Renaissance Florence had a problem: it wanted female sex workers, but it also needed to offer them a way out. The solution was a new brothel district – and a nunnery for former prostitutes ...

Teodoro Castro or Iosif Grigulevich? Costa Rica’s ambassador to Yugoslavia was a Soviet spy sent to kill Tito. O n the ...

Zaga Christ died on 22 April 1638 leaving Europe no wiser as to the authenticity of the self-proclaimed Ethiopian prince who ...

Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss Edited by Rowena E. Archer and Simon Walker (Hambledon xxviii + 270 pp.) The Politics of Fifteenth-Century England: John ...

James II is generally considered to have been one of the worst of English kings. Recently, two American historians have incidentally had something to say in his defence. But in earlier times, ...

Bolesław Chrobry was finally crowned king of Poland on 18 April 1025. It was an elevation two decades in the making. Otto III ...

The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw himself as a puppet-master, engineering British politics from afar in his feud ...

Hungary had been ruled successively by Turkish sultans and Austrian emperors for centuries when the 1848 upsurge of revolutionary nationalism in Europe struck Budapest, where liberty, equality and ...

Shortly after half past four on the afternoon of April 13th, 1919, a detachment of 75 troops - 50 of them armed with rifles – marched into the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, where a prohibited meeting ...

When James VI of Scots rode south to London in 1603 to be crowned as James I of England, he called himself King of Great Britain. He hoped for a union of his two realms and tried to sell the idea to ...

The death-knell of the Chartist movement in Britain sounded on what was meant to be its day of triumph. In a year when thrones tottered and regimes quailed as revolutions broke out all over Europe, ...

As Christianity spread, it carried Catherine of Siena’s legacy to the Americas. Her asceticism inspired Rose of Lima, Kateri ...