Themes in European History

Lecture 1 - Christianity in Rome and Byzantium

After the attack on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001, known to the Americans as 9/11, President George W. Bush declared a "War on Terrorism" and d...

Lecture 2 - Islam

Mahomet and the rise of Islam.* * This material is also covered in Lecture 4 of the Early Middle Ages lectures. The years after Justinian's reconque...

Lecture 3- The revival of the West

Last week we discussed the eruption of Islam onto the Mediterranean world,  the shrinking  of Byzantium and the economic collapse of Western...

Lecture 4 -The First Crusade

The Crusades are the one thing that everyone knows occurred in the Middle Ages - in fact for most people the Middle Ages and the Crusades are synonymo...

Lecture 5 - The Second, Third and Fourth Crusades.

  Outremer after the First Crusade. The First Crusade, as we have seen, established the Latin Christians in four states - the County of Edessa ...

Lecture 6 - The later Crusades

The history of the later crusades is a rather sorry  tale, and can be told in little space.  Two crusades were mounted shortly after the fia...

Lecture 7- The Results of the Crusades

We have been looking at the Crusades for the last couple of lectures, and have concentrated on events in Outremer. But the crusades were as much a par...

Lecture 8 - The Islamic Response to the Rise of the West

The Islamic Response.At the end of the last lecture we left the world of Outremerwith the Crusaders in total disarray, and with the world of Islam not...

The Crusades - Introduction

Introduction. In the third lecture in the  series entiteld The European Millennium, there is a discussion of the background of the crusades and ...