084- Longing For Death

Antoninus's reign is often pointed to as the golden age of the Roman Empire. In many ways the assessment is correct, though unresolved issues would come back to haunt his successors. 

The Roman world was divided between slaves, freedmen, and free citizens of every economic class. Gross inequality though was the order of the day, with the Emperor himself controlling the lion's share of the Empire's wealth. 

With Roman education leaving much to be desired, many citizens found enlightenment in the eastern mystery cults or Greek philosophy. 

After all our recent foreshadowing, we’ve finally arrived at the period of Abbasid collapse. It’s a relatively long period, stretching from the start of al Muqtadir’s reign in 908 until around the middle of that century, when the Abbasids were reduced to figureheads by a more com ... Show More

Al Mansur’s long reign transformed the caliphate in countless ways, most of them for the better. It provided a kind of stability the umma desperately needed to absorb the tumult of the Abbasid revolution and adjust to the new status quo. What followed was a golden age of prosperi ... Show More

Succession once again warrants its own episode. Al Saffah relied on three commanders to oversee different parts of his caliphate, and while the setup kept the new dynasty safe and stable, the ambitions of these three leaders clashed soon after the caliph passed away. 

<p>216 BCE - If crossing the Alps with 37 elephants wasn't enough to impress you, then what Hannibal achieved at Cannae just a couple of years later defies belief on the deadliest day in the history of Europe before this battle.</p> 

We go back to a quiet mountain valley of north-eastern Italy where the peace was forever broken by one of the country's most ambitious architerctural and engineering projects that ended in one of the worst disasters in the history of Italy in the 20th century. This is the story o ... Show More

1620 - 1324 BCE - More specifically the story of the Eighteenth Dynasty, a golden age in Egyptian history.  However, keeping it in the family may not have necessarily been beneficial to the Royal Family. 

In 37 CE, Caligula became the third emperor of Rome, ushering in a brief era of prosperity before pilfering the treasury and embarking on a quest to conquer Britannia. Before too long, his sadistic — and sometimes darkly comedic — rulings inspired a fatal conspiracy. Learn more a ... Show More

<p>When a coalition of European nations invaded Paris in 1815, they offered Napoleon what they believed to be very generous terms of surrender: he would keep his head, but be exiled to a life as Emperor of the insignificant island of Elba off the coast of Italy. Though Napoleon c ... Show More

Considering the absurd levels of official mismanagement, it’s astounding how long the caliphate survived during al Muqtadir’s inept administration. Although it never collapsed, over the course of two dozen years the state’s power steadily declined in meaningful ways. It collected ... Show More

Due to his father al Mahdi’s arrangement, Haroon al Rashid endured a traumatic year during which his brother tried to have him removed from the line of succession. Having barely survived the experience, he put a great deal of thought and effort into the matter of his own successi ... Show More