Dead Empires

In 1095, a pope stood in a field in France and called on the knights of Europe to march two thousand miles and take Jerusalem. Four years later, against every reasonable expectation, they did. Then they had to figure out how to keep it. This is the story of the First Crusade and the improvised kingdom its survivors built, held together by bad deals, Italian fleets, warrior monks, and the fact that...

In October of 218 BC a twenty-eight-year-old marched the last of his elephants over a 10,000-foot Alpine pass that no Mediterranean army had ever attempted. He came down into Italy with roughly 26,000 men, half of what he’d started with, and over the next eighteen months he handed the Roman Republic the three worst military disasters in its history. At Cannae alone, more Romans died in a single af...

In the spring of 146 BC, Roman soldiers spent seventeen days burning the wealthiest city in the Western Mediterranean. When the fires went out, they plowed the ground and burned the libraries. Seven hundred years of accumulated knowledge: histories, philosophy, poetry, law, science, gone. Almost everything we know about Carthage today comes from the people who destroyed it. This is the story of ho...