Janina Ramirez: From the start of my academic career, I learned from [Palestinian-American literary critic and activist] Edward Said and others the value of acknowledging one’s perspective: being transparent about who you are, rather than claiming some sense of neutral empirical truth.

For me, identity rests on three pillars. First, I am a woman. Second, class: I come from an immigrant, working-class background. Third, heritage: Polish-Irish, born in Dubai, raised in the UK, married to a Spanish-Scot, with a distinctly European sense of self. With all that, I wasn’t going to get away without a Catholic upbringing: convent school, just very Roman Catholic foundations. I’m not practising now, but it gave me empathy for faith and an understanding of belief.

These roots inevitably shape my work. When I published The Private Lives of the Saints [in 2015], my aunt, a Franciscan missionary, told me how proud she was. I had to laugh because the book dismantled saintly myths rather than celebrating them. Yet she was right: I was still that Catholic schoolgirl, writing about religious figures, even as I reframed them.

Questions of nationality also ran through my research. My first book required careful choices of terms: ‘Irish’, ‘Welsh’, ‘Scottish’, ‘British Isles’ – each politically charged. By Femina [2022], the pattern was striking: nations everywhere reclaiming heritage, from Scandinavia’s Vikings to France’s Cathars. The focus of my latest book crystallised while writing about [queen and saint] Jadwiga of Poland. My grandmother, who owned a bronze of Pope John Paul II, reminded me how faith and identity intertwine. In my lifetime, that pope canonised women I now study, using them to shape national narratives. So the direction of this new book was clear even as I finished the last one.

You explore how women such as Joan of Arc and Isabella of Castile became symbols of national identity. Do you think their stories continue to shape how nations see themselves today?

I open the book with one of [French far-right nationalist politician] Jean-Marie Le Pen’s impassioned rallies at the statue of Joan of Arc on the Place des Pyramides in Paris. So yes, her story remains relevant – mocked or taken seriously, but still shaping France’s political landscape.

After being expelled from the [far-right anti-immigrant] National Front, Le Pen founded an even harder-right party, naming it after Joan of Arc and making her its emblem. That’s how potent her image remains to French nationalists.

Similarly, Isabella of Castile’s influence endures. When I speak with Spanish friends, they describe how the Castilian dialect is still seen as the benchmark [rather than regional dialects such as Catalan or Galician] – much like in Britain, where London can feel like a ‘brain drain’ and doesn’t reflect life in the north, Cornwall or Kent. That sense of central dominance ties directly back to Isabella and the way she imposed her vision of Spain.

And that’s the heart of it: attempts to impose a single collective identity on diverse peoples – peoples with different regions, traditions and faiths – inevitably crack. Even in Isabella’s lifetime, that imposed single national identity fractured and was repeatedly reinforced, layer upon layer. We see the same dynamics now in places such as Catalonia, the Basque Country and Scotland. These identities don’t simply vanish; they resist, reassert themselves and continue to challenge imposed unity.

• Read more | Jonathan Sumpton on the Hundred Years’ War: “It was Joan of Arc who persuaded the French that they could win”

I’d love to explore how nations so often personify themselves as women – from Britannia to Marianne – embodying a strange mix of maternal or nurturing spirit, virginal purity, even martial strength. What do you think is going on there?

Brilliant question! I’m very fortunate to be a colleague in Oxford of Marina Warner, the doyenne of this subject. She has written on Joan of Arc, but also a wonderful book called Monuments and Maidens, which speaks directly to this point.

She shows how nations embody themselves in female form: the Statue of Liberty, Marianne in the Panthéon, Britannia looming in St Paul’s Cathedral. And you’re absolutely right: there’s a deep frustration here. The nation is imagined as a woman, yet women themselves had little to no role in building nations.

It’s a profound injustice: in virtually every revolutionary moment, women were excluded from shaping national identity. In France, ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’ – that emphasis on brotherhood – was about raising up men, not women. Think of how the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen [1789] prompted the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen [1791] in response; the author of that second declaration, Olympe de Gouges, was executed for it. Revolutions don’t work for women; they offer no place for us.

Yet the most powerful symbol to unite people is often ‘the mother’. That universal image, both compelling and emotionally resonant, becomes propaganda: to serve king and country is to serve one’s motherland. Men are called to die for their ‘mother’, while real women are denied participation in politics, philosophy, architecture or law. That’s the deep irony you’ve identified: women are entirely excluded from nation-building, yet the ultimate emblem of the nation is a woman.

Several of the women you write about pushed back against the expectations of their time. Why do you think some have become celebrated as heroines whereas others have been condemned?

We are still enthralled by the charismatic, the extreme, the outspoken. I don’t understand why certain celebrities and influencers command such attention while thoughtful, rational voices struggle to be heard. We must be cautious about whom we choose to celebrate as heroes, both today and in the past. The figures who endure often do so because their stories are condensed into simple, powerful images that can be reproduced and instantly recognised.

Take Agustina of Aragón, for example. Many women fought in Zaragoza [against invading French forces] during the Peninsular War from 1808, yet she became iconic because painters such as Goya fixed her image: a small figure on a pile of bodies, lighting a cannon’s fuse. That lodged itself in the public imagination – this is how legend works. When I began the book, I also considered including men such as Robin Hood or Alfred the Great, whose myths have likewise been reshaped into soundbites.

People prefer statues, posters and slogans to complex truths. They want heroes they can identify at a glance without grappling with the full picture. That’s why I wrote the book: to question the stories we take as fact. Consider the Lady Godiva legend [in which the 11th-century noblewoman of Mercia rode naked through the streets of Coventry in order to win respite for its people from oppressive taxation by her husband, the earl]. The only factual link between the historical Godgifu and the tale we know is Coventry itself. Everything else is invention. I love stories, and I open each chapter with one, but my aim is to dig beneath them – to be forensic about who these figures really were. In doing so, they become more complex, more fascinating and ultimately more thrilling than the legends that have simplified them.

• Read more | “In times of political volatility, it’s more vital than ever that we tell women’s stories” | 3 historians on the state of women's history

Were there any unexpected objects or sources that illuminated the roles of women featured in your book?

Yes – particularly while researching the chapter on Greece, one of the hardest to write. The 1821 Greek revolt is often downplayed in accounts of nationhood. Because it was a rebellion against the Ottoman empire – against ‘the east’, rather than against monarchies in western Europe – it can feel like a different story from the Belgian, German or French struggles for democracy, and tends to be pushed to the margins. I wanted to foreground it. What struck me most was how this perspective connects to broader debates about Eurocentrism. Recently, at the Gloucester History Festival, I listened to Peter Frankopan, 10 years on from the publication of his book The Silk Roads, urging us not to be so western-focused, and Vince Cable, who echoed the same point in relation to China, India and Japan today.

I wanted to shift the narrative away from the familiar classical thread linking Europe to Rome and ancient Greece, and instead emphasise that, for much of medieval history, Constantinople (now Istanbul) was the true hub of civilisation and power. London and the north of Europe were seen as barbaric backwaters.

Greek identity in the 19th century was not just a Byronesque, romantic appeal to ancient culture. For Greeks, it was about reclaiming the legacy of Constantinople, which had fallen to the Ottomans in the 15th century.

Researching the role of women in Constantinople, I was struck by the extraordinary survival of coins, enamels, jewelled crosses – objects that in most revolutions would have been melted down, yet remained intact because the Ottomans largely ignored them. Among them are coins depicting the 11th-century sisters Zoe and Theodora (left) ruling with the male title ‘emperor’ of Byzantium, rather than ‘empress’.

Their images, along with artefacts carried to places such as Georgia when it was ruled by Queen Tamar (reigned 1184–1213), are stark reminders that women could and did rule empires. Indeed, at the same time as Charlemagne was trying to construct a Holy Roman Empire [at the turn of the ninth century], Empress Irene was ruling in Constantinople, viewing the Franks as peasants on the fringes of civilisation.

That chapter forced me to question western national narratives and to reflect on the cycles of rise and fall in world history. It also highlighted the need for humility in how we see our place in a global story that has always been in flux, and the importance of asking where women feature in that.

You also discuss the intersection where religious devotion and politics meet, through women such as Catherine of Siena. Today, would their faith make them seem radical or reactionary?

Catherine of Siena [14th-century mystic and letter-writer] is a fascinating and difficult figure to grasp. I suspect that she would now be seen as a radical extremist. Her influence grew rapidly from local notoriety to involvement in politics, family disputes and the affairs of the nobility. Rejecting the cloistered life of a nun, which she deemed too modest and hidden, she instead exploited the opportunities of the Dominican Third Order, which allowed women to live partly within the rhythms of monastic life while remaining active in the world – able to marry, raise families and pursue public roles.

Even this was too restrictive for Catherine. She craved visibility and seized every chance to place herself centre stage. Behind her was a group that recognised her potential and promoted her as a kind of spiritual influencer. With their support, she was propelled onto ever larger platforms, becoming more reactionary and extreme as her fame grew. Eventually, she had the ear of the pope and played a part in global politics.

It was a meteoric but tragic rise. Catherine’s regime of intense self-mortification, involving starvation and other severe practices, destroyed her health and she died young [aged just 33, in 1380]. Ironically, in the medieval world, some of the very behaviours officially condemned – such as fasting and self-harm – often brought fame and were celebrated as marks of sanctity. Extreme acts, such as plunging into frozen rivers or enduring brutal beatings, drew attention, enhanced reputations and opened the way to influence. For women, especially, punishing the body was often the only route to power and legacy.

This pattern was not confined to women; men pursued similar paths. Nor is it a relic of the past. Even today, religious devotion expressed through extreme bodily endurance persists – in India, for example, ascetics hold an arm aloft until it withers. We may think ourselves too rational, too secular, to be drawn into such practices, but self-punishment in the name of belief remains very much alive.

The temptation is to label such figures simply as fanatics, yet the reality is more complex. Were they extremists, or merely individuals desperately trying to stand out and make a difference? Religion, identity, politics, economics – all can be forces for good but, in the wrong hands and when driven by personal ambition, they become extreme. What emerges, in Catherine’s case and beyond, is the interplay between individual striving and wider social structures – why one person rises to prominence while others remain unheard.

• Read more | Michael Wood on lessons on good government from medieval Siena

In the end, you argue that reconnecting with these stories can help us resist division and manipulation. What do you think these women have to teach us about resilience and identity today?

In my conclusion, I write that Agustina lit the cannon, while Joan picked up the sword. What unites these women is their courage. In times of threat and change, they were brave – and my argument is that we must be brave, too. We need clarity of mind and sharpened intellects to face today’s challenges. We are not fighting on streets with swords, but against misinformation, propaganda and manipulation at the highest levels. We must be equipped to understand our place in the world and our communities.

The book begins and ends with women who had no concept of nations as we know them, yet shared the same land as us, walked the same paths and looked upon the same mountains. Their lives offer inspiration because they survived, thrived and achieved remarkable things in difficult circumstances. By connecting with their environments, we become part of their legacy.

I deeply believe in the power of local history and connecting with our surroundings – exploring archives, visiting museums, walking through graveyards. Engaging with objects and places allows us to connect with people of the past in a meaningful way. It reminds us that humans have always been complex and brilliant. We are not the pinnacle of progress, and the people of the past were not mere peasants living short, brutish lives. Their experiences are fascinating, and learning about them teaches us to be better citizens today.

In our modern world, we cannot control distant geopolitical events manipulated by the powerful. What we can control is our daily interactions with those around us, with the landscape and with our communities. Humanity has always found ways to coexist, collaborate and learn from one another across cultures and generations. That shared, everyday life that I see in my medieval figures still exists. We’ve just lost sight of it.

We need to reconnect with each other, with the land and with the tangible realities of life, rather than the digitised, ethereal existence of screens and texts. Humans have always lived alongside one another, and understanding those relationships is essential.

This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

By the time Douglass spoke in Chicago, the idea of Haitian ‘voodoo’ as a murderous cult was lodged in the American public consciousness. As he noted, the features of this myth would have been familiar to many. According to scores of white writers at the turn of the 20th century, ‘voodoo’ was an imported African religion devoted to the worship of Satan incarnated as a snake. ‘Voodoo’ ceremonies, it was claimed, consisted of frenzied dances, sexual orgies and the ritual sacrifice of animals or humans followed by the consumption of their bodies or blood. The priests and priestesses of this imaginary faith were said to be the real rulers of Haiti, holding all its citizens – from presidents to peasants – in the grip of terror.

