
For nearly eight hundred years, the Iberian Peninsula was defined by a shifting, fragmented frontier where military ambition and religious identity collided.

Three centuries after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, a single ruler bound the fractured territories of Western and Central Europe back into a unified whole.

Before he was the Conqueror, he was William the Bastard, the illegitimate son of Duke Robert I of Normandy and his mistress Herleva.

In 1095, an appeal for military aid from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who was facing the pressure of Seljuk Turks, reached Pope Urban II.