Intellect PlusPost-classical
612 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 11 of 11.
Fifty-three days in 1453 ended a fifteen-hundred-year RomeOn 29 May 1453, after a siege begun on 6 April, Mehmed II’s outnumbering Ottoman army took Constantinople from Constantine XI Palaiologos. The conqueror made the city his capital …
Ismaili caliphs claimed Fatimah’s blood across North AfricaFrom the tenth to twelfth centuries the Fatimid Caliphate—an Ismaili Shi’a dynasty—spanned North Africa and West Asia from the western Mediterranean toward the Hijaz and Syria. Th…
Asparuh’s Bulgars forced Byzantium to recognise a new empireBetween the seventh and eleventh centuries the First Bulgarian Empire dominated the northeastern Balkans. Asparuh’s Bulgars won Byzantine recognition around 680–681 to settle sout…
Baghdad’s caliphs ruled an Islamic golden age for centuriesIn 750 a revolution from Khurasan toppled the Umayyads and installed the Abbasids, kin of the Prophet’s uncle Abbas. From Iraq—and especially from Baghdad, founded in 762—they pre…
Africa’s only hydraulic empire taxed rivers into powerOn the Horn of Africa the Ajuran Sultanate rose in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and, by the fifteenth, ran what sources call Africa’s only hydraulic empire—dykes, dams,…
Muslim Iberia lasted from 711 until Granada fell in 1492Al-Andalus names the shifting Muslim polities that ruled Iberia—and sometimes bits of southern France—between 711 and 1492. From a Umayyad province to Córdoba’s caliphate, then ta…
Veiled Saharan Berbers built an empire from Senegal to SpainThe Almoravids—al-Murābiṭūn, “people of the ribats”—rose from Lamtuna, Gudala, and Massufa nomads between the Draa, Niger, and Senegal. From a new capital at Marrakesh around 1070…
A Tang general’s revolt gutted China’s medieval peakBetween 755 and 763, general An Lushan tried to replace the Tang with his own Yan dynasty. Rebels took Chang’an after the emperor fled to Sichuan, then tore themselves apart. Fami…
White Sheep Turkomans once ruled from Anatolia to OmanThe Aq Qoyunlu—“those with white sheep”—were a Sunni Turkoman confederation, culturally Persianate, that held eastern Anatolia from 1378 to 1508 and, under Uzun Hasan, spilled int…
Four centuries of border war after Yarmuk’s shockFrom the seventh to the eleventh centuries, successive Islamic caliphates and Byzantium fought for the eastern Mediterranean. After Yarmuk, Arab armies stripped the empire of Leva…
Triple Alliance power peaked just as Cortés arrivedFrom about 1300 to 1521, Nahuatl-speaking peoples of central Mexico built a civilisation of altepetl city-states. Three of them—Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan—forged an empir…
Boyars ranked just below princes across Eastern EuropeA boyar—or bolyar—belonged to the top feudal nobility in Bulgaria, Kievan Rus’ and later Russia, Moldavia, Wallachia, Lithuania, and among Baltic Germans. Second only to princes, …