Eastern Europe: Did you mean...?

Replica of a 16th-century earthenware stove with decorative tiles from around Šenkvice. Slovak National Museum, Bratislava. Central European clay stoves emerged in the late medieval period as an evolution of the traditional dome-shaped...

Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725) in Russian dress during the Grand Embassy (1697-1698). Austrian National Library, Vienna.

This great Chinese philosopher believed in everything we ignore nowadays: tradition, institution, obedience and order. That’s why he matters.

A depiction of the Ottoman Empire and its dependencies in 1683 CE, with an indication of territory held prior to that date.

So, "modern" is kind of a loaded term, but today we're going to talk about modern life in Europe, as it looked around the time the 19th Century CE turned into the 20th Century CE. We'll look at what life was like in the rapidly growing urban...

The German-Soviet War, known in the USSR and today's Russia as the Great Patriotic War or, in Western Europe, as the Eastern Front of the Second World War (1939-45), began in June 1941 with Operation Barbarossa and ended in Germany's total...

In the 13th century, astonishing quantities of spices and silk passed from the Far East to Europe. Exact amounts are not known, but spice popularity in both cuisine and medicine reached its historical peak during the Middle Ages in Europe...

Feudalism was a system of social society present during the high middle ages in Europe between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. Feudalism can be understood as a hierarchical society where the king owned most of the land, he would distribute...

The Western Roman Empire is the modern-day term for the western half of the Roman Empire after it was divided in two by the emperor Diocletian (r. 284-305 CE) in c. 285/286 CE. The Romans themselves did not use this term. At its height (c...

"The Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire," wrote Voltaire, and this interpretation still dominates the popular imagination, so the Holy Roman Empire is treated as a bad joke, a pale parody of the glory of Rome...