Calm Bedtime History

Somewhere in Iceland, around the year 1000, a poet sits by a long fire in a dark hall. Outside, the autumn wind carries the smell of sulfur from the hot springs. He has memorized verses that his grandfather learned from a traveler from Norway, verses about a god who gave an eye for wisdom and hung nine nights from a tree. The fire crackles. He begins to speak of Óðinn.

In the hill town of Jesi, near Ancona on Italy's Adriatic coast, a boy was born on the day after Christmas in 1194. His mother, Constance of Sicily, was forty years old and had travelled north to secure his birth in imperial territory. Within hours, she would ride through the streets to prove that this heir was truly hers. The child was Frederick Roger, grandson of the great Frederick Barbarossa,...

In the autumn of 1340, a Lübeck merchant named Hinrich Wittenborg ties his cog at the quay of Bruges, where the Zwin estuary still runs deep enough to float a ship of two hundred tons. He has come to buy Flemish broadcloth for the warehouses of Novgorod, and to pay his compulsory dues at the German Kontor on the Walstraat. The city holds forty thousand souls, and the bells of the Church of Our Lad...

It is late May in the year 1453. On the heights above Constantinople, the campfires of an army eighty thousand strong flicker against the darkened land walls. Inside the city, seven thousand defenders stand where once two hundred thousand lived in splendour, and the dome of Hagia Sophia rises pale above the sea mist, still crowned with a cross of gold.

It is the year 802 in the Frankish royal palace at Aachen. The octagonal chapel has stood for barely a year, its pale stone still sharp against the grey sky of the Eifel hills. Inside, a man of fifty-five winters moves between the scriptorium and the great hall, leaving traces of melted snow from his boots on the mosaic floor. He is Charles, King of the Franks and Lombards, Patrician of the Romans...

In the Great Palace beside the Bosporus, Emperor Basil II prepares to receive a bodyguard of six thousand Viking axe-men sent by Vladimir of Kiev. The year is 988. The treaty they seal this winter will create an imperial guard that endures for two centuries, binding the rivers of Scandinavia to the golden capital of Byzantium.

It is January 532, in the imperial box above the Hippodrome of Constantinople. Below you, thirty thousand spectators chant the name of their favourite chariot colour, green against blue, as the emperor Justinian watches with his empress. Theodora at his side was born to a bear-keeper and a dancer, raised among the factions whose cheers now shake the marble seats. Within days, these same voices wil...

The Tigris River winds through the flat plain of Mesopotamia, its waters brown with summer silt. On the eastern bank, workmen from every province of the new Abbasid empire are tracing circles in the dust with rope and peg. Caliph al-Mansur has chosen this spot, where Persian engineers and Arab surveyors converge, to build a capital that will eclipse every city on earth. Within five years, the wall...

In the ducal palace at Poitiers, on the first day of April in the year 1204, Eleanor of Aquitaine lies in her final illness. She has outlived two husbands, most of her children, and nearly every rival who ever stood against her. For eight decades she has governed the largest duchy in France, been queen of France and then of England, led armies across continents, and spent fifteen years imprisoned...

In the spring of 1193, in a modest stone chamber in the Citadel of Damascus, Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub lay dying. He was fifty-five or fifty-six years old. Around him stood physicians, family members, and the few possessions he still owned. Outside, the city he had made his capital prepared for mourning. The man who had recaptured Jerusalem, who had faced Richard the Lionheart across a battlefi...

In the harbour of Constantinople, beneath the walls of the imperial capital, Egyptian grain ships have begun to dock. It is the year 542, and the Emperor Justinian has reigned for fifteen years. The city holds perhaps half a million souls, the greatest metropolis in the Mediterranean world.

You are standing on the limestone cliffs above the Adriatic, where the city of Ragusa clings to a rocky promontory jutting into the sea. It is the year 1358. The last Venetian governor has just departed through the Pile Gate, and the nobles of the city have gathered in the Rector's Palace to swear an oath of collective rule. For the next four hundred and fifty years, this tiny walled republic betw...

It is September 1434. Cosimo de' Medici, sixty years old, richest citizen of Florence, rides through the Porta al Prato after a year of exile in Venice and Padua. The bells of San Giovanni are ringing. He does not enter as a conqueror. He walks home to the Via Larga, past the unfinished cathedral with its gaping hole where the dome should rise, past workshops where bronze founders stoke their furn...

In the year 1253, a Franciscan friar named William of Rubruck reached a city of stone walls and felt tents, built on the open grassland where no city had ever stood before. He had travelled five thousand miles from the court of King Louis IX of France to reach Karakorum, the capital of the most powerful empire on earth.

It is the year 1450 before the common era, in the reign of Thutmose III. The Nile has begun to swell at Elephantine, its waters brown with silt carried from the mountains of Ethiopia. In the village of Deir el-Medina, on the west bank at Thebes, a tomb painter named Kha wakes before dawn to walk the path to the Valley of the Kings, where he will work by lamplight on the burial chamber of a pharaoh...

It is the Ides of March, and the dictator Gaius Julius Caesar lies bleeding on the floor of the theatre of Pompey. The republic he had dominated convulses in shock. In his will, to the astonishment of the assassins, Caesar has named a great-nephew: Gaius Octavius, a sickly eighteen-year-old studying in Apollonia across the Adriatic. The boy will cross stormy seas to claim his inheritance. No one y...

It is the fourth year of the Genroku era, 1701, in the eastern capital. The cherry blossoms have fallen along the Sumida River, and the first summer fires are being lit in the watchtowers of the daimyo residences. A city of more than a million souls stretches between the shogun's castle and the flatlands of the east, larger than London, larger than any city in Europe, yet unknown to the world beyo...

The limestone plateau rises from the western desert, eight kilometres southwest of the city that Egyptians will one day call Giza. In the season of Akhet, when the Nile spreads across its valley, twenty thousand workers gather where nothing stood two decades before. They have come to finish a mountain built by human hands, its white casing already catching the dawn light as the final block is draw...

It is the year 1487. The great temple of Huēy Teōcalli has just been rededicated, and the city of Tenochtitlan stretches across its island in Lake Texcoco, connected to the mainland by three great causeways of stone. Two hundred thousand people move through its canals and markets, in a metropolis larger than any in Europe at this hour.

It is the year 780 of the Common Era. The muezzin has not yet called the fajr prayer, but lamps already flicker in the paper workshops beneath the citadel of Afrasiab. A merchant from Chang'an, having crossed the Pamirs with his pack animals, sleeps now in the courtyard of a caravanserai near the Oxus road. His bales of raw silk wait in the warehouse. By noon, Sogdian brokers will weigh them again...

You stand on the eastern bank of the Trave River, where the water widens into a sheltered bay before meeting the Baltic Sea. It is the year 1143. Count Adolf II of Holstein has chosen this spot, a day's sail from Denmark and within reach of Slavic territories to the east, to plant a new settlement. The ground is soft. The air smells of tidal mud and pine resin from the surrounding forests. Somewhe...

It is April of the year 1100. In the harbour of Genoa, forty galleys ride at anchor beneath the steep limestone hills. Sailors unload bales of Syrian cotton and jars of Palestinian wine, the first fruits of a treaty struck with Bohemond of Antioch during the recent crusade. The city is barely two miles long, pressed between the mountains and the Ligurian Sea, yet its merchants have already begun t...

It is a morning in June, in the year 79 of the common era. The sun rises over the Bay of Naples, and in the city of Pompeii, a woman steps into her atrium to hear water dripping from the compluvium onto the impluvium below. The mountain Vesuvius stands to the north, as it has for every morning of her life, its slopes green with vines and silent.

It is the autumn of 1520, and the body of Sultan Selim I has barely reached Istanbul when his only surviving son, Suleiman, twenty-six years old, enters the city through the ancient walls to claim the throne. The capital he inherits already holds perhaps four hundred thousand souls, making it the largest city in Europe, larger than Paris, larger than Venice at the height of her power. From the Ars...

It is the year 900, in the early months of spring. A clinker-built longship lies ready at the head of a deep Norwegian fjord, its striped sail furled against the mast, its crew of thirty men preparing to row out on a long crossing of the northern seas. The voyage ahead will last many days, through waters they know only by the memory of those who have returned.