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In recent years, though, Turks have been engaged in an ideological contest over Gallipoli’s legacy. With the rise of the country’s Islamist government under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan have come efforts to diminish the role of Ataturk, who established Turkey under secular principles. The military, which once had a predominant role over politics in Turkey, has also been pushed aside under Mr. Erdogan.

In victory, the Turks ended decades of Ottoman defeats on the edges of the empire and emerged with a new sense of nationalism — and a leader, Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk, who would lead the country to independence after the war ended. Mustafa Kemal, then a young officer, met the invading Australians with his men on the day of the landing and earned a reputation as a military genius for his success.

In defeat, the Australians gained what many historians have described as the first embers of a national consciousness, apart from their British colonial legacy. “It’s certainly seen today as the beginning of a real Australian self-identity,” Rupert Murdoch said.

The trenches are still there, carved in the green hills of the slim Gallipoli Peninsula just across the Dardanelles,

It is hallowed ground for battlefield tourists, mostly Turks and Australians

Almost a hundred years ago, it was the place where World War I was supposed to turn in the Allies’ favor, but instead it became one of the great slaughters of the Great War.

Gallipoli campaign has taken on an outsize importance as the bloody event that became the foundation of a modern national identity.

In September 1915, with the slaughter unfolding on Gallipoli but news limited in Australia because of military censorship

Australian prime minister authorizing him to look into the postal service for the soldiers.

were needlessly being sent to slaughter by incompetent British officers, he agreed to

When the commanding general at Gallipoli, Sir Ian Hamilton, learned of Keith Murdoch’s plan to evade the censorship rules, he had him detained at a port in France and the letter was destroyed.

“As he was writing his letter, the editor of The Times looked in and said, ‘What are you doing, young man?’ ”

“I’ve got to show this to the chief.” B

The 8,000-word letter, detailing what Keith Murdoch called “one of the most terrible chapters in our history,”

Keith Murdoch later came under sharp criticism in Britain for breaking the censorship rules, and many in the British establishment, including Churchill, never forgave him,

He had a perfectly clear conscience,”

The Australian government recently selected 8,000 people from a lottery to attend anniversary commemorations next year at the beaches in Turkey.

In those days, people believed that nations were born in blood,” he said.

named for the acronym of the force that landed there, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, just as thousands of his fellow Australians do each year.

“My grandfather fought here,” he said. “But he never talked about it.”

“Our kids, our grandkids, want to come here more than us or our parents did,” he said.

“Gallipoli is the place that for the first time, after a century of defeats, the Turks were successful,”

The Islamists say, ‘We defeated the infidels,'”

Many conservative Turkish municipal governments have been organizing free battlefield tours, with a message delivered

“They don’t have much education. They’ll believe in anything.”

In 1934, Ataturk famously wrote a letter to Australian mothers, saying, “having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.”

The truth is, they just wanted to kill one another and win the war, something evident in the letters from the front.

“Everything is so quiet and still one would never dream that two opposing forces, each eager for the other’s blood, were separated by only a few yards – and in places only a few feet.”

Our earliest written accounts of who Muhammad was, what he did and how Islam began come more than a century after his death. This is an authorized, canonical biography written by ibn Ishaq in Baghdad in the mid-8th century. But even that book has been lost. It only survives in editions and excerpts from two other Muslim scholars (ibn Hisham and al-Tabari) writing in the 9th and early 10th centuries, respectively.

These narratives come far too long after the events in question to be taken at anything like face value in historical terms. Memories of who Muhammad and his milieu were and what they did were passed down as oral traditions for three or four generations before being written down. They then passed through new rounds of editing and reshaping and recension for another century. We know from ancient and contemporary examples that such oral traditions usually change radically over even short periods of time to accommodate the present realities and needs of the communities in which they are passed down

To get your head around the challenge, imagine we had no written records fo the American Civil War and our only knowledge of it came from stories passed down orally for the generations until the the US government had a scholar at the library of Congress pull them together and create an authorized history in say 1985.

Unsurprisingly, recent studies using the tools and standards historians apply to other eras suggest that the beginnings of Islam were quite different from the traditional or canonical accounts most of us are familiar with.

If these two things, the conventional narrative of events and the process of making sense of the sources and weighing their credibility, can be woven together the end result is fascinating and more compelling than a more cinematic narrative. This Morris accomplishes very well

Morris, the author, begins with a discussion of just this issue, how the historian can balance the need for comprehensible narrative of William’s conquest of England with a candid explanation of how little we know with certainty and how much we don’t know at all. This is a literary challenge of the first order, simultaneously building your narrative and undermining it

Like the Norman Conquest but on a vastly greater scale, the victory at Yarmouk would have a profound linguistic and cultural impact which lasts down to today. It is why the Levant, Syria and Egypt now all speak Arabic. It is also why the Middle East is dominated by Islam rather than Christianity.

