Medieval

Girolamo Savonarola is burned at the stake in the centre of Florence (Getty)

A big day in history: Florence’s bonfire of the vanities

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Glenluce Abbey, Dumfries and Galloway

An 18th century village in Germany. Strict laws regulated the goods that each social class could buy. (DeAgostini/Getty Images)

Beware what you buy: the goods German citizens were forbidden to consume

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Whithorn Priory, Dumfries and Galloway

A gold head, thought to represent the head of an important enemy killed in battle, from the Asante kingdom. The abundance of this precious metal greatly shaped the region's history. (Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

The Golden Coast

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Illustration by Jonty Clark.

The Library Ye Olde Travel Guide: Mainz 1455 . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

The Siege of Antioch during the First Crusade, c1200. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Why Islam crushed the crusaders

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A statue of Joan of Arc in the home where she is thought to have been born, in Domrémy-La-Pucelle, eastern France. (PATRICK HERTZOG/AFP/Getty Images)

Where history happened Joan of Arc . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

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Royston Cave, Hertfordshire

A portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer from an early 15th-century manuscript of the poem ‘De Regimine Principum’ by Thomas Hoccleve. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

The Library Chaucer and the idea of Englishness

A c15th-century vellum shows the Squire from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. For Adam Nicolson, the essence of the gentry was “government-through-networking”. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

Stories of the gentry

The Tower of London. More than 30 inmates successfully broke out of the royal fortress between the 12th and 18th centuries. (Photo by Tetra Images/Getty Images)

How to escape from the Tower of London

A portrait of King Edward III. By using his offspring as pawns in a series of alliances, the king hoped to wield power over a confederation of dependent states bound together by feudal and family ties. (Photo by VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)

King Edward III: the family man

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Beaumaris Castle, Anglesey

A scene from the Chronique de St Denis depicting the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII of France, 1137. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

An A to Z of the Plantagenets