Middle Ages
Polynesian Voyaging: How Navigators Settled East Polynesia
Within roughly three centuries, Polynesians settled almost every habitable island in a triangle of ocean larger than Europe and North America combined.
All Articles
Every Chronicle article on world history, newest first: battles, empires, disasters, discoveries and revolutions.
Middle Ages
Ife Bronze and Terracotta Heads: Masterpieces of Yoruba Art
Ife artists created some of the most naturalistic sculpture of the medieval world, closely tied to sacred kingship, and their work overturned European prejudices about African art.
Middle Ages
Second Battle of Tarain (1192): Prithviraj Chauhan's Defeat
Decisive Ghurid victory; Prithviraj was captured and executed, opening northern India to Ghurid rule and leading to the Delhi Sultanate.
Middle Ages
Bulguksa Temple and Seokguram Grotto: Silla Buddhist Art (751)
Two linked Buddhist monuments were built that became the finest surviving works of Unified Silla art and, in 1995, a joint UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Middle Ages
Founding of Baghdad (762): al-Mansur's Round City on the Tigris
A new, purpose-built capital gave the Abbasid caliphate a secure seat of power and grew into one of the largest cities in the medieval world.
Middle Ages
Murder of Thomas Becket (1170): Death in Canterbury Cathedral
Becket was killed in his own cathedral; he was canonised in 1173, Henry II did public penance, and Canterbury became one of Europe's great pilgrimage centres.
Middle Ages
Codex Amiatinus (c. 700): Oldest Complete Latin Vulgate Bible
The giant single-volume Bible survived in Italy and is today the earliest complete manuscript of the Latin Vulgate.
Middle Ages
Hungarian Conquest of the Carpathian Basin (c. 895): Árpád
The Magyar tribal confederation settled the Carpathian Basin, which became the core of the later Kingdom of Hungary.
Early Modern
Peter the Great's Grand Embassy (1697-1698): A Tsar in Europe
The embassy failed to build a European coalition against the Ottomans, but Peter recruited hundreds of foreign experts and returned determined to modernise Russia.
Early Modern
Battle of Mbwila (1665): Portugal Defeats the Kingdom of Kongo
Portuguese victory; King António I was killed, and Kongo slid into decades of civil war, though Portugal did not conquer it.
Early Modern
La Salle's Mississippi Expedition (1682): Claiming Louisiana
La Salle reached the Gulf of Mexico and claimed the whole Mississippi basin for France as Louisiana; his later attempt to settle the river mouth ended in disaster.
Early Modern
Himeji Castle (1601): The White Heron Castle of Japan
Ikeda Terumasa's rebuilding created the castle complex that survives today, a National Treasure and one of Japan's first UNESCO World Heritage Sites (1993).