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£10.99
Its name means ‘centre of the world’, and since the dawn of history the Mediterranean Sea has formed the shared horizon of innumerable cultures. Here, history has blurred with legend. The glittering surface of the sea conceals the remnants of lost civilisations, wrecked treasure ships and the bones of sailors, traders and modern refugees. Of the many cities that dot this ancient coastline, Tyre, Carthage, Syracuse, Ravenna and Antioch are among the oldest and most intriguing. All are beautifully situated, and for layers of history and cultural riches they are rivalled only by Rome, Istanbul, and Jerusalem. Once major power centres, all five have declined into relative obscurity. To bring these mysterious lost capitals to life, Pangonis sets out on a voyage from the dawn of civilisation on the Lebanese coast to a modern-day Turkey wracked by the devastation of the 2023 earthquake.
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£30.00
‘House of Lilies’ is a highly enjoyable, state-of-the-art account of this extraordinary sequence of events, set against one of the great eras in the history of western Europe, a time of remarkable cultural efflorescence. Justine Firnhaber-Baker brilliantly conveys not only the sheer glamour of the French court, but also the intellectual achievements, the battles and the centrality of religion, as well as the series of catastrophes that led to the dynasty’s ultimate demise.
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£10.99
‘Grimly fascinating ? engrossing’ Daily Mail
NINE HISTORIC CRIMES. ONE FAMILIAR OBSESSION.
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£10.99
We tend to think about the Middle Ages as a dark, backward and unchanging time characterised by violence, ignorance and superstition. By contrast we believe progress is the consequence of science and technological innovation, and that it was the inventions of recent centuries which created the modern world. We couldn’t be more wrong. As Ian Mortimer shows in this fascinating introduction to the Middle Ages, people’s horizons – their knowledge, experience and understanding of the world – expanded dramatically. All aspects of life were utterly transformed between 1000 and 1600, marking the transition from a warrior-led society to that of Shakespeare.
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£12.99
For centuries, the Crusades have been central to the story of the Medieval Near East, but these religious wars are only part of the region’s complex history. As ‘The Mongol Storm’ reveals, during the same era the Near East was utterly remade by another series of wars: the Mongol invasions. In a single generation, the Mongols conquered vast swaths of the Near East and upended the region’s geopolitics. Amid the chaos of the Mongol onslaught, long-standing powers such as the Byzantines, the Seljuk Turks, and the crusaders struggled to survive, while new players such as the Ottomans arose to fight back. The Mongol conquests forever transformed the region, while forging closer ties among societies spread across Eurasia. This is the definitive history of the Mongol assault on the Near East and its enduring global consequences.
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£18.99
From the bustling bazaars of Tabriz, to the mysterious island of Caldihe, where sheep were said to grow on trees, Anthony Bale brings history alive in ‘A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages’, inviting the reader to travel across a medieval world punctuated with miraculous wonders and long-lost landmarks. Journeying alongside scholars, spies and saints, from western Europe to the Far East, the Antipodes, and the ends of the world, this is no ordinary travel guide, containing everything from profane pilgrim badges, Venetian laxatives and flying coffins to encounters with bandits and trysts with princesses.
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£10.99
‘A beautiful, beautiful book . . . archaeology is changing so much about the way we view the so-called Dark Ages ? [Williams] is just brilliant at bringing them to light’ Rory Stewart on The Rest is Politics
From the bestselling author of Viking Britain, a new epic history of our forgotten past.
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£25.00
‘A diligent historian and a superb writer’TIMES, BOOK OF THE WEEK
From bioarchaeologist and bestselling author of River Kings, a gripping new history of the making of England as a nation, told through six bone chests, stored for over a thousand years in Winchester Cathedral.
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£10.99
A beautifully observed journey through the cycle of the year in Anglo-Saxon England.
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£25.00
Katherine Pangonis explores five forgotten cities of the Mediterranean: Syracuse, Antioch, Ravenna, Tyre and Carthage. Each of these of these ancient cities has a claim to have been the centre of the world in its own time.
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£10.99
Richard Owen’s book begins in London, where the poet dealt with Italian merchants in his role as court diplomat and customs official. Next Owen takes us, via Chaucer’s capture at the siege of Rheims, to his involvement in arranging the marriage of King Edward III’s son Lionel in Milan and his missions to Genoa and Florence. By scrutinising his encounters with Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the mercenary knight Sir John Hawkwood – and with vividly evocative descriptions of the Arezzo, Padua, Florence, Certaldo, and Milan Chaucer would have encountered – Owen reveals the deep influence of Italy’s people and towns on Chaucer’s poems and stories. Much writing on Chaucer depicts a misleadingly parochial figure, but as Owen’s enlightening, short study of Chaucer’s Italian years makes clear, the poet’s life was internationally eventful. The consequences have made the English canon what it is today.
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£40.00
A new account of the Mediterranean economy in the 10th to 12th centuries, forcing readers to entirely rethink the underlying logic to medieval economic systems. Chris Wickham re-examines documentary and archaeological sources to give a detailed account of both individual economies, and their relationships with each other.
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