Late medieval Islamic history: Fatimid gate of Cairo Bad al-Futuh (1087 AD) The Abbasid Empire In 750 AD, it seemed like the Islamic Empire would last a thousand years. The Abbasid caliphs ruled a giant [...]
The Hafsid Dynasty minted gold coins like this one The Hafsids replace the Almohads In the early 1200s AD, the Almohad empire fell apart into Marinid, Christian, and Hafsid kingdoms. The middle of North Africa [...]
Topkapi Palace, Istanbul (Turkey, 1400s AD) By the time the Ottoman sultans conquered Constantinople from the Roman emperors in 1453 AD, the old palace of the Roman emperors was really very, very old. The Roman [...]
Byzantine Greece Byzantine Greece: Interior of Hagia Sophia After the collapse of the western part of the Roman Empire around 400 AD, the Romans continued to rule Greece , but [...]
Hellenistic government: Philip of Macedon Philip of Macedon In the 300s BC, Philip of Macedon conquered Greece. He ruled all of Greece as the king. (In theory Philip was only leading a league of Greek [...]
The Temple of Octavia in Corinth, dedicated to the sister of the emperor Augustus Hellenistic Corinth After the Macedonians conquered Corinth in 338 BC, Corinth was not as powerful as [...]
Hellenistic Athens: Veiled dancer (now in the Metropolitan Museum) The Peloponnesian War Athenian democracy was badly shaken by the Peloponnesian War, which started in 441 BC. As the Athenians began [...]
A model of the gold and ivory statue of Athena inside the Parthenon Inside the Parthenon, the great sculptor Pheidias carved a huge statue of Athena made out of gold [...]
Where does coffee come from? Coffee history starts in Africa. Coffee plants grew wild in East Africa. Sometime before 1000 AD, the people who lived in Ethiopia, in East Africa, began to pick [...]
British soldiers in the Crimean War After Catherine the Great When Catherine the Great died in 1796 AD, her son Paul became the czar of Russia. Who was Catherine? All [...]
