Today the thing we find mysterious is why WWI lasted as long as it did. Why continue a pointless slaughter. Comparisions with the war in Ukraine suggest an answer!

My guess is is Professor David Stevenson and for him the mystery is not why it lasted so long but why it ended when it did.

For the German public is was particularly mysterious. Just a few months before the Armistice Germany was all conquering. Russia had been driven out of the war on terms hugely favourable to Germany. And in the West her storm troopers seemed poised to deliver victory on this front too.

And while the tide had clearly turned the German army was falling back in good order. So what compelled Germany to submit to allied terms? Was it a stab in the back as many Germany came to believe, or something else?

David is brilliant at unpicking all of this. As for the answer to the riddle - well, one place to look is in Bulgaria . . 

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Ed West is a journalist and massively popular substacker - do check out his substack The Wrong Side of History. But he has a sideline in history so I got him on the show to talk about 1066 and the battle of Hastings. Ed is on top form so please join us as he talks about:

- why Harold should have listened to his Mum

- Harald Hadrada's absolute last poem

- what made the Norman's so very hard to beat

- and why the Normans were the woke progressives of their day!

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A six-foot-two prince who loved tournaments, outfoxed a revolution, and nearly died on crusade returns to build castles that still dominate the Welsh coast and to bend Scotland to his will until Robert the Bruce strikes back. We follow Edward I’s path from a devoted crusader to the architect of a more centralised, harder-edged medieval state, where finance, logistics, and image mattered as much as swords. Along the way, we discuss the political craft behind his parliaments, the Italian bankers who kept his campaigns moving, and the trade-offs needed to fund his empire.

We don’t shy away from the darkness. The 1290 expulsion of England’s Jews reveals the brutal alignment of prejudice and power. So does the battlefield assassination of Simon de Montfort at Evesham and the legal sleight that turned Scottish arbitration into overlordship. For all that Edward comes across as very human. His marriage with Eleanor of Castile was unusually close for the age, marked by shared journeys, many children, and the Eleanor Crosses erected on her death.

 If Wales became Edward’s lasting triumph in stone and statute, Scotland proved a different matter. It was larger, more resilient, and capable of rebirth under Bruce. And on the continent, a friendly France turns hostile, tricking the king into surrendering Gascony leading to a war England can barely support.

Edward does indeed emerge a ruler both great and terrible: a master of war and administration who built a stronger English polity while leaving scars at home and abroad. If you care about medieval power - crusader ideology versus realpolitik, taxes versus consent this episode will sharpen your view of how states harden and why reputations endure. 

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“With the heart of a serpent and the nature of a wolf, she gathered sycophants to her cause and brought destruction to the just. She slew her sister, butchered her brothers, killed her prince, and poisoned her mother. She is hated by men and gods alike.”

Jonathan Clements came back on to talk about his book on Wu Zetian (623–705), the only woman ever to rule China in her own name. Rising from lowly concubine/chambermaid to God-Emperor, she outmanoeuvred courtiers, generals, monks and poets alike - sometimes with charm, sometimes with a knife - and ruled over the empire at the height of the Silk Road.

Jonathan describes Wu’s ascent through the Tang court: a place of whispered plots, divine omens, and women struggling to survive. Along the way we encounter girls on top, a boob-shaped tomb, a harem of 120 pretty boys, dogs on sticks, a honey-trap gone wrong, and an inadvisable attempt to train a cat not to eat a parrot.

A story of power, paranoia, and the perilous art of surviving your own success.

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As promised in part 1 we started the podcast by talking about some of Napoleon III’s many mistresses.  Women like Harriet Howard, the Brighton bootmaker’s daughter, Virginia de Castiglione, sent by the Italians to seduce and spy on him (and welcomed with open arms!), Marguerite Bellanger and Louise de Mercy-Argenteau. His wife hated his infidelities but at least in the case of Louise she took comfort that she was a proper aristocrat!

Moving on from the scandalous we talked about Napoleon III’s solid achievements. Not least his success in the Crimean War which led to an alliance with the British and bringing France in from the diplomatic cold. And domestically the economy thrived and Paris was rebuilt.

The great tragedy of Napoleon III’s reign was that he was up against Bismark. Suffering from various illnesses (bladder stones in particular) his judgement was possibly affected. And Bismark tricks him into declaring war - with predictable results. 

His son survived him and oddly ended up fighting with the British Army in South Africa. If you don’t know the story this alone makes the podcast more than worth the time.

If you enjoy this podcast on France’s second Empire - its scandals, triumphs, and collapses - then please follow Subject to Change, share it with a friend who loves history, and leave a review telling me what struck you most.

From exiled prince to emperor, Napoleon III's rise to power reads like a political thriller too wild to be true. Edward Shawcross tells the story of Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, a man who attempted not one but two comically failed coups before finally succeeding in becoming Emperor of France.

This episode explores Louis-Napoleon's bizarre childhood as the imperial nephew raised in Swiss exile, where his mother turned their home into a shrine to Napoleon while teaching him the arts of conspiracy and subterfuge. We cover his early revolutionary activities in Italy and his truly farcical coup attempts - including one featuring a live eagle purchased for a pound - that landed him in prison for life.

Rather than breaking him, prison became Louis-Napoleon's "university," where he turned from a figure of fun into a serious political thinker with a programme of social reform. His escape disguised as a working man complete with platform shoes to change his height reads like fiction, yet it set the stage for his triumphant return during the 1848 Revolution.

