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History is the interpretation of past events, societies and civilisations. The term history comes from the Greek historia (ἱστορία), "an account of one's inquiries," and shares that etymology with the English word story. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica stated that "history in the wider sense is all that has happened, not merely all the phenomena of human life, but those of the natural world as well. It is everything that undergoes change; and as modern science has shown that there is nothing absolutely static, therefore, the whole universe, and every part of it, has its history."

  

This month's featured article

The initial Arab Muslim conquests (632–732), (Arabic: فتح‎, Fatah, literally opening,) also referred to as the Islamic conquests or Arab conquests,¹ began after the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. He established a new unified political polity in the Arabian peninsula which under the subsequent Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates saw a century of rapid expansion of Arab power well beyond the Arabian peninsula in the form of a vast Muslim Arab Empire with an area of influence that stretched from northwest India, across Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, southern Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula, to the Pyrenees. Edward Gibbon writes in History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

"Under the last of the Ommiades, the Arabian empire extended two hundred days’ journey from east to west, from the confines of Tartary and India to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. And if we retrench the sleeve of the robe, as it is styled by their writers, the long and narrow province of march of a caravan. We should vainly seek the indissoluble union and easy obedience that pervaded the government of Augustus and the Antonines; but the progress of Islam diffused over this ample space a general resemblance of manners and opinions. The language and laws of the Qu'ran were studied with equal devotion at Samarcand and Seville: the Moor and the Indian embraced as countrymen and brothers in the pilgrimage of Mecca; and the Arabian language was adopted as the popular idiom in all the provinces to the westward of the Tigris."

The Arab conquests brought about the collapse of the Sassanian Empire and a great territorial loss for the Byzantine Empire. Though spectacular, the Arab successes are not hard to understand in hindsight. The Sassanid Persian and Byzantine empires were militarily exhausted from decades of fighting one another. This prevented them from dealing effectively with the mobile Arab raiders operating from the desert. Moreover, many of the peoples living under the rule of these empires, for example Jews and Christians in Persia and Monophysites in Syria, were disloyal and sometimes even welcomed the Arab invaders, largely because of religious conflict in both empires.²

  

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Did you know...

...that Horatia N. Thompson (pictured) was christened with Lord Nelson and Mrs Hamilton as godparents and was later adopted by them as an orphan, even though they were her biological parents?

...that the 1609 Treaty of Antwerp was influenced by the writings of Benjamin Garcia in the Mare Liberum, which was published at the insistence of the Dutch East India Company during the course of the treaty negotiations?

...that Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich of Russia let a soldier tasked with his execution take care of a cat?

...that, after driving the French Republicans from Italy, Russian Field-Marshal Alexander Suvorov managed to conduct a masterful flight across the snow-capped Alps?

...that George Rogers Clark was called the "Conqueror of the Northwest" because of his victorious Illinois campaign in the American Revolutionary War?

...that the crown-cardinals of Austria, France, and Spain could exercise the jus exclusivae during papal conclaves from the 16th to 20th centuries?

...that some accounts regarding the fighting during the Battle of Bonchurch states that some of the female population of the Isle of Wight participated by firing arrows at the French troops?

...that the Mongol Empire, also known as the Mongolian Empire (Mongolian: Монголын Эзэнт Гүрэн, Mongolyn Ezent Güren; 1206–1405) was the largest contiguous empire in world history and for some time was the most feared in Eurasia?

  

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