History has a small number of these critical linguistic inflection points. Alexander the Great’s conquests made Greek the lingua franca and the language of government and most cities throughout the eastern Mediterranean, which it remained for almost a thousand years.

The fact that the Arab conquests so rapidly erased Greek from this region is a clue that its roots never ran that deep and that the Semitic languages that remained the spoken language of the rural masses, particularly Aramaic, may have been more porous and receptive to the related language of Arabic.

Earlier I referred to Heraclius as perhaps the last Roman Emperor. This is because most historians mark the change from the Roman to the Byzantine periods at the Muslim conquests

The people we call the Byzantines never called themselves that. They remained “Romans” for the next eight centuries until the Ottoman Turks finally conquered Constantinople in 1453.

But after the Muslim conquest, the Roman state starts to look less like a smaller Roman empire and more like the other post-Roman successor states in the West. It is smaller and more compact, more tightly integrated in language, religion, economy and culture. From here what we can now call Byzantium enters into a dark, smoldering and more opaque period lasting some two centuries of holding on against repeated Muslim incursions and threat.

What captures my attention is this peculiar kind of reversal of fortune, spectacular victories which are not so much erased as rendered moot because they are rapidly followed by far more cataclysmic defeats.

to check the drift to war, but her success was uncertain

The peace of Saint-Germain in August 1570 held some prospect of permanence, since the house of Orange, leading resistance to Spain in the Netherlands

Although the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, had conferred in 1565 with Philip II’s lieutenant, the Duke of Alba, the close association of the French Crown with Spain had been broken by the death of her daughter, Philip’s Queen, in 1568

crossed the frontier to assist the rebels, and by mid-summer the French government was on the brink of open war with Spain

a majority opposed Coligny’s policy of foreign war to ensure domestic peace, but the decision lay with the King, and the ascendancy Coligny had established over Charles IX suggested he would opt for war

Catherine initiated the train of events that led to the massacre. Elizabeth of England, who had no wish to see France in control of the Netherlands, informed Alba that she did not regard the Anglo-French treaty as committing her to war, and Alba passed this information to Catherine. The Huguenot armies sustained severe setbacks, and the Queen Mother persuaded herself that war at this time would end in disaster

Associated with these conscious motives was her bitter resentment at being replaced in her son’s confidence by Admiral Coligny

This plan seems to have remained in Catherine de Medicis’ mind as an alternative for use in an emergency. In all the frantic discussions of August 23rd it involved no more than the killing of the inner circle of Protestant nobles, the young Bourbon princes, Navarre and Condé, excepted

Saint Bartholomew’s day had been prepared two whole years in advance. It was a day when one section of the nation slaughtered another; when the assassins pursued their victims under the very beds and even into the arms of princesses who vainly tried to intercede [a reference to the memoirs of Marguerite de Valois]; when Charles IX himself fired from a window of the Louvre upon those of his subjects who had escaped the butchers

The massacre became a general slaughter because the Crown needed a military force strong enough to ensure success.

When Henry of Guise, who had pursued a group of escaping Huguenots, returned to the city, the King was obliged to accept public responsibility for the counter-blow to the alleged Protestant plot

Belief in a diabolical and long-standing deception on the part of Charles IX and his mother became widespread soon after the massacre

The joy with which Philip II and Pope Gregory XIII welcomed the news confirmed Protestant suspicion of the complicity of Madrid and Rome

The age of Louis XIV, into which Voltaire was born, witnessed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the persecution of Catholic Jansenists and Quietists as well as of Huguenots

During the Regency that followed the death of Louis XIV in 1715 there was a need for another kind of hero to replace the Sun King’s tarnished military glory and record of religious persecution. Voltaire chose Louis’ grandfather, Henry of Navarre, who had accepted Catholicism after the massacre, reverted to Protestantism on his escape from court in 1576, and found Paris worth the price of a mass seventeen years later. The King who had healed French divisions after the religious wars, and granted the edict of toleration that Louis XIV had revoked, seemed the perfect candidate

asserted that the Queen Mother planned the massacre at the time of the peace of Saint-Germain in 1570

the cynical bad faith of Catherine de Medici, the turbulence of the aristocracy, and the cruelty of popular fanaticism. The lesson was reiterated with little variation

