Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

…The answer is, of course, a love of Al-Andalus. Al Andalus, as Osama himself would tell us were he a blogger, was the last Muslim kingdom in Europe. Compromising the…

…war and by invading Belgium Germany got a three front war, with Russia, the UK and France furious, het up and determined. All Europe’s financial indicators suggest that Germany was…

Beach lives in a part of Europe (Italy) where the memory of the Soviet Union is revered not only by daft revolutionaries creeping out at night to graffiti their way…

…in Europe or the Americas. Second, British code breaking against the Japanese was (almost entirely thanks to American assistance) good until December 1940 when the Japanese changed their JN-25 code…

…subsisting in the heart of Catholic Europe follow. The Alibigensians (aka Cathars) seem to have emerged in about 1150 in the south of France. The Albigensian Crusade began in 1209…

  Human sacrifice does survive in literate cultures – the Aztecs, various medieval Indian states… But in Europe, at least, it melted away at about the time of the first…

…Romani-style halotype which may be present but undetected in the European population: ‘the probability is very low’. 3) The halotype was common in Saxon times but has since been lost:…

One of the great twentieth-century photographs. The four men who dominate Europe in late September 1938 stand side by side. On the left, looking as if he has an umbrella…

…or Muslim magnate fell to the floor. Their hits were to be found throughout the Middle East, but there is good evidence that they also worked in Europe and there…

When Beach wrote his university entrance exams, many decades ago, he waxed unlyrical about Europe’s second sons who went on crusade because there was nothing for them at home. There…

…of the Gothic building boom in Europe. You couldn’t just knock down a couple of old Roman buildings and reuse the stones when building those style of buildings. Why not…

…food until well after European contact. It was one the major reasons for conflict between Native Americans and early European settlers in North America as European land use was much…

…so the Gaels went for the next best thing: lizards… Curiously, in other parts of Europe lizards had the reputation of preventing snakes entering the body of sleeping men. Note…

Vampire legends arrived in Britain and Ireland from the east of Europe in the eighteenth century and were, then, celebrated in fiction in the early, mid nineteenth century (The Vampyre,…

Beach has a heaving filing cabinet full of spells: spells from the Middle Ages, spells from early modern Europe and spells from as recently as the Second World War. Some…