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Inside Britain's first refugee camp: a 300-year history of immigration
"This was the site for what may have been Britain’s first refugee camp", writes Kavita Puri
Blackheath in south-east London has a rich history. It was a rallying point for both the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and the Kentish rebellion of 1450. Monarchs through the ages have passed through. But what is less known is that it was also the site for what may have been Britain’s first refugee camp. In 1709, army tents were temporarily erected in Blackheath to give shelter to some of the estimated 13,000 German refugees who had arrived in Britain from the Palatinate, which is the modern-day Rhineland. There were also camps in Camberwell, Clerkenwell and Greenwich. Initially, the refugees were supported with charitable donations. Many arriving were poor and they spoke a different language, but they were viewed as Protestants fleeing persecution from oppressive Catholic regimes. English parishes raised around £20,000 to support the Palatine refugees. The Rhineland had suffered significantly during years of warfare. Most recently, it had been invaded by King Louis XIV of France in 1707. However, when the Palatine arrivals came to England, there was not a particular ongoing dispute making them flee. As part of the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, the state was tolerant of Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists. The ruling ‘Elector’ was Catholic, yet both Catholics and Protestants used the most important church in the city of Heidelberg, the Heiliggeistkirche (Church of the Holy Spirit), as a place of worship. Read more | Your guide to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 When the British government took a census of the people arriving from Germany, the authorities realised that about a third were Catholic. The reasons they were coming, it turned out, were complex. Many of the refugees had indeed been affected by religious persecution. But others were travelling in search of economic opportunities. They were escaping bad harvests, high food prices, poor prospects. And there were those who wanted to journey on, to America. Britain in 1709 was also facing its own economic difficulties. The country’s involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession had disrupted trade and pushed up prices. The numbers of people relying on charity through the Poor Law had increased. There were concerns that the Palatines were draining the economy, taking jobs away from the English poor. And although the newcomers were largely Protestants, they were not members of the Church of England and so could pose a threat to the nation’s security. Tradesmen and the labouring poor were especially suspicious. Politicians amplified a sense of fear that also found expression in pamphlets and newspapers. A report in The Daily Courant in August 1709 said: “They have not left their native land because their prince’s government is more intolerable than others… No, ’tis because their country is so unhappily situate, that it has felt the invenom’d rage of the enemy, and been expos’d to the calamities of war, more than any other.” Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "A UK museum that tells the long, rich history of migration is long overdue" In the end, many of the Palatines were eventually resettled across the Atlantic. They joined other German speakers to become the largest single group, aside from enslaved Africans, to enter the American colonies between 1680 and 1780. Around 3,000 Palatines were shipped to Ireland. Some made their way back to their homes in the Rhineland, preferring to be there than left begging on the streets in England. A few towns, such as Liverpool and Perth, had agreed to take in some settlers. Others found new homes in parts of rural Lancashire, but most local corporations refused to take in any newcomers. And yet for all the suspicion directed at the Palatines, there were those who tried to emphasise the advantages in offering them a home. A publication of 1710, The State of the Palatines for Fifty Years Past to this Present Time, said: “In the whole they appear to be an innocent, laborious, peaceable, healthy and ingenious people; and may be rather reckon’d a blessing than a burden to any nation.” Debates around immigration in the 18th century, it seems, weren’t so different to today. This column was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
The Tudor law that forced an occult practice underground for centuries
As well as creating new regulations on faith, Henry VIII’s 16th-century government also decided which kinds of knowledge were legitimate – and which were criminal
The people who controlled Tudor England made certain that any belief that didn’t align with strictly Christian values was deemed to be highly suspicious, and likely criminal. Witchcraft and demonology were stark examples, but Henry VIII himself also passed a law that criminalised palmistry: the reading of one’s fate from the palm of the hand. Henry VIII ruled from 1509 to 1547, presiding over one of the most transformative periods in English and wider British history. His reign encompassed religious revolution, repeated rebellions and an unprecedented expansion of royal authority. But while Tudor governments worked to centralise authority and standardise religious belief after decades of dynastic instability, many elite thinkers continued to explore esoteric ideas in private: the truth was, the early modern period was the perfect hotbed for alternative ideas to flourish. The people who lived in the early 16th century were wracked by uncertainty. England was still emerging from the Wars of the Roses, and Henry VIII was only the second Tudor king; his claim to the throne rested on recent victory in battle rather than ancient lineage, making loyalty to the crown a constant concern. Early modern governance relied heavily on local surveillance and reputation, and strangers presented a challenge to that system. Roma communities were newly visible in England in the early 1500s. As historian Alison Bashford explains, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, contemporary Europeans believed these communities came from Egypt. “Hence the term ‘gypsy’,” she says. It was a misidentification that would shape Tudor laws, based on false ideas that Roma people came from a place imbued with ancient, supposedly occult forms of knowledge. The Egyptian Acts and Tudor control Under Henry VIII, Parliament passed a series of statutes known collectively as the Egyptian Acts. They aimed to fix populations in place and eliminate practices that escaped oversight. But they had a much longer reach than you might first think. “Henry VIII’s Egyptian Acts actually run through the 18th and 19th centuries,” says Bashford. “They’re the forerunners of vagrancy acts that continue well into the 20th century.” Watch now | Tudor love lives: inside a 16th-century bedroom These laws targeted cultural practises that didn’t fit within church or guild oversight. The aim was to impose a Tudor vision of order, in which authority flowed from crown to institution to subject. One law that is a perfect example of this attempted authority was the ban of the practice of palmistry. “As far back as Henry VIII’s time, one of the clauses in the original Egyptian Act was to render unlawful the telling of fortunes from the palm,” explains Bashford. Practising palmistry required no licensing and no formal apprenticeship or qualifications. It was an unregulated, and – to Tudor society – incomprehensible form of secret knowledge that posed a tangible threat to the established social and religious order. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-1397985996-6d2d6ae-e1771418600358.jpg" width="1480" height="1000" alt="This woodcut of Roma fortune tellers, first published in 1552, reflects Tudor England’s suspicion of so-called 'Egyptians'. Under a series of Tudor laws, Roma people faced expulsion, persecution while practices such as palmistry and fortune telling were outlawed as fraud or witchcraft." title="Gipsies Fortune Telling" /> Knowledge after the Reformation The ban of palmistry sits within the broader context of the English Reformation. Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the 1530s fundamentally altered how knowledge and authority were organised in England. By dissolving monasteries, abolishing papal authority, and declaring himself Supreme Head of the Church, Henry concentrated interpretive power in the crown – and thus himself. Palmistry fell victim to this because of who practised it – and how. It was associated with the occult, with women, oral transmission, and independence that didn’t rely on parishes or churches. But by banning this form of knowledge, the king had also turned it into a magnet for some of the elites who were interested in the esoteric. Read more | Porpoise for breakfast and late night sex visits: a day in the life of Henry VIII To demonstrate that point, Bashford points to the 17th century and one of England’s most celebrated intellectual pioneers: Isaac Newton. “Isaac Newton bought what were then called chiromancy books. He bought one called Palmistry: The Secrets Thereof Disclosed,” Bashford says. But just because the elite had discovered a fascination with the subject didn’t mean that the laws were changed. It persisted for centuries. “That law continues through the 18th century and the 19th century,” Bashford explains. “It comes into vagrancy law after the Napoleonic Wars. It remains in place through the 1890s, when a whole number of palmists suddenly proliferating in the West End [of London] are charged … under a clause that has its origin in the Egyptian Acts.” The cultural survival of hidden knowledge Still, the tradition persisted in Roma communities. “All the way along [the story of palmistry] are Roma people themselves – almost always women – traditionally telling fortunes from the palm,” says Bashford. By the 19th century, Roma fortune tellers were fixtures of British leisure culture – Bashford cites Blackpool as a place where it became a key feature of entertainment as the country’s religious tensions began to fade. What the Tudors had framed as a threat to state order steadily became a form of risqué fun-making, imbued with a cultural mystique and links to occult and spiritual traditions. But Henry VIII’s ban on palmistry had never been exclusively about religion and superstition. It was about consolidating authority, and keeping power in the hands of the ‘right’ people. Alison Bashford was speaking to Elinor Evans on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
The overlooked history of Muslims in Europe
Tharik Hussain speaks to Danny Bird about the long but often overlooked and distorted history of Muslims in Europe – and the enduring resistance to its reappraisal