In 1901, claims about Haitian ‘voodoo’ coalesced in a widely reprinted newspaper report on the “demoniacal orgies” of this purported “devil’s cult”. Supposedly reproducing the findings of the famous American geologist and traveller Robert Hill, the author of the piece claimed not only that “large numbers of young children are offered up annually in Haiti as sacrifices to the Great Yellow Snake” but also that “mothers frequently dedicate their infants at birth to this purpose”.

The article provoked an incredulous response from Ebenezer Bassett who, as US minister to Haiti between 1869 and 1877, was the first black American diplomat. Having lived there for more than a decade, and speaking fluent French, Bassett – like Douglass – could claim authority on the question of Haitian religion.

As Bassett knew, “the whole story about cannibalism in Haiti is no more than a myth which, like other myths, has gained credence by persistent repetition”. Casting doubt on the veracity of the report, he noted that Robert Hill had refuted the existence of Haitian cannibalism in his recent Caribbean travel narrative, and that the claims of the article were “in full accord with – it is better not to say that they are probably based upon – Sir Spenser St John’s book”.

Lurid inventions

Spenser St John was a British diplomat and former chargé d’affaires in Haiti, and the book in question was Hayti, or, The Black Republic. First published in 1884, it made a deep impression on US journalism, providing the blueprint for a plethora of articles that, though claiming originality, did little more than summarise, in increasingly lurid terms, its lengthy chapter on “Vaudoux Worship and Cannibalism”.

Up to this point, I have placed ‘voodoo’ in quotation marks, not only to suggest that it was a figment of white imaginations but also to differentiate it from Vodou, the African-derived religion genuinely practised by Haitians. Much of this religion can be traced to west and west-central Africa. It contains elements of the religions practised during the era of slavery by the Aja and Fon peoples of the Bight of Benin (vodu is the Fon word for spirit), as well as of others from the kingdom of Kongo.

• Read more | Frederick Douglass escaped enslavement in 1838 – but here's why he was still far from true freedom

However, Vodou was not, as 19th-century white commentators claimed, a direct African import. It was a product of the New World melting pot – a dynamic blend of the religions of enslaved Africans and the Christianity of their European enslavers. In this respect, Vodou has much in common with other black diasporic religions including Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé and Jamaican Obeah. Like those, Vodou helped people of African origin survive the brutality of Atlantic slavery.

In the Victorian age, white people on both sides of the Atlantic ignored the vibrant realities of Vodou, dwelling instead on its demonic imagined double: ‘voodoo’. Why were they so keen to defame Haitian religion? Frederick Douglass had the answer. “Haiti is black,” he declared in Chicago, “and we [Americans] have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.”

Between 1791 and 1804, enslaved and free people of colour rose against the French colonial government of Saint-Domingue. The revolution resulted in the abolition of slavery and independence for the colony. Renamed Haiti, it became the world’s only black republic. Desperate to demonstrate that people of African descent were incapable of self-government, white supremacists spent the next century defaming Haiti, presenting it – in the words of Douglass – as a “very hell of horrors”.

As the 20th century approached, the idea that the world could be divided into races whose members shared the same essential traits was widely accepted. Thus, to opponents of black freedom in the US, Haitian ‘voodoo’ became proof that, without white control, black Americans would degenerate to savagery. As Douglass reflected, the black American could “never part with his identity and race”, meaning that the denial of Haitian civilisation was a denial of the “possibilities of the negro race generally”.

This backlash against black freedom explains why ‘voodoo’ first entered the American popular consciousness during the 1860s and 1870s, just as a series of constitutional amendments secured the abolition of slavery, along with the establishment of black citizenship and the enfranchisement of black men. As the author of an 1866 article in the Memphis Appeal proclaimed, ‘voodoo’ was “beginning to take hold among the negroes. Free them from the check which was once held over them, they have unlimited control over their baser passions, and now and then it bursts out, and proves that the worship of their barbaric fathers still runs in the blood of the Americanised negro.”

Deluge of discourse

Initially, Americans writing about ‘voodoo’ focused on Louisiana and, particularly, New Orleans. A former French colony, Louisiana had a sizeable French-speaking population well into the 19th century. In the 1790s and early 19th century, this population had been bolstered by the arrival of up to 25,000 refugees from the Haitian Revolution, well over half of whom were enslaved. It is thus unsurprising that a reference to “an African deity called Vaudoo” appeared in a New Orleans newspaper as early as 1820.

However, from the 1880s onwards, thanks to Spenser St John, attention turned to ‘voodoo’ in Haiti. The press was swiftly saturated with reports depicting the Caribbean republic as a “land of blood” – with articles bearing headlines such as: “Haiti, a Brooding Nightmare of Savagery, Bloodshed, Cannibalism”.

It is tempting to see this deluge of discourse as a reflection of US imperial designs on Haiti, which it occupied between 1915 and 1934. However, at the turn of the 20th century, Haitian ‘voodoo’ was most often invoked by white-supremacist Democrats who argued that Jim Crow laws and regulations – which, enacted from the late 19th century, disenfranchised black Americans and enforced their segregation from white people – were necessary to prevent similar savagery at home.

The peak of interest in Haitian ‘voodoo’ coincided with legal efforts to destroy the black vote in the South. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, and ending with Georgia in 1906, southern legislatures drew up new state constitutions containing a plethora of voting restrictions. These were intended to disenfranchise black Americans without contravening the 15th Amendment of 1870, which made it unconstitutional to deprive the vote on the basis of race. In the halls of Congress, Democrats, including the Mississippi senator Hernando Money, cited the work of St John as supposed proof that the black American was no more than a “veneered savage”. To the architects of Jim Crow, ‘voodoo’ was an ideological weapon.

Depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ worship, a potent brew of sex and violence, helped to sell newspapers in an age of sensationalist journalism. At the same time, they reinforced racist notions that everybody of African descent was inherently bestial, criminal and hypersexual. Depictions of orgiastic worship chimed with the myth that white women were in constant danger of the black ‘beast rapist’, which was used to justify Jim Crow and fuel violence against black Americans.

• Read more | The Haitian Revolution: the enslaved Africans who rose up against France

In a 1914 speech to Congress, the notoriously racist Mississippi senator James Vardaman made the connection explicit. St John, he claimed, had presented a “disgusting story of the worship of the voodoo and cannibalism, which he says is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic”.

Frequently portraying black worshippers as beasts and demons, the language used in depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ was dehumanising in the extreme. Written portrayals were sometimes accompanied by lurid illustrations, such as A Voodoo Sacrifice, published in the Los Angeles Herald in 1905. A depiction of child sacrifice, the illustration included a worshipper with grotesquely ape-like features as well as a reptilian figure fixing the newspaper reader with an accusatory gaze, suggesting that she or he was an unwelcome witness to secret black rites.

Fears of black resistance

While ostensibly justifying Jim Crow, American depictions of Haitian Vodou betrayed acute white fears of black resistance. African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices played a part in almost every slave uprising in North America and the Caribbean. In 1822, protective charms were allegedly distributed among those involved in South Carolina’s Denmark Vesey conspiracy, named after a free black man convicted of planning a major uprising of enslaved people. In Jamaica a little over 60 years earlier, the use of similar charms during the massive slave insurrection known as Tacky’s Revolt prompted a British crackdown on Obeah.

For late 19th-century white Europeans and Americans, however, the dangerous character of black religion was most associated with the Haitian Revolution. By the end of the century, the idea had been enshrined in Haitian mythology that the revolution began with a Vodou ceremony in a forest named Bois-Caïman, during which a pig was sacrificed and a blood oath sworn.

Though Vodou certainly galvanised the Haitian Revolution, the reality of the Bois-Caïman ceremony has been debated by scholars, some of whom question the sources upon which the story is based.

White supremacists, however, had no interest in questions of historical accuracy, instead portraying Vodou as a death cult bent upon the annihilation of the white race. This accusation chimed with the widespread view that political equality in the US would lead to race war. In 1908, the San Antonio Light published what it claimed was a genuine Vodou chant invoking racial extermination, but which was almost certainly the product of a journalist’s fevered imagination.

O-he! Papa Damba!

Down with whites and with mulattoes!

Burn them, shoot them, drown their women!

Help your blacks, your poor black children

Circulated by those seeking to justify Jim Crow, tales of ‘voodoo’ sacrifice and cannibalism were shot through with white anxiety. These sanguinary stories may have facilitated a kind of psychological displacement. In other words, real white violence against African Americans was projected as imaginary black murder in the service of Satan.

In the turn-of-the-20th-century South, racial violence assumed unimaginable dimensions in the form of spectacle lynching: black Americans were tortured and murdered before white crowds that could number in the thousands. According to statistics compiled by the NAACP (the civil rights organisation founded in 1909 as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), at least 1,902 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1910. The affinities between these all-too-real rituals and fictional ‘voodoo’ ceremonies seem more than superficial, especially if we note – as many historians have – the religious symbolism and sacrificial dimensions of spectacle lynching.

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This reign of racial terror troubled many white people, undermining their sense that they stood at the summit of human civilisation. Condemning the 1904 lynching of Luther Holbert of Mississippi, one newspaper editor wrote that “[t]he negroes, in their most bestial state of voodooism, could be guilty of nothing more savage and brutal.” The editor’s conclusion deliberately inverted the racist language of Democratic politicians such as Hernando Money. “The white man is given to much boasting,” that journalist reflected, “but in many instances he is but a thinly veneered savage.”

‘Voodoo’ gripped the public imagination because, while fuelling the violence upon which Jim Crow was built, it allowed many white Americans to imagine that it was not themselves but others who lived in a “land of blood”.

David G Cox is a lecturer in modern American history at the University of Southampton. His research for this article was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship

This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

Amidst these seismic events, however, Henry’s daily life continued much as it had done during the previous 24 years of his reign. The Tudor court ran according to a strict routine, and nothing – not even the pope in Rome – could disrupt it.

In the early years of his reign, when Henry was at the peak of his youthful vigour, he would rise at the crack of dawn and go hunting for several hours – sometimes until dusk. The courtier and diplomat Richard Pace reported to Cardinal Wolsey that, during the summer, the “King rises daily, except on holy days, at 4 or 5 o’clock and hunts till 9 or 10 at night”. Henry would get up later in the colder months, typically at around eight o’clock.

But those carefree days had diminished by 1533. The king was paying much closer attention to affairs of state and was no longer living “in continuous festival”, as his first wife had put it in the early days of their marriage. Nevertheless, Henry still spent a decent amount of each day indulging in physical pursuits. Now in his early forties, he was almost as full of energy as he had been in his youth.

An “improbably large codpiece”

To get Henry ready for whatever the day held, his privy chamber staff had to rise even earlier than he did. Having cleaned the king’s chambers, the grooms would wake the esquires of the body, who slept in the ‘pallet chamber’ next door to the royal bedchamber. The esquires would enter their royal master’s bedchamber to “array him and dress him in his [under]clothes”, which were strewn with fresh herbs to keep them sweet-smelling.

Having been “loosely dressed” by his esquires, Henry would step into the privy chamber so that his six gentlemen could complete the ceremony of robing with whichever garments he had chosen for that day. Henry loved to show off his physique – as well as his riches – in the quality and quantity of the cloth from which his garments were fashioned. His broad shoulders were emphasised by padded and embroidered sleeves, the curve of his calf muscles was shown off to best effect by white silk hose, and his improbably large codpiece symbolised his masculinity and power. Clearly, he pulled it off. The Venetian ambassador, Sebastiano Guistinian, described Henry as “the best dressed sovereign in the world”.

Hair, ear wax and urine

When the king was dressed for the day, his barber would begin shaving his royal master and dressing his hair. He had to be a man of infinite trustworthiness: after all, he would be holding sharp blades to the king’s throat! During the early years of his reign, Henry was clean-shaven, as Catherine of Aragon preferred. But what she liked mattered less by 1533, when he sported a fine beard, which the barber would ensure was neatly trimmed.

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Luxury pervaded the business of hairdressing and shaving, as it did every other element of Henry’s daily routine. Inventories of his possessions list silver basins for shaving and facecloths trimmed with black silk, as well as a comb of “gold garnished with… stones and pearl”, a toothpick case of gold, and an “ear pick of silver”. Among the many gifts that the king had showered Anne Boleyn with during their courtship was a gold ear wax scoop. Who says romance is dead?

Next up, Henry would be examined by one of his team of physicians. They came armed with bladder-shaped flasks for inspecting the king’s urine and would also examine his stools. In submitting himself to the frequent attentions of his medics, the king was following royal protocol – after all, a sovereign’s health was of the utmost importance to the state. But Henry had always been prone to hypochondria and would be thrown into a panic at any sign of illness at court. The French ambassador described him as “the most timid person in such matters you could meet”.

Mrs Cornwallis’s sweet treats

Having been washed, groomed, dressed and examined, the king was at last ready to go out into the court. The first meal of the day was generally served at around 10.30 or 11 o’clock, although sometimes it was as late as midday (breakfast was not a thing until the reign of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth). This was known as ‘dinner’ and was substantial enough to maintain the king and his courtiers until late afternoon. It comprised an array of different meats, such as boar, pork, lamb and venison, as well as game birds like pheasant and rabbit, swan and more unusual fare like conger eel and porpoise. The king had a sweet tooth, too, and regularly gorged on custards, fritters, tarts, jelly, cream of almonds and quince marmalade. His favourite confectioner was a woman named Mrs Cornwallis, whom he rewarded with a fine house close to the Tower of London.

In contrast to the popular image of Henry seated at the top table of a great feast, devouring endless chicken legs and throwing the bones over his shoulder, he was a very fastidious eater and preferred to take his meals in private. He didn’t like to linger over his meals, either, because he was impatient to get on with his day.

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Hunting, archery, bowling and tennis took up several hours. Sir William Kingston, who was a regular at Henry’s court (and was later Anne Boleyn’s gaoler at the Tower), observed that even after more than 20 years on the throne: “The king hawks every day with goshawks and others… both before noon and after.” Having practised these sporting pursuits from childhood, Henry was highly skilled, particularly at tennis. The Venetian ambassador enthused: “It is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play.”

“Tedious and painful”

The distinction between work and play was blurred during Henry’s reign. He would discuss politics with ambassadors and ministers while enjoying a game of bowls or practising archery, and would hold more private audiences with his advisors while being dressed or undressed, taking his meals or bathing.

The privy council was the beating heart of Henry’s government and would meet almost every day at around noon. By 1533, Henry was attending those meetings much more frequently than during the carefree early years of his reign. They would discuss all the most pressing matters of the day – of which there was no shortage in the year that the king rid himself of one wife, took another and separated England from Roman Catholic Europe. Thomas Cromwell was the most influential member of the privy council and worked closely with Henry, often holding private meetings with the king.

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Supper was served between three and four o’clock each afternoon and would typically comprise soups, pottage, roasted meats, tarts, custards, fruits, nuts and cheeses. If Henry was peckish in the evening, his cooks would prepare a snack known as a ‘rear night’ or ‘all night’, which was usually served between eight and nine o’clock.

Henry was renowned for his piety and spent a significant part of every day in worship. One ambassador reported: “He hears three masses daily when he hunts and sometimes five on other days.” This had been encouraged by his first wife, a devout Roman Catholic. By contrast, Anne Boleyn was a reformer and introduced Henry to radical religious texts that encouraged him to break from obedience to Rome. Although he admitted to finding writing “tedious and painful”, the king was a voracious reader, and his private library was filled with classical and theological texts from across the world.

Long trips to the loo

Every so often, the king would take a bath in his private apartments. But the leading physicians of the age cautioned against regular bathing in hot water because it opened the pores and allowed deadly diseases such as the plague, sweating sickness and smallpox to enter the body. Instead, cold water was used for washing the king’s hands and face first thing in the morning and before and after every meal. Even if Henry’s baths were infrequent, they were predictably luxurious. At the palaces of Richmond and Whitehall, Henry had steam baths installed, fragments of which are still preserved at Hampton Court.

Henry had his own private close stool (a type of portable toilet) in each palace. His ‘stool chambers’ at Greenwich and Hampton Court were kitted out with pictures and bookshelves to keep the king amused during the long hours that he spent there. His close stools were covered in embroidered velvet, stuffed with swan’s-down and studded with gilt nails.

To emphasise his magnificence, Henry staged lavish evening entertainments at court. His Master of the Revels devised plays, pageants and musical interludes to be performed in front of the king and his guests. Some of the more ambitious set-pieces involved mock battles and the famous ‘Château Vert’ pageant of 1522, when a certain young lady called Anne Boleyn made her first appearance at Henry’s court. As well as being an accomplished musician, Henry loved to show off on the dance floor. He “exercised himself daily in dancing” and “does wonders and leaps like a stag”, reported an astonished onlooker.

Most evenings, the king and his courtiers would indulge in gambling. Huge sums would be won and lost at cards, dice and board games. Between the years 1529 and 1532, Henry squandered a staggering £3,243 (equivalent to £2.36 million today). But there was always a jester or ‘fool’ on hand to cheer the king after his losses. Henry’s favourite fool was Will Somer, who entered his service in 1525 and kept the king entertained for the next 20 years. It was said that “in all the court few men were more beloved than was this fool”.

Henry’s bedroom antics

The king rarely retired before midnight, “which is our accustomed hour at court to go to bed”. An elaborate ceremony of disrobing began as soon as he stepped into the bedchamber. His gentlemen and esquires of the body would carefully untie, unbuckle and remove every item of clothing and then put on his nightgown. Another attendant would bring a basin of water and a cloth so that he could wash his face and clean his teeth. The king’s body servants would then comb his hair and cover it with a ‘night-bonnet’ of scarlet or black embroidered velvet before helping him into bed and lighting a candle next to it. Their work complete, all but one of the privy chamber attendants bowed low and backed out of the room, leaving their royal master to his rest.

Every detail of this protracted routine would be observed each night without fail. It only differed when Henry chose to visit his wife. On such occasions, he would summon his grooms of the chamber, who would dress him in his nightrobe and escort him with lighted torches to the door of the queen’s bedchamber. The king would rarely spend the night there, though, and would return to his own bedchamber once his, erm, ‘business’ there had been concluded.

But given that Anne Boleyn was almost certainly pregnant at the time she married Henry in January 1533, these conjugal visits would have been rare or non-existent until she gave birth in September. The wisdom of the day dictated that sex during pregnancy was harmful to the unborn child, so instead Henry found comfort with other women.

This caused the first serious rift between the newlyweds in August 1533, when Anne was about to enter her ‘confinement’ – the month-long period when a royal wife would live in complete seclusion to await the birth of her child. “The king’s affection for her [Anne] is less than it was”, reported the Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys. “He now shows himself in love with another lady, and many nobles are assisting him in the affair.” When she heard of this, Anne was “very jealous” and confronted her royal husband. To her dismay, rather than offering placatory assurances, he spat back that she must “shut her eyes and endure” as more “worthy” persons had done. Henry’s affection for his new wife took another nose-dive when she gave birth to a daughter (the future Elizabeth I) on 7 September, rather than the hoped-for son.

• Read more | Inside the six wives' bedchamber: the stories of Tudor ladies-in-waiting

Adultery, treason and execution

As the year 1533 drew to a close, the court moved to Greenwich for the Christmas celebrations. “The King’s Grace kept great court, as merry and lusty as ever”, one guest observed. There was a good reason for Henry to be cheerful: Anne Boleyn was pregnant once more. Her New Year gift to the king was an exquisite table fountain of gold, studded with rubies, diamonds and pearls. Designed by Hans Holbein, it featured three naked women standing at the foot of a fountain, water issuing forth from their nipples – a clear allusion to her impending motherhood.

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Sadly, the queen lost the child a few months later and miscarried twice more in the two years that followed. The king, who in the early days of their courtship had been so enraptured that he had overturned his entire kingdom in order to marry Anne, now “shrank from her”. In May 1536, Anne was condemned on trumped-up charges of adultery, incest and treason and executed.

Earlier that year, Henry had suffered a serious accident whilst jousting, which brought the physical activities that had filled so many of his days at court to an abrupt end. Plagued by pain and humiliated by his expanding girth, this most famous of kings became the bloated tyrant of legend.

The Nazis considered nuclear families to be the building blocks of a ‘pure’ German nation

The family was exalted in Nazi ideology and propaganda as “the germ cell of the nation”. In the Nazi Party platform, a 25-point programme outlining their political goals, it was declared that: “The state must ensure that the nation’s health standards are raised by protecting mothers and infants.”

This 1936 poster shows the Nazi eagle spreading its wings protectively over the valuable German family. Echoing the eagle, the father of the family has his arms around his wife and one of his children; the mother holds a baby in her arms, while a third young child smiles out at the viewer. “The NSDAP protects the national community” is the headline slogan, with further wording proclaiming that “national comrades” could turn to their local NSDAP group for help or advice.

The Nazi Party did indeed provide assistance and counsel to families – provided that they were deemed ‘pure’ German, hereditarily healthy, and of good blood and character.

OWNING THE AIRWAVES

Encouraging universal uptake of radios, the Nazis hijacked broadcast media for propaganda purposes

Radio offered a convenient way of streaming propaganda and speeches directly into homes – so, unsurprisingly, the Nazis were keen to ensure that as many Germans as possible had their own radios. Hence the Volksempfänger (‘People’s Receiver’), a range of low-cost sets developed by the government from 1933.

“All Germany listens to the Führer with the People’s Receiver,” proclaims this 1936 poster, one of several designed to encourage take-up. The implication was, of course, that every proud citizen would be expected to buy a set and tune in to listen to Hitler. And the effort succeeded: by 1939, 70 per cent of German households owned a radio, creating a mass audience for the regime’s output. In 1933 alone, Hitler made at least 50 radio broadcasts. Communal listening was also encouraged, to heighten the emotional impact of speeches, with loudspeakers set up in town squares and other public areas for this purpose.

• Read more | The rise of the Nazis and the importance of heeding warnings

DRIVING FORCE

A scheme designed to boost car ownership reflected the regime’s plan to motorise Germany

The Nazis were determined that Germany should be a nation of motorists as a signifier of the regime’s modernity, speed and progress. From August 1938, workers were encouraged to save for a Volkswagen (‘People’s Car’) via the government-backed Kraft durch Freude (KdF; Strength through Joy) organisation. To make car ownership accessible to all Germans, not just the wealthy elites who were previously able to afford one, the KdF-Wagen scheme involved paying instalments of 5 Reichsmarks each week for four and a half years. Posters such as this 1938 example, showing a black Volkswagen with a voucher card, were produced to promote the scheme. By 1939, some 270,000 people had signed up.

The Volkswagen was intended as “a car for free time and leisure” – no longer largely the preserve of the business sector but a desirable, useful and enjoyable consumer product. However, the outbreak of war in 1939 choked the output of KdF cars, as the economy was diverted to support armament production and factories were dedicated to turning out military vehicles.

FEMALE GAZE

Posters played on the fears of economically deprived women during the Depression

At the height of the economic crisis in Germany, in 1932 some 6 million people were unemployed across the country, leading to widespread poverty. The Nazis played on the hardships suffered by so much of the population, using posters to declare that only Hitler and his party could lift the country – and its citizens and their families – out of the deprivation that afflicted so many.

To maximise the impact, campaigns were cannily targeted, using images, language and themes to appeal to specific groups .This example, aimed at women, proclaims: “Frauen! Denkt an Eure Kinder!” (“Women! Think of your children!”). The picture shows a young family – a dejected, unemployed father, an anxious mother and two small children – with the clear message to “save the German family”. The suggestion being that voting for Hitler was the best way to secure a brighter future for the nation’s children.

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FIGHTING TALK

Posters were deployed to boost public morale during wartime

In this “Ein Kampf, Ein Sieg!” (“One Struggle, One Victory!”) poster designed by Hans Schweitzer in 1943, a brown-shirted member of the Sturmabteilung (Stormtroopers, the paramilitary force that played a key role in Hitler’s rise to power) joins a Wehrmacht solder in stretching his right arm in a Hitler salute beside swastika flags. The dates at the top, 30 January 1933–1943, imply that the war was simply an extension of Hitler’s continued efforts, right from the moment he took power, to make Germany great and to defeat its enemies. This evokes the sense of a continued battle from the early days of Nazi political success to projected victory in the war.

This strikingly martial and belligerent poster was intended to bolster endurance among the German people by reinforcing the prowess, fortitude and ideological determination of German soldiers. It was one of many designed to boost morale and dictate the public narrative about the progress of the war.

