The Blog
Medieval history · Crusades · Templars · Ancient Greece
Historical essays on the great themes of my novels.
Did they poison Godfrey of Bouillon? The last lunch of the first king of Jerusalem
Summer of 1100. The man who had conquered Jerusalem, the first Christian sovereign of the Holy City, sits down to eat in a palace by the sea, on the coast of Palestine. A few hours later he begins to die, amid high fevers and atrocious pains, and no one will ever know for certain why. A sudden illness… or a transparent poison, sprinkled over his favourite dessert by a hired killer in the pay of an ambitious archbishop? Come with me, dear readers, to reconstruct one of the best-disguised crimes of the Middle Ages: the last lunch of King Godfrey of Jerusalem.
Jean de la Valette: the iron grandfather who saved Malta and Europe from the clutches of Islam
At seventy-one, the Grand Master of the Hospitallers stood up to the mightiest empire of the age, the Ottoman, with a handful of knights and civilians, and did not yield a single inch · Malta, 1565
After Baldwin IV: the boy king who inherited Jerusalem and died at nine
Acre, summer 1186. A nine-year-old boy dies in a castle by the sea, and with him dies the crusader kingdom's last chance. This is the story of Baldwin V, the king who never got to reign.
The Assassins (Hashshashin): the sect of the Old Man of the Mountain that terrorized kings and sultans
A secret order perched on impregnable high-mountain fortresses, whose members killed their victims in broad daylight without fearing death. From their name comes our word "assassin" and the video game Assassin's Creed · 11th–13th centuries
Zoroaster and the religion of fire: the faith that invented the eternal struggle of good against evil
Long before Christianity and Islam ever appeared on this planet, a Persian religion was already speaking of a benevolent god of light, of an evil spirit of darkness, of the day of final judgement and of paradise for those who had earned it · here you will find out what the faith of the Persian kings who fought Greece was really like
Fort St Elmo: 31 days that saved Europe
Summer of 1565: a few hundred Christians hold Fort St Elmo for 31 days against the Ottoman army. The fall that saved Malta — and half of Europe.
Saladin: an enemy so noble that even the crusaders admired him
The sultan who retook Jerusalem and spared the lives of many of his enemies (except for one bastard named Reynald of Châtillon). The same man who earned a place of honour even in the legends of his Christian adversaries: the Crusades, 12th century.
Baldwin IV: the leper king who defeated Saladin
Crowned at 13 and a leper since childhood, he defeated Saladin at Montgisard aged just 16 and ruled a kingdom at war while his body fell apart. The most heroic —and tragic— life of all the Crusades, and how his sister Sibylla and the inept Guy de Lusignan lost it all at Hattin.
Peter the Hermit: the mystic preaching monk who dragged half of Europe to the Holy Land
A gaunt, dishevelled monk with deep, tormented eyes, a white beard and a thundering voice, who went from village to village riding a tiny, ancient donkey, set in motion—with nothing but his apocalyptic words—the greatest mass movement of the Middle Ages: the Crusades.
Croesus of Lydia: the richest and most capricious king of the ancient world (and his fall onto the pyre)
The richest man of the ancient world, bound to a bonfire? Wise Solon warned him, the Delphi oracle tricked him, and Cyrus beat him with… camels. The fall of Croesus, by Herodotus.
Candaules of Lydia: the first documented pervert in history
680 B.C. A king obsessed with his wife's beauty showed her naked to the wrong friend. He lost the crown, the dynasty and his throat.
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.
The Eight Crusades: why they were 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.
Cyrus the Great: the shepherdess Spakó who saved the future king 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.