Danny Bird: You open your book by recounting a chance visit to an old mosque in Cyprus. What was so significant about that moment? Tharik Hussain: Nothing changed for me on the day itself, because I knew very little about Islam’s history in Europe at that time. On a long, cheap layover in Larnaca – a place I’d never heard of – I was simply looking for a way to pass the time with a toddler in tow. I’d found a brief reference to a nearby mosque, and decided to visit. At the time (2003), I was preparing to make hijrah – to leave Britain, because I felt that I no longer belonged. My education had led me to believe that there was no meaningful Muslim history in Europe. So when we arrived at this neglected Ottoman-era mosque at the Hala Sultan Tekke, I had no framework for understanding it. The elderly guide didn’t speak English, and neither of us knew what we were looking at. What unsettled me was a tomb inside the mosque, which clashed with the theological outlook my wife and I held at the time. We left, dismissing the place, though the guide handed us a small booklet as we went. Two years later, while working as an English language teacher in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I rediscovered the booklet. To my shock, it claimed that the tomb belonged to a relative of the Prophet Muhammad – his maternal aunt, Umm Harâm. That completely overturned my belief that Europe had no real Islamic history, let alone connections reaching back to the Prophet’s own family. When did Islam first come to Europe? If we look at the very beginnings of Muslim presence in Europe, it’s striking how quickly it arrived. Within 20 years of the Prophet Muhammad’s death in AD 632, Muslims were present in places such as Cyprus and, later, Sicily, establishing themselves far more quickly than Christian or Jewish communities had done in the continent. Some of these early arrivals, including members of the Prophet’s family, were then buried in Europe, their tombs becoming sites of ziyara (pilgrimage), holding great spiritual significance. Medieval sources document these tombs as being attached to a mosque, and highly revered. That period also marked the creation of the first Muslim navy. Initially, ambitions to launch a maritime expedition to Cyprus were met with caution, because Muslims had previously conquered only overland territories. After persistence and strategic negotiation, the naval expedition was allowed. Umm Harâm accompanied her husband on that mission, and she died during the campaign. This acquisition of Cyprus and establishment of a naval presence were pivotal, securing Muslim control of the eastern Mediterranean and enabling subsequent campaigns across Greek islands, Sicily, Malta, Portugal and Spain. Far from being minor raids, these early campaigns were foundational to the long-lasting Muslim presence in Europe. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/CR65R8webready-ae14d6f-e1770821971435.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An 18th-century painting showing a bearded man in red and gold robes sitting atop a white horse. Under the horse are several men being trampled. The background shows a blue and white sky" title="An 18th-century painting of Saint James ‘the Moor-slayer’ turning the tide in the legendary battle of Clavijo – a myth created centuries after the supposed clash (Image by Alamy)" /> Why do you think that the history of Islam’s presence in Europe has for so long been hidden or even denied? There are several factors, as I suggest throughout the book. Put simply, in the long contest between Christendom and Islam in Europe, Muslim powers – the Umayyads in Iberia, later dynasties in the south and, latterly, the Ottomans – eventually ‘lost’. As the aphorism goes, winners write history. From the crusades onwards, anti-Muslim narratives grew in tandem with a developing exclusionary ‘European’ identity in Christendom. In the regions I discuss, these later fed into the Spanish Reconquista story and anti-Ottoman rhetoric to develop what I call an anti-Muslim DNA that runs through western European identity. National legends such as Santiago Matamoros [‘Saint James the Moor-slayer’, patron saint of Spain] or the ‘tribute of 100 virgins’ myth [the false narrative that the Christian kingdom of Asturias had to pay such a tribute annually to the Muslim emirate of Córdoba] helped cement these attitudes, as did countless local stories in areas that once had Muslim communities. This isn’t always the result of deliberate design – it’s a common human pattern – but the effect is undeniable. I also refer to the erasure and neglect of Islamic heritage – sometimes through omission from history books, sometimes through archaeological indifference, and at other times through misrepresentation. In places such as the Alhambra in Spain, later European romanticism or orientalist projections have distorted how that history is presented. Even today, popular historians often reinforce these old tropes. Read more | Step onto the medieval Silk Road and you'll witness its intense wonders – and its hidden horror That’s why, after I first visited Larnaca, I was shocked to realise how much had been excluded from the history I’d grown up with. Even academic works often reflected a strongly Eurocentric perspective. To counter this, I draw heavily on Muslim sources, and occasionally Jewish ones, which offer a very different picture: richer, more nuanced and far more appreciative of these moments in European history. Ultimately, whether we are comfortable admitting it or not – and I include myself as someone educated within this system – an anti-Muslim thread shapes our sense of European identity. Take the Balkans: this region is full of indigenous European Muslims, full of Islamic heritage, yet we instinctively place it outside ‘real’ Europe and label it ‘eastern’. People often blame the Iron Curtain, but the region was being othered long before communism, largely because it was the heart of Ottoman – and, therefore, Muslim – Europe until quite recently. All of this is part of the same 1,400-year story. In telling it, I use the Islamic calendar intentionally, beginning with the first Muslim presence within Europe around AD 647. How does the historical record debunk the notion that Islam, rather than being ‘foreign’, has in fact been an integral part of European history? What’s striking is that, regardless of the period, long Muslim presences in Europe – 800 years in Spain, 500 in Portugal, more than 200 in Sicily – are still described as ‘invasions’. It’s an odd way to characterise communities who, over centuries, became as Spanish or Portuguese as anyone else. We would never describe the European presence in modern America as an ongoing ‘invasion’, yet traditional historians have spoken this way about Muslims in Iberia and, later, the Balkans. Whether the initial arrival of Muslim armies is seen as invasive or not, the people who lived there afterwards, and whose descendants still live there, were not invaders. When I began examining these histories from alternative perspectives, especially Muslim and Jewish sources, a more complex picture emerged. Take the Muslim arrival in Iberia. When Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed into the Visigothic territories from north Africa in 711, one neglected factor is the role of the local Jewish population [in Iberia], who were enduring severe persecution. Some Jewish historians suggest that those people actively sought Muslim support. There is certainly evidence that Muslims and Jews cooperated: the 17th-century scholar Ahmad al-Maqqari records that, when Muslim forces captured major cities such as Córdoba, Granada and Toledo, they often left the local Jewish community in charge – a sign of both trust and local collaboration. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/P9GMRXwebready-c14b821-e1770821776100.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Medieval-style illustration showing two seated figures beneath stone arches. On the left, a bearded figure in purple and red robes sits on a throne with a small dove near his shoulder; on the right, another bearded figure in tan clothing sits holding a sheathed sword across his lap, both facing slightly toward each other against a pale parchment background." title="A 14th-century miniature depicts Roderic, the usurper Visigothic king of Spain, and Tariq ibn Ziyad, who led the Muslim forces against him in 711 (Image by Alamy)" /> From Jewish and Muslim perspectives, the arrival of Muslim rule could legitimately be seen as a liberation, given the conditions the Jewish communities had endured under Christian Visigothic rule. What followed was a celebrated period of coexistence – even a Jewish ‘Golden Age’ – in what became known as al-Andalus. Yet conventional European history insists on framing this as a conquest, which later justified the narrative of the Reconquista created by northern Iberian Christian realms – a narrative made even more curious by the fact that many leading figures of the so-called reconquest were descended from people who came from outside Iberia altogether. One of the most evocative parts of your book deals with what you term the ‘Córdoban Caliphate Culture’ – a world of poetry, architecture and science. What was this civilisation really like? It’s hard to summarise briefly, but this was a period of extraordinary scientific, philosophical and cultural achievement unlike anything Europe had seen. Lost Hellenic works returned to Europe through Muslim scholars who flourished in centres such as Córdoba, Palermo, Kairouan [in what’s now Tunisia] and, later, Cairo. Córdoba, in particular, became the intellectual heart of this vast cultural sphere. What’s remarkable is how widely these advances spread. They shaped not only Muslim societies but also Europe long after the caliphate fragmented. Yet this influence is still rarely acknowledged. Figures such as Ibn Sina [known in the west as Avicenna], al-Razi and al-Zahrawi were central to this transformation. Al-Zahrawi’s Kitab al-Tasrif (The Method of Medicine), published around the year 1000, described sophisticated surgical procedures, including draining fluid from an infant’s brain and treating migraines, at a time when England was still relying on remedies from ‘leechbooks’ and folk cures. His work covered surgery, orthopaedics, ophthalmology, dentistry, pathology and childbirth, and remained authoritative for centuries. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL3085389webready-fe4d4ea-e1770822370370.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An 18th-century miniature depicting three men wearing white and red turbans sitting together. On the left is a man with a long beard wearing a green robe, sitting crossed legged on a wooden bench. Behind him, another man wearing a blue robe stands, looking over the scene. To the right, another man dressed in red robe holding a horizontal stick with a basket on each end" title="An 18th-century miniature from what’s now Turkey shows treatment for smallpox based on Ibn Sina’s earlier writing (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Equally influential was Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine, which synthesised Greek knowledge with Arabic scholarship and became a foundation of European medical education. In philosophy, Ibn Rushd [Averroes] made Aristotle accessible, earning the byname ‘the Commentator’. Muslim scholars didn’t simply preserve knowledge – they expanded it and pushed it forward. Read more | Marvellous medieval medicine: why their curious cures were better than you think The cultural impact was just as striking. Ziryab (Abu al-Hasan ’Ali ibn Nafi), arriving in Córdoba from Baghdad like a rock star in 822, revolutionised etiquette, cuisine and music. Under his influence, Europeans adopted table coverings, cutlery, crystal glassware, three-course meals and refined dining customs. These innovations spread across the continent. All of this helped sow the seeds of the Renaissance, from which the Enlightenment eventually emerged. When you trace the intellectual lineage backwards, you find it leads directly to this era. Comparing medieval Córdoba to the cities of northern Europe, the 20th-century author Victor Robinson captured the contrast perfectly: “Europe was darkened at sunset, Cordova [sic] shone with public lamps; Europe was dirty, Cordova built a thousand baths; Europe was covered with vermin, Cordova changed its undergarments daily; Europe lay in mud, Cordova’s streets were paved; Europe’s palaces had smoke-holes in the ceiling, Cordova’s arabesques were exquisite; Europe’s nobility could not sign its name, Cordova’s children went to school; Europe’s monks could not read the baptismal service, Cordova’s teachers created a library of Alexandrian dimensions.” It’s a vivid reminder of just how brilliant this period truly was. When did Europe’s erasure of its Islamic past begin – and what drove it? The construction of an anti-Muslim identity in Europe began with the crusades, when papal calls urged Christians to unite against what was depicted as an infidel presence. In Spain, this sentiment gained momentum with narratives such as that of Santiago Matamoros, who was said to have miraculously appeared on a white horse to help Christians defeat Muslims at the mythical ninth-century battle of Clavijo. This legend emerged only in the late 12th century – long after the supposed battle. Another powerful myth was the aforementioned ‘tribute of 100 virgins’, in which the king of Asturias allegedly sent 50 noble and 50 common virgin girls to Umayyad rulers each year. Both narratives became central to emerging Spanish cultural identity, appearing in festivals and plays. To this day, many Spanish churches have statues depicting Saint James slaying Muslims. Through such myths, imagery and ritual, these narratives reinforced anti-Muslim sentiment and helped shape what became a modern Spanish identity. If you could sneak a few more pages into every European history textbook, which stories or people would you add first, and why? One of the most fascinating figures is Abd al-Rahman III, the first Umayyad ruler in Iberia to declare himself caliph. His story begins with the massacre of the Umayyads by the Abbasids in the Middle East in 750, in which his great ancestor Abd al-Rahman I was the sole heir to survive. Abd al-Rahman I fled first to north Africa, where he gathered support, crossing into southern Iberia a few years later. Drawing on the legacy of his family, in 755 he defeated the governor of al-Andalus and then established himself as emir Abd al-Rahman I, with Córdoba as his capital. Over subsequent generations, his descendants gradually extended Umayyad control over most of the Iberian peninsula. By 929, his great-great-great-great-grandson Abd al-Rahman III felt powerful enough to declare himself caliph – a bold move in a period when the Abbasids in Baghdad and the Shia Fatimids in Tunisia also claimed that title. He built the magnificent city-palace of Madinat al-Zahra – sometimes called the ‘Versailles of Muslim Spain’ – as a statement of his caliphate. He was of European descent, with white skin, blue eyes and reddish-blonde hair – so much so that he reportedly dyed it black to appear more ‘Arab’. His personality and appearance add another layer to his intriguing character. Read more | Divided they fell: how war, revolution and sectarianism led to the end of the Ottoman empire Are you optimistic that both Muslim and non-Muslim readers in Europe can embrace this shared heritage together and foster a fuller understanding of its past? I’m tentatively hopeful because more people today are willing to revisit accepted historical narratives. The challenge is undoing 1,400 years of anti-Muslim European storytelling and recognising the Muslim contribution to European culture often mislabelled as ‘Judaeo-Christian’. That term itself is misleading, given the repeated persecution of Jewish communities by historical European Christians while many found safety in parts of Muslim Europe. Acknowledging these shared histories could slowly shift perceptions, but it will take immense effort, courage and time. Many are uncomfortable with the idea that Europe is as Muslim as it is Christian or Jewish, reflecting the deep-rooted othering of Islam in European identity. Historians who challenge widely held narratives, such as David Olusoga or Sathnam Sanghera, often face significant hostility. Speaking openly about these histories requires resilience because it challenges beliefs central to people’s sense of identity. It’s urgent, though, because leaving Muslim contributions out of mainstream European history has allowed Islamophobic sentiment to flourish, giving contemporary far-right rhetoric room to portray Islam and Muslims as a ‘foreign’, invasive presence rather than a long-standing part of European culture – a myth repeated even in recent public demonstrations. Tharik Hussain is an author, historian and travel writer. His latest book is Muslim Europe: A Journey in Search of a Fourteen Hundred Year History (Viking, 2025) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
Meet the incredible woman who saved Portugal's Jews
With the Inquisition active throughout much of Europe, the first half of the 16th century was a perilous time for Jewish people. Andreé Aelion Brooks explores how the fabulously wealthy Doña Gracia worked tirelessly to protect her community
Still in her 20s, Gracia Mendes Nasi (Nacy), better known as Doña Gracia, was recently widowed and fabulously rich. She should have been able to live in comfort for the rest of her life. Her husband, Francisco Mendes, a spice dealer and banker, had divided his wealth in his will between Gracia and his brother, Diogo. Yet without her husband’s protection, even her money could not shield her from a looming crisis. Indeed, being in possession of such a fortune in patriarchal and Catholic Lisbon in the middle of the 1530s was inherently dangerous for someone of Doña Gracia’s background. She was a converso, a term for a person forced to convert from Judaism. When the papal nuncio, an ecclesiastical diplomat, paid a visit to her palatial home in the old Jewish quarter of Lisbon, he demanded yet another bribe to keep the Inquisition from beginning work in Portugal. The Inquisition, Gracia knew, rounded up conversos, who were then charged with being insincere Catholics and imprisoned. Whether this was true or not, their assets were confiscated. Furthermore, Doña Gracia certainly wasn’t sincere in her public faith. While she had married Francisco, who was also her maternal uncle, at Lisbon Cathedral, the ceremony had been preceded by a secret Jewish wedding. Compounding Doña Gracia’s problems, representatives of the Portuguese king, John III, had also visited her. They told her they wanted to take her young daughter, Ana, to the palace to live as an adopted child of the royal family. According to local laws, the king could thus gain the use of any portion of the Mendes fortune that belonged to Ana. It was clear Doña Gracia needed to make a new start elsewhere in Europe, but there was another problem: converso families were forbidden to leave Portugal. Demonstrating the skill that would make her an outstanding leader, she set two plans running simultaneously, an approach she would follow for the rest of her life. Read more | Your guide to the Spanish Inquisition Firstly, she sent a message to the king explaining that most of the fortune he sought was with her brother-in-law, Diogo, in Antwerp. To retrieve the fortune, she needed the king’s exemption to leave the country. And, of course, she could not leave her baby daughter behind. Nor her two nephews, who were registered to begin studies at university in Louvain. Nor her younger sister, Brianda, who was betrothed to Diogo. She also contacted Diogo to bring one of his spice ships, pick up the family from Lisbon and take them to Antwerp. The greedy king, hoping to maximise the amount of money he could seize, agreed to let her travel. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-173449744-8114cab-e1768985633175.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration of a man in a white and red apron, a tall white coned hat, and holding a stick in one hand. Behind him, there is a large building with many windows" title="A depiction of a man condemned to be burned on the orders of the Inquisition (Image by Getty Images)" /> But Doña Gracia had no intention of giving up her fortune so easily. Before departing for Antwerp, she had also set the second part of her plan in action. She had applied to the Vatican for a ‘Safe Conduct’, a super-passport valid throughout Christian Europe and which overrode any local laws preventing someone from travelling abroad. Throughout her life, Doña Gracia believed in doing what she could to maximise her chances of success. Her skills went beyond protecting her own family. Not only did she take the helm of her late husband’s business, an unusual enough development in itself in the late Renaissance era, but she assumed a leadership role within the converso community. With the threat of the Inquisition looming, Doña Gracia began to expand a nascent escape network that spirited members of the community out of danger and helped them travel to the Ottoman empire, which offered a haven for Europe’s Jewish community. In 1536, with the formal establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition, the situation for conversos in the country grew even more perilous. Read more | Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul: the history of a city of many names Speaking truth to power In 1553, Doña Gracia too would relocate to Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), but in the latter half of the 1530s her focus was on building a new life in Antwerp. Yet here, she encountered many of the same problems she had faced in Portugal. The rulers, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and his sister, Mary of Austria, who acted as governor of the Habsburg Netherlands, were quick to pick up where the Portuguese king had left off. The royal duo tried to pledge young Ana to a marriage that would be advantageous to them. Summoned to Mary’s palace to approve the match with Don Francisco D’Aragon – an illegitimate Spanish nobleman and descendant of the royal house of Aragon – Doña Gracia played for time, repeatedly implying she was sick. But she was so opposed to the union that she was reported as saying she would rather see her daughter drown – an audacious and insulting remark. Doña Gracia didn’t back down. She told Mary that she was furious about how Ana’s selected suitor had blamed the continuing persecution of conversos on Doña Gracia’s own obstinacy. Doña Gracia’s confrontational manner shocked Mary, a blue blood who had been queen consort of Hungary and Bohemia before she was widowed and became governor. Once again, Doña Gracia was forced to leave, fleeing to the Republic of Venice in 1544. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-463914533-e7876ff-e1768986146801.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing a large snaked line of people processing through a town square, surrounded by white building with blue and orange roofs. A crowd watches on as hundreds of men in black cloaks walk behind one another" title="An 18th century depiction of the procession of criminals sentenced by the Inquisition of Lisbon. As the persecution intensified, Doña Gracia helped many to flee to Constantinople (Image by Getty Images)" /> Compounding her difficulties, Doña Gracia did not even have the support of her own family. While in Antwerp, Diogo had died and named Doña Gracia as the guardian of his infant daughter rather than the child’s own mother – his wife and Doña Gracia’s sister, Brianda, who was talked of as untrustworthy. This so angered Brianda that, when both were living in Venice, she betrayed Doña Gracia as a secret Jew. In 1549, Doña Gracia again had to flee, this time to Ferrara, a tolerant duchy in northern Italy. Throughout, Doña Gracia continued to be a leader among her people, despite facing many setbacks. At one point, she helped lead a boycott of the Italian port of Ancona in retaliation for the burning of more than 20 conversos by the Italian Inquisition – an outrageous act even by the standards of the era. But the boycott was not a success in the long run because the Jewish merchants in the Ottoman empire who used the port could not agree on a combined strategy. Doña Gracia also failed in efforts to persuade the Venetians to give the conversos one of their lagoon islands as a place to settle. Read more | “Some say that the first Jews sailed here on King Solomon’s ships”: Kavita Puri on India's long Jewish history Life in the open But Doña Gracia’s sheer persistence also paid off. In 1553, she settled in Constantinople with her entourage. Here, she could live publicly as a Jew. Moreover, she persuaded Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottoman empire, to grant her a long-term lease on Tiberias (in present-day Israel). She helped finance the rebuilding of a city that nestles on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, and it became a refuge for those conversos wishing to live in their own semi-autonomous area. Doña Gracia thus headed one of the earliest attempts to found a modern Jewish state in the Middle East. Her efforts here likely saved a significant portion of the ethnic Jewish world at a critical juncture in its history. She planned to settle in the region herself and built a mansion in Tiberias, but she died in Constantinople in 1569. In the years since, knowledge of Doña Gracia’s remarkable life has gradually faded, but that may be changing. Four years ago – during a period when the State Archives in Modena, northern Italy were closed because of the pandemic – archivist Alberto Palladini took advantage of the peace and quiet to clean out a box of old letters. It included two from Doña Gracia. These showed she spelled her last name as Nacy, not Nasi as the historical record currently suggests. It’s a small detail, but significant, if only because it hints at the possibility of further revelations should researchers go looking, which seems likely given the current interest in the lives of powerful women whose place in history has been under-appreciated. As for Doña Gracia herself, she certainly never sold herself short. As the seal for her correspondence, she used the Lion of Judah. This suggests she saw herself not just as a rich and successful businesswoman and philanthropist, but as someone descended from the House of David, a Jewish royal. Andrée Aelion Brooks is a journalist and lecturer. Her books include Russian Dance: A True Story of Intrigue and Passion in Stalinist Moscow (John Wiley & Sons, 2004) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
From krakens to serpents: 5 fearsome sea monsters from history
Sea monsters have haunted human imaginations for millennia. From the kraken to killer serpents, Prema Arasu explores what five mythical creatures reveal about our deepest fears
1. Armed and dangerous The writhing tentacles of the kraken inspired horror and disgust Sea monsters have fired our imaginations – and chilled our blood – for as long as humanity has sailed the seas. The Babylonian epic Enūma Eliš, which dates back to at least 1200 BC, describes the creation of the world from two fearsome primordial beings: Apsû, the embodiment of subterranean fresh water, and Tiamat, the sea. Like the many mythical aquatic creatures that have occupied our dreams and our nightmares, Apsû and Tiamat reveal much about how the Babylonians saw the world, acting as projections through which their anxieties about nature could be expressed, examined and, perhaps, mastered. Fast forward more than a thousand years and, in Naturalis Historia (c77 AD), the earliest extant work of natural history, the Roman author Pliny the Elder argued that the largest animals found in the sea “exceed in size any of the terrestrial animals” because of the “superabundance of moisture with which they are supplied”. One such giant creature is the kraken, its origins lying in Nordic mythology and folklore. In his 1752–53 proto-scientific work The Natural History of Norway, Danish bishop Erik Pontoppidan described the “Kraken, Kraxen, or, as some world name it, Krabben” as an island-sized creature, “round, flat, and full of arms, or branches”. Alfred, Lord Tennyson was so energised by reports of this monster of the deep that, in 1830, he wrote a poem in its honour, describing an ancient, giant-armed creature slumbering “Below the thunders of the upper deep; Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea.” British naturalist Henry Lee offered a more rational perspective. In Sea Monsters Unmasked (1883), he stated that kraken sightings by sailors were most likely exaggerated reports of giant squid (Architeuthis dux), described a quarter of a century earlier by the Danish biologist Japetus Steenstrup. Even after that, though, kraken and other squid-like monsters proliferated in literature. Herman Melville dedicated a chapter of Moby-Dick (1851) to the giant squid. Ishmael, Moby-Dick’s narrator, references The Natural History of Norway in his description of the creature, offering up the possibility that the kraken might not be a mythological beast but a taxonomically recognised species. Myth and reality continued to amalgamate in the science-fiction genre. Jules Verne’s battle with a giant squid in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–70) was based on reports of an encounter between a French corvette, Alecton, and a squid in 1861. As Verne puts it: “Before my eyes was a horrible monster worthy to figure in the legends of the marvellous. It was an immense cuttlefish, being eight yards long… Its eight arms… were twice as long as its body, and were twisted like the furies’ hair.” The uncanny undulations of kraken continue to fascinate. Roger Luckhurst, a scholar of the field of horror, links this to our innate “response to things that overwhelm our senses, stick too close, ooze across borders, or refuse to keep a stable shape”. Read more | Water gods and sea goddesses: 17 water deities from world history 2. A feminine fantasy Aquatic half-humans enchanted men and attracted women seeking new freedoms Sirens, tritons, nereids, merfolk, nymphs… part-fish, part-human creatures have gone by many names over the millennia. These alluring beings have glided gracefully into cultural traditions across the world for thousands of years – particularly those with strong histories of seafaring. And, unlike many of the aquatic beings on these pages, they haven’t always done so with malign intentions. In Naturalis Historia, Pliny described “tritons and nereids” as creatures in which “the portion of the body that resembles the human figure is still rough all over with scales”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/AKG342658webready-934ba2a-e1767351773509.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A stone relief showing a ship full of men sailing towards three women lined up on the left" title="A fourth-century BC urn shows Odysseus sailing towards the sirens, who, he reported, “sit and sing most beautifully in a field of flowers” (Image by AKG)" /> Sirens had appeared in Homer’s poem the Odyssey nine centuries earlier. But in the case of this ancient Greek epic, they were never physically described. Rather, we’re told that they “sit and sing most beautifully in a field of flowers”. Interestingly, they tempt sailors with knowledge, rather than – as other, later, depictions would have it – luring them to their doom. “When we had got within earshot of the land, and the ship was going at a good rate,” the fictional Odysseus recalls, “the sirens saw that we were getting in shore and began with their singing: ‘No one ever sailed past us without staying to hear the enchanting sweetness of our song – and he who listens will go on his way not only charmed, but wiser’.” In medieval art, Homer’s sirens are interpreted as both aquatic and non-aquatic creatures. In contrast, the nereids of Greek myth were explicitly spirits or embodiments of the sea, albeit often visually depicted as human women. In the Romantic and Victorian imagination, they became synonymous with mermaids, frequently depicted with tails. Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe conjured a fish-tailed ingénue in her 1794 poem The Sea-Nymph, as did Hans Christian Andersen in The Little Mermaid four decades later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/gr0031911Hwebready-444c4de-e1767352384901.jpg" width="1500" height="1001" alt="A drawing showing a mermaid with a black, orange and yellow tail and long blonde hair, laying on her front on a rock, with a sea plant in the background" title="A 1930s depiction of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, which did so much to popularise the fish-tailed ingénue (Image by TopFoto)" /> Radcliffe’s poem marked a turn to the mermaid as a feminine fantasy: an aspirational symbol for young women who might otherwise feel confined by the gendered expectations of public life. This manifests today in the enduring visibility of the mermaid in popular culture and in the burgeoning pastime of mermaiding – cosplaying by swimming with a decorative monofin. 3. Terror in the deep For millennia, giant, ravenous sea serpents have played on humanity’s primal terrors It didn’t pay to get on the wrong side of the gods in ancient mythology. Just ask Laocoön, a Trojan priest who offended the deity Minerva – and didn’t live to tell the tale. As the Roman poet Virgil relates it in the Aeneid – his epic first-century BC poem telling the story of the foundation of Rome – Laocoön committed the cardinal sin of throwing a spear into the Greeks’ wooden horse to show that it was hollow. It was an act that so enraged Minerva that she unleashed two giant sea serpents to eat him. “Taking swift course; their necks were lifted high,” Virgil writes of the ravenous creatures. “Their gory dragon-crests o’ertopped the waves; all else, half seen, trailed low along the sea; while with loud cleavage of the foaming brine, their monstrous backs wound forward fold on fold.” Poor Laocoön didn’t stand a chance. As the priest’s grisly fate proves, the sea serpent had established itself as a terror of the deep by the time the Greeks and Romans dominated the Mediterranean. But they weren’t the first to live in fear of this creature. In fact, the ancient Greeks’ diverse bestiary of monsters likely derived from earlier prototypes. Sea serpents recur in the folklore traditions of a range of coastal and lake cultures, from the black, hairy Nile-dwelling monster Aman Doger of ancient Nubia to the rainbow snake of Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime myth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1288491221webready-92f8e54-e1767351878133.