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Please enjoy this first chapter of my latest novel "Califia's Crusade." I hope you enjoy it! On the isle of California in the year of our Lord 1500, a woman in a hut stared at two helmets and pretended she had a choice. Polished to a mirror shine, the left helmet glinted vividly in the morning sunlight that streamed through the open window. The swirling designs and intricate patterns of its…

How The Thriving, Prosperous Timurid Empire of Central Asia Declined and Dissolved While Timur’s personal brand of ruthless politics and battlefield competence kept his realm united during his lifetime, it was not long after his death that cracks began to appear in the foundations of his empire. Succession among nomadic steppe cultures was rarely a simple affair and the mantle of the chief…

The Greatest Poet You’ve Never Heard Of At a certain point while researching Califia’s Crusade, I wanted to bring more real-life historical figures into the story. While studying the Gurkani Empire in the late 1400s, I happened upon a fascinating courtier, politician, and poet named Alishir Navai. A portrait of Alishir Navai which was painted during his lifetime. Source: Public Domain Born in…

The Timurid Renaissance When Timur the Great passed away in early 1405, a succession dispute quickly arose among potential claimants. Timur had kept control over his empire by appointing family members as governors of various regions and cities. Now that he was gone, some of them favored splintering the empire so that they could now act with absolute authority in their domains and not have to…

Who Could Claim Constantinople After the Ottoman Conquest? As I’ve previously noted, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 was not the first time that the Eastern Roman Empire had been ousted from its capital city. However, unlike the 1204 sack of Constantinople by knights of the Fourth Crusade and subsequent restoration after a six-decade occupation, there would be no Byzantine…

The Legend of the Gargareans, the Anti-Amazons The Amazons are a well-known component of Greek mythology and there are many similar stories of all-women societies in folklore worldwide, as well as many real-life examples of women warriors in general throughout actual history like the Onna-Bugeisha of feudal Japan and the Dahomey Amazons of Africa. Greek mythology in particular, however, also…

Timur the Great and the Central Asian Empire You’ve Probably Never Heard Of West of China and India, south of Russia, and east of Turkey and Iraq lies a stretch of land that is currently occupied by Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. The area that these nations occupy roughly correspond with one of the largest and most impressive…

Late Medieval Politics and the Quest for Constantinople The Crusades occupy a strange place in the American imagination. Popular impressions of what they were, why they happened, and what their practitioners hoped to accomplish are incredibly varied and often dependent upon contemporary political outlook. My own opinion on the matter is that the Crusades were a uniquely Medieval phenomenon…