Eastern Europe

  • Ancient Who Dunnit-  The Death of Philip II of Macedon

    Philip had been the ruler of Macedon for twenty-three years and was currently on wife number seven.  He had turned Macedonia into a force to reckoned with by revolutionizing the army into a efficient fighting force.  He subdued Greece and conquered the surrounding territories.  Now he had a raft of children from his various wives.  His son, Alexander, was from wife number four, Olympias, whom he divorced and was Greek to boot.  Even though Alexander was older, the oldest son did not always get the throne and Philip and wife seven had a young son named Caranus.  In fact, there had been an incident where members of the court expressed…

  • The Lost Roman Legion of Crassus

    Marcus Licinius Crassus was one of the richest men in the Roman World and part of the First Triumvirate with notables such as Pompeius Magnus and Julius Caesar.  He had made his money through picking up the property of those killed in Sulla’s proscriptions at firesale prices.  Indeed, he was accused of adding the name of a particularly rich man just so he could pick up his property at bargain basement prices.  Combine that through slave trafficking and silver mines, gave Crassus a fortune estimated by Pliny at 200 million sestertii, or about 8.5 billion in today’s dollars.  If his name sounds familiar, you may have heard in the old…

  • Hürrem Sultan- From slave to queen

    Born Aleksandra Ruslana Lisowska around 1502, little Nastia as she was known would never have dreamed she would rise to become a queen.  She was born in the town of Rohatyn in Polish Ruthenia, which is now in Western Ukraine.   Legend has it her father was an Orthodox priest.  Some time in the 1520’s, Nastia’s world turned upside down when she was captured by the Crimean Tartars at the tender age of 12.  Raids by the Tartars into this region were not uncommon, and Nastia was soon taken to the slave markets of Kaffa.  From there she went on to Istanbul, where she was selected for the sultan’s harem.  The…

  • Cassandra

    Cassandra is a popular figure and made many appearances in Greek  plays and poems.  Her predicament even inspired a name for a present day problem-  the Cassandra Syndrome.  So who was this lady whose name inspires even today? Cassandra was born a princess of Troy, the daughter of Priam and Hecuba and the fraternal twin sister of Helenus.  She was the most beautiful of their daughters and as such attracted divine attention.  Homer tells a tale that she and her brother Helenus spent the night in Apollo’s temple where the temple snakes licked their ears clean so they were able to hear the future.  Cassandra was a priestess of Apollo…

  • The Defenestration of Prague of 1618

    The wars of religion had been raging for years now and left their mark on the nations of Europe.  Catholics and Protestants had been at each other’s throats fighting for the souls of men for what seemed like forever.  However, the fighting took a strange form in what is now the Czech Republic.  They liked to throw people out windows. The first instance of this was on July 30, 1419 when Jan Želivsky, a follower of the Czech reformer Jan Hus, led a procession through the streets to Charles Square to demand the release of Hussite prisoners.  The Catholic town council refused and somehow a stone was thrown at Želivsky…