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An engraving showing a naked man with curly hair and a beard, with a large snake wrapped around his body, holding him down, alongside his two sons" title="Laocoön and his two sons are attacked by serpents, as shown in a 16th‑century engraving. Could megalophobia – the fear of large objects – be a factor in humanity’s obsession with sea monsters? (Image by Getty Images)" /> For the Victorian naturalist Henry Lee, tales of colossal sea serpents were a case of mistaken identity, likely originating in sightings of other marine phenomena – perhaps large pods of porpoises or whales. “I believe that… the supposed coils or protuberances of the serpent’s body, were only so many porpoises swimming in line in accordance with their habit before mentioned,” he wrote. Read more | Liquor, loot and death on the high seas: 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the history of pirates The anthropologist David D Gilmore has offered an alternative interpretation of our sea serpent obsession. He has suggested that the recurrence of such creatures in literature down the ages points to three primal human fears: of the sea; of what might lurk in the unknown; and of large objects, otherwise known as megalophobia. 4. The theory of de-evolution Early Christians feared that the Leviathan would propel the human race back to its watery past To some, it has been a benign presence. To others, a terror-inducing harbinger of doom. Ever since the Leviathan emerged from the depths of the oceans and floated into the human consciousness, it has meant different things to different people. Jews and early Christians were certainly fearful. In the Hebrew Bible – where it appears in the Old Testament books of Psalms, Job and Isaiah – the Leviathan is a female sea serpent who will bring about the apocalypse together with her male counterpart, the desert monster Behemoth. Such ancient beasts played on the enduring fear of regression, reminding us of our uncomfortable origins in the oceans. David D Gilmore suggests that the water that so often drips from primal monsters as they emerge from the deep “symbolises not only the amniotic fluids of the womb, but also the primal element from which all life emerged”. These creatures threaten us with the possibilities of de-evolution – a stripping of what modern science has decided makes us human. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-534969411webready-723169d-e1767352029623.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A drawing depicting a large black whale being held under a boat, while several people and other sea creatures surround it in the water" title="An illustration from a 14th-century manuscript shows Alexander the Great being lowered into the sea to explore the ocean bed – a place populated by aquatic humans, dogs and a huge whale (Image by Getty Images)" /> For Renaissance cartographers, the Leviathan meant something different. Medieval maps of the world abound with monstrous-looking whales, depicted in ornate detail. According to historian Chet van Duzer, these illustrations served two purposes: to warn sailors of dangers that awaited them at sea, and as decorative elements designed to show off the artist’s talents. By the time the American writer Celia Thaxter penned her poem Leviathan in 1876, the creature had shape-shifted again. For Thaxter, it was a largely peaceful presence, who triumphed against the rage of nature: “For her worst fury he nor stayed nor turned. ‘Twas joy to think in such tremendous play, Through the sea’s cruelty, all unconcerned. Leviathan pursued his placid way!” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/CPA0030665webready-7c5c3eb-e1767352254831.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration showing a large grey and orange fish with a man laying next to it, covered in flowers" title="A 14th-century depiction of Jonah with the giant fish that spat him out. Huge sea creatures make numerous appearances in biblical texts (Image by TopFoto)" /> 5. Visions of Atlantis Tales of an aquatic city populated by hyper-intelligent Atlanteans enchanted authors from Plato to HG Wells “A strange vertebrated animal.” That’s how Elstead, the narrator of HG Wells’s 1897 short story In the Abyss, describes the lifeform he encounters on a journey into a deep ocean trench. “Two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon fashion, and it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its little nostrils,” reported the intrepid submariner. “The vertical pitch of its face gave it a most extraordinary resemblance to a human being.” In introducing Elstead to this strange creature, HG Wells was joining a long list of writers to conjure the inhabitants of a mysterious underwater civilisation into fictional life. In fact, the possibility of an intelligent, almost godlike race of aquatic beings living on the ocean bed has captured the imagination for centuries. Mentions of the submerged island Atlantis date back to Plato’s fourth-century BC dialogues Timaeus and Critias, in which the Greek philosopher described a land sunken by a devastating earthquake. Renaissance scholars such as Francis Bacon linked Atlantis to the Americas, a notion he further explored in his utopian novel The New Atlantis (1624). In 1931, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientists Henry Bryant and Columbus Iselin embarked upon a research cruise in search of the lost continent around the Azores. It was unsuccessful. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/the-shape-of-water9lp0tuwebready-2ed216e-e1767352125833.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photo of a woman with her hands pressed up against a glass tank, looking into the eyes of a large green sea creature behind the glass" title="2017 dark fantasy film The Shape of Water, which traces the relationship between a mute woman and a captured humanoid amphibian (Image by MovieStills)" /> Tales of Atlantis made a resurgence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1929 novel The Maracot Deep features a team of scientists who descend into the ocean, become trapped in a deep-sea trench and are saved from disaster by descendants of Atlantis. Other underseas peoples in popular fiction aren’t quite so benign. American horror writer HP Lovecraft described an undersea race of creatures called Deep Ones who worship the deities Dagon and Cthulhu. In The Shadow Over Innsmouth Lovecraft projects his own prejudices about racial purity and miscegenation (sexual relationships between people of different ethnic groups) onto a fictional coastal town. Here the residents interbreed with marine beings and become corrupted in form and character. Read more | Tails from the deep: separating the real folklore of mermaids from Disney stories The denizens of cities under the sea continue to capture our imaginations today. Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning 2017 film The Shape of Water tells how a mute cleaner working in a high-security government laboratory falls in a love with a green-skinned humanoid amphibian. This enduring interest in aquatic beings speaks to a wider fascination with how great civilisations might fall. This is an intriguing and alarming prospect. After all, if a creature is to knock us off our self-appointed perch at the top of the evolutionary ladder, then surely that creature could come from the same primordial soup as we once did? Prema Arasu is an adjunct research fellow at the University of Western Australia, and author of The Book of Sea Monsters: Leviathans of Literature (Adlard Coles, 2025) This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The US 'voodoo' scare: why 19th-century racists spread fake news about Haiti
From sexual orgies to Satan incarnated as a snake, lurid depictions of ‘voodoo’ in North America long titillated and shocked readers. As David G Cox explains, they were also wielded as justifications for racist oppression during the social and political upheavals of the 19th-century US
On 2 January 1893, the black American abolitionist and reformer Frederick Douglass delivered a lecture on Haiti to an audience in Chicago. It was widely alleged, he reflected, that the Caribbean republic was riddled with “voodooism, fetishism, serpent worship and cannibalism”, and that “little children are fatted for slaughter and offered as sacrifices to their voodoo deities”. Such claims, Douglass declared, were false. He told his listeners that, while serving as US minister (effectively, ambassador) to Haiti between 1889 and 1891, he found no evidence of ritual sacrifice, despite diligent investigation. By the time Douglass spoke in Chicago, the idea of Haitian ‘voodoo’ as a murderous cult was lodged in the American public consciousness. As he noted, the features of this myth would have been familiar to many. According to scores of white writers at the turn of the 20th century, ‘voodoo’ was an imported African religion devoted to the worship of Satan incarnated as a snake. ‘Voodoo’ ceremonies, it was claimed, consisted of frenzied dances, sexual orgies and the ritual sacrifice of animals or humans followed by the consumption of their bodies or blood. The priests and priestesses of this imaginary faith were said to be the real rulers of Haiti, holding all its citizens – from presidents to peasants – in the grip of terror. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-556636225webready-f31fffd-e1765183494712.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a black man dressed in a suit with a small bow tie. He has short hair and a thick moustache" title="Ebenezer Bassett denounced claims that the black-led Caribbean nation was a hotbed of ‘voodoo’ cannibalism and human sacrifice (Image by Getty Images)" /> In 1901, claims about Haitian ‘voodoo’ coalesced in a widely reprinted newspaper report on the “demoniacal orgies” of this purported “devil’s cult”. Supposedly reproducing the findings of the famous American geologist and traveller Robert Hill, the author of the piece claimed not only that “large numbers of young children are offered up annually in Haiti as sacrifices to the Great Yellow Snake” but also that “mothers frequently dedicate their infants at birth to this purpose”. The article provoked an incredulous response from Ebenezer Bassett who, as US minister to Haiti between 1869 and 1877, was the first black American diplomat. Having lived there for more than a decade, and speaking fluent French, Bassett – like Douglass – could claim authority on the question of Haitian religion. As Bassett knew, “the whole story about cannibalism in Haiti is no more than a myth which, like other myths, has gained credence by persistent repetition”. Casting doubt on the veracity of the report, he noted that Robert Hill had refuted the existence of Haitian cannibalism in his recent Caribbean travel narrative, and that the claims of the article were “in full accord with – it is better not to say that they are probably based upon – Sir Spenser St John’s book”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-152197629webready-4da9320-e1765183520674.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two stone figures, tied together by a metal chain around their necks" title="Chained bocio (protective figures) of the Vodun religion of the Fon people of southern Benin. The chains are symbolic both of slavery and of Gu, the vodu (spirit) of iron and war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Lurid inventions Spenser St John was a British diplomat and former chargé d’affaires in Haiti, and the book in question was Hayti, or, The Black Republic. First published in 1884, it made a deep impression on US journalism, providing the blueprint for a plethora of articles that, though claiming originality, did little more than summarise, in increasingly lurid terms, its lengthy chapter on “Vaudoux Worship and Cannibalism”. Up to this point, I have placed ‘voodoo’ in quotation marks, not only to suggest that it was a figment of white imaginations but also to differentiate it from Vodou, the African-derived religion genuinely practised by Haitians. Much of this religion can be traced to west and west-central Africa. It contains elements of the religions practised during the era of slavery by the Aja and Fon peoples of the Bight of Benin (vodu is the Fon word for spirit), as well as of others from the kingdom of Kongo. Read more | Frederick Douglass escaped enslavement in 1838 – but here's why he was still far from true freedom However, Vodou was not, as 19th-century white commentators claimed, a direct African import. It was a product of the New World melting pot – a dynamic blend of the religions of enslaved Africans and the Christianity of their European enslavers. In this respect, Vodou has much in common with other black diasporic religions including Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé and Jamaican Obeah. Like those, Vodou helped people of African origin survive the brutality of Atlantic slavery. In the Victorian age, white people on both sides of the Atlantic ignored the vibrant realities of Vodou, dwelling instead on its demonic imagined double: ‘voodoo’. Why were they so keen to defame Haitian religion? Frederick Douglass had the answer. “Haiti is black,” he declared in Chicago, “and we [Americans] have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.” Between 1791 and 1804, enslaved and free people of colour rose against the French colonial government of Saint-Domingue. The revolution resulted in the abolition of slavery and independence for the colony. Renamed Haiti, it became the world’s only black republic. Desperate to demonstrate that people of African descent were incapable of self-government, white supremacists spent the next century defaming Haiti, presenting it – in the words of Douglass – as a “very hell of horrors”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/webready-9c7ef73-e1765183675345.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" title="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" /> As the 20th century approached, the idea that the world could be divided into races whose members shared the same essential traits was widely accepted. Thus, to opponents of black freedom in the US, Haitian ‘voodoo’ became proof that, without white control, black Americans would degenerate to savagery. As Douglass reflected, the black American could “never part with his identity and race”, meaning that the denial of Haitian civilisation was a denial of the “possibilities of the negro race generally”. This backlash against black freedom explains why ‘voodoo’ first entered the American popular consciousness during the 1860s and 1870s, just as a series of constitutional amendments secured the abolition of slavery, along with the establishment of black citizenship and the enfranchisement of black men. As the author of an 1866 article in the Memphis Appeal proclaimed, ‘voodoo’ was “beginning to take hold among the negroes. Free them from the check which was once held over them, they have unlimited control over their baser passions, and now and then it bursts out, and proves that the worship of their barbaric fathers still runs in the blood of the Americanised negro.” Deluge of discourse Initially, Americans writing about ‘voodoo’ focused on Louisiana and, particularly, New Orleans. A former French colony, Louisiana had a sizeable French-speaking population well into the 19th century. In the 1790s and early 19th century, this population had been bolstered by the arrival of up to 25,000 refugees from the Haitian Revolution, well over half of whom were enslaved. It is thus unsurprising that a reference to “an African deity called Vaudoo” appeared in a New Orleans newspaper as early as 1820. However, from the 1880s onwards, thanks to Spenser St John, attention turned to ‘voodoo’ in Haiti. The press was swiftly saturated with reports depicting the Caribbean republic as a “land of blood” – with articles bearing headlines such as: “Haiti, a Brooding Nightmare of Savagery, Bloodshed, Cannibalism”. It is tempting to see this deluge of discourse as a reflection of US imperial designs on Haiti, which it occupied between 1915 and 1934. However, at the turn of the 20th century, Haitian ‘voodoo’ was most often invoked by white-supremacist Democrats who argued that Jim Crow laws and regulations – which, enacted from the late 19th century, disenfranchised black Americans and enforced their segregation from white people – were necessary to prevent similar savagery at home. The peak of interest in Haitian ‘voodoo’ coincided with legal efforts to destroy the black vote in the South. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, and ending with Georgia in 1906, southern legislatures drew up new state constitutions containing a plethora of voting restrictions. These were intended to disenfranchise black Americans without contravening the 15th Amendment of 1870, which made it unconstitutional to deprive the vote on the basis of race. In the halls of Congress, Democrats, including the Mississippi senator Hernando Money, cited the work of St John as supposed proof that the black American was no more than a “veneered savage”. To the architects of Jim Crow, ‘voodoo’ was an ideological weapon. Depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ worship, a potent brew of sex and violence, helped to sell newspapers in an age of sensationalist journalism. At the same time, they reinforced racist notions that everybody of African descent was inherently bestial, criminal and hypersexual. Depictions of orgiastic worship chimed with the myth that white women were in constant danger of the black ‘beast rapist’, which was used to justify Jim Crow and fuel violence against black Americans. Read more | The Haitian Revolution: the enslaved Africans who rose up against France In a 1914 speech to Congress, the notoriously racist Mississippi senator James Vardaman made the connection explicit. St John, he claimed, had presented a “disgusting story of the worship of the voodoo and cannibalism, which he says is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic”. Frequently portraying black worshippers as beasts and demons, the language used in depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ was dehumanising in the extreme. Written portrayals were sometimes accompanied by lurid illustrations, such as A Voodoo Sacrifice, published in the Los Angeles Herald in 1905. A depiction of child sacrifice, the illustration included a worshipper with grotesquely ape-like features as well as a reptilian figure fixing the newspaper reader with an accusatory gaze, suggesting that she or he was an unwelcome witness to secret black rites. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1426141403webready-352c952-e1765183778614.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a white man, wearing a white shirt and black cowboy hat, looking towards the right" title="Mississippi senator James Vardaman, who in 1914 told Congress that in Haiti “cannibalism… is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fears of black resistance While ostensibly justifying Jim Crow, American depictions of Haitian Vodou betrayed acute white fears of black resistance. African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices played a part in almost every slave uprising in North America and the Caribbean. In 1822, protective charms were allegedly distributed among those involved in South Carolina’s Denmark Vesey conspiracy, named after a free black man convicted of planning a major uprising of enslaved people. In Jamaica a little over 60 years earlier, the use of similar charms during the massive slave insurrection known as Tacky’s Revolt prompted a British crackdown on Obeah. For late 19th-century white Europeans and Americans, however, the dangerous character of black religion was most associated with the Haitian Revolution. By the end of the century, the idea had been enshrined in Haitian mythology that the revolution began with a Vodou ceremony in a forest named Bois-Caïman, during which a pig was sacrificed and a blood oath sworn. Though Vodou certainly galvanised the Haitian Revolution, the reality of the Bois-Caïman ceremony has been debated by scholars, some of whom question the sources upon which the story is based. White supremacists, however, had no interest in questions of historical accuracy, instead portraying Vodou as a death cult bent upon the annihilation of the white race. This accusation chimed with the widespread view that political equality in the US would lead to race war. In 1908, the San Antonio Light published what it claimed was a genuine Vodou chant invoking racial extermination, but which was almost certainly the product of a journalist’s fevered imagination. O-he! Papa Damba! Down with whites and with mulattoes! Burn them, shoot them, drown their women! Help your blacks, your poor black children Circulated by those seeking to justify Jim Crow, tales of ‘voodoo’ sacrifice and cannibalism were shot through with white anxiety. These sanguinary stories may have facilitated a kind of psychological displacement. In other words, real white violence against African Americans was projected as imaginary black murder in the service of Satan. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/AKG9430442webready-9ba2b82-e1765183804180.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a group of people seated on the ground of a cemetery, with large black and red trees arching over the top of them" title="A Vodou scene in Haiti, by renowned artist Hector Hyppolite. Lurid reports in US newspapers of ‘voodoo’ ceremonies were cited as proof that white control was necessary to prevent black Americans from degenerating into savagery (Image by AKG)" /> In the turn-of-the-20th-century South, racial violence assumed unimaginable dimensions in the form of spectacle lynching: black Americans were tortured and murdered before white crowds that could number in the thousands. According to statistics compiled by the NAACP (the civil rights organisation founded in 1909 as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), at least 1,902 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1910. The affinities between these all-too-real rituals and fictional ‘voodoo’ ceremonies seem more than superficial, especially if we note – as many historians have – the religious symbolism and sacrificial dimensions of spectacle lynching. Read more | Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregation This reign of racial terror troubled many white people, undermining their sense that they stood at the summit of human civilisation. Condemning the 1904 lynching of Luther Holbert of Mississippi, one newspaper editor wrote that “[t]he negroes, in their most bestial state of voodooism, could be guilty of nothing more savage and brutal.” The editor’s conclusion deliberately inverted the racist language of Democratic politicians such as Hernando Money. “The white man is given to much boasting,” that journalist reflected, “but in many instances he is but a thinly veneered savage.” ‘Voodoo’ gripped the public imagination because, while fuelling the violence upon which Jim Crow was built, it allowed many white Americans to imagine that it was not themselves but others who lived in a “land of blood”. David G Cox is a lecturer in modern American history at the University of Southampton. His research for this article was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Who won the crusades? The causes, death toll, and number of medieval holy wars explained
Who won the crusades, how many were there, and what caused them? Medieval expert Rebecca Rist answers these major questions, exploring how centuries of religious conflict reshaped the medieval world
The crusades were a centuries-long sequence of era-defining medieval holy wars that transformed dynamics of power and religious ideas across Europe and the Middle East. But who won the crusades, and just how many crusades were there? Those are two of the questions answered by professor Rebecca Rist, an expert on the crusades and their broader medieval context. Speaking about the topic on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Rist steps into the dust of medieval roads and the heat of besieged cities to explain why these campaigns erupted, what the major expeditions set out to accomplish, how those ambitions played out on the ground, and how the long arc of conflict finally came to an end. Who won the crusades? Overall, the Muslim forces won the crusades, and the Christians lost. However, as Rist explains, while that was the final state of play, the granular details were far from that simple. "The final bastions of the crusader states were lost in 1291 (having been founded originally in 1099) to Muslim forces. In that sense, obviously the Muslims won the crusades and the Christians were defeated. "However, the crusades span a very long period of time, starting with the First Crusade in 1095 and ending with the loss of Acre in 1291. There were many individual crusades within that period, some of which were won by the Christians – by the Western Franks, like the First Crusade – and others by Muslims. For example, the Muslim forces were successful in the Fifth Crusade in capturing Damietta." In other instances, Rist says there were greater degrees of complexity. "In some crusades, we have partial victories. If we take the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart was partially successful, in the sense that he was able to take and maintain Acre. But, of course, he didn't win back Jerusalem with a military victory." <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/06/GettyImages-1186332544-4f0a3d8-e1764009254971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This illustration depicts Richard the Lionheart paying homage to King Philip Augustus of France during the Third Crusade. Although allies in their campaign to the Holy Land, the two monarchs maintained a tense partnership" title="Richard the Lionheart and Philip Augustus" /> How many crusades were there? "There were eight crusades during the period from 1095 to 1291 in the Near East," says Rist. However, Rist is careful to caveat this: it's a number that's subject to debate, as what precisely counts as a full-scale crusade is difficult to define. Still, according to Rist, the eight major crusades were broadly as follows: "The First Crusade (1095–99), is where the crusaders take Jerusalem and set up the crusader states. The Second Crusade (1147–50), is a subsequent response to the fall of the first crusader kingdom of Edessa (the crusader kingdom in the north). The Third Crusade (1189–92) is launched to try to win back Jerusalem and is perhaps the most famous because it involved Richard the Lionheart. The Fourth Crusade (1202–04) doesn't end up in the Holy Land at all, but the crusaders instead sack the town of Zara and then Constantinople. The Fifth Crusade (1217–21) is an attack that the crusaders make on Egypt, on the town of Damietta in particular (and this ends in failure). The Sixth Crusade (1228–29) is very interesting because it's not authorised by the papacy, but it’s a crusade where emperor Frederick II, goes out under excommunication. He has a lot of success and makes a truce with the sultan and gets Jerusalem back for 10 years. Finally, I like to think of the Seventh (1248–54) and Eighth (1270) Crusades, which are the two crusades of Louis IX, launched respectively at Egypt and at Tunis." Read more | Is the world still living in the shadow of the crusades? In addition to these eight core crusades, there were other conflicts that need to be recognised. "There were also many more minor expeditions [with] small groups of fighters between these major crusades as well. So we can think of the Barons’ crusade of 1236, for example, or the crusade by Edward, prince of England, sometimes called the Ninth Crusade (1271–72). These little ventures are going on between these major responses [when] great papal calls are put out, and very large armies take up that call." How many people died in the crusades? The crusades' death toll likely came in at around 5-6 million, possibly reaching as high as 9 million, according to Rist. But, once again, there are serious caveats to consider. "It's very difficult to estimate [the crusades' death toll] because of the source material. We're dealing with very unreliable sources: medieval chroniclers are notoriously unreliable when they give figures of battles and losses." Despite the problems with the sources, it's still possible to come to a very broad conclusion. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the Crusades "There are figures ranging from 1 million to 9 million over the whole period from 1095 to 1291. John Robertson famously, in his Short History of Christianity – a very old but seminal book first published in the early 20th century – had that really huge figure of 9 million. But I've seen other historians estimate much lower numbers. When I'm giving these figures, I'm including Christians, Muslims and all those who followed the armies, not just the combatants. "Historians generally prefer to try to give estimates for individual battles rather than for the crusades overall, and I think that gives us a better sense of the carnage and the losses. Regarding the overall estimates between 1 million and 9 million, certainly one million seems far too few to me." She concludes, "I would go for a much higher figure: 5 or 6 million." <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/06/GettyImages-1435556881-76ecf57-e1764009379800.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This 14th-century illustration by the Maître de Fauvel depicts the Battle of Dorylaeum on 1 July 1097, one of the First Crusade’s major engagements. It shows crusader forces rallying after a surprise Turkish attack, capturing the drama and brutality of a battle that helped secure the crusaders’ advance into Anatolia." title="The Battle Of Dorylaeum On 1 July 1097" /> What caused the crusades between 1095­–1204? The motivations behind the crusades were a mixture of: "religious, political, social, and economic," says Rist. "To highlight a few definite motivating factors: I think the papacy granting a ‘remission of sins’ in the 12th century is a driving force. People want to be free from their sins, to try to wipe the slate clean, and they know that crusading will assure them that spiritual privilege. There is another religious motivation: to help fellow Christians. The pope had called for the First Crusade to help the Byzantines in the east. The Byzantine emperor, Alexius Comnenus, had asked for help from the west because the Byzantines were struggling against the Seljuk Turks at this time." But it was far from just religion that motivated the conflicts, as Rist explains. Read more | Did the crusaders fight for God or gold? "There are many other non-religious motivations, such as the charismatic preaching that we see happening with these crusades. Take a figure like Bernard of Clairvaux on the Second Crusade. He preaches all over Europe drawing large crowds, and influences kings to ‘take the cross’. "I think crusaders were also spurred on by the idea of the glory that can pertain to their families if they take part in these great expeditions. Certainly, kings and emperors think it will do their ‘PR’ no harm. They take the cross often when they become kings. Often, it's a way of showing that there is a new reign and that they’re different from their fathers. "There's no doubt that there were also ideas of adventure. At the time of the First Crusade, there had been very bad harvests; there was famine in Europe, so people wanted something different and new. Of course, when they get out there, they didn't necessarily like it. But there were all kinds of romantic and adventurous ideas associated with the crusades." Ultimately however, Rist stresses that the motivation behind crusades was neither singular, nor homogenous. "An individual crusader doesn't just have to have one motivation. He can be conventionally very pious. He can also be hoping to be in favour with his lord. He can be hoping that there might be some land parcelled out to him. He can be inspired by charismatic preaching." How did the crusades end? The crusades ended in 1291 "when the Mamluks captured Acre," says Rist. She concludes, "For decades, Acre had been the centre of what remained of the kingdom of Jerusalem – and so it was the most important city that was still left of the crusader states. It fell to the Mamluk Sultan Khalil in 1291. In the days that followed, the rest of the remaining crusader towns – Beirut, Haifa, Tyre, Tortosa – all fell in a domino effect." The First Crusade Member exclusive | Walk in the footsteps of the first crusaders, witnessing the hardships they faced, meeting the people they came across and seeing the landscapes they traversed through their eyes. Listen to all episodes now
This ancient goddess commanded a Wonder of the World – but why did she have thirty breasts?
The strange and powerful symbol at the heart of one of history’s greatest temples reveals the importance of the goddess Artemis in ruling fertility, childbirth and nature
When we think of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon may be the first examples that come to mind. However, the oldest-known versions of the list start with a landmark that is often forgotten: the Temple of Artemis. Located in the ancient city of Ephesus (near modern-day Selçuk, Turkey), this remarkable place of worship was renowned for its size and scale, standing at least 20 metres tall and boasting an enormous tile-covered roof supported by 127 marble columns. With a floor plan of some 6,000 square metres, the temple was also nearly three times as large as the famous Parthenon in Athens. But some of the most startling archaeological evidence from Ephesus isn’t concerned with the dimensions of the temple, nor its complicated history of destruction and rebuilding. Instead, much attention has been directed towards a collection of statues depicting the temple’s patron deity, Artemis. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/BAL957668-36357fc.jpg" width="7715" height="4533" alt="A large temple with a triangular roof and many columns holding it up. It sits on top of a large flight of stairs. The roof has a mural of the goddess sitting in the middle and surrounded by crowds of people and two golden horses" title="A 20th-century depiction of the Temple of Artemis, dedicated to the goddess Artemis (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Rather than portraying the goddess as a conventional Greek beauty, the sculptures display Artemis in an altogether different guise. And, according to classicist and broadcaster Bettany Hughes, these statues bear a particularly striking physical characteristic. Read more | On the steps of a sacred temple, Cleopatra's feud with her sister came to a blood-soaked end “[This] is not the Artemis that you probably have in your heads… this image of a beautiful young woman in a tiny Greek chiton, artfully pulling a bow and arrow,” reveals Hughes on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast. “She is a huge, towering figure, covered in birds and bees, goats and curious figures. But what none of you will miss… is that she looks as though she has 30 or so breasts.” Thirty breasts… or testicles? What need did Artemis have for 30 breasts? As well as being the goddess of hunting and the moon, Artemis was also revered as a deity of fertility and childbirth. Having a multitude of breasts would therefore be a fitting attribute for a goddess so intrinsically connected with fecundity and womanhood. In fact, even alternative theories – which suggest that the ‘breasts’ are actually bulls’ testicles or sacks of honey – bolster Artemis’s association with abundance. Both motifs have also been used as symbols of procreation in Greek art, so the ambiguity was likely deliberate. “These ancient craftsmen are likely playing a game with us,” says Hughes. Ultimately, the ancient Greeks believed that Artemis was so potent in her fertility that “she didn’t need anything as mundane as sex to procreate”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/M42ADD-2-4bc4f79.jpg" width="5560" height="3707" alt="A large statue of a woman with black hands and face, and covered in light brown bulbous growths. On her head, there is a well-shaped crown" title="A second-century AD interpretation of Artemis, with the head and hands cast in bronze added in the 19th century. Artemis is an enduring symbol of fertility (Image by Alamy)" /> A goddess of power and procreation It’s not just the features on the statue[s] itself that suggest Artemis’s importance – the location where they were discovered is notable too. Ephesus was situated on the eastern edge of the ancient Greek world, where Artemis’s association with fertility and childbirth was perhaps stronger than elsewhere. Read more | Wanderlust: Bettany Hughes on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World “The Artemis who was worshipped in Ephesus was an ‘eastern Artemis’ – a direct descendant of the great nature goddesses of the eastern world,” says Hughes. “Any ancient traveller who went to visit the temple would have been left in no doubts of how extremely strong and potent she was.” While Artemis was regarded as a powerful goddess for all, she was particularly important to women. Care of the temple was entrusted to high priestesses, a system that Hughes likens to a “hive buzzing around, serving the queen bee”. Overall, maleness was not well tolerated at the site; it was intended to be devoted to female presence and power. An offer of sanctuary But it wasn’t just the high priestesses who devoted themselves to Artemis. Countless ordinary women also dedicated themselves to this bastion of fertility, travelling from far and wide to give offerings. “Poor female pilgrims would beat a path to Artemis’s door, and some of them would leave extraordinary gifts [and] beautiful gold offerings,” says Hughes. “They were left as temple dedications and then buried as hoards.” In some cases, the poorest pilgrims would simply leave a seashell for Artemis instead. They merely offered whatever they could, in the hope that the goddess would provide protection and preparation for marriage and childbirth. Crucially, the Temple of Artemis wasn’t solely a place for worship – it also functioned as a place of refuge for the oppressed. Hughes adds, “If you were being persecuted politically, and even if you were a woman escaping domestic abuse, you could go to sanctuary at the temple.” Read more | The gods and their whims: your guide to ancient Greek religion <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/WHA0108722-2-0d5f3b2.jpg" width="5000" height="3542" alt="A brown terracotta jug with a circular spout and no handle lays on its side on the left of the image. On the right, there is a pile of small gold-coloured coins" title="A round-mouthed jug and an assortment of Electrum coins, discovered in the foundations of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (Image by TopFoto)" /> A forgotten legacy The Temple of Artemis was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World for good reason. Its sheer scale and beauty were matched only by the power of the goddess it honoured. To the modern eye, her many breasts might seem slightly mystifying. But – whether seen as symbols of fertility, abundance or simply a playful riddle set by ancient craftsmen – they remind us of the complexity and depth of her worship. Bettany Hughes was speaking to Rachel Dinning on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
5 things you (probably) didn't know about the Tudors
Ruth Goodman, who teaches our new HistoryExtra Academy course on Tudor life, shares five insights about the dynasty’s legacy
1. The Tudors brought peace and prosperity to England Bringing peace was probably the most important thing the Tudors did for us. The British countryside is littered with the sites of medieval battles – places where opposing forces stomped over crops, burned barns and rounded up people’s sons. For centuries, rival aristocrats made and broke alliances, and killed those who got in their way. Henry Tudor took the throne in exactly this way at Bosworth in 1485, when he persuaded a number of warlords to desert their king, Richard III. But there it stopped. Intrigue and power politics were thenceforth undertaken by more covert means. Everyone became a bit safer, the day-to-day became a bit more predictable, and lots of people got a little bit richer. Less war meant that more crops made it to market, more young men were available for work, and there was less damage done to buildings, less thievery with menaces and safer travel. In turn, this meant more trade and a greater willingness to invest. The peace the Tudors brought to their lands benefited all – rich and poor alike. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-540735906webready-614eaac.jpg" width="5572" height="3714" alt="An engraving shows Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester during the Reformation, presenting an English translation of the Bible to Henry VIII (Image by Getty Images)" title="An engraving shows Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester during the Reformation, presenting an English translation of the Bible to Henry VIII (Image by Getty Images)" /> 2. Henry VIII was a reluctant reformer When the Tudors came to power, the Catholic church was already struggling to maintain its grip upon the minds and souls of Europe. New ideas about the nature of God and the state of Christianity were circulating. So when Henry VIII lost patience with the pope, there were plenty of people delighted by the opportunity to rethink England’s official religious position. Read more | Tudor England had no standing army, but this humble hobby kept its people ready for war Henry himself seems to have been happy to leave the religion as was. He just wanted the power and money the pope had been leveraging from his kingdom. He was quickly convinced, though, that he should also have the money and assets of the monasteries. A significant number of influential and vocal people wanted much more, however, pushing for a ‘purer’ form of Christianity that did away with priests entirely and abandoned the rituals and traditions of Catholicism. Others, of course, wholeheartedly defended the time-honoured form of faith. The result was a fracturing of society. Hundreds, both Protestant and Catholic, were executed for refusing to change their form of faith and follow the state-sponsored format – one that changed radically several times. But for all the death and fear, the upset and soul-searching, a new freedom of thought also emerged. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-463916919webready-ea853dd.jpg" width="3432" height="2288" alt="A painting showing a person, holding the page of a book which sits on a table" title="During the Tudor era, literacy grew, in part because Protestantism emphasised reading the Bible rather than the word of God being mediated by a priest (Image by Getty Images)" /> 3. The Tudor era brought a rise in literacy A few years before Henry Tudor took the throne, in 1476, William Caxton printed his first book on English soil. As printing presses became established and the price of books plummeted, reading became affordable to many more people. There was also more choice. Alongside religious texts, books of popular stories, advice manuals, joke books, medical texts and scandal sheets were published. At the same time, there was a new religious pressure for Britons to learn to read. The Protestant faith required its adherents to stop relying on priests and to read the Bible for themselves. This applied to everyone: shepherds and ploughmen as well as nobles and merchants – even women. Teaching people to read became a new religious duty and literacy rates started to climb. Read more | What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century 4. They drove the expansion of industry The Tudor monarchs – Elizabeth, in particular – were very keen to kickstart new industries and update old ones. In order to do this, specialist workers from Europe were encouraged to resettle on these shores. Some came as refugees fleeing religious persecution in France and the Low Countries, bringing new textile-making skills. Others were purely economic migrants with mining expertise or knowledge of new glassblowing and brass-founding techniques. The strategy worked – and these new arrivals provided the core of know-how and experience around which English industry could grow. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain 5. The health of the nation improved Rates of fatal illness fell during the Tudor period – though this was the result of sheer luck, as certain major diseases mutated into less virulent forms. When a new, often lethal form of the plague arrived in England in 1348 – the Black Death – it killed around a third of the population, suddenly and catastrophically. Plague returned to Britain many times over the centuries that followed but, by the start of the Tudor era, the outbreaks were becoming smaller and more people were surviving. Meanwhile, another major killer known as the sweating sickness – a mysterious disease causing rapidly developing symptoms including shivers, headaches, dizziness, pains and, soon afterwards, sweating and commonly death – came and went. The first epidemic broke out in 1485, just as the Tudor era was beginning, and the last came in 1551, after which it apparently vanished completely. With both of these big killers in retreat, the population began to grow. Ruth Goodman is a social and domestic historian and broadcaster. Her books include How to Be a Tudor (Viking, 2015) This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine Want to step even further into the world of the Tudors? In her brand-new HistoryExtra Academy series, Ruth Goodman takes you inside everyday life in the 16th century — from food and fashion to faith, work, and even love and marriage. The first three episodes are available now on the HistoryExtra app, with more to come soon. Start watching today Want to ask Ruth a question? Join our live virtual Q&A on 19 November. Find out more here
Tudor religion: what did people believe?
In episode two of her HistoryExtra Academy series Tudor Life, social historian Ruth Goodman explores how religion influenced people’s lives in the 16th century
Religion was at the heart of Tudor life. It shaped how people understood the world, guided their daily routines, and affected everything from politics to personal relationships. In episode two of Tudor Life, Ruth Goodman looks at what people believed in the 16th century View Green Video on the source website Enjoyed this video? Ruth is hosting a live Q&A for HistoryExtra members on 19 November 2025 at 7pm (GMT). Find out more here Want more from Ruth? Find more episodes of Tudor life here Ruth Goodman is a historian of the social and domestic life of Britain. She has advised the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Globe Theatre and presented a number of BBC television series, including Victorian Farm