Ambient Lectures: History of Great Men

He was ten years old when the Romans took him. By twenty-five he was wearing their uniform, drawing their pay, eating at the governor's table. By twenty-seven he had killed twenty thousand of them in a forest in three days.Arminius is the man who stopped Rome. Not slowed it. Stopped it. The line he drew at the Rhine in September of 9 AD held for four hundred years and shaped the map of Europe we still live on. He did it with no army of his own, no state behind him, no money. He did it with a lie he held in his head for two years without breaking.This is his story.#Arminius #TeutoburgForest #RomanEmpire #AncientRome #Hermann #Varus #Cherusci #AncientHistory #MilitaryHistory #RomanHistory

The story of Alfred the Great -- the only English monarch ever called "the Great." Born the fifth son of a Wessex king in 849, Alfred should have been irrelevant. Instead, he saved England. This is the story of the man who lost his kingdom to the Vikings on a January night in 878, fled into the Somerset marshes with nothing but his faith and a handful of loyal men, and came back to defeat them, baptize their warlord, and build the institutions that would become medieval England. Burhs, the Doom Book, the palace school, the translations of Boethius and Bede -- all of it Alfred's work, all of it done while governing in chronic pain. He carried the light out of the marsh himself.0:00 Prologue: The Ashes of Chippenham2:30 Chapter One: The Boy Who Was Sent to Rome6:42 Chapter Two: The Wars Before the War11:38 Chapter Three: Athelney - The Island in the Marsh16:39 Chapter Four: Egbert's Stone - The Gathering19:33 Chapter Five: The Baptism of Guthrum22:27 Chapter Six: The Burghal System26:14 Chapter Seven: The Palace School30:00 Chapter Eight: The Illness31:41 Chapter Nine: The Second Viking Age34:37 Chapter Ten: The Law36:49 Chapter Eleven: The Faith38:57 Chapter Twelve: The Family41:12 Chapter Thirteen: The Death of the King43:58 Epilogue: What Alfred Left Behind

Frederick the Great - the king who took a sandy, broken electorate and made it a great power. The man Napoleon studied like scripture. The soldier-philosopher who carried poison for seven years rather than surrender, fought four empires at once, and built a state that outlasted him by a century and a half.This is his life. From the cell window at Küstrin to the tomb at Potsdam Napoleon would not desecrate.⚔ Chapters00:00 Prologue — The Tomb at Potsdam01:40 The Kingdom That Clawed Itself Into Existence07:14 The Soldier-King's Son10:46 The Gamble17:24 The Encirclement19:15 The Years of Fire24:20 The Darkest Year27:54 Old Fritz38:26 What He Left🜃 SourcesChristopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of PrussiaTim Blanning, Frederick the Great: King of PrussiaRobert B. Asprey, Frederick the Great: The Magnificent EnigmaSelected correspondence of Frederick II and Voltaire#FrederickTheGreat #Prussia #MilitaryHistory #SevenYearsWar #Napoleon #EuropeanHistory #GreatMen #AmbientHistory #HistoryPodcast #AmbientLectures

In the summer of 1462, Sultan Mehmed II — the conqueror of Constantinople, master of the largest army in Europe — marched ninety thousand men into Wallachia to break a vassal who had stopped paying tribute. He marched seventy miles into a country burned to ash by its own prince. He found a field of twenty thousand impaled corpses outside the capital. He turned his army around and went home.The man who turned him around was Vlad III of Wallachia, called Dracula, called Tepes, called the Impaler.He was born in 1431, the son of a Christian voivode sworn to the Order of the Dragon. At eleven he was taken hostage by the Ottomans and held for six years in an Anatolian fortress. At sixteen he learned his father had been murdered and his elder brother buried alive. At twenty-five he took the throne of Wallachia for the second time and began the work of remaking a country that had killed thirty princes in a hundred years.He purged the boyars. He broke the Saxon merchants. He impaled by the thousands — enemies, traitors, criminals, foreigners. He held the law absolute. He nailed the turbans of Ottoman envoys to their heads when they refused to bow. He raided Bulgaria in winter and sent the Hungarian king a letter counting 23,884 dead, in his own bookkeeper's hand.When Mehmed came north to break him, he burned his own country, poisoned the wells, drove the people into the forests, and let the country fight for him. He launched a night attack on the Sultan's tent with seven thousand horsemen. He missed the tent in the dark. By morning he was gone, and Mehmed was riding back to the Danube.He fell to his brother Radu the next year, escaped over the mountains, and was imprisoned by the Hungarians for twelve years. They let him out in 1476 because they needed him. He held the throne for less than two months before he was killed in a winter ambush near Bucharest. His head was sent to Constantinople and set on a pike on the walls of the city Mehmed had taken.He is remembered in the West as a monster. He is remembered in Romania as the man who held the line against the Ottomans with twenty thousand men and a country burned to ash behind him. Both readings have history behind them.This is his story.#vladtheimpaler #vladdracula #wallachia #ottomanempire #medievalhistory #historydocumentary 00:00 — Intro00:27 — Prologue02:40 — The Dragon's Son7:58 — The Throne14:15 — The Turbans16:53 — The Night Attack20:09 — The Brother23:45 — The Last Ride26:312 — The Name28:15 — What Remains

Three hundred years of the Targaryen dynasty, from Aegon the Conqueror landing at the mouth of the Blackwater to a hedge knight at a wet fire on the night before the Ashford tourney.Narrated by Tywin Lannister over rain and ambient music. The dragons that died. The kings who failed. The bastard who came within an arrow's flight of the throne. The wound that would never close clean. The boy at the campfire who did not yet know the morrow.What's required of men to maintain power.

The last real Viking. Exiled at fifteen, he fought his way across the known world — Kievan Rus, the Byzantine court, the sands of North Africa — commanding the Emperor's elite guard before returning north to seize the Norwegian crown. He spent two decades trying to conquer Denmark, failed, and then rolled the dice on England instead. He died at Stamford Bridge in 1066, three weeks before Hastings. The arrow that killed him also closed the Viking age.

n 451 AD, on a wide plain in what is now eastern France, a Roman general led a coalition of Visigoths, Alans, Burgundians, and Franks against the largest army the West had seen in centuries. Across the field stood Attila the Hun, the man Constantinople paid in gold to keep at a distance, who had crossed the Rhine and was burning his way south through Gaul.The Roman general was Flavius Aetius. He had been raised among the Huns as a child hostage. He spoke their language, knew their kings, had ridden with them. And he was the last man in the Western Empire who could have built the alliance that stopped Attila on the Catalaunian Plains.This is the story of Aetius — the soldier, diplomat, and political survivor who held the Western Roman Empire together for two decades while it should have already fallen. The man Sidonius Apollinaris called the bulwark of the West. The man history would eventually name the last of the Romans.He bought Rome twenty more years. He was murdered in a palace chamber by the emperor he had served his entire life. And six months later, that emperor was dead too — killed by Aetius's own men.

Skanderbeg — Gjergj Kastrioti — was the Ottoman Empire's most gifted student, and the man who became their most persistent nightmare. For twenty-five years he held off the largest empire on earth from a mountain stronghold in Albania, defending Christendom when no one else would. This is his story.Part of Ambient Lectures: History of Great Men. Read by Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones.