Islam

Stephen Clissold describes how many Christian prisoners in sixteenth and seventeenth century North Africa embraced the Islamic faith, willingly serving their new masters.

Stephen Clissold describes a world of Christian slaves and Moslem masters in North Africa, from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries.

On August 26th, 1071, Byzantine army was defeated by the Seljuk Turks, and Anatolia was forever lost to Christendom.

When, on September 8th, 1565, the last Turkish troops had been driven from the island, only six hundred of its original defenders were still capable of bearing arms. But, as T.H. McGuffie writes, the attacking force had lost some twenty-five thousand men; and the Turkish drive westwards was for ever halted.

While the Pilgrim Fathers were drawing up plans for sailing to America, writes Iris Macfarlane, Thomas Roe in India was laying the foundations in a very different form of British Empire.

Robert H. Schwoebel explains how, in the fifteenth century, the growing power of the Turks prompted a number of European princes to despatch emissaries to the Levant as intelligence officers on the Eastern Question.

John Andrew Boyle describes how, in the early thirteenth century, the Mongol hordes devastated Turkestan and Persia, where the grandson of Genghis Khan founded a dynasty.

J.J. Saunders continues the story of the first, and perhaps the greatest, of Islam’s Commanders of the Faithful. The Caliph Omar, after triumphantly laying the foundations of the Arab Empire, fell to a Persian Christian assassin in the year 644.

J.J. Saunders describes how, under Muhammad's second successor, the Caliph Omar, the great era of Arab expansion began, that carried the faith of Islam westwards, to Spain, and eastwards, far into the Orient.

Martin Evans offers a frank reassessment of his article on 30 years of Algerian independence, published in History Today in 1992.