Ambient Lectures: History of Great Men

Every educated person knows the name Alexander. Almost no one knows the name of the man who handed him the world. Philip II inherited a kingdom one bad week from disintegration — four enemies on the board, a third of the army dead in a single afternoon, an infant nephew with a better claim to the throne, and a treasury his brother's war had drained dry. He was twenty-three. Twenty-three years...

He was taken as a hostage by the Ottoman Empire. Raised in the court of the sultan. Trained to become one of their greatest commanders. And then, after twenty years of service, he turned against them. This is the story of Skanderbeg — the man the Ottomans called “Lord Alexander,” the warrior who never lost a pitched battle, and the commander who held back the most powerful empire on earth for over...

He had been a slave on the Black Sea. A soldier in Hungary. A knight of three nations who had cut the heads off three Turkish champions in single combat before he was twenty-three. He had killed his master with a threshing flail and ridden the dead man's horse west until he reached Russia. And when the Virginia Company shipped him across the Atlantic in 1606, the gentlemen aboard put him in chains...

Twenty years. Ten fighting the war at Troy. Ten trying to get home. This is the story of Odysseus — the king who refused immortality on a goddess's island and chose his rocky little kingdom instead. The hero who endured what other heroes could not, survived by cunning when force had failed, and walked back through his own door after twenty years disguised as a beggar. He chose what he had chos...

George Washington had a temper that frightened the men who saw it. Jefferson said it was the most terrifying thing he ever witnessed in a human being. Washington's face went white before it went red. He flung his hat to the ground and stomped on it in front of his cabinet. He hanged deserters and walked past their bodies in the morning. He had been at Jumonville Glen when an Indian chief beat...

The Bronze Age did not fade. It broke. The great palace kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean went dark inside a single lifetime — Hattusa burned, Ugarit burned, Mycenae burned, the long trade networks that had carried copper and tin and grain across the connected world simply stopped moving. Egypt held. Barely. What rose from the wreckage was a leaner, harder, more dangerous world — and into that...

In the spring of 1206, a man who had been born with nothing and lost everything twice was acclaimed Khan of Khans on the banks of the Onon River. He was forty-four years old. Behind him lay a childhood of starvation and slavery, betrayal by his own blood brother, and two decades of war against every man who had ever crossed him. Ahead of him lay the largest contiguous land empire the world would e...

He was offered the crown of the Western Roman Empire twice in his life. Twice he gave it back. Flavius Belisarius — born in obscurity on the Thracian frontier around the year 500, dead in his own bed in Constantinople sixty-five years later — won the only campaigns in Roman memory in which a general retook provinces lost to barbarians within living memory. He destroyed the Vandal kingdom in Africa...

He was ten years old when the Romans took him. By twenty-five he was wearing their uniform, drawing their pay, eating at the governor's table. By twenty-seven he had killed twenty thousand of them in a forest in three days. Arminius is the man who stopped Rome. Not slowed it. Stopped it. The line he drew at the Rhine in September of 9 AD held for four hundred years and shaped the map of Europe we...

The story of Alfred the Great -- the only English monarch ever called "the Great." Born the fifth son of a Wessex king in 849, Alfred should have been irrelevant. Instead, he saved England. This is the story of the man who lost his kingdom to the Vikings on a January night in 878, fled into the Somerset marshes with nothing but his faith and a handful of loyal men, and came back to defea...

Frederick the Great - the king who took a sandy, broken electorate and made it a great power. The man Napoleon studied like scripture. The soldier-philosopher who carried poison for seven years rather than surrender, fought four empires at once, and built a state that outlasted him by a century and a half. This is his life. From the cell window at Küstrin to the tomb at Potsdam Napoleon would not...

In the summer of 1462, Sultan Mehmed II — the conqueror of Constantinople, master of the largest army in Europe — marched ninety thousand men into Wallachia to break a vassal who had stopped paying tribute. He marched seventy miles into a country burned to ash by its own prince. He found a field of twenty thousand impaled corpses outside the capital. He turned his army around and went home. The ma...

Three hundred years of the Targaryen dynasty, from Aegon the Conqueror landing at the mouth of the Blackwater to a hedge knight at a wet fire on the night before the Ashford tourney. Narrated by Tywin Lannister over rain and ambient music. The dragons that died. The kings who failed. The bastard who came within an arrow's flight of the throne. The wound that would never close clean. The boy at the...

The last real Viking. Exiled at fifteen, he fought his way across the known world — Kievan Rus, the Byzantine court, the sands of North Africa — commanding the Emperor's elite guard before returning north to seize the Norwegian crown. He spent two decades trying to conquer Denmark, failed, and then rolled the dice on England instead. He died at Stamford Bridge in 1066, three weeks before Hastings....

n 451 AD, on a wide plain in what is now eastern France, a Roman general led a coalition of Visigoths, Alans, Burgundians, and Franks against the largest army the West had seen in centuries. Across the field stood Attila the Hun, the man Constantinople paid in gold to keep at a distance, who had crossed the Rhine and was burning his way south through Gaul. The Roman general was Flavius Aetius. He...

Skanderbeg — Gjergj Kastrioti — was the Ottoman Empire's most gifted student, and the man who became their most persistent nightmare. For twenty-five years he held off the largest empire on earth from a mountain stronghold in Albania, defending Christendom when no one else would. This is his story. Part of Ambient Lectures: History of Great Men. Read by Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones.