The Blog
Medieval history · Crusades · Templars · Ancient Greece
Historical essays on the great themes of my novels.
Dogs die in war too: Nuvola Bianca and the firing squad of five rifles
On 28 May 1565, La Valette ordered all the dogs of besieged Malta killed. The story of Nuvola Bianca and the firing squad of five rifles with a single bullet.
Pets in Antiquity: 25 centuries loving our dogs and cats
Think loving the family dog is modern? Egypt, Greece and Rome already wept for their pets. The epitaph of the dog Patricus will melt your heart.
Caesar and Nicomedes: Rome's most famous gay story (or the first gold-digging in history?)
Rome's greatest womaniser carried all his life a single rumour about his manhood: King Nicomedes of Bithynia. His legionaries' ditty, Roman sexual morality and a malicious hypothesis about the young Caesar.
When pirates kidnapped Julius Caesar (and lived to regret it very briefly)
A very young Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates, demanded they raise his ransom, promised to crucify them between laughs… and kept his word. Antiquity's most revealing anecdote, per Plutarch and Suetonius.
Emicho of the Rhineland: the count who massacred thousands of Jews in 1096
In 1096, before the First Crusade reached the Holy Land, Count Emicho of the Rhineland led one of the largest massacres of Jews in European history. The true story, and the bishops who tried to stop it.
What if Helen of Troy never actually set foot in Troy?
The priests of Memphis told Herodotus that the Trojan War was a colossal fraud: Helen never set foot in Troy, she was in Egypt, and the Greeks knew it two months after she fled.
Adrastus: the unluckiest jinx in all of history
In the first book of Herodotus lives Adrastus, a man so deeply jinxed that his mere presence was enough to unleash disaster. His story, at the court of King Croesus, is at once the most comic and the most tragic of antiquity.
Why were the Eight Crusades inevitable?
From Peter the Hermit to the fall of Acre: why each crusade called for the next.
When Europe was saved on an island: the Great Siege of Malta
In the summer of 1565, on a barren island of barely 316 km² in the centre of the Mediterranean, a few hundred Christian knights stopped the greatest army of the Ottoman Empire. The siege that decided the fate of Europe.
Mathurin de Romegas and his capuchin monkey: the luckiest pirate of the Mediterranean
Malta, 1554. A French captain survives beneath the flooded hull of his capsized galley, breathing the last bubble of air with his capuchin monkey. Ten years later, a single act of piracy triggered the Great Siege of Malta of 1565.
Spakó: the shepherdess who saved Cyrus the Great of Persia
Year 599 BC. An illiterate shepherdess whose name meant «She-Wolf» saved the future founder of the Persian Empire with a brilliant idea. The story behind the legend of the wolf that suckled Cyrus the Great.
Did you know why Friday the 13th brings such bad luck? The Templars' curse
Paris, dawn of 13 October 1307. Philip IV's soldiers storm the commanderies of the Order of the Temple. Before dying at the stake seven years later, Jacques de Molay curses the king and the pope. Seven centuries on, Europe still fears Friday the 13th.