Medieval
The biggest and most formidable castles in Britain, Europe and The World
During the Middle Ages, the arms race between siege engineering and defensive military architecture produced some of the most formidable strongholds in human history. These stone titans were engineered to withstand starve-out sieges, heavy trebuchet bombardments, and subterranean sapping.
By Lewis Smith10 days ago in History
The Secretary Who Knew Too Much — Constantinople, 843 AD
✦ ✦ ✦ Nikiphoros Phokas was not yet aware that he was going to die. But he had a tormenting presentiment that he was about to suffer something severe. He took a piece of parchment from his desk, wrote a single word, sealed it and carried it in the inner pocket of his cloak to the corridor outside the Magnolia Hall.
By S. Kallistos18 days ago in History
The Girl Who Could Be Quiet — Constantinople, 836 AD
✦ ✦ ✦ The young girl used to count at her house in Thessaloniki — the house where her mother was happily grinding wheat in the kitchen, with a lemon tree in the courtyard and the desk where she had been taught to read by her father. Counting meant sequence. Sequence meant for her that the world was moving forward. But the sequence was interrupted three nights ago, the moment when two men knocked at their door. She remembered her father sternly telling her: "Go to your room."
By S. Kallistos18 days ago in History
The Widow - Constantinople, 840 AD
✦ ✦ ✦ Theophano Doukena wrote to her husband on the third day of every week. Not for news; the household gave her none, since it ran itself, the way a good house does, on the quiet competence of people who had served it for years. She wrote because the writing kept him in the room. That morning she set the parchment on the small cedar table by the window and told him the small things: the fig had set fruit early, the cistern was low, the water carriers wanted more than they were worth, Eirene had learned to read the Psalms and stumbled only on the long words. She told him these because the alternative was to tell him she was afraid, and that was not a thing you wrote to a man on a frontier.
By S. Kallistos18 days ago in History
The General Who Almost Knew — The Taurus Frontier, 840 AD
✦ ✦ ✦ The fortress was nameless on the imperial maps. It was distinguished by a number: Outpost Twelve, and its mission, written in the same dry hand as everything else in the Logothesia of the Course, was to watch the road.
By S. Kallistos18 days ago in History
The Dinosaurs Beneath Our Feet
Drive across America and the landscape seems familiar. Cattle graze beneath the enormous skies of Montana. Highways cut through the red-rock country of Utah. Rivers wind through Texas. Forests cover parts of Connecticut and New Jersey. Towns, farms, parking lots, shopping centers, and neighborhoods occupy almost every landscape in between.
By The Iron Lighthouse2 months ago in History
