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24 books with the same feel
Hide books by the same authorIbn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North
'Hmd bn fDln, Ahmad ibn Fadlan · 256 pages
"In 922 AD, an Arab envoy from Baghdad named Ibn Fadlan encountered a party of Viking traders on the upper reaches of the Volga River. In his subsequent report on his mission he gave a meticulous and astonishingly objective description of Viking customs, dress, table manners, religion and sexual practices, as well as the only eyewitness account ever written of a Viking ship cremation. Between the
The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman
Nancy Marie Brown · 313 pages
Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed past the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in Newfoundland, few believed that the details of Gudrid's story were true. Then, in 2001, a team of scienti
The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings
Lars Brownworth · 269 pages
Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade
James Reston Jr. · 312 pages
The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain
Maria Rosa Menocal · 315 pages
A brilliant and fascinating portrait of medieval Spain explores the golden age when Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance. of photos. 3 maps.
Blood Sisters: The Women Behind The War Of The Roses
Sarah Gristwood · 408 pages
"In Pembroke Castle, on 28 January 1457, the 13-year-old Margaret Beaufort gave birth to a son she named Henry. Her husband was already dead; her sufferings in childbirth were grave... England was in the grip of civil war - the War of the Roses. Known to contemporaries as 'The Cousins War', beyond the fields of battle raged a family feud, a violent and emotional domestic drama. For the noble women
The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam
Bernard Lewis · 176 pages
The Maid and the Queen: The Secret History of Joan of Arc
Nancy Goldstone
Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World
Colin Wells · 368 pages
The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century
Ross E. Dunn, Ibn Battuta · 357 pages
Known as the greatest traveler of premodern times, Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta was born in Morocco in 1304 and educated in Islamic law. At the age of twenty-one, he left home to make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca. This was only the first of a series of extraordinary journeys that spanned nearly three decades and took him not only eastward to India and China but also north to the Volga River valley and
Blood & Roses: the Paston Family and the Wars of the Roses
Helen Castor · 426 pages
The Wars of the Roses turned England upside down between the years of 1455 and 1485. Yet, as they navigated their disintegrating world, a Norfolk family called the Pastons were writing letters--about politics, business, shopping, love--and about each other. Extraordinarily, these letters have survived. Drawing on these remarkable letters, Castor has written an intimate and compelling family biogra
The New Concise History of the Crusades
Thomas F. Madden · 259 pages
"How have the crusades contributed to Islamist rage and terrorism today? Were the crusades the Christian equivalent of modern jihad? In this sweeping yet crisp history, Thomas Madden offers a narrative of the crusades and their contemporary relevance." "Placing all the major crusades within their medieval social, economic, religious, and intellectual environments, Madden explores the uniquely medi
The Third Horseman: A Story of Weather, War, and the Famine History Forgot
William Rosen · 304 pages
How the Irish Saved Civilization
Thomas Cahill · 246 pages
From the fall of Rome to the rise of Charlemagne - the "dark ages" - learning, scholarship, and culture disappeared from the European continent. The great heritage of western civilization - from the Greek and Roman classics to Jewish and Christian works - would have been utterly lost were it not for the holy men and women of unconquered Ireland. In this delightful and illuminating look into a cru
The Women of the Cousins' War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King's Mother
Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin, Michael K. Jones · 342 pages
A non-fiction companion to The White Queen, The Red Queen, and The Lady of the Rivers. Philippa Gregory and two historians, leading experts in their field, tell the extraordinary 'true' stories of the lives of these women who until now have been largely forgotten by history, their background and times, highlighting questions which are raised in the fiction and illuminating the novels. With a forew
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie · 383 pages
"Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has had a success which few historians experience and which is usually reserved for the winner of the Prix Goncourt...Montaillou, which is the reconstruction of the social life of a medieval village, has been acclaimed by the experts as a masterpiece of ethnographic history and by the public as a sensational revelation of the thoughts, feelings, and activities of the ordin
The Last Plantagenets
Thomas B. Costain · 424 pages
This, the fourth volume of the author's chronicle of English history entitled The Pageant of England, covers the period from the rule of Richard II to the end of the dynasty in Richard III. A story of intrigue and murder, much of which is still a mystery to historians.
The Stormin' Normans
Terry Deary
Fascinating facts about big bad Bill the Conqueror and his bully-boys who battled at Hastings. Everyone knows about 1066, and how William the Conqueror's men scored a bull's eye at the Battle of Hastings. Or rather a King's eye. But why did William like conquering so much? Were the Normans abnormal? Probably not -- King Harold and his men were just as fond of cutting off bits of people they didn't
God's War: A New History of the Crusades
Christopher Tyerman · 1,023 pages
The story of how a group of warriors, driven by faith, greed and wanderlust, carved out new Christian-ruled states in the Middle East is one of the most extraordinary of all epics. The crusaders' stunning initial success started a sequence of great Crusades, each with its own story, that fundamentally shaped the Christian and Muslim worlds for two centuries, until the last Crusader castles were fi
The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph & Diversity 200–1000
Peter R.L. Brown · 353 pages
The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors
Dan Jones · 392 pages
The crown of England changed hands five times over the course of the fifteenth century, as two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty fought to the death for the right to rule. Celebrated historian Dan Jones describes how the longest-reigning British royal family tore itself apart until it was finally replaced by the Tudors. Some of the greatest heroes and villains of history were thrown together in
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
Carlo Ginzburg · 177 pages