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13th C

When Robert the Bruce Fought for the English

The First War of Scottish Independence and the struggle to reject English overlordship masked an equally fierce and overlapping war waged between different factions of the Scottish nobility.

James Turner

Robert Bruce is an icon of Scottish nationalism, the man who led the kingdom to victory in the first War of Independence. A detail well known to scholars, which seldom penetrates far into public discourse, is that Robert began the war fighting for the English king....

The Forgotten Campaign to Conquer Egypt

The overlooked Fifth Crusade and the capture of Damietta show how an ambitious Christian invasion came close to reshaping the medieval Middle East.

Thomas Smith

When we think of the Crusades, the first things that come to mind are 12th-century characters such as Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, locked in combat for control of the Holy Land. The average medieval person, though, would have had a much richer understanding...