Catherine de Medici ordered the massacres in the midst of the wedding celebrations, in circumstances of profound peace, and after the most solemn oaths. Frightful as they were - and wholly destructive to the good name of France-their memory must be perpetuated, so that those who are always ready to begin unhappy religious disputes may see to what excess a partisan spirit ultimately leads

The slaughter of the Huguenots was not the outcome of a skilfully contrived and long premeditated plan, but the passions of the time, the enormity of the act, and the assertions of those who claimed, or seemed to claim, foreknowledge of the event

Saint Bartholomew had accounted for about 90,000 martyrs

Venice earned special trading rights with the empire in return for accepting Byzantine sovereignty again. The city grew richer, and independence was gained in 1082. However, they retained trading advantages with Byzantium by offering the use of their, now considerable, navy.

The twelfth century saw Venice and the remainder of the Byzantine Empire engage in a series of trade wars, before the events of the early thirteenth century gave Venice the chance to establish a physical trading empire: Venice had agreed to transport a crusade to the ‘Holy Land,’ but this became stuck when the crusaders couldn’t pay.

Venice then warred with Genoa, a powerful Italian trading rival

restricting Genoan trade. Others attacked Venice too, and the empire had to be defended

Venetian expansion targeted the Italian mainland with the capture of Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and Udine.

This era, 1420–50, was arguably the high point of Venetian wealth and power. The population even sprang back after the Black Death, which often traveled along trade routes.

Venice’s decline began in 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, whose expansion would threaten, and successfully seize, many of Venice’s eastern lands

In addition, Portuguese sailors had rounded Africa, opening another trading route to the east. Expansion in Italy also backfired when the pope organized the League of Cambrai to challenge Venice, defeating the city. Although the territory was regained, the loss of reputation was immense.

The Venetian Republic came to an end in 1797, when Napoleon’s French army forced the city to agree to a new, pro-French, ‘democratic’ government; the city was looted of great artworks. Venice was briefly Austrian after a peace treaty with Napoleon, but became French again after the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, and formed part of the short-lived Kingdom of Italy. The fall of Napoleon from power saw Venice placed back under Austrian rule.

. In the 1860s, Venice became part of the new Kingdom of Italy, where it remains to this day in the new Italian state,

In Italy, the Ostrogoths (eastern Goths) established dominance by the end of the fifth century, but would fall to the Byzantine Empire within a few decades.

Around 375, a new group known as the Huns appeared north of the Danube and began pushing other groups–including both the Goths and Vandals–further into Roman territory.

Alaric’s descendants, known as the Visigoths (western Goths), settled in Gaul and Iberia; the last Visigoth kingdom, in Spain, fell to the Moors in 711.

With Genseric’s forces marching on Rome in 455, the desperate Romans sent Pope Leo I to plead for mercy; in exchange for free entry, the Vandals agreed not to burn the city or massacre its citizens

Byzantine force invaded in 534 and took the last Vandal king, Gelimer, captive in Constantinople.

Explorers learned more about areas such as Africa and the Americas and brought that knowledge back to Europe.Massive wealth accrued to European colonizers due to trade in goods, spices, and precious metals.Methods of navigation and mapping improved, switching from traditional portolan charts to the world's first nautical maps.New food, plants, and animals were exchanged between the colonies and Europe.Indigenous people were decimated by Europeans, from a combined impact of disease, overwork, and massacres.The workforce needed to support the massive plantations in the New World, led to the trade of enslaved people, which lasted for 300 years and had an enormous impact on Africa.

When the Ottoman Empire took control of Constantinople in 1453, it blocked European access to the area, severely limiting trade. In addition, it also blocked access to North Africa and the Red Sea, two very important trade routes to the Far East.

Portuguese explorers discovered the Madeira Islands in 1419 and the Azores in 1427. Over the coming decades, they would push farther south along the African coast, reaching the coast of present-day Senegal by the 1440s and the Cape of Good Hope by 1490. Less than a decade later, in 1498, Vasco da Gama would follow this route all the way to India.

Christopher Columbus, an Italian working for the Spanish monarchy, made his first journey in 1492. Instead of reaching India, Columbus found the island of San Salvador in what is known today as the Bahamas.

Columbus would lead three more voyages to the Caribbean, exploring parts of Cuba and the Central American coast.

Great Britain and France also began seeking new trade routes and lands across the ocean. In 1497, John Cabot, an Italian explorer working for the English, reached what is believed to be the coast of Newfoundland. A number of French and English explorers followed, including Giovanni da Verrazano, who discovered the entrance to the Hudson River in 1524, and Henry Hudson, who mapped the island of Manhattan first in 1609.

