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The First Crusade (1095-1102) was a military campaign by western European forces to recapture the city of Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim control. Conceived by Pope Urban II following an appeal from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I...

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) was the founder of fascism and dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943. He led the country into a highly authoritarian regime and then dragged it into the Second World War (1939-45) on the side of Nazi Germany. Mussolini...

Aqueducts transport water from one place to another, achieving a regular and controlled supply to a place that would not otherwise receive sufficient quantities. Consequently, aqueducts met basic needs from antiquity onwards such as the irrigation...

The Palaeolithic ('Old Stone Age') makes up the earliest chunk of the Stone Age – the large swathe of time during which hominins used stone to make tools – and ranges from the first known tool use roughly 2,6 million years ago to the end...

In ancient China warfare was a means for one region to gain ascendancy over another, for the state to expand and protect its frontiers, and for usurpers to replace an existing dynasty of rulers. With armies consisting of tens of thousands...

The magnificent temple on the Acropolis of Athens, known as the Parthenon, was built between 447 and 432 BCE in the Age of Pericles, and it was dedicated to the city's patron deity Athena Parthenos. The temple was constructed to house the...

The Messerschmitt Bf 109, also known as the Me 109, was Germany's most important single-seater fighter plane throughout the Second World War (1939-45). Produced in greater numbers than any other German plane, the fighter was a match for the...

The French Expedition to Egypt and Syria (1798-1801), led by Napoleon Bonaparte, aimed to establish a French colony in Egypt and to threaten British possessions in India. Despite initial French victories, the campaign ultimately ended in...

The 1605 Gunpowder Plot was a failed attempt by pro-Catholic conspirators to blow up the English Parliament on 5 November and kill King James I of England (r. 1603-1625) and the entire nobility along with him. The plot was discovered when...

Rhodes, with an area of 1,400 km², is the largest island in the Greek Dodecanese group located in the south-eastern Aegean. The island was an important protagonist in wider Greek and Mediterranean affairs throughout the Bronze Age, Archaic...