ANTISEMITIC ART

Nazi posters painted Jews as the root of Germany’s economic and political problems

In Nazi propaganda, the Jew was frequently used as a scapegoat for all that had gone wrong in Germany. In his writings and speeches, Hitler repeatedly blamed the Jews for both the disaster of the First World War and the outbreak of the Second.

Using lurid colours to highlight the alarming nature of the Jewish ‘enemy’, antisemitic posters appeared on the streets of Germany and across Nazi-occupied territories to try to influence the public as they went about their daily activities. This 1943 example by Hans Schweitzer epitomises the themes and style. It features a caricature of the ‘capitalist’ Jew, presented as hook-nosed, fat and repellent in his black hat and suit, wearing a yellow Star of David bearing the word “Jude” (“Jew”).

The text makes no bones about the perceived culpability of the Jews. “Der ist schuld am Kriege!” (“He is responsible for the war!”), it shouts, the word “Der” (“He”) presented in a much larger font size to emphasise who’s to blame for the conflict.

• Read more | Did Hitler have a secret Jewish grandfather? Our DNA research has solved the mystery

AMIABLE OCCUPATION

The Nazis attempted to pacify the civilian inhabitants of the countries they invaded

The Nazi regime was keen to extol the benefits of occupation to the populations of some lands its troops invaded. For example, in this positively cheerful poster from 1940 by Theo Matejko, aimed at civilians in occupied France, a German soldier is shown holding a smiling French child munching a piece of bread, with two more French youngsters gazing hopefully up at him.

The caption, in red and black lettering, reads: “Populations abandonnées, faites confiance au soldat allemand!” (“Abandoned populations, place your trust in the German soldier!”). Such calculated propaganda, offering reassurances about the occupying forces, belied the truth of their aims.

This gentle image of a German soldier was very different from those portrayed on propaganda posters distributed in Germany – such as the one shown on the opposite page – which showed the Wehrmacht as ruthlessly determined in the face of its enemies. Slogans intended for a German audience were powerful and memorable: “Life or Death”, “For Freedom and Life”, “Perish Judah”, “Victory at any Price”.

Lisa Pine is a fellow of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. Her most recent book (co-authored with Kees Boterbloem) is Soviet and Nazi Posters: Propaganda and Policies (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Lauren Good explores the real history behind our Christmas traditions.

There was nothing so unusual about this stroke of misfortune – the waters of the eastern Mediterranean were plagued by bandits all too willing to prey on Roman travellers. But there was certainly something unusual about what happened next.

Seemingly oblivious to the danger in which he now found himself, Caesar decisively took control of the situation. According to his biographer, Plutarch, “when the pirates demanded 20 talents for his ransom, he laughed at them for not knowing who their captive was, and of his own accord agreed to give them 50”. While his agents set out to raise the ransom money, Caesar made the pirates listen to his speeches and poetry, assuring them that he would come after them as soon as he was freed.

He was as good as his word. Having paid the ransom, Caesar raised a fleet from the cities of the Roman province of Asia (western Anatolia) and captured the pirates. Then, when he discovered that the corrupt governor of Asia was looking to make a profit from the captives, he “took the robbers out of prison and crucified them all, just as he had often warned them on the island that he would do, when they thought he was joking”. It was a brutal act of revenge – softened only slightly by the fact that he slit the pirates’ throats to spare them the agony that would have been their fate on the crosses.

Origin stories

Caesar’s pirate-slaying escapades represent a truly extraordinary tale. But what are we to make of it? We know a great deal about Julius Caesar in the ‘colossus’ phase of his career – that period stretching from his mid-thirties to his assassination in his mid-fifties when he was an established political and military powerhouse. But for the earlier part of his life – before his every act was performed in the full glare of the ancient world’s attention – it’s a different story.

Caesar’s youth and young manhood is shrouded in mystery and conjecture. The tales of his formative years are subject to exaggeration, even outright invention. Yet that doesn’t make examining that early life any less worthwhile. Doing so gives us rich insights into not only the rise of one of the ancient world’s towering figures but also of the political motivations of those who wrote that history in the chaos that followed his death.

Much of what we know about Caesar’s early life has come to us through his two biographers, Suetonius and the aforementioned Plutarch, both writing towards the beginning of the second century AD, around 150 years after his death. Their accounts of those early years are quite similar, which suggests that they drew on a common source. Based on quotations in Suetonius’s writings, that source can be identified as Gaius Oppius, one of Caesar’s most powerful lieutenants.

When it came to setting the record straight, Oppius was more interested in a good story than the truth. The same was true of his colleague Aulus Hirtius, who was at work in the same months editing and updating notes that Caesar himself had left behind. Both men were working under the overall guidance of Cornelius Balbus, who had been Caesar’s chief of staff.

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Oppius got to work soon after Caesar’s murder on the Ides of March 44 BC. He needed to set the record straight at a time when Caesar’s legacy was being challenged by two very different forces. First, and most predictably, there were the assassins, who presented the slain leader as a tyrant whose character was shaped by uncontrolled arrogance and ambition. The second was aspiring ruler Mark Antony – leading general and one of Caesar’s most powerful supporters – who was also shaping the dead dictator’s legacy to suppress the interests of his chosen heir, Octavian, the future emperor Augustus.

So what do Oppius’s writings, communicated to us via Suetonius and Plutarch, tell us about Caesar’s earlier years? And do they contain any clues about how this product of a moderately successful patrician family rose to such dizzying heights of power?

Classical education

Caesar certainly seems to have benefited from a good eduction. His mother, Aurelia – whom Plutarch describes as “a woman of discretion” – saw to that. She found him an excellent tutor for his early teens, Marcus Antonius Gnipho, who went on to run his own well-regarded school. Gnipho had strong views on the Latin language, arguing that a word should only have a single meaning. This made quite an impression on his pupil: Caesar later wrote a book about this very subject, endorsing his tutor’s opinions. Another influence was an uncle, Caesar Strabo Vopiscus, who was famous for his wry sense of humour, which perhaps inspired the wit in Caesar’s writings.

One person missing from any story of Caesar’s youth is his father, Gaius Julius Caesar. The biographies emphasise Caesar junior’s devotion to his mother, Aurelia, and make a great deal of his link to another uncle, Gaius Marius, who was renowned as the saviour of Rome from a barbarian invasion around the time of Caesar’s birth. His father, however, is nowhere to be seen.

Was Caesar senior an absent dad? Or did he just not care? The marriages arranged for his offspring – to people who, while socially acceptable, lacked the drive to support the young Caesar – suggests the latter. The young Caesar’s first marriage, in his early teens, was to a girl named Cossutia, whose family hailed from well outside the political elite.

Young Caesar’s status changed after his uncle Marius had himself installed as consul of Rome – the highest elected public official in the Republic – alongside Cornelius Cinna, following a civil war in 87 BC. To bolster this alliance, Marius had Caesar’s marriage to Cossutia dissolved so that the teenager could marry Cinna’s daughter, Cornelia. Caesar, we’re told, loved Cornelia deeply. If his father had any influence on the new match, the sources don’t mention it.

Thanks to his family connections, the young Caesar was increasingly pulled into the orbit of political power. For his later biographers, though, that wasn’t enough: what was needed at this stage in his life were adventures providing context for the great events that came later. If these episodes included triumph over loss and oppression, all the better. And in Caesar’s interactions with the Roman general and dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, that’s exactly what they got. Sulla’s dramatic arrival on the scene – seizing Rome, establishing a dictatorship and ruthlessly hunting down his enemies – shaped the politics of a generation. It also shaped the politics of Caesar himself.

Sulla had become a major figure on the political stage when he was elected to one of Rome’s two consulships, in 88 BC. He was then awarded a campaign against Mithridates, ruler of the kingdom of Pontus, who had invaded Rome’s provinces in western Anatolia and encouraged the slaughter of Roman citizens. But then the command against Mithridates was taken from Sulla and awarded to Caesar’s uncle Marius. That’s when things turned ugly.

Outraged, Sulla marched on Rome, stormed the city and declared that he had restored the rightful constitution. Marius was forced into hiding, but then returned with Cinna a year later, in 87 BC, winning the civil war mentioned earlier. Sulla then turned the tables on his enemies once again, launching a huge invasion of Italy in 83 BC. His military victory was complete by the end of the following year, at which point he posted up the names of his enemies – his notorious ‘proscription lists’ – around Rome.

• Read more | Caesar's funeral drama: anger and revenge after death

Where did this leave Caesar? We can’t know for sure. Yet, as the nephew of Marius and son-in-law of Cinna, he may well have been at the top of those lists. Sulla certainly seems to have made life pretty uncomfortable for him. The sources claim that the dictator deprived Caesar of the post of flamen dialis (high priest of Jupiter) to which he had been – or was about to be – appointed. They also tell us of Sulla’s demand that Caesar divorce Cornelia – and that, when the young man refused, he was forced to flee.

Marked man

For Caesar’s biographers, there was no lack of drama in this period of their subject’s life. He was, they tell us, pursued into hiding by one of Sulla’s assassins, who soon caught up with the fugitive – and spared him only after he agreed to pay a large bribe. When Caesar did eventually appear before Sulla, accompanied by his mother’s brothers and the Vestal Virgins, Sulla reluctantly granted him a pardon. “Have your way and take him,” he reportedly declared, “only bear in mind that the man you are so eager to save will one day deal the death blow to the cause of the aristocracy, which you have joined with me in upholding; for in this Caesar there is more than one Marius.”

At this point we must proceed with caution. Did Sulla really utter these portentous words? To many historians, they bear all the hallmarks of a dramatic device, injected into the story to add an extra layer of jeopardy. As for the claim that Sulla denied Caesar the priesthood, that appears to be even more unlikely – because the latter never would have held the position. Cornelius Tacitus, Rome’s greatest historian, states that the post of flamen dialis remained unoccupied for 75 years after the death of a priest called Merula in 87 BC. What’s more, a requirement for the post was that both of the priest’s parents be patricians – members of Rome’s archaic aristocracy. Aurelia was from a wealthy family, but she was no patrician.

Some historians have also speculated that Sulla’s antipathy towards Caesar has been overstated. Light is shed on this point by Caesar’s first post, an appointment to the Roman province of Asia, where he served under one of Sulla’s most trusted lieutenants. Would this man really have taken on a youth whom his boss hated? It seems unlikely.

Caesar’s service in Asia was notable for two events. One was the award he won for valour, having saved the life of a fellow soldier in combat. The other was his dispatch to the kingdom of Bithynia in the north-west corner of Anatolia, where he convinced the ruler, Nicomedes IV, to lend Rome naval reinforcements. A story that has swirled for 2,000 years – that Caesar had a sexual relationship with Nicomedes (Suetonius writes that “he dawdled so long at the court of Nicomedes that he was suspected of improper relations with the king”) – appears to be baseless.

What does seem certain is that Caesar’s experience of persecution by Sulla – deprived of office and property, pursued by homicidal thugs – moulded his later career. After his rise to power in the 60s BC, Caesar repeatedly drew contrasts between the mercy he showed his defeated foes and Sulla’s mass murder of political rivals. And though he came from a noble family – descended, so the story goes, from Rome’s founder, Aeneas – he took the ‘popular’ path to the political summit in a bid to undo Sulla’s conservative constitution, which was designed to keep wealth in the hands of Sulla’s friends and prevent ambitious people from challenging the status quo.

Sulla died in 78 BC, and Caesar returned to Rome soon afterwards. A year later he embarked on a career in law, prosecuting two of Sulla’s most prominent lieutenants for corruption in provincial offices. That wasn’t an act of anti-regime revenge: young men routinely drew attention to themselves by serving as prosecutors. Caesar’s speech in one of these cases, prosecuting a man named Antonius, was so effective that the officials in charge of maintaining the citizen roll quoted it when they banished the convicted man.

Caesar’s eloquence was soon attracting more attention among the ranks of Rome’s elite. In the words of Plutarch: “It is said that Caesar had the greatest natural talent for political oratory, and cultivated his talent most ambitiously.” Even Cicero, who opposed Caesar, later stated that the latter could have become the greatest orator of his generation. But that wasn’t good enough for Oppius. He needed to burnish Caesar’s story with one more escapade showcasing his subject’s courage, resilience and resourcefulness. The tale of his capture by pirates did just that.

