-crossing of dynasties taking place over several generations. A proud teacher If the examples on these pages teach us anything, it’s that 1066 witnessed no shortage of wars and rebellions. Yet there’s much more to the late 11th century than violence and unrest. To illustrate this point, let us turn to a letter from a scholar named Goswin, schoolmaster in the cathedral in Mainz, to a former student called Walcher. In the letter, Goswin thanked his former pupil for sending him a book, which Walcher had personally copied after reading. Strikingly for the modern reader, Goswin suggested that the excellent quality of the scribal work justified the corporal punishment he had inflicted upon Walcher when he taught him as a child. For most of the letter, though, Goswin reminisces about his younger days studying and teaching in Liège. He compared the educational environment of the city favourably to Plato’s academy, while festooning the letter with learned quotations from Horace, Cicero and other classical writers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/BAL4619329webready-f17b02e-e1769423807871.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing a man dressed in a long red shift, holding a book and reading it to a small group of men sitting around him" title="Peter Abelard was an important French theologian and philosopher, shown here teaching at the school he established on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> But Goswin didn’t only reminisce on past times. He also commented on new trends – unfavourably. These days, he claimed, avarice had taken over everywhere, and he and his fellow scholars were not suitably remunerated for their efforts. The biggest target of his ire, though, was the new generation of students: “Fleeing instruction in the gravity of moral discipline, they are blown about like light chaff in every wind of doctrine… They do homage to vain and pestiferous novelties of phrasings and questions… Also if they gather some scrap of arcane or verbose knowledge, they wander like vagabonds through the fields of learning, discoursing to no one’s satisfaction.” This might read very much like the complaint of an ageing academic about the frivolities of the young, but it’s been argued that Goswin was actually putting his finger on a genuine development in educational practice. In the mid-11th century, intellectual energy was beginning to drain away from the old and rather conservative cathedral schools such as Mainz or Liège, heirs to the Carolingian Renaissance, and into the more disputatious classes held by a new generation of charismatic teachers. This new wave of educators was epitomised by men such as Peter Abelard of Paris, a firebrand whom, we can safely surmise, Goswin would have disliked immensely. Read more | Not 1066 again! Should we ditch our obsession with dates? Heavyweight battles For all Goswin’s musings on intellectual decay in the continent’s greatest seats of learning, we have to conclude our tour of 1066 Europe by returning to a more visceral theme: conflict. This particular outbreak of bloodletting was on a such a scale that it put even the Norman conquest in the shade. At the heart of the conflict was one of the world’s great polities: the Byzantine empire. This had dominated much of the Mediterranean world since the fourth century AD when it had emerged as a continuation of the Roman empire (which is why it is often referred to as the Eastern Roman empire). In 1066, with the mighty city of Constantinople as its capital, it stretched from the Adriatic in the west to Antioch on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. However, by the middle of the 1060s, the empire was coming under pressure from multiple external forces. Turkic-speaking nomads were launching raids across the river Danube in the Balkans, with a particularly large incursion taking place in 1065. Meanwhile, in the eastern provinces, Byzantine forces had to contend with the Seljuk Turks, a powerful nomadic consortium who had converted to Islam, conquered Baghdad, and were now regularly unleashing raids in Anatolia. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/BAL4778974webready-1ede7f5-e1769423696271.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration of two ships with groups of men on them, facing each other on the sea. Below the boats, a naked man is swimming in the water" title="A soldier swims to attack an enemy ship in a Byzantine treatise from the conflict-ridden 11th century (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Byzantine historians who recorded these events tended to see them as premonitions of the disaster that would befall the empire a few years later. At the battle of Manzikert in 1071, Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes was defeated and taken prisoner by a Turk force led by Alp Arslan, sultan of the Seljuk empire. Romanos was treated honourably by his captors and soon released, but his humiliation unleashed a civil war. On his return to Constantinople, Romanos was brutally blinded by internal enemies and died from his injuries. For Byzantine historians of the time such as John Skylitzes, the seeds of this defeat were visible years before, because emperors failed to pay enough attention to the military threats menacing their borders. Skylitzes reserved some of his most stinging criticisms for Romanos’s predecessor, Constantine X, observing that: “Far more than anything else, the emperor yearned and desired to increase state revenues and to hear private law cases… while having less to do with other imperial duties, by which I mean maintaining military superiority and the fighting prowess of our soldiers.” We should beware the hindsight on display here, though. As King Harold and Duke William both discovered at Hastings, battles were unpredictable affairs, and the outcome of Manzikert was never a foregone conclusion. If, in 1066, Constantine X had devoted himself chiefly to the running of his empire, that was because it was, quite reasonably, the top priority. Although there were military problems, he could draw on enormous financial and ideological resources to overcome them. Indeed, these resources allowed Byzantium to effect a recovery and it remained a mighty state into the later 11th century, as the crusaders discovered when they surged east from 1095. Meanwhile, back in England, the country was reeling from the battle of 1066, and some contemporaries elsewhere in Europe acknowledged its drama. In Bavaria, the chronicler Frutolf of Michelsberg devoted his entire entry for the year 1066 to it. “England was pitifully attacked and eventually conquered by the Norman William, who was made king. Soon afterwards he sent virtually all the bishops of that kingdom into exile and the nobles to their deaths. Those of the middle rank he forced into the service of his knights, and all the wives of the indigenous people into marriage with the newcomers.” There’s no doubt that the Norman Conquest was an extraordinary event for the English and Normans alike. Yet, taking a wide view, it was just one of the ways in which the tectonic plates of European politics and society were dramatically shifting in the 11th century. Charles West is a professor of medieval history at the University of Edinburgh and author of Europe in the Eleventh Century: Beyond Revolution and Reform (Oxford University Press, 2025) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine