The emirate of Granada – Islam’s last polity in Spain – was surrendered to the Catholic monarchs on 2 January 1492.

On 25 December 336 Rome’s believers celebrated Christmas Day – the earliest recorded use of that date as it spread across ...

The body belonged to Charles d’Espagne, constable of France and its most powerful figure after the king, Jean II. The man ...

The Raj’s control of India’s princely states was never absolute, as the British-appointed tutor to the last maharajah of ...

History Today was launched, but in what ways? I can’t remember when I first read History Today: probably not in 1951, when I was seven, but soon afterwards my parents bought me a subscription, since ...

When the aurora borealis appeared in the skies of 18th-century Europe, Enlightenment scientists first turned to history to understand it.

Since 1708 there has been vicious competition over the Spanish treasure galleon San José, its cargo, and, now, its sunken remains.

In 1563 Elizabeth Flynte, a servant from Haselor, Warwickshire, described the extra-marital activities of her mistress to the church court of the Lichfield diocese: He come in here this night, ...

A brilliant inventor and engineer, William George Armstrong was also an armaments magnate, a considerate and generous man who manufactured killing machinery in large quantitities. Born in 1810, the ...

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) is a profoundly – even unsettlingly – historical novel. Granted, it doesn’t look like one at first. Set either in Golding’s own day, or in the very near ...

But it wasn’t an engraving. It was a sheet of finely woven silk – a thousand threads to the inch – so subtle and detailed ...

The English saint Oswald of Northumbria proved incredibly popular in the medieval German-speaking world. How did he get there ...