Wine: Did you mean...?

Samos is a Greek island in the east Aegean, just off the coast of modern-day Turkey. It particularly flourished in the 6th century BCE and was famous in antiquity for its navy, wine, and important sanctuary to Hera. Samos was an active...

With a wealth of natural resources, Brazil was by far the most important colony in the Portuguese empire and was, at one time or another, the world’s leading producer of sugar, diamonds, and tobacco. Colonised from the 1530s...

Jan Hus (also John Huss, l. c. 1369-1415) was a Czech philosopher, priest, and theologian who, inspired by the work of John Wycliffe (l. 1330-1384) challenged the policies and practices of the medieval Church and so launched the Bohemian...

William Tyndale (l.c. 1494-1536) was a talented English linguist, scholar and priest who was the first to translate the Bible into English. Tyndale objected to the Catholic Church’s control of scripture in Latin and the prohibition...

Saguntum (modern Sagunto), located near Valencia in Spain, was an Iberian, and then Roman, settlement. The town's most dramatic moment in history came in the late 3rd century BCE when it was attacked by Hannibal, an act which famously...

Ashurnasirpal II (r. 884-859 BCE) was the third king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. His father was Tukulti-Ninurta II (r. 891-884 BCE) whose military campaigns throughout the region provided his son with a sizeable empire and the...

A medieval monastery was an enclosed and sometimes remote community of monks led by an abbot who shunned worldly goods to live a simple life of prayer and devotion. Christian monasteries first developed in the 4th century in...

Ancient Persian culture flourished between the reign of Cyrus II (The Great, r. c. 550-530 BCE), founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, and the fall of the Sassanian Empire in 651 CE. Even so, the foundations of Persian...

The Crown Jewels of the monarchy of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are today kept in the Tower of London and date mostly to the 17th century, with a few later sparkling additions such as the Koh-i-Noor...

St. Anthony's Fire (SAF) is an illness brought on by the ingestion of fungus-contaminated rye grain causing ergot poisoning (ergotism). The disease's common name derives from the medieval Benedictine monks dedicated to that...