Ed explains how this seemingly delusional man understood mass politics better than any of his contemporaries, positioning himself as the people's champion against the political establishment. Through universal male suffrage, he won France's first direct presidential election before orchestrating a coup that established the Second Empire - proving that persistence, timing, and understanding the power of a name can overcome ridicule and failure.

This is part 1 of a two part series. Part 2 will deal with his time as emperor and will not shy away from the more, er, sensational aspects of his life. In particular his extraordinarily large number of mistresses!

Fourteen centuries of enslavement, from the Prophet Muhammad's day to modern Mauritania. Justin Marozzi's fascinating book "Captives and Companions"  has as its subject the complex history of slavery across the Islamic world, challenging simplistic narratives and revealing uncomfortable truths about power, race, and religion.

Our conversation touched on how Islam didn't invent slavery but incorporated existing practices while encouraging manumission. We talked about the huge diversity of slavery - from the huge Zanj Rebellion when East African slaves revolted in Iraq, to the paradoxical power of Mamluk slave-soldiers who became sultans. I particularly liked how Justin managed to balance the brilliance and the cruelty of the life of the concubines at the court in Baghdad at the height of its power. 

We also spent a lot of time discussing eunuchs. What purpose they served, the way Islam got round the prohibition on the practice and how and why the use of eunuchs lasted so long.

The racial side of things was a surprise to me. Primary sources from Islam's greatest medieval intellectuals expose deeply racist attitudes toward black Africans, while white Circassian slaves commanded premium prices. And the Barbary Corsairs provided another surprise, with a large number of Europeans who "turned Turk" to join Muslim pirates enslaving fellow Christians across the Mediterranean.

When we reached abolition, Justin talked about how external Western pressure, not internal Islamic reform, primarily drove formal emancipation. And his interviews with people in Mali and Mauritania showed how hereditary slavery continues today, with miserable stories of people still fighting for freedom in the 21st century.

This episode looks at the courtroom drama that helped to shape Asia after World War II with Princeton University's Gary Bass. Far more than a simple account of justice served, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal represents a fascinating intersection of international law, power politics, and competing visions of history that continues to reverberate through East Asian relations today.

The tribunal tried 28 Japanese leaders for crimes that began long before Pearl Harbor. Imperial Japan's expansionist wars stretched back decades, leaving a trail of atrocities including the Nanjing Massacre where approximately 200,000 civilians were killed. Yet political calculations ensured Emperor Hirohito remained untouched, creating an enduring contradiction where his closest advisor received a life sentence while the monarch himself watched from his palace.

Three defendants embody the trial's moral complexities: defiant Prime Minister Tojo Hideki who used his testimony to justify the war; the Emperor's advisor Kido Koichi who claimed to restrain militarists yet enabled their actions; and perhaps most poignantly, Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori who actively opposed the war, confronted military leadership, and later pushed for surrender—only to die in prison after conviction.

What distinguishes this tribunal from Nuremberg is its contested legacy. While Germany embraced denazification, some Japanese war criminals later returned triumphantly to politics- including Kishi Nobusuke who became Prime Minister in 1957. His grandson, former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, continued questioning the tribunal's legitimacy decades later. Meanwhile, at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, war criminals are venerated alongside fallen soldiers, revealing Japan's unresolved relationship with its imperial past.

When 50,000 northerners marched under their banners in 1536, England witnessed its largest rebellion since the Peasants' Revolt. The Pilgrimage of Grace wasn't just a protest - it threatened to undo the English Reformation completely and return the kingdom to Rome.

Professor Peter Marshall, the renowned Tudor historian, tells the story of this extraordinary episode where religious devotion, political power, and regional identity collided with explosive results. 

Henry VIII's desperate quest for a male heir led him to break with Rome, setting off changes that  wentfar beyond the royal bedchamber. What began as a "change of the English Church's CEO" rapidly transformed into something more radical - monasteries dissolved, shrines dismantled, and traditions questioned. For northerners especially, these weren't abstract theological matters but direct attacks on community identity.

When the rebels and royal forces faced off across the River Don, England's religious future hung in the balance. A providential rainstorm, false royal promises, and factional divisions among the rebels ultimately preserved Henry's reformation. 

Peter is brilliant in explaining how the English reformation got started and how a rebellion came within a whisker of stopping it in its tracks and tumbling Henry from his throne.

The ever excellent Professor David Parnell (of Belisarius and Antonina fame) came on to talk about the First Crusade. And given his interest in the Eastern Roman Empire we spent a lot of time talking about it from that angle.  When Emperor Alexius I found his thousand-year-old empire crumbling under Turkish advances in the late 11th century, he asked the West for help. He got more than he could have expected!

What followed was extraordinary. Pope Urban II's call at the Council of Clermont in 1095 unleashed an avalanche of armed pilgrims, knights, and nobles who descended upon Constantinople with a mixture of religious zeal and worldly ambition. From this magnificent but now vulnerable city Alexius faced the delicate task of channeling this unpredictable Western force toward his enemies while maintaining control over his own destiny.

We started by talking about the history written by Alexius's daughter Anna Komnene (the first long-form narrative by any European woman) who was at pains to show the brilliance of her father. We followed the crusade to Antioch and talked about Alexius's fateful decision not to come to the aid of the crusade when it most needed him. A decision that would eventually bear bitter fruit in the catastrophic Fourth Crusade a century later.

The Byzantine perspective on the First Crusade reveals a sophisticated diplomatic dance that initially saved the empire, restoring significant territories and ushering in a period of stability known as the Komnenian Restoration. Yet it also set in motion forces that would eventually contribute to Constantinople's downfall.