Religion

Thomas Cromwell, Tudor statesman and 'alter rex'.

Your guide to Cardinal Wolsey, Tudor statesman and prince of the church

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin vs God: did the ‘Origin of Species’ cause a clash between church and science?

Dr Johanna Dale explores how the seventh-century Northumbrian king Oswald became an important saint across medieval Europe, on the HistoryExtra podcast. (Image by Getty Images)

Oswald, the many-headed medieval saint

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Thomas More: saint or sinner?

A painting of 1616 depicts the Moriscos boarding ships to sail from the port of Valencia

The 17th-century expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain: what happened?

The battle of Dover, 24 August 1217, (image c1880). (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)

Eustace the Monk: one of medieval Europe’s unholiest holy men

In 802 Charlemagne took delivery of an elephant, sent to him by Harun al-Rashid, the caliph in Baghdad. Here, a manuscript illumination from a late 12th century English Latin bestiary. (Image by Alamy)

8 turning points in medieval European history

The storming of Beziers

Medieval turning points

Priest offering the heart taken from a living human victim to the Aztec sun god and god of war, Huitzilopochtli. Print of facsimile from Aztec Codex, published 1904. Human Sacrifice (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Q&A: Why and how did the Aztecs practise human sacrifice?

Empire builder Maharajah Ranjit Singh sits astride a horse as an attendant holds a parasol over him. Singh is historically credited with growing his ancestral warrior-clan, the Sukerchakia misl, into a grand imperial dynasty. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images via Getty Images)

A Sikh tragedy: the Indian kingdom that fell foul of the British empire

Michael Wood reveals how Hadrian, a little-known “man of Africa”, helped lay the foundations of English culture

The African who transformed Anglo-Saxon England

The ‘Pilgrims’ stride onto American soil in 1620 after crossing the Atlantic on the Mayflower, as shown in a 20th-century painting by WJ Aylward (Photo by Getty Images)

The Mayflower

A spider on its web, woodcut, 1547. (Image courtesy of Wellcome Collection)

A sign of the devil or a miracle cure? How people felt about spiders in the Middle Ages

Illustration by Joey Guidone

The big question: has terrorism ever achieved its aims?

Selim I

The extraordinary life of Sultan Selim I