• Read more | The shockingly simple question historian Tom Holland would ask Julius Caesar

Unlikely anecdotes

So, to return to an earlier question, what are we to make of this tale? Caesar may well have been captured by pirates, but details in the story ring alarm bells. A ransom of 50 talents appears extremely high in a region that was largely bankrupt. And at the time, Caesar held no public office and, therefore, no authority to kill anyone, even a pirate.

Perhaps, then, we should reassess this episode by considering what Oppius was trying to say about his former boss. The story was, perhaps, an attempt to contrast the ‘mercy’ of Caesar with the brutality of Crassus, who crucified thousands of Spartacus’s followers a few years later – and didn’t cut their throats to spare them protracted suffering. It also establishes Caesar as a foe of piracy years before Pompey – his one-time ally, later bitter enemy – took on a command to purge pirates from the seas.

No matter how extravagantly the stories of Caesar’s dealings with Sulla and his capture by pirates were embellished, it’s not hard to join the dots between the young Caesar and the icon. He was a brilliant student of literature, shaped by excellent role models. His relationship with Aurelia, a strong character in her own right, may have influenced his own attraction to smart, powerful women, including his long-term mistress Servilia and later, Cleopatra. And he was courageous. The man who stood in the front line during crises in Gaul and the civil war against Pompey was the same person who had saved a fellow soldier’s life in Asia.

Caesar the politician, however, was more the product of the dysfunctional Rome of his adulthood than of any event in his youth. When all’s said and done, it was his meticulous attention to detail and supreme ability to think on his feet that powered his incredible rise. And it seems that these were talents with which he was born, rather than ones honed through the adventures of youth.

David S Potter is a professor of Greek and Roman history at the University of Michigan. His latest book, Master of Rome: A Life of Julius Caesar (OUP, 2025)

This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

1. The Hohle Fels phallus

Around 28,000 years ago, an effigy of a human penis was left inside Hohle Fels cave, southwestern Germany. Made from fine-grained siltstone, the object was meticulously ground, polished and etched with grooves at both ends.

Given its polished surface and true-to-life size, some researchers have suggested it may well have been an early masturbatory aid – or the first-ever dildo, to put it bluntly.

However, that was not the artefact’s only possible purpose. When University of Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J Conard first announced the find in 2005, he suggested that it was also used for knapping flints.

2. Bread

Yes, that’s right. As well as being a staple food in ancient times, bread may also have been used for less salubrious purposes. A passage from the Babylonian Talmud, for instance, contains a description of what should be done to treat a man afflicted by a puncture in his penis. The suggested solution is that a piece of warm barley bread should be placed on the man’s anus to induce ejaculation, proving whether or not the perforation has properly healed.

Notably, the ancient Greeks are also said to have used makeshift sex toys known as olisbokollikes: batons of stale bread that were inserted into the anus, using olive oil as lubrication. It may sound far-fetched (and could have just been a rude joke), but the practice is mentioned in the lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria, compiled in the fifth or sixth century AD.

3. Goat eyelids

Texts from ancient China describe penis rings made from a rather unusual material: goat eyelids, often with the eyelashes left intact. These were reportedly used between the third and fifth centuries AD to enhance sexual pleasure and performance by trapping blood within the penis. The elasticity of the goat eyelid was presumably the major selling point, but leaving the eyelashes on suggested they played a part too, potentially providing extra stimulation for both parties.

By the 1600s, some Chinese men had upgraded their penis ring technology. These more modern devices were made from materials like jade and ivory, and were ornately carved, often depicting dragons. The dragons’ tongues usually extended to form a protruding nub, which could be placed against the woman’s clitoris to enhance her pleasure during intercourse – a forerunner to today’s clitoral stimulators.

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4. Apadravya (‘apparatus’)

Even if you’re not remotely interested in the history of sex and sexuality, you’ll have likely heard of Vātsyāyana’s third-century AD tome, the Kama Sutra.

As well as guidance about living a healthy sex life, the Sanskrit text also extols the virtues of using apadravya (‘apparatus’) to enhance one’s pleasure, describing the use of dildos, penis extenders and other sex aids made of wood, rubber, gold, silver, copper and ivory. Some of the devices are particularly unusual: one is shaped like a flower bud, while another resembles an elephant’s trunk.

If that wasn’t enough, the Kama Sutra also contains instructions for creating artificial vaginas made of “hollowed-out pumpkins” and bamboo moistened with oil or ointment. Sounds a bit more effective than bread…

5. The Science Museum’s luxury ivory dildo

One of the best-documented early modern sex toys is currently in the care of London’s Science Museum. Labelled “ivory dildo with a contrivance for simulating ejaculation”, the 18th-century device takes the form of an erect penis and includes a small pump and reservoir, seemingly intended to cause fluid to shoot out at an opportune moment.

Curiously, the catalogue entry also states that the item was “found in the stuffed seat of a Louis XV armchair, which was in a convent on the banks of the Seine, near Paris”, but how it got there is a mystery sadly lost to the mists of time.

6. George Taylor’s steam-powered ‘Manipulator’

he ivory dildo might have been very novel in many ways, but one crucial thing that it didn’t do was vibrate. So where did the concept of the vibrator come from?

The answer, it appears, lies in a steam-powered device from 1869 known as the ‘Manipulator’. Invented by American physician George Taylor, the Manipulator was not a theme park ride as its name suggests, but a large, padded table connected to vibrating ball, which would be positioned against the patient’s pelvic area as they lay on the device. The ball – which was powered by a coal-fired steam engine – provided continuous mechanical stimulation and was described as a “medical vibrating and kneading machine”.

The Manipulator was an adaptation of a similar machine created by Swedish physical therapist Gustaf Zander; Taylor merely improved on Zander’s ideas by attaching his ‘Medical Rubbing Apparatus’ to what was, in effect, a stationary steam engine. However, Taylor warned physicians who bought the device that treatment of female pelvic complaints with the Manipulator should be supervised to prevent “overindulgence”.

7. ‘Rubber women’

Rubber, in its natural form, has been known and used for thousands of years, but modern rubber as we know it today was developed much later. In 1839, American inventor Charles Goodyear discovered vulcanisation, a process that made rubber strong, elastic and weather-resistant, paving the way for a wide range of industrial and consumer applications – some of which were later exploited for erotic purposes.

Selected accounts suggest that, by the 1850s, manufacturers were producing rubber items that could be interpreted as early forms of sex dolls. These items have been described as ‘rubber women’ or femmes en caoutchouc in French, though they were not explicitly advertised as sex toys.

The first mention of manufactured sex dolls in academic literature appears in Iwan Bloch’s The Sexual Life of Our Time (1908), where he claims they were marketed primarily to sailors. However, modern scholarship suggests that Bloch relied heavily on fictional sources and exaggerated advertising, calling into question the book’s accuracy.

Given the modern popularity of sex dolls, however, it seems plausible that variations on the theme may have existed in the early 20th century.

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8. Granville’s ‘Percuteur’

Large, steam-powered vibrators like George Taylor’s ‘Manipulator’ were far too bulky and costly for most physicians, so British doctor Joseph Mortimer Granville decided to invent a smaller, spring-driven electromechanical vibrator known as the ‘Percuteur’.

After patenting his device in the early 1880s, Granville was adamant that it should only be intended for therapeutic use on men, stating: “I have avoided, and shall continue to avoid, the treatment of women by percussion… simply because I do not want to be hoodwinked… by the vagaries of the hysterical state.”

It’s not clear whether fellow doctors heeded Granville’s advice, but it’s important to note that vibrators at the time were viewed primarily as medical instruments rather than sexual devices.

Indeed, Dr Carol Queen – curator of the Antique Vibrator Museum in San Francisco – has cautioned against calling these early vibrators ‘sex toys’, saying: “The vibrators were not marketed and sold for this purpose. They were healthcare devices that just happened to cause orgasm if you knew where to apply the vibration… there is no evidence that people who owned or used them knew this… though there’s also no evidence that they didn’t.”

9. Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators

Modern butt plugs did not originate as sex toys, but as treatments for a range of ‘rectal ailments’, including constipation and ‘nervousness’. They were first patented in 1892 and marketed as ‘Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators’ from 1893 to 1940. They were sold in sets of four, in increasing sizes, and advertisements and surviving sets show that each dilator had an olive or bullet-shaped tip and a flanged base to prevent full insertion – a shape strikingly similar to today’s butt plugs.

The devices were made of rubber, and the instructions suggested they be used with either Dr Young’s Piloment lubricant or Vaseline. Like early vibrators, they were marketed as ‘healthcare devices’, but back then – as now – the human anus contained a great deal of nerve endings, meaning inserting the dilators into the rectum will have caused many ‘patients’ to experience sexual pleasure.

To paraphrase Dr Carol Queen, there’s no evidence to suggest that people did use these dilators during sex – but, equally, there’s nothing to say they didn’t.

10. Louis B Hawley’s Patented Penis Stiffener

In 1907, US inventor Louis B Hawley sprang into action to quite literally support men with erection problems. Hawley’s patented ‘surgical appliance’ took the form of an external splint to keep the penis erect, with a covering to help hold it in place.

Unfortunately, there are no first-hand accounts of how comfortable the device would have been for both parties, though given later patent writers’ critiques about its design being bulky and awkward, it’s probably fair to speculate that the answer may well have been “not very”.

However, this early prototype did pave the way for more modern penis ‘stiffeners’, most notably Dr F Brantley Scott’s inflatable device, which was first sold in the 1970s and made up of two inflatable silicone cylinders with a reservoir and pump. That, in turn, led to the advent of surgically implanted and inflatable prostheses, which are still helping people enjoy robust and vigorous sex lives today.

• Read more | Queen Victoria’s voracious appetite for food and sex

11. Hand-cranked ‘massagers’

The earlier question of “but did people really use these things to masturbate?” raises its head again as we look at hand-cranked vibrators like Dr Macuara’s Blood Circulator, which was sold throughout the early 1900s and could deliver 6,000 vibrations per minute.

At this time, masturbation was widely viewed as shameful, and ‘obscene’ content was illegal in the US under the 1873 Comstock Act. This meant that vibrators could not be openly advertised as sexual products.

However, according to sex toy historian Hallie Lieberman, “it’s impossible to deny that sexual uses for vibrators weren’t known”. The makers of the Bebout Vibrator, for example, made their target market very clear in a 1908 advert, describing their device as “gentle, soothing, invigorating and refreshing [and] invented by a woman who knows a woman's needs”.

Interestingly, many of these hand-cranked devices came with dildo-like attachments – though these were ‘officially’ intended to treat uterine complaints.

12. The Oster Stim-U-Lax

This scalp massage device, marketed to barbers, promised to deliver “several thousand rotating-patting Swedish-type massage movements per minute” via the operator’s fingers.

But it wasn’t only used on scalps. A frank first-hand account by US sex educator Betty Dodgson (1929–2020) describes using an Oster Stim-U-Lax with her lover in 1966, explaining:

“One day he was getting a haircut when his barber ended with a scalp massage using a vibrating machine that was strapped onto the back of his hand. Grant got the bright idea that it would be great for sex. On our next date, Grant brought out his new toy for us to try. Although I wasn't all that crazy about getting off on a mechanical device, my motto is to always try everything at least once.”

It was, according to Dodgson’s account, extremely effective, and led her to become a keen advocate for vibrators from that point onwards. Dodgson is even credited with helping to bring such sex toys into the mainstream, promoting devices such as the now-ubiquitous Hitachi Magic Wand, first marketed in 1968.

The story of the first Thanksgiving has been highly mythologised in American history. In 1621, the so-called Pilgrims who travelled on the Mayflower and formed the settlement of Plymouth, in Massachusetts, came together with the local indigenous peoples, the Wampanoag, for a feast to celebrate a good harvest and the growing friendship of settler and Native American in the New World. That is the version long told in schools.

In truth, the Pilgrims threw themselves a harvest festival and around 90 of the Wampanoag showed up. Without their help, especially a man named Squanto, the European settlers would have likely perished in their brutal first winter. The only sources for the three-day feast are sparse mentions in writings by two of the Pilgrims, Edward Winslow and William Bradford. Neither actually used the word ‘thanksgiving’, however, and since they gave few details of what happened, the mythologising took over.

They may not have eaten turkey at the first Thanksgiving

For many Americans, no modern Thanksgiving meal is complete without a turkey as the centrepiece of the table. It’s unclear, however, whether this tradition began in 1621.

