Shows / Calm Bedtime History
Calm Bedtime History
Long, calm history to fall asleep to. Every day: a new 3 – 4 hour narrated journey through medieval Europe, ancient empires, and forgotten ages. Paced for drifting minds. No hooks. No shouting. Just history, a fireplace, and a good night's sleep.
Episodes
Calm Bedtime HistoryThe Republic of Ragusa: Dubrovnik's Five Centuries of Freedom, 1358-1808 | Calm Bedtime History
You are standing on the limestone cliffs above the Adriatic, where the city of Ragusa clings to a rocky promontory jutting into the sea. It is the year 1358…
Calm Bedtime HistoryFlorence Under the Medici, 1434–1492 | Calm Bedtime History
It is September 1434. Cosimo de' Medici, sixty years old, richest citizen of Florence, rides through the Porta al Prato after a year of exile in Venice and…
Calm Bedtime HistoryLife in Karakorum: The Capital of the Mongol Empire, 1235–1260 | Calm Bedtime History
In the year 1253, a Franciscan friar named William of Rubruck reached a city of stone walls and felt tents, built on the open grassland where no city had ever…
Calm Bedtime HistoryDaily Life Along the Nile in Ancient Egypt, 1550-1350 BCE | Calm Bedtime History
It is the year 1450 before the common era, in the reign of Thutmose III. The Nile has begun to swell at Elephantine, its waters brown with silt carried from…
Calm Bedtime HistoryAugustus and the Birth of the Roman Empire, 27 BCE - 14 CE | Calm Bedtime History
It is the Ides of March, and the dictator Gaius Julius Caesar lies bleeding on the floor of the theatre of Pompey. The republic he had dominated convulses in…
Calm Bedtime HistoryDaily Life in Edo, Japan's Capital, 1700–1800 | Calm Bedtime History
It is the fourth year of the Genroku era, 1701, in the eastern capital. The cherry blossoms have fallen along the Sumida River, and the first summer fires are…
Calm Bedtime HistoryBuilding the Great Pyramid of Giza, c. 2560 BCE | Calm Bedtime History
The limestone plateau rises from the western desert, eight kilometres southwest of the city that Egyptians will one day call Giza. In the season of Akhet, when…
Calm Bedtime HistoryDaily Life in Tenochtitlan Before the Conquest, 1450–1519 | Calm Bedtime History
It is the year 1487. The great temple of Huēy Teōcalli has just been rededicated, and the city of Tenochtitlan stretches across its island in Lake Texcoco…
Calm Bedtime HistorySamarkand at the Heart of the Silk Road, 700-900 CE | Calm Bedtime History
It is the year 780 of the Common Era. The muezzin has not yet called the fajr prayer, but lamps already flicker in the paper workshops beneath the citadel of…
Calm Bedtime HistoryThe Rise of Lubeck, Queen of the Hansa, 1143–1370 | Calm Bedtime History
You stand on the eastern bank of the Trave River, where the water widens into a sheltered bay before meeting the Baltic Sea. It is the year 1143. Count Adolf…
Calm Bedtime HistoryThe Maritime Republic of Genoa, 1100–1380 | Calm Bedtime History
It is April of the year 1100. In the harbour of Genoa, forty galleys ride at anchor beneath the steep limestone hills. Sailors unload bales of Syrian cotton…
Calm Bedtime HistoryDaily Life in Pompeii Before the Eruption, 79 CE | Calm Bedtime History
It is a morning in June, in the year 79 of the common era. The sun rises over the Bay of Naples, and in the city of Pompeii, a woman steps into her atrium to…
Calm Bedtime HistoryIstanbul Under Suleiman the Magnificent, 1520–1566 | Calm Bedtime History
It is the autumn of 1520, and the body of Sultan Selim I has barely reached Istanbul when his only surviving son, Suleiman, twenty-six years old, enters the…
Calm Bedtime HistoryA Viking Voyage: Life Aboard the Longship, c. 900 CE | Calm Bedtime History
It is the year 900, in the early months of spring. A clinker-built longship lies ready at the head of a deep Norwegian fjord, its striped sail furled against…
Calm Bedtime HistoryDaily Life in Ancient Sparta, 5th Century BCE | Calm Bedtime History
You are standing on the bank of the Eurotas river, where the water runs clear and cold from the Taygetus mountains. It is the year 450 BCE. The morning sun has…
Calm Bedtime HistoryBabylon at Its Height Under Nebuchadnezzar II, c. 600 BCE | Calm Bedtime History
It is the year 584 BCE, the twenty-first year of King Nebuchadnezzar II's reign. You stand upon the western bank of the Euphrates, where the river bends…
Calm Bedtime HistoryCleopatra's Alexandria, 48–30 BCE | Calm Bedtime History
It is the year 48 before the Common Era. In the royal palace on the harbour's edge, Cleopatra VII has just been driven from her throne by the ministers of her…
Calm Bedtime HistoryThe Maya City of Tikal at Its Height, c. 700 CE | Calm Bedtime History
In the year 682, a king named Jasaw Chan K'awiil I took the throne of Tikal, a city of limestone and plaster rising from the rainforest of northern Guatemala…
Calm Bedtime HistoryDaily Life in the Great Monasteries of the Rhineland, 800-1200 | Calm Bedtime History
It is the year 850, in the Benedictine abbey of Lorsch on the Bergstrasse. A monk rises in the darkness before dawn, his breath visible in the unheated cell…
Calm Bedtime HistoryAthens in the Age of Pericles, 461-429 BCE | Calm Bedtime History
The morning light comes early over Mount Hymettus, catching the dust that rises from the Agora where fish-sellers are already laying out their catch. It is the…
Calm Bedtime HistoryCusco and the Inca Road: Life at the Center of Tawantinsuyu, 1438-1532 | Calm Bedtime History
The Sapa Inka Pachacútec Yupanqui has just died after thirty-three years of rule, and his body lies in state in the Coricancha, the temple whose interior walls…
Calm Bedtime HistoryThe Maritime Republic of Venice at Its Height, 1200–1400 | Calm Bedtime History
The galleys are coming home. It is April of 1204, and the lagoon is thick with smoke from cook-fires on the Lido. Doge Enrico Dandolo's fleet has been gone two…
Calm Bedtime HistoryThe Reign of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, 1556–1605 | Calm Bedtime History
The second battle of Panipat is about to begin. Hemu, the Hindu general who has captured Delhi and Agra, commands a force of war elephants and Afghan cavalry…
Calm Bedtime HistoryThe Hanseatic Peterhof at Novgorod, 1200–1494 | Calm Bedtime History
It is the year 1392, deep in the Russian winter. On the right bank of the frozen Volkhov river, within the trading quarter of Novgorod, stands the Peterhof—a…
Calm Bedtime HistoryThe Tiwanaku Polity of the Lake Titicaca Basin, 500–1000 CE | Calm Bedtime History
It is the year 780 CE. On the Altiplano, three thousand eight hundred metres above the sea, frost whitens the raised fields before dawn. The city of…
Calm Bedtime HistoryChang'an: The Tang Dynasty Capital at the World's Crossroads, 618-755 CE | Calm Bedtime History
It is the year 742, and the sun rises over the outer walls of Chang'an, casting the shadow of the city's grid upon fields of mulberry trees. The drum at the…
Calm Bedtime HistoryThe Nine Worlds of Norse Cosmology, c. 900–1250 | Calm Bedtime History
You are sitting in a longhouse in Iceland, sometime around the year 1000. Outside, the wind moves through volcanic rock and sparse birch. Inside, someone…
Calm Bedtime HistoryThe Prince-Electors of the Holy Roman Empire, 1356–1648 | Calm Bedtime History
It is the tenth of January, 1356, in the Free Imperial City of Nuremberg. Emperor Charles IV, King of Bohemia, stands before the assembled princes of the Holy…
Calm Bedtime HistoryThe Crusader Principality of Antioch, 1098–1268 | Calm Bedtime History
It is the third of June, 1098. Inside the double walls of Antioch, the last defenders of the garrison watch from the towers as Frankish soldiers scale the…
Calm Bedtime HistoryByzantium and the Long Year of Manzikert, 1068-1081 | Calm Bedtime History
The high plateau of eastern Anatolia stretches brown and wind-scoured toward the Persian horizon. In late August of the year 1071, a Byzantine army of many…
Calm Bedtime HistorySamarkand Under the Timurids, 1370–1500 | Calm Bedtime History
It is the eighth of September, 1404. In a garden palace outside Samarkand, Ruy González de Clavijo, ambassador from the court of Castile, is brought before…
Calm Bedtime HistoryThe Hanseatic Merchants of Northern Europe, 1250–1400 | Calm Bedtime History
The first light is grey upon the canals of Bruges. In the upper storey of a timber-framed house near the Jan van Eyckplein, a man from Lübeck named Hildebrand…
Calm Bedtime HistoryThe Late Stoics and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, c. 50–180 CE | Calm Bedtime History
The emperor sits by lamplight in a leather tent somewhere on the middle Danube, perhaps near the legionary fortress of Carnuntum or the temporary camp at…