Between 1350 and 1650, this form of government vanquished city-states, town leagues, and smaller lordships to dominate first Europe and then the world.
As the fifteenth century turned into the sixteenth, warfare was transformed. Cannon made castles obsolete, and firearms and pikes displaced knights as the dominant force on the battlefield.
The lives and careers of two English archers in the late stages of the Hundred Years War and two German mercenaries around 1500 to try to understand what the Military Revolution meant for real people.
Cities were what made the Roman world, well, Roman. They were centers of culture and political life, and they were the bedrock that tied together its economy.
Professor Lisa Bitel of the University of Southern California, join to talk about a world-class expert on medieval Christianity and Christian conversion.
From credit instruments to the capitalist mindset, the years between 1350 and 1650 built the institutions that eventually led to an economy that's recognizably our own.
how Latin transformed from a single, widely dispersed language into a series French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and so on of related but no longer mutually intelligible tongues.
Justinian was the last great Roman emperor, but his reign was plagued by disasters beyond his control: volcanic eruptions, a changing climate, and a plague of epic proportions.
Talk to Actor Gary Oldman and Screenwriter Anthony McCarten. The conversation covered history, film and how they recreated Winston Churchill's first month as Prime Minister in the tense weeks of May 1940 in the new film "Darkest Hour."
Kyle Harper, Professor of Classics at the University of Oklahoma, joins to discuss his important new book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire.
The Renaissance is still with us today. It shapes our sense of what art is, our ideas of education, our understanding of historical time, and even our political concepts.
These early knowledge workers combined a genuine interest in the wisdom of the classical past with a practical desire for the skills that would help them rise up the economic and social ladder.
Dr. Keith Pluymers, soon to be professor of history at Illinois State University, drops by to discuss environmental history, the Atlantic World, and the politics of ecology.
Within a few decades of its invention in the 1450s, the printing press transformed the world. It launched an information revolution, leading directly to the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution.
Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and the other important explorers of the early sixteenth century didn't appear in a vacuum; instead, their voyages were the result of centuries of slow, steady exploration in the Atlantic.
Within one fateful decade, the 1490s, Europeans burst onto the world scene: Christopher Columbus headed west across the Atlantic and came upon the Americas, while Vasco da Gama reached India.
How and why did the Portuguese end up sailing thousands of miles from their home country to acquire the riches of the Indian Ocean? To find out Roger Crowley join to discuss this.
The Reformation may have begun with Martin Luther, but it didn't end there. Other reformers in different parts of Europe took the threads of change in a wide variety of directions.
Follow along on an in-depth tour of Europe on the brink of the late Middle Ages, with a changing climate, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years War peeking over the horizon.
