Ancient Naval

A fresh account of some of history's greatest warriors. The Vikings had an extraordinary and far-reaching historical impact. From the eighth to the 11th centuries, they ranged across Europe - raiding, exploring, and colonizing - and their presence was felt as far away as Russia and Byzantium. They are most famous as warriors, yet perhaps their talent for warfare is too little understood.

A modern American expeditionary strike group vanishes from a routine exercise — and reappears in the Mediterranean at the edge of the Second Punic War. No satellites. No resupply. No modern nation behind them. Only finite fuel, limited ammunition, fragile medical stores, and ships powerful enough to terrify the ancient world — but not powerful enough to survive carelessness. Commodore Daniel Mercer commands a fleet that should not exist in 218 BCE. Around him are modern warships, Marines, aircraft, drones, engineers, doctors, and enough firepower to shatter any ancient navy. But every ...

Themistocles (524–459 BC) came of age just as a newly democratic and empowered Athens was emerging. He would become an instrumental political and military figure, fighting in the Battle of Marathon; persuading Athenians to expand their fleet; and engineering the Athenians' defeat of the...

The fleet survived its arrival. Now it must survive what people do with its rules. After a modern American expeditionary strike group is stranded in the Mediterranean during the Second Punic War, Malta becomes more than a foothold. It becomes the beginning of a road — a protected route where fuel, medicine, labor, witnesses, and law must all be counted. But Rome, Carthage, smugglers, debt holders, engineers, scribes, and ambitious men of learning quickly understand the truth: whoever controls the rules of the Route may control the future around it. False tolls appear. False medicine ...

The road has a name now. And every empire wants to own it. After the impossible arrival of the USS Gerald R. Ford in 1519, Fort Rainbow is no longer just a stranded military outpost. It has become something far more dangerous: a system. A road. A source of clean water, medicine, light, work, records, and law in a world that understands power through tribute, kings, gods, and conquest. To the people who depend on it, the Compact is survival. To Spain, it is a prize. To the great powers of the lake, it is a threat. To the black markets growing in its shadow, it is an opportunity. And to the ...

The road has learned the sea. After surviving its impossible arrival and building the Route, the stranded American expeditionary strike group now faces a new kind of war. The rules that once protected medicine, fuel, workers, witnesses, and children have crossed beyond Malta — into harbors, fleets, markets, workshops, and the hands of men who know how to turn law into power. Rome wants witness. Carthage wants control. Syracuse wants proof. And Archimedes wants to understand the machine behind the miracle. But the greatest danger is not a fleet, a fire ship, or a stolen weapon. It is a man...

The fields of Cannae provide the setting for one of the bloodiest battles in history. But who will triumph? Hannibal and his warrior army, or the mighty legions of Rome. By Ben Kane, the Sunday Times bestselling author of Hannibal: Enemy of Rome. Hannibal's campaign to defeat Rome continues as...

The King Who Would Drown Greece: Xerxes and the Invasion That Broke an Empire Discover the true story of history's most audacious military gamble—and its catastrophic failure. In 480 BCE, Xerxes I of Persia commanded the largest empire the world had ever seen, stretching from India to Libya. Yet one region remained defiantly independent: Greece. Inheriting his father's unfinished war and burning with dynastic obligation, Xerxes launched an invasion of staggering scale—bridging the Hellespont with pontoon spans, cutting a canal through a mountain, and assembling perhaps 200,000 troops ...

Zheng He's Treasure Fleets: The Voyages That Could Have Changed the World In 1405, sixty years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic in a 60-foot ship with 90 men, China launched an armada of over 300 vessels and 27,000 crew into the Indian Ocean. The flagship was 400 feet long. The commander was a castrated slave who had risen to become the most powerful admiral in the world. His name was Zheng He. And the story of what he accomplished — and why China chose to stop — is one of the great untold dramas in world history. In this book, you'll discover: The extraordinary personal journey of ...

What Modern Warfare Myths Get Wrong About The Vikings The shield wall was not broken by courage. It was broken by exhaustion, bleeding, and the brutal reality of human limits. Most modern portrayals of Viking warfare are built on a false premise: that violence in the Dark Ages was driven primarily by berserker rage, strength, and fearlessness. But open the archaeological record, and a very different reality emerges. Viking warfare was not an expression of rage—it was a highly engineered system constrained by logistics. Viking Warfare and Engineering presents the gritty, operational ...

In 1881, a writer in the Saturday Review called tattooing ‘an art without a history’. ‘No-one’, it went on, ‘has made it the business of his life to study the development of tattooing.’ Until now. Painted People is a beguiling and intimate look at an untold history of humanity. The...

She didn’t just survive the pirate king. She became one. Canton, 1801. In the humid, decaying splendor of the Pearl River, Shih Yang is a prized commodity. A high-ranking courtesan on the floating "flower boats," she trades in more than just flesh. She trades in secrets—cultivating a mental ledger of every corrupt official and smuggler who enters her silk-draped cage. But Shih Yang isn't waiting for a savior. She's waiting for an empire. When the notorious pirate warlord Zheng Yi raids the harbor, it isn't a stroke of misfortune. Shih Yang orchestrated the attack herself to escape a ...

Every sailor in the Caribbean knows the myth of the man who walked out of the fire. They say No-Beard was burned alive by mutineers and returned as a revenant with a heart as cold as the deep . Now, the most feared captain on the water is hunting for more than just merchant silver. He is hunting for the Black Reef Vault, a legendary treasure hoard guarded by something ancient and hungry . When the galleon Nuestra Señora del Sol is trapped in an unnatural fog, its crew discovers the true price of legend . No-Beard has the map to a place where the tides defy the moon and the rocks have teeth...

The flowering of Greek civilization was further made possible by an increase of trade between the cities and with other civilizations. Trade became a major occupation on account of the scarcity of agricultural land in the largely mountainous regions of the Balkan peninsula. The polis of Athens, in particular, assumed economic dominance in the Aegean in from the sixth century BC. The consequent increase in wealth, resources, and population made a cultural renaissance possible.