Over the next decades, the French, Dutch, and British would all vie for dominance. England established the first permanent colony in North America at Jamestown, Va., in 1607.

Other important voyages of exploration during this era included Ferdinand Magellan's attempted circumnavigation of the globe, the search for a trade route to Asia through the Northwest Passage, and Captain James Cook's voyages that allowed him to map various areas and travel as far as Alaska.

The Age of Exploration ended in the early 17th century after technological advancements and increased knowledge of the world allowed Europeans to travel easily across the globe by sea. The creation of permanent settlements and colonies created a network of communication and trade, therefore ending the need to search for new routes.

The Age of Exploration had a significant impact on geography. By traveling to different regions around the globe, explorers were able to learn more about areas such as Africa and the Americas and bring that knowledge back to Europe.

As technology advanced and known territory expanded, maps and mapmaking became more and more sophisticated.

The Age of Exploration served as a stepping stone for geographic knowledge. It allowed more people to see and study various areas around the world, which increased geographic study, giving us the basis for much of the knowledge we have today

In 313 C.E., Roman emperor Constantine the Great ended all persecution and declared toleration for Christianity. Later that century, Christianity became the official state religion of the Empire. This drastic change in policy spread this relatively new religion to every corner of the Empire.

But the Christian belief in one god — who was not the emperor — weakened the authority and credibility of the emperor.

In 330 C.E., he split the empire into two parts: the western half centered in Rome and the eastern half centered in Constantinople, a city he named after himself.

The western Empire spoke Latin and was Roman Catholic. The eastern Empire spoke Greek and worshipped under the Eastern Orthodox branch of the Christian church.

Over time, the east thrived, while the west declined.

a decrease in agricultural production led to higher food prices. The western half of the empire had a large trade deficit with the eastern half. The west purchased luxury goods from the east but had nothing to offer in exchange. To make up for the lack of money, the government began producing more coins with less silver content. This led to inflation

Finally, piracy and attacks from Germanic tribes disrupted the flow o

f trade, especially in the wes

There were political and military difficulties, as well

As money grew tight, the government hired the cheaper and less reliable Germanic soldiers to fight in Roman armies. By the end, these armies were defending Rome against their fellow Germanic tribesmen. Under these circumstances, the sack of Rome came as no surprise.

Germanic barbarian tribes swept through the Roman Empire. Groups such as the Visigoths, Vandals, Angles, Saxons, Franks, Ostrogoths, and Lombards took turns ravaging the Empire, eventually carving out areas in which to settle down. The Angles and Saxons populated the British Isles, and the Franks ended up in France.

In 476 C.E. Romulus, the last of the Roman emperors in the west, was overthrown by the Germanic leader Odoacer,

In the West, Justinian considered it his duty to regain provinces lost to the empire “through indolence,” and he could not ignore the trials of Catholics living under the rule of Arians (Christian heretics) in Italy and in North Africa.

In the face of considerable opposition from his generals and ministers, Justinian launched his attack on North Africa to aid Hilderich in June 533.

Northern Africa was reorganized as part of the empire and now included Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearic Islands, and Septem (Ceuta).

War broke out again in 540, when Justinian was fully occupied in Italy. Justinian had somewhat neglected the army in the East, and in 540 Khosrow moved into Mesopotamia, northern Syria, and Byzantine Armenia and systematically looted the key cities.

On the northern frontier in the Balkans the Roman provinces faced continual attacks from barbarian raiders. Thrace, Dacia, and Dalmatia were harried by Bulgars and Slavs

the provincial governor was unwilling or not sufficiently strong to enforce good government; and with the disappearance of the larger unit of the vicariate, there was nothing left but an expensive appeal to Constantinople.

He greatly stimulated legal studies, and in 528 he set up a commission to produce a new code of imperial enactments or constitutions, the Codex Constitutionum.

A second edition of the Code of Justinian containing Justinian’s own laws up to the date of issue was published in 534

Justinian was genuinely concerned with promoting the well-being of his subjects by rooting out corruption and providing easily accessible justice. This involved adequate control over provincial governors and some administrative reorganization.

The Slavs, and later the Bulgars, eventually succeeded in settling within the Roman provinces. Failure to keep them out is one of the criticisms sometimes made against Justinian.

The sale of raw material was a government monopoly, and Peter Barsymes, Justinian’s finance minister, extended this to silk fabrics, thus creating another lucrative state monopoly.

It was therefore the duty of Justinian, as it was for later Byzantine emperors, to promote the good government of the church and to uphold orthodox teaching. This explains why so many of his laws deal in detail with religious problems.

Toward the end of his reign, Justinian to some extent withdrew from public affairs and was occupied with theological problems. He even lapsed into heresy when, at the end of 564, he issued an edict stating that the human body of Christ was incorruptible and only seemed to suffer

Until the 1930's, Antioch's remains were almost entirely literary; its physical glories had been obliterated by earthquakes, floods and invasions from the east.

Since then, however, as the study of history has focused as much on ordinary citizens as on their leaders, attention has shifted from throne rooms to dining rooms. Only 10 percent of Antioch's population was rich, according to the fourth-century pagan philosopher Libanios, and only 10 percent was poor. The remaining 80 percent lived remarkably well, and at its height, Antioch's population numbered more than 400,000 citizens and freedmen, not counting women, children and slaves.

The exhibition focuses on their dining rooms, or triclinia, in order to recreate the city's great middle-class era, and for middle-class America at the beginning of the third millennium, those ancient houses reveal a familiar ostentation.

Antioch: The Lost Ancient City'' reunites many of the artifacts and objects excavated by the expedition, including some of the most beautiful mosaics. During the five years of preparations for this show, scholars examined for the first time in decades some of the material from the excavations that had been in storage, and the show's catalog presents much of their new research.

Antioch marked the crossroads of trade routes between Persia and the Far East, Egypt and Rome.

During the centuries of the Roman peace, Antioch flourished; its baths and wide arcaded streets were theaters where strangers -- Romans, Syrians, Jews, Christians, Persians, Greeks -- mingled and learned from one another. Its dining rooms set a more intimate stage upon which to continue the dialogue.

The city's pivotal geography proved the source of both its vitality and its vulnerability. Persian emperors of the Sasanian dynasty coveted Antioch, sacked it twice -- in A.D. 256 and 540 -- and incorporated the phrase ''better than Antioch'' into the names of the cities they built closer to home. Sasanian stylized art, using birds and animals in patterned design -- a mosaic border of ram's heads, for instance -- found its way into Antioch's houses.

Probably they discussed religion. The Pax Romana, of course, has found its modern parallel in the Pax Americana, in the worldwide exportation of American culture. Ideas, art, politics and religions circulate, blend and clash. The yearning for a spiritual haven was perhaps even more urgent in Roman Antioch than it is today.

The expeditions of the 1930's dug up no pagan temples or synagogues, but they did uncover in Antioch's port remnants of a church whose ambulatory was paved with a mosaic of animals and birds. Elephants, flamingos, zebras, gazelles, peacocks, a lioness and her cubs: all creation circled the church in a docile parade.

In this floor, pagan entertainment translated into a vision from Genesis: the bloody staged hunt has been converted to a peaceable kingdom.

London never really caught a break after the Black Death. The plague resurfaced roughly every 10 years from 1348 to 1665—40 outbreaks in just over 300 years. And with each new plague epidemic, 20 percent of the men, women and children living in the British capital were killed.

By the early 1500s, England imposed the first laws to separate and isolate the sick. Homes stricken by plague were marked with a bale of hay strung to a pole outside. If you had infected family members, you had to carry a white pole when you went out in public. Cats and dogs were believed to carry the disease, so there was a wholesale massacre of hundreds of thousands of animals.

Smallpox—A European Disease Ravages the New World

The indigenous peoples of modern-day Mexico and the United States had zero natural immunity to smallpox and the virus cut them down by the tens of millions.

“[T]he annihilation of the smallpox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice,” wrote Jenner in 1801. And he was right. It took nearly two more centuries, but in 1980 the World Health Organization announced that smallpox had been completely eradicated from the face of the Earth.

In the early- to mid-19th century, cholera tore through England, killing tens of thousands. The prevailing scientific theory of the day said that the disease was spread by foul air known as a “miasma.” But a British doctor named John Snow suspected that the mysterious disease, which killed its victims within days of the first symptoms, lurked in London’s drinking water. Snow acted like a scientific Sherlock Holmes, investigating hospital records and morgue reports to track the precise locations of deadly outbreaks. He created a geographic chart of cholera deaths over a 10-day period and found a cluster of 500 fatal infections surrounding the Broad Street pump, a popular city well for drinking water.

While cholera has largely been eradicated in developed countries, it’s still a persistent killer in third-world countries lacking adequate sewage treatment and access to clean drinking water. 

“In the 14th century, there was a systemic violence against the Jews and that’s when we see series of images that are conceived as expressions of anti-Jewish feeling,” he said. “But we need to realise that they are above all a means of building Christian ideas and beliefs: they are images that underline and reinforce the Christian identity.”