The Pilgrims cooked up a selection of fowl – which may have included turkey, but could just as easily been duck and goose – while the Wampanoag killed a number of deer, meaning venison was on the menu. They might have had seafood, too, including eels, clams, mussels and lobster.

Yes, William Bradford mentioned a “great store of wild Turkies” in the region, but the bird did not become a staple of the Thanksgiving meal until the 19th century.

The first Thanksgiving may have happened earlier than 1621

While the 1621 feast became the foundation for the Thanksgiving holiday, perhaps Americans should celebrate a different year. Other acts of thanksgiving, based in the tradition of Christian harvest festivals, took place earlier in the short-lived Popham Colony in Maine and Jamestown in Virginia, both founded in 1607.

Two years before the Pilgrims and Wampanoag, the Berkeley Hundred settlement, also in Virginia, held a celebration and decreed that the same day should be “perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God”. The true first Thanksgiving, however, was not English, but Spanish. On 8 September 1565, in what is now St Augustine, Florida, hundreds of Spaniards held a religious ceremony and shared a meal with the local people to mark their safe arrival.

Americans eat around 46 million turkeys every year

A major reason why turkey became the meat of choice for Thanksgiving is that the birds are both abundant and large (meaning a lot of meat), and it’s a good thing, too. There’s a reason the holiday is also referred to as Turkey Day.

With apologies to the non-meat eaters out there, it is estimated that around 46 million birds are killed for the holiday every year in the US alone, according to the Department of Agriculture. That’s one turkey for every seven or eight Americans.

The fastest time to carve a turkey is under four minutes

Without wanting to dismay all the Americans who take immense pride in serving up the meal every Thanksgiving, the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to carve a turkey is currently held by a British person.

The UK does eat its fair share of turkeys at Christmas, after all. In 2009, Paul Kelly, a turkey farmer in Essex, managed the feat in just three minutes and 19.47 seconds.

The author of Mary Had a Little Lamb is known as the ‘Mother of Thanksgiving’

Sarah Josepha Hale was a writer, the first American woman to be editor of a magazine and, in 1830, she published the nursery rhyme, Mary Had a Little Lamb (originally titled Mary's Lamb).

One of her biggest passions, though, would always be Thanksgiving. Born in 1788 in New England, she grew up with the local celebrations and customs that took place every year, and wanted Thanksgiving to become a national holiday. For years, she embarked on this campaign, writing editorials for her magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, which had a peak circulation of 150,000, as well as countless letters to presidents asking for their help.

Finally getting somewhere with Abraham Lincoln, she is now heralded as the ‘Mother of Thanksgiving’.

In 1705, a town postponed Thanksgiving because of pumpkin pie

Until Sarah Josepha Hale’s campaign, it was up to each town and state to determine how to mark Thanksgiving, with most of the events taking place only in the US northeast. For the people of Colchester, Connecticut, the celebrations must include pumpkin pie. The dessert had become a symbol of the bounty of the New World.

In 1705, however, they faced a problem: bad weather prevented supplies from reaching them, including the molasses that they needed to make their pies. Rather than have a Thanksgiving without them, the townsfolk elected to postpone the festivities for a week until the molasses could be delivered.

Thomas Jefferson was opposed to Thanksgiving (sort of)

In 1789, George Washington issued a presidential proclamation naming Thursday 26 November as a “day of public thanksgiving and prayer”. This did not make the holiday official, as each president had to issue their own proclamations every year. While John Adams followed Washington’s example, the third president, Thomas Jefferson, did not.

He did not oppose families coming together for a nice meal – in fact, he encouraged it as governor of Virgina – but he felt that the religious significance of Thanksgiving meant the president could not endorse it. Otherwise, he would undermine the separation of church and state as established by the first amendment of the Constitution, which he had helped get written.

Benjamin Franklin preferred turkey to bald eagles

The bald eagle has been a national emblem since being chosen to adorn the Great Seal of the United States in 1782. However, the decision did not meet the approval of the great polymath and Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin. He thought the bald eagle had “bad moral character”, “generally poor”, “often very lousy” and a “rank coward”, as he wrote in a letter to his daughter. The turkey, on the other hand, was a “much more respectable bird and withal a true, original native of America,” in his opinion.

• Read more | Benjamin Franklin's greatest inventions

Franklin was effusive in his praise, describing the turkey as “though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.”

The cornucopia has ancient origins

A horn-shaped basket overflowing with the fruits of the harvest, the cornucopia is a symbol of abundance. As such, it has come to be associated with Thanksgiving and is a common feature of the decorations.

The origins of the horn of plenty have nothing to do with the Pilgrims or Wampanoag in 1621, or with Sarah Josepha Hale and Lincoln: it goes back much further. According to ancient Greek mythology, the god Zeus was raised by Amalthea, either an enchanted goat or a water nymph with an enchanted goat.

Either way, one day the baby deity broke off one of the horns and it began pouring forth fruits, seeds and nuts. To the Romans, however, Hercules created the horn by snapping it off a river god.

Thanksgiving became a national holiday during the American Civil War

Sarah Josepha Hale tried for years to get Thanksgiving recognised as a national holiday, but it was with the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 that the circumstances finally came together.

In 1863, she wrote to President Abraham Lincoln arguing that Thanksgiving could heal the divided and hurting country, and he agreed. Less than a week later, he issued a proclamation declaring a holiday on the last Thursday of November – and so Thanksgiving has been celebrated ever since, with a few exceptions.

A small Pacific island has celebrated Thanksgiving since the 1800s

Thanksgiving is not celebrated only in the US: Canada marks it in October, while festivities can be seen in countries around the world. A contender for the most unlikely place has to be Norfolk Island, a tiny Australian territory in the Pacific Ocean home to just over 2,000 people.

Yes, Thanksgiving comes on a Wednesday, not Thursday, and there are a lot of local dishes alongside the pumpkin pie, but the holiday is firmly rooted in American traditions. It began in the 1800s when American sailors and whalers made regular stops there. One American, Isaac Robinson, settled on Norfolk Island and made a big deal of celebrating Thanksgiving. After he died, the islanders just kept it going.

The inaugural Turkey Trot had only six runners

Every year on or around Thanksgiving, around a million people put on their running shoes – and maybe a turkey costume – and take part in their local Turkey Trot, one of many races held all over the US. If nothing else, the run will help counter all the calories about to be consumed.

The Turkey Trot began in Buffalo, New York, in 1896, on a much smaller scale. Just six runners started the five-mile course, with four finishing. One pulled out after two miles, while another had to stop when his “late breakfast refused to keep in its proper place”.

The first Macy’s Parade featured live animals, not balloons

Another constant of Thanksgiving television is the Macy’s Parade. Best known today for the storeys-high balloons in the shapes of beloved characters, when the department store first planned a parade through the streets of New York in 1924, the main attraction was a bit livelier – literally. They borrowed animals from Central Park Zoo, including elephants, tigers, bears, camels and monkeys.

Some 10,000 people attended the Macy’s Christmas Parade, so-called as it launched shopping season for Christmas, preferably at Macy’s at Herald Square, rather than celebrated Thanksgiving.

• Read more | The history of Christmas, plus 10 festive facts you might not know

Snoopy has the most appearances in the Macy’s Parade

The famous Macy’s Parade balloons made their debut in 1927, with the honour of the first character going to Felix the Cat. It is a dog, however, who has been flown through the streets of Manhattan on Thanksgiving more than any other. Since 1968, Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s loyal companion from the beloved Peanuts comics by Charles M Schulz, has clocked up more than 40 appearances with eight different balloons.

Calvin Coolidge was sent a raccoon for his Thanksgiving meal

In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge received an unusual present from one of his supporters: a live raccoon, along with a note suggesting that it would make a delicious Thanksgiving meal. Rather than send the animal to the oven, though, Coolidge decided to keep it as a pet. Named Rebecca, she had free rein of the White House and its grounds, and at the end of his presidency Coolidge and his wife, Grace, sent the raccoon into retirement at a zoo in Washington, DC.

• Read more | 10 famous people in history and their bizarre pets

The Detroit Lions always play Thanksgiving football

American football is as much a part of Thanksgiving as turkey, with millions tuning in to the blockbuster matches that afternoon. It’s a big day for the sport, but especially for fans of the Detroit Lions since they play every year.

This custom goes back to 1934. When radio executive George Richards bought an Ohio-based team and moved them to Detroit, Michigan, he had the idea to drum up excitement by putting on a game on Thanksgiving, when everyone was off work.

It was inspired: the game between the Lions and the champion Chicago Bears sold out, and became an instant annual tradition. In 1966, the Dallas Cowboys got in on the act and now they have their own game too.

There were two Thanksgivings in 1939, 1940 and 1941

President Franklin D Roosevelt made a bold decision in 1939 to go against precedent and move Thanksgiving up a week. The issue was that the traditional date for the holiday fell on the last day of November that year, leading retailers to warn FDR about the economic damage a late Thanksgiving would have on Christmas shopping.

Not everyone was happy with the date change, dubbed ‘Franksgiving’, with Time magazine even comparing FDR to Adolf Hitler. With many states ignoring it and celebrating on the usual day, the US had two Thanksgivings.

• Read more | “We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp”

Despite the criticism, the president doubled down and did the same thing the following year. Congress got involved in late 1941, passing a resolution to set the date for Thanksgiving once and for all – but not before that year's festivities had already been impacted too.

The day after Thanksgiving is the busiest day of the year for plumbers

Perhaps this should not be all that surprising: with large groups gathering under a single roof to eat a huge meal, clogging up the kitchen drainage and – ahem – bathroom pipes, the pressure on America’s plumbing peaks at Thanksgiving.

The day after the celebrations, therefore, proves to be an extremely busy time for plumbers. One national company claims they see a 50 per cent increase in calls from the average Friday. While everyone else is calling it ‘Black Friday’, the plumbers of America have come to refer to it as ‘Brown Friday’.

Presidents have the power to pardon turkeys

Every Thanksgiving, the president performs one of their stranger duties: the pardon of one or two turkeys. Freed from the dinner table, they are sent for a long life on a farm or petting zoo (or, in some cases, Disneyland).

The custom officially began with George HW Bush in 1989, although its roots go back further. When a turkey was sent to the White House for the Thanksgiving meal, JFK, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter all chose to let them live. Ronald Reagan did the same, although he went so far as to use the word “pardon”.

The same day also marks the National Day of Mourning

For many Americans, Thanksgiving is not a cause for celebration, but a stark reminder of the oppression of the Native American population. The image of the first Thanksgiving – where European settler and indigenous people sat side-by-side in peace – is a myth that glosses over the centuries of brutality and persecution that followed. The last Thursday in November, therefore, is a time of protest.

It began in 1970 when Wamsutta Frank James, an elder of the Aquinnah Wampanoag, was refused the chance to give a speech he had written for the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower, which spoke of the painful legacy of colonisation and governmental subjugation. Instead, he led a group of protesters in Plymouth and declared the first National Day of Mourning.

Today, the United American Indians of New England (UAINE) organise a march and rally to honour their ancestors and educate the public about why Thanksgiving should be about more than giving thanks.

Although Elizabethan writer and courtier John Harrington wasn’t the first person to design a flushing toilet – Londoner Thomas Brightfield had done so in 1449 – he was the first to provide a written specification for one.

In 1596, he penned his Metamorphosis of Ajax (a pun on ‘jakes’, a slang word for a privy) in which he described a remarkably modern-sounding device that he’d installed in his house. This incorporated a pan with a seat and a cistern filled with water. When a handle was turned, the water washed the contents of the pan into a cesspool. Although Harrington installed one for Queen Elizabeth I in Richmond Palace, cost, problems of water supply, and lack of sewers meant that the idea wouldn’t catch on for centuries.

B... is for Bazalgette

By the 1850s, London’s growing population  was producing unmanageable amounts of sewage. Cesspools leaked and overflowed, contaminating water supplies, and matters weren’t helped by the outpourings of the increasingly popular water closet. London’s Commission of Sewers had ordered that cesspools and house drains should be connected to sewers, but these fed directly into an increasingly noisome River Thames.

Following the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858, when the smell from the river was so bad that MPs even considered abandoning Westminster, the Metropolitan Board of Works was tasked with overhauling London’s sewerage system. Civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette (1819–91) was put in charge of operations. His 16-year project included embanking parts of the Thames, constructing 1,100 miles of street sewers, 82 miles of main interceptor sewers and building four monumental pumping stations, all designed to take the sewage eastwards to be discharged into the river away from heavily-populated areas.

Watch | 10 minutes of toilets through time

C... is for Crapper

In 1866, Yorkshire-born industrialist and plumber Thomas Crapper opened the world’s first bathroom showroom in Chelsea. For the first time, people could actually see sanitary products in place. Some were even plumbed in so that potential customers could try before they bought.

In the late 1880s, Crapper was asked by the Prince of Wales to install lavatories at Sandringham, and he went on to supply sanitary ware for both Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.

The idea that one of our more robust terms for a bowel movement is derived from his name is a myth – that word was in use well before Crapper became famous. However, it is possible that the American word ‘crapper’, meaning a lavatory, became popular after US soldiers in Britain in 1917 saw his name stamped on the cisterns in some public toilets.

• Read more | How did knights in armour go to the toilet?

D... is for Dung

The infamous 1618 Defenestration of Prague, which saw three Catholic officials thrown from a third-floor window in Prague Castle, helped trigger the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. Remarkably, all three survived the 50-foot fall.

Catholic sources claimed they were saved by divine intervention, while Protestants ascribed their survival to the fact that they landed on a huge pile of dung beneath the window.

E... is for Espionage

It’s hard to believe that the unremarkable public toilets in the small Hampshire town of New Alresford played a part in the Cold War. But they did. Harry Houghton used them as a dead letter box in his dealings with Soviet spy ‘Gordon Lonsdale’.

A plaque on the toilet wall recalls how in 1961, Houghton was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment for his part in the Portland Spy Ring, which sold secret information from the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment to the Soviet Union.

F... is for Fleet Street

Inspired by the success of Jennings’ toilets at the Great Exhibition (see ‘J’), the Royal Society of Arts tried to cash in on the act. On 2 February 1852, it opened London’s first modern public toilet (for men) at 95 Fleet Street. Women had to hang on a little longer; the first female public toilet opened at Bedford Street nine days later.

Delicately dubbed ‘public waiting rooms’, they featured water closets in wooden surrounds and cost two pence to use. But, despite being extensively promoted by handbills and even an advert in The Times, only 58 men and 24 women used the rooms in the first month. Within six months, they were closed.

G... is for Garderobe

Originally a term for a storeroom for clothes and valuables, a garderobe is now usually used to describe a medieval privy, particularly in a castle. Actually, the two uses were by no means mutually exclusive, as the ammonia from urine helped deter moths and other parasites. Many garderobes were built into the thickness of an outer wall, and consisted of a stone or wooden seat over a vertical shaft. Others were sited in a projecting turret over an open drop.

Depending on the design, the excrement would either hit the ground or land in a pit (which had to be periodically cleared out by an individual known as a ‘gong farmer’), or drop into a moat or river. The garderobes of some coastal castles, like St Andrews, simply projected over the sea and let the tide do the work. Garderobes could be a weak spot in a castle’s defences. During the siege of the mighty Château Gaillard in 1204, the French captured its middle bailey after sneaking up one of its garderobe chutes. When Henry III commissioned a new privy for Guildford Castle, the Clerk of Works was specifically told to fit bars to its outlet to deter intruders.

H... is for Hampton Court

To cope with the sanitary needs of the vast numbers of Tudor courtiers who assembled there, Hampton Court Palace boasted a huge communal garderobe.

Known as the ‘Great House of Easement’, it was two storeys high and could accommodate 28 people simultaneously. Occupants sat side by side on oak planks and their waste was carried into the Thames via brick-lined drains. The building still stands today, although now it has a different function: it’s the office of the Chief Executive.

I... is for Ironside

It’s always a good idea to check that a vacant toilet really is vacant. The 12th-century writer Henry of Huntingdon gives this account of the death in 1016 of English King, Edmund Ironside: “When Edmund, fearful and most formidable to his enemies, was prospering in his kingdom, he went one night to the lavatory to answer a call of nature. There the son of Ealdorman Eadric, who by his father’s plan was concealed in the pit of the privy, struck the King twice with a sharp knife in the private parts, and leaving the weapon in his bowels, fled away.”

• Edmund Ironside: Anglo-Saxon warrior king

J... is for Jennings

When the Great Exhibition opened in 1851 in Hyde Park, one of its landmark attractions was Britain’s first paid-for flushing public toilets, which were designed and installed by Hampshire-born plumber George Jennings. For the price of a penny, visitors were provided with a clean toilet seat, a towel, a comb and a shoe shine. Records show that during the exhibition, over 675,000 pennies were spent.

K... is for King

Elvis Presley wasn’t the only King to die on the toilet. On 25 October 1760, George II’s valet was waiting outside the water closet for his master to finish his morning ablutions when he heard what he described as “a noise louder than the royal wind” followed by a crash “like the falling of a billet of wood from the fire”.

He rushed in to find the king dying on the floor. A subsequent post-mortem revealed that he had died from an aortic aneurysm, which had probably been caused by straining.

• Read more | Showering, teeth brushing and donning underwear: the strange history of our daily routine

L... is for Luther

Was the Protestant Reformation thought up on the toilet? It’s quite possible. Martin Luther, the German Augustinian friar who was a seminal figure in the Reformation, suffered from constipation. He spent many hours in contemplation on the toilet, and later wrote that he was “in cloaca” – or in the sewer – when the belief that salvation was gained through faith not deeds came to him.

M... is for Monasteries

Many of Britain’s medieval monasteries still retain the remains of their communal toilets. Dubbed necessaria (for obvious reasons) or reredorters (because they stood behind the dorter or dormitory), they could be quite extensive in size. One of the most impressive can be found at Muchelney Abbey in Somerset. Unique in having a thatched roof, it’s a two-storey affair that the monks entered at first-floor level from their dormitory.

N... is for Nightmen

In the days before sewers, people in towns had to find a way of disposing of their excrement. This is where the nightmen came in. So-called because by law they could only work at night, it was their job to empty the excreta from people’s cesspits and cart it away. They usually operated in teams of four. One man, the ‘holeman’, went into the cesspit and filled a tub lowered by a colleague called the ‘ropeman’. Once full, it was pulled back up and two ‘tubmen’ carried it to a waiting cart. The night soil was then taken away and mixed with other rubbish before being sold to farmers as manure.

O... is for Orford

For those with an interest in medieval toilet arrangements, Orford Castle in Suffolk is a must-see. Its 12th-century keep is equipped with garderobes served by a system of chutes, which directed their discharge to a single area at the back of the tower. Like most castles, the majority of Orford’s toilets are of the sit-down variety, but it also boasts a rarity – a stand-up, triangular ‘poke and pee’ urinal in the corridor outside the constable’s chamber. Handily placed to save a night-time walk to one of the main garderobes, it now offers modern visitors an almost irresistible photo opportunity.

P... is for Pepys

An entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary offers an insight into the rather ramshackle state of 17th-century London’s sanitary arrangements, even for the well-to-do: “20 October 1660: This morning one came to me to advise with me where to make me a window into my cellar… and going down my cellar to look, I put my foot into a heap of turds, by which I find that Mr Turner’s house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me…”

Things weren’t any better at court. The antiquary Anthony Wood acidly commented that when Charles II and his court descended on Oxford in 1665, “though they were neat and gay in their apparel, yet they were very nasty and beastly, leaving at their departure their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coalhouses, cellars”.

Q... is for Queen

If the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey is to be believed, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, may well have regretted not paying a precautionary visit to the privy before being presented to Queen Elizabeth I.

In his Brief Lives, a splendidly scandalous collection of anecdotes about the great figures of Tudor and Stuart England, Aubrey writes: “This Earl of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to fart, at which he was so abashed that he went to travel for seven years. On his return, the Queen welcomed him home and said ‘My lord, I had forgotten the fart’.”

R... is for Rome

Toilet walls have always been a temptation for idle scribblers, and things were no different in the days of ancient Rome. One such wall in a house in the Roman town of Herculaneum (which, like Pompeii, was destroyed in AD 79 by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius) bears the words “Apollinaris medici Titi Imperatoris hic cacavit bene” – roughly translated, that’s “Apollinaris, physician of the Emperor Titus, had a good crap here”.

S... is for Stool

One of the most sought-after jobs in the Tudor court was the position of Groom of the Stool. The Stool in question was a ‘close stool’, a fixed or portable commode, and the Groom’s job was to help the king undress before using it and to supply him with water, towels and a washbowl when he had finished. Whether the Groom was actually required to wipe the Royal Bottom is a matter of debate.

• Read more about the men who changed Henry VIII’s underpants

The reason why this apparently lowly job was so desirable was the fact that it gave the holder an intimate access to the king that no other office holder enjoyed. Because a word in the king’s ear could make or break a courtier, it was important to keep on the right side of the Groom, and people would often petition him to pass on their concerns or requests to the monarch.

As time went on, the Groom’s duties expanded until they came to act more as personal secretaries. Sir Anthony Denny, Henry VIII’s last Groom of the Stool, was also given the great responsibility of caring for the ‘dry stamp’, which was used to sign the king’s name on documents. In addition to the influence they enjoyed, Grooms of the Stool enjoyed high pay and a range of perks, including being given the king’s old clothes and furnishings.

T... is for Torrens

In 1868, William McCullagh Torrens, Liberal MP for Finsbury, introduced the Artizans and Labourers Dwellings Act, enabling local authorities to clear away houses without proper sanitation and erect decent dwellings for the working classes. Despite powerful opposition, the bill was passed.

U... is for U-Boat

In April 1945, just weeks before the end of World War II, German submarine U-1206 was cruising in the North Sea off Peterhead at a depth of about 60 metres when problems with the pressurised flushing system of its on-board toilet caused a leak, which flooded the hull with seawater. When this came into contact with the ship’s batteries, poisonous chlorine gas was created, leaving the captain with no option but to surface. U-1206 was quickly spotted and attacked by Allied aircraft, forcing the captain to order his crew to scuttle the U-boat and abandon ship.

V... is for Vespasiennes

Vespasiennes were metal open-air public urinals that were first erected in Paris in 1834, in a bid to put an end to indiscriminate public peeing (by men).

They took their name from the Ancient Roman emperor Vespasian who, according to legend, imposed a tax on the collection of urine (which was used in tanning and laundries) from Roman public toilets. Vespasiennes were once a common sight on the streets of Paris; in the 1930s, there were over 1,200, but now, only one remains – on the Boulevard Arago in the 14th Arondissement.

W... is for Westonzoyland

After the Duke of Monmouth’s defeat at the Battle of Sedgemoor in July 1685, the nearby church of St Mary’s, Westonzoyland was pressed into service as a temporary prison for hundreds of Monmouth’s defeated rebel followers. Two comfortable toilets have recently been installed in the church, but no such facilities existed in Monmouth’s time… the church accounts record the expenditure of 5s 8d on frankincense, pitch and resin to fumigate the soiled building after the prisoners had been removed.

X... is for Xylospongium

How did Romans wipe their bottoms? They used a sponge on a stick called a xylospongium. In communal toilets, they were kept in tubs of water in front of where you sat. You took one, rinsed it, used it, and then put it back. The well-preserved Roman latrine at Housesteads on Hadrian’s Wall still has the channel which contained the running water used to wash the sponges.

Writing in the middle of the first century, the philosopher Seneca described how a Germanic gladiator used a xylospongium to commit suicide: “He withdrew in order to relieve himself – the only thing he was allowed to do in secret and without the presence of a guard. While so engaged, he seized the stick of wood tipped with a sponge, devoted to the vilest uses, and stuffed it down his throat.”

Y... is for York

Although pay toilets didn’t appear until the 19th century, the towns and cities of medieval Britain appear to have been well-equipped with public privies. The first recorded public convenience in York was sited in an arch of the old Ouse Bridge. In 1380, one William Graa left 40d a year in his will to provide "a light in the common jakes at the end of Use Bridge”. One section of Conwy’s town walls houses a group of 12 projecting stone latrines, while London boasted Whittington’s Longhouse, a huge public toilet over the Walbrook river. Opened in 1421, it had seats for 64 men and 64 women.

Z... is for Zagreb

If you visit the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, check out Croatia’s most historic toilet. A magnificent blue-and-white porcelain creation, it was installed for the visit of Emperor Franz Joseph I when he opened the neo-baroque theatre in 1895. Use it and you’ll be sitting where a range of historical figures have sat over the years, including Franz Joseph, Ustaše leader Ante Pavelić and Marshal Josip Broz Tito.

This article was first published in the June 2018 issue of BBC History Revealed magazine

Though evidently both humorists, the book’s authors – Punch writers WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman – were making a serious point. History has long been thought to be concerned with preserving the past. The 12th-century historian and Byzantine princess Anna Komnene observed how “time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity”. Her solution was the study of history, which “forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time”. This is a powerful idea – one that perhaps moved King Charles I, moments before his execution in January 1649, to utter a last single word to William Juxon, the former bishop of London, instructing him: “Remember.”

But do our efforts to remember really require us to do something so trivial as memorising dates? More radically, do the historical events these dates mark even matter? The Oxford English Dictionary leaves little room for doubt. Its definition of an event is “something that happens or takes place, especially something significant or noteworthy”. History is often taught as a succinct sequence of such occurrences – those accepted as important moments, neatly knitted together to explain the present. Indeed, for many historians, especially those preoccupied with political, constitutional or military matters, the practice of history itself involves assessing the importance of events by examining their causes, contexts and consequences, considering how they represent change or continuity over time.

Yet almost no archaeologist would approach the past in such terms. Nor would many of today’s social, economic or cultural historians. In the 20th century, proponents of the Annales school, named for a scholarly journal, famously considered events relatively insignificant. French historian Fernand Braudel (1902–85) argued that events were simply “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs”. Has the importance given to events been overstated? Should we, therefore, put less emphasis on learning dates? Are there better ways of understanding history?

The first issue to consider is just how ‘important’ dates are selected. If we are told that some day or year is more noteworthy than another, who decided this? It would be appealing to be able to say that the established chronology has been objectively selected by balanced, skilled historians, and arrived at through years of scrupulous scholarship and vigorous debate. Yet history is a human thing, written and argued over for all kinds of reasons. Even if such matters are really decided by historians – instead of, say, politicians or poets – we are all equally flawed, prone to error and liable to misinterpret the past through a panoply of biases, conscious or not. Moreover, humans are social animals and have consequently evolved to value convention, tradition and the received wisdom of our ancestors. Most of us simply accept the established chronology.

Such a shared history can indeed function as a powerful bond cementing the otherwise disparate identities of social groups. To reinforce this sense of the collective, past incidents thought worthy of remembrance were once upon a time written in stone – literally. The Parian Marble, a fragment of a stele found on the island of Paros and now displayed in the ancient Greek section of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, is inscribed with a neat chronology of events and their dates from 1582 BC to 299 BC in our terms. These include the fall of Troy, purportedly in 1209–1208 BC, and the rather more reliably dated battle of Marathon in 490 BC. The stele’s text, similar to the earlier ‘Sumerian King List’ housed in the nearby Mesopotamian gallery, fuses myth with history.

Such objects represent early examples of a phenomenon that has become increasingly common in the past two centuries or so. With the rise of nation states, backstories have been created for their “imagined communities”, as Anglo-Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson famously dubbed nations in 1983. These stories typically rest on simple historical narratives, ideally sprinkled with a few inspirational national heroes and some key dates. In the UK, a chronology of past rulers plays a major role. Reigns became surrogates for eras, suffused with each ruler’s character. Looking back, for example, we see all those who were alive between 1837 and 1901 as ‘Victorians’.

Battles are often key parts of national stories. Like Marathon for the ancient Greeks, the battles of Hastings in 1066 and Agincourt in 1415 are considered important to the English. For the British more generally, Trafalgar in 1805 and Waterloo in 1815 are significant. In Serbia, the notoriously bloody battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which forces led by Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović squared up to an invading Ottoman army under the command of Sultan Murad I, has been endlessly mythologised. Lithuanians and Poles still celebrate victory over the German Teutonic Order at the battle of Grunwald in 1410.

But few dates and events are as significant as national narratives suggest, battles least of all. Why? Because battles, though certainly rare and dramatic moments, are seldom, if ever, decisive at ending wars so can’t be imbued with much causal importance. Even after Hastings, at which much of the English ruling class was killed, it took William the Conqueror many years to bring England truly under Norman rule, a period notorious for the so-called Harrying of the North (1069–70). Likewise, the greatly celebrated clash at Agincourt (1415), which owes much of its fame to William Shakespeare, saw the mass slaughter of French nobility – but it was not until 1420 that Henry V forced Charles VI to agree to recognise the Plantagenet claim to the French throne under the Treaty of Troyes.

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Yet such totemic dates are repeatedly reinforced by that staple of public history and national myth-making: the commemoration of anniversaries. These appear to be good moments to reconsider the past and revive enthusiasm for historical enquiry, but there’s a built-in problem: at least outwardly, nobody involved questions the real significance of the events marked – that would defeat the exercise. It is understandable that, on occasion, people wish to memorialise the loss of their loved ones in wars or other disasters. In general, however, anniversaries reflect current concerns and as such are profoundly unhelpful when it comes to understanding what happened in the past.

Admittedly, some moments appear to have been so overwhelmingly important that they demand our attention. For Europe, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 seems epochal. In China, the final defeat of the Song dynasty by the forces of Kublai Khan in 1279 has a similar significance. Yet these events represent the culmination of long and complex processes. Seen in this light, the events themselves were largely symbolic.

Surely, you say, the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492 had massive historical consequences. Well, one can quibble over whether his first voyage itself achieved much – likewise his three further transatlantic expeditions in 1493–96, 1498–1500 and 1502–04, for that matter – despite being catastrophic for the indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean. Columbus thought – and continued to think for the rest of his life – that he was exploring east Asia.

The world indeed changed thereafter as it gradually fused into what, in 1974, the American economic historian and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein termed the “modern world-system”, but this was not an inevitable consequence of Columbus’s first voyage. After all, Europeans had been in the Americas before. The Norseman Leif Erikson is thought to have reached North America around AD 1000, and a Norse settlement excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada seems to support this. So it is of far greater historical significance that pivotal processes occurred after 1492 – but not after 1000. This is a point made in Alfred W Crosby’s groundbreaking 1972 book The Columbian Exchange, a foundational text of environmental history that charted the seismic global effects of the intercontinental transfer of plants, animals, diseases and cultures.

Such developments can be shown to be genuinely transformative to people’s lives, from the food they ate to the diseases that afflicted them. By contrast, traditional chronology often neglects the experiences of a broad spectrum of people. Not everyone was present at battles or on voyages of discovery. Indeed, most humans who have ever lived were peasants who wrested their subsistence from the soil. For these people, few experiences were shared beyond a restricted locality, especially in periods when speeds of travel were slow and communication limited. Nearly all people must have been ignorant of what we now assert, after the fact, were key events.

Others would have been simply indifferent. According to the historian De Lamar Jennsen, the Spanish Armada – King Philip II of Spain’s unsuccessful project to invade England in summer 1588 – was the “worst kept secret in Europe”. Yet research suggests that, far from striving to achieve victory for their country in some epic national struggle, during the Armada many English sailors and merchants were more preoccupied with selling food and other supplies to the enemy than with fighting them.

Perhaps the key problem is that narrative history gives us a false sense of order, in part by playing to our innate tendency to identify and interpret patterns. It suggests that big events necessarily have big consequences. This completely fails to account for the unpredictable nature of the world through which we move. Seemingly insignificant factors can and do have a disproportionate impact on history. As the proverb has it in James Baldwin’s version: “For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for the want of a horse the battle was lost; for the failure of battle the kingdom was lost; and all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” Conversely, apparently important things can turn out to be irrelevant.

To return to Columbus, how are we to frame the decision of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon to support him, having equivocated for years over whether to stump up the cash to fund his voyage west? Some cite the fall of Granada to Christian forces in January 1492 – marking the end of Islamic rule on the Iberian peninsula, which gave the co-ruler monarchs both confidence and the promise of more secure finances – as the key explanation for their change of heart. Assuming this were true, we could equally portray what happened as the result of the Arab Nasrid dynasty, which ruled the Emirate of Granada for more than 250 years, carelessly losing control of their territory. In the latter reading, Wallerstein’s modern world-system was in a sense created “for want of a nail”.

As should be becoming clear, questioning the assumptions that underpin so much conventional narrative history has serious implications. This forces you, for example, to recognise that the lowliest peasant may have been as significant as an emperor or king, and that their relative impact on history was not necessarily proportionate to their immediate influence. “The ruler’s power was rarely effective,” Danish historian Patricia Crone put it, “even within such sphere of competence as he did enjoy.” Braudel hauntingly evoked a “historian who takes a seat in Philip II’s chair and reads his papers” and is transported into “a world of strong passions” but one “unconscious of the deeper realities of history, of the running waters on which our frail barks are tossed like cockleshells”. Yet such is our wish to impose order on a complex world that we have frequently reached for elaborate explanations for erratic ‘nonlinear’ outcomes, among them the capricious will of deities, the movements of celestial bodies, even conspiracy theories.

In truth, because our evidence of the past is so incomplete, we are unlikely ever to pinpoint true cause and effect. Despite this, we still tend to look for what Annales school historian Marc Bloch called “the idol of origins”. Countless books claim to trace the roots of anything from states and religions to sports. Even the aforesaid Parian Marble located the birth of agriculture to 1409–08 BC when the goddess Demeter supposedly invented grain crops. In practical terms, though, nothing has any origin in history. “For most historical realities,” Bloch wrote in the early 1940s, “the very notion of a starting point remains singularly elusive.” As we have shown, we cannot even be sure that the origin of the Columbian Exchange was Columbus himself.

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Indeed, trying to frame this story, we could be more radical and go back even before the time of Leif Erikson – perhaps all the way back to 14,800 years ago, when the Bering Strait Land Bridge was last rendered impassable and Asia was fully separated from the Americas. But where do you stop? Rather than there being actual origins, all things were and are constantly in the course of being made through a process of emergence. As Bloch argued, “A historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time. This is true of every evolutionary stage, our own and all others.”

So how, then, are we to approach history without straightforward narratives? There are any number of options. Some historians, such as those of the Annales school, have examined historical structures – social, political and economic – rather than events to explain change, frequently over the long term. This approach has often been fused with the so-called histoire des mentalités (history of attitudes), which endeavours to understand the perspectives of those in the past in their own terms. Meanwhile, some social and economic historians have used Marxist theory and framed conflict between social classes as explaining change. Others have put the emphasis on demography and land use. Today, in a time of climate change, many historians are interested in understanding past societies’ interactions with their environments.

Each new approach has inevitably attracted criticism for its own alleged oversimplification and misrepresentation of the past. British historians, in particular, were notoriously hostile to the Annales school. Geoffrey Elton of the University of Cambridge, for example, held to his focus on events, with disdain for nearly all scholarship outside the study of power politics. It is said that his colleague Maurice Cowling would privately exclaim: “Annales is balls!” Despite such intransigence, though, new ideas did spread. Going forward, future historians will doubtless find even more innovative forms of historical enquiry using formidable artificial intelligence-driven tools.

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To be clear, though they make less of specific events, new approaches are not necessarily histories without dates. Peter Laslett, in his pioneering 1965 work of social history The World We Have Lost, even began with one: “In the year 1619 the bakers of London applied to the authorities for an increase in the price of bread.” Though Laslett pinpoints a moment that might seem banal when compared with a great battle, coronation or discovery, we should arguably accord such granular details equal attention for what they tell us of our ancestors’ priorities. Their world, like our own, was a practically infinite morass of events and dates whose relative importance and interrelationships were vastly more uncertain than we impulsively suppose.

History is not, as one student in Alan Bennett’s 2004 play The History Boys put it, “just one f****** thing after another”. Rather, as the sixth-century historian and bishop Gregory of Tours began his Historia Francorum (History of the Franks), “A great many things keep happening.” Faced with this truth, should we not stop presenting history as neat, ordered and, as such, unrepresentative of how our forebears experienced it?

Ultimately, we cannot preserve the past inside the present. Explorers such as Columbus and rulers such as Charles I or Philip II will eventually be forgotten, just as we will all one day be swept away by the stream of time. Trying to understand this process, not learning dates, is the true art of history. Kings and queens are not innately important; neither are great battles. All things are transient. As the 11–12th-century Persian poet and scientist Omar Khayyam put it, it is far better we “think, in this batter’d caravanserai [a refuge for travellers] whose doorways are alternate night and day; how sultan after sultan with his pomp, abode his hour or two, and went his way”.

This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine