It is one of the great love affairs of history. Upon meeting again shortly after her 18th birthday, Victoria and Albert became smitten with each other and within 5 days Victoria asked him to marry her. Whilst initially an unpopular match, the spectacle of the Royal Wedding dispelled some of the public’s misgivings about Albert. However, all was not well in the first decade of Victoria’s reign. The turbulence of 1840s Europe is ripping through Victoria’s nation. Listen as William and Anita...

Born on the 24th May 1819, Alexandrina Victoria was fifth in line to the throne at a time in which the monarchy’s popularity was declining. Yet, over the course of her reign, which at the time was the longest of any British monarch, Victoria transformed the monarchy, Britain, and its place in the world. She endured a tortured childhood in which she was controlled and mollycoddled to the extent she could not even walk down the stairs without holding someone’s hand. But, before she was even 20,...

For centuries Spain had been an outlier in Europe due to its religious diversity; Christians, Jews, and Muslims all existed reasonably peacefully across the Iberian peninsula. Under Isabelle of Castile that all changed. She began the Spanish Inquisition and brought to the fore a religious fundamentalism that would eventually force out of the country the muslims and the jews. In the epoch defining year of 1492, she also conquered Granada with her husband Ferdinand, ending the era of Islamic...

To some she is Europe’s first great queen, to others she is one of history’s great villains, but there is no doubt that Isabella of Castile holds one of the most significant legacies in European history. Born third in line to the throne of Castile, she asserted herself and rose to be queen of Castile and then through her fiery marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon, laid the foundations for the unification of Spain. But as soon as she rose to dominance, she made it clear that she was willing to use...

With Jahangir sliding into more of an opium and alcohol fuelled slumber with each passing day, Nur Jahan took the reins of the Mughal Empire. In this she demonstrated her political prowess, but she was also a remarkable woman. She hunted tigers, greatly improved her family's standing, and at one point led an army of men on elephant-back. But her most significant legacy lies in the tomb she designed for her father, which in turn helped to influence the architecture of the famous Taj Mahal....

Nur Jahan was born on a roadside as her well-to-do parents fled from Safavid Persia for the tolerant court of the Mughal emperor. Her first marriage was respectable although unremarkable, but then her husband died and she entered the imperial harem. From here, she rose through the ranks and managed to charm one of the most powerful men in the world, the emperor Jahangir. Listen as William and Anita discuss the rise of one of the most powerful women in Indian history. **Empire Live** Empire...

Börte came from a powerful nomadic tribe and in many ways her marriage to Genghis Khan set him up to become the great conqueror we know. They married young and when they were twenty, he brought his new bride back to his camp. But their newlywed life was turned upside down when Börte was kidnapped. He formed important alliances to retrieve her and seek revenge. Once reunited, Börte became a key advisor to her husband as he laid the foundation of the Mongol Empire, establishing a dynasty that...

Sold as a slave to the great Abbasid Caliph, al-Khayzuran quickly rose to the very top of the pyramid. Through marriage and motherhood, she became wife of the caliph and then Queen Mother and in both instances she wielded extraordinary power. In the court at Baghdad - the very heart of the civilised world - al-Khayzuran had major influence and it is possible that during her lifetime, she was the most powerful woman in the world, determining politics from Morocco to Afghanistan. Some even say...

The Empress Theodora is often unfairly remembered for the salacious stories that have been told about her when she was forced to work in a brothel. She was far more than that. She used her power to improve the fortunes of women who were unfortunate enough to go through the same shocking situation as her. She helped rebuild the Hagia Sophia and turn it into the largest and most beautiful building in the 6th century world. She assisted Justinian’s foreign campaigns that sought to restore the...

Placed by her mother into a brothel when she was just a child, Theodora was born into the most brutal of worlds. It was a Constantinople riven with division, whether due to theology or circus factions it was always ready to boil over. As befitting a Christian saint, Theodora managed to rise above all of this; she escaped working in a brothel, became the model of a reformed woman, and married the future emperor, Justinian. Then, in 527, when he was declared Emperor, Theodora was brought...

Born in poverty at a time when the Roman Empire was in danger of cracking up and disintegrating, Helena was set for a life of obscurity as a stable hand, bar maid, and, according to some, a prostitute. Yet, in the most improbable tale she rose through the social hierarchy to be proclaimed Empress, then later canonised, and declared by some as queen of the world. Not only was she mother and most trusted advisor to the Emperor Constantine, but she played a pivotal role in the conversion of the...

With Julius Caesar dead, Cleopatra turned to another of Rome’s dominant figures. She became entwined with Mark Antony, the ruler of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, but even with their enormous combined power the destructive tendrils of Roman politics were inescapable. Just like all of the Mediterranean, Alexandria dwelt in the shadow of Rome and so when Octavian, Julius Caesar’s chosen heir, turns on the couple in an attempt to become the sole emperor of Rome, their future looks...

Born in the romantic splendour of Ptolemaic Egypt, not far from the Library of Alexandria, Cleopatra was destined for greatness. She ascended to the throne at 18 and very quickly asserted her authority across Egypt as her extraordinary mind and legendary charisma captivated all. To some she was even a goddess, a living embodiment of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Such was her magnetism that not even the most powerful men of the age were able to resist her. Listen as William and Anita are joined...

In late autumn, 629 AD, Xuanzang set out for the great university of Nalanda from Chang’an. Across the desert, over the Pamirs, and through multiple robberies, it was an epic journey. As he neared the Buddhist heartlands, he saw Buddhism in decline with its monasteries increasingly dilapidated, and he feared disappointment. However, after 6 years on the road he arrived at Nalanda and was awestruck by its splendour. In particular, he was blown away by the library. Nine storeys high, split into...

Buddhism reached China in the 1st century AD, yet it remained a minor, foreign religion for the next 100 years. It was not until the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 AD and the cracking of the classical Confucian order that Buddhism began to make headway in the Middle Kingdom. Over the following centuries, the religion took hold and so China both transformed Buddhism and was transformed by it. Yet, a monk named Xuanzang, born in 600 AD, was worried about Chinese Buddhism. He feared it had...

In the 1st century AD, the nomadic Kushans settled in what is now Afghanistan and established settlements and trade. From here, they moved down over the Hindu Kush and took large sections of Northern India. Within their new kingdom, Buddhism flourished under the patronage of the ruling class. Before Kushan rule, the Buddha had never been represented as a human, only as a tree or an empty throne. Yet through the empire’s trade connections with Rome, Buddhist symbols took on a more classically...

Ruling in the 3rd century BC, Ashoka was one of India’s greatest ever rulers. Under his rule, the Mauryan Empire grew into the largest empire India had ever seen. Its capital, Pataliputra was a dazzling, glorious, cosmopolitan city that was eleven times larger than Athens. After a brutal conquest of the Kalinga kingdom, Ashoka suffered from intense guilt and turned to Buddhism as he now coveted peace. From then on, he was committed to spreading Buddhism not just throughout his kingdom, but...

India was the forgotten heart of the ancient world. For a millennium and a half, from about 250 BC to 1200 AD, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas, an ‘Indosphere’ where its influence was predominant. During this period, the rest of Asia was the willing recipient of a mass-transfer of Indian soft power. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics, and mythology blazed a trail across the...

From the beginning of the Raj, British tastes began to turn away from Indian cuisine towards a European palate. The colonial classes sneered at Indian food, instead seeing French food as the height of sophistication. Meanwhile, people in Britain – including Queen Victoria – sought out Indian flavours and so began the Indianisation of British cuisine. Imports of curry powders rapidly increased and the earliest Indian restaurants popped up in British cities. With this came the introduction of...

When the East India Company first arrived on the shores of India, the food they ate in their first factories was not so different from that of Britain. It was all stews, heavy with butter and stuffed with spices, almonds, cinnamon, fruit and raisins, scooped up by bread. Although the Portuguese introduced the chilli to Goa at the start of the 16th century, it had not yet travelled into North India. Over the course of the next 200 years the cuisines of the British and the Indians diverged, in...

Since November 2023, the Houthis have been attacking international shipping lanes in the Red Sea. They set off from the Yemeni coastline on speedboats, armed with guns and unmanned drones, often supplied by Iran, and cause havoc. Such has been the chaos of these attacks that Britain, the USA, and other western nations have launched retaliatory airstrikes. But where did this group come from and what do they want? Emerging in the 1990s as a Shia religious movement that rejected the repressive...

In September 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded neighbouring Iran and so began the longest conventional war in modern history. After initial Iraqi successes, a brutal stalemate set in that was reminiscent of the horrors of the First World War. The Iraq-Iran War saw the use of chemical warfare, in 1984 Saddam’s forces unleashed the first recorded use of nerve gas in battle, and there was grinding trench warfare. Iran also pioneered human wave attacks, which merely added to the extreme...

In June 1982, Israeli tanks rolled over the Lebanese border. Soon after, Iran sent 1,500 Revolutionary Guards into Lebanon to help fight them. Thereafter, funded by Iran but largely manned by Lebanese Shi’ites, Hezbollah established itself as the most powerful militia in Lebanon and the Ayatollah’s most influential proxy. They were among the first Islamic groups in the Middle East to use suicide bombing, assassination and kidnapping. But it did not stop there. In the 1990s, Hezbollah began to...

1979 was the year that set the Islamic world on the path to today. In Iran, the revolution established the nation as a theocracy that sought to defend Shi'ism across the world. In Saudi Arabia, the siege of the Holy Mosque led to the nation embracing a more radical Sunni Islam that it began to export around the world. Almost immediately they began to clash, with great impact across the globe. Listen to William and Anita as they speak with Kim Ghattas about the birth